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

[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.

[endsthegame]

Ender had his own theories on why Warren had did what he'd done, but he didn't volunteer those now.

"You mean?" he prompted gently.

[wwiii]

"I mean... she was trying to claw my arms off, and telling me that she never wanted to see me again, and I knew that's how she'd react. I expected worse. And I was okay with that. I mean, it hurt, but if that's what it took to keep her safe, then so be it. It was worth it."

He inhaled slowly, and then let it all out in a quiet hiss directed toward the floor.

"I wasn't thinking about what she felt was her duty to Glacia, no. But looking back, her people wouldn't have been able to appreciate her noble goddamn suicide anyhow. They didn't even know they were about to disappear. There isn't anything about what she was doing that could have been anything but a waste."

[endsthegame]

"I think Karla has been here so long, she's lost some perspective on what her duties really are," Ender commented thoughtfully. He shook his head. "But I'll take that up with her," he said.

That was going to be a fun conversation.

"As for you-- I hope you know you still have a couple of people you can fall back on, if you need someone."

He was not making the mistake of treating any of these people like soldiers.

[wwiii]

"At least one or two, huh?"

Warren wasn't sure how many people were still left. But Ender was sitting here, and Wesley hadn't gone back to his world or anything, and that was worth a lot.

"I probably will," he admitted a moment later. "I mean, I... wasn't so great at holding it all together before."

He'd been pretty good at faking it. But that wasn't exactly the same thing.

[endsthegame]

Maybe, but that's where it started.

"But you're still walking and talking," Ender noted. Having cleaned everything up, he picked another seat - this time on the closest available bed. "I mean, obviously that's not everything. As far as holding it together goes, though, everyone's chief concern is just that you keep getting out of bed every morning."

[wwiii]

"It's as simple as that, huh?" Warren finally managed the smile that he really wasn't feeling at the moment. "I guess now that I have something to do, there's not really any excuse for me not to."

In the grand scheme of things, he really had no idea what they'd be able to do with a catalogue of physical mutations and similar, but if nothing else, it was something to focus on.

[endsthegame]

You never knew; maybe these Auditors were some brand of Omega-level mutant.

"Good," Ender said, "Because if I don't catch you in the library at 9 AM sharp, I'm showing up with a bucket of ice water."

He was joking.

Probably.

[wwiii]

"I'll set my alarm and aim for eight," Warren promised. "And if I can remember any of my... my dad's research on mutants between now and then, I'll make notes."

There would probably be a large stack of information about what caused natural physical mutation, and another stack of the bits and snippets that worked into how his father had found a way to reverse it. The actual limits to it would be vague, though. He'd worry about that one in the morning.

[endsthegame]

Ender nodded once. Honestly, he expected that the only real gain from this would be one more person walking around being useful instead of breaking and collapsing on them, providing another drain on people's spirits.

But you never knew.

"Anything you can remember is helpful," he said. "And I'll ask Ben if he wants to drag you out for a drink or some pool."

[wwiii]

"That'd be good too. I mean, so long as we don't do too much drinking or something."

Though, really, Warren couldn't see them getting too wild and crazy if they went out drinking at the moment. At least, not to the point where somebody would find themselves being Force-launched at a ketchup pig on the wall or anything.

[endsthegame]

"And they shall be known by the trail of the sordid voicemails," Ender said.