Disclaimer: Ender's Game was written by Orson Scott Card; all characters and events therein are of his making. I'm just here to screw around with them. Les Misérables characters and events belong to Victor Hugo; I just needed to borrow a couple for an extended analogy.
Required Reading Ender's Game and Ender's Shadow. Having read Children of the Mind would be helpful for full understanding of all fun and irony, but not necessary, and a little bit of background knowledge of Les Misérables would also be useful, but I explain just about all you need to know.
Author's Note: Part One of my (completely coincidental) ideas for Two Introspectives on Ender from People Whose Names Mean Rock. (The second is up; the third is forthcoming, unless I go on another year-long sabbatical from fanfiction before I get around to it.) If you've read Shadow of the Hegemon, there's a small bit about Petra's crush on Ender; I took it a little farther. It's not a romantic idea that's provided for in canon beyond that couple of paragraphs, but it doesn't contradict canon, either, so I decided I'd run with it.
Petra's Confession
Dear Ender,
You know, I think I might have been a little bit in love with you.
I know you're never coming back home to Earth; both Locke and Demosthenes insist against it. My dad told me it's kind of become a saying over these past four years or so – "something on which Locke and Demosthenes agree." Something for certain. The sky is blue – that's something on which Locke and Demosthenes agree. Everyone was surprised that they agreed about you, the coolheaded peacemaker and the demagogue, but I only knew it meant I'd never see you again, which is the only reason I have courage enough to write this.
I wasn't your first friend at Battle School – that'd be Shen, I guess – nor was I your closest – that's Alai. But I was your friend somewhere you didn't have any other friends. And I taught you how to shoot straight. That count for something, neh? To be honest with you, I didn't become your friend cause I saw some special light in you, shining all for me, and not cause I was pulled to you by some invisible force, neither. It was cause you was a little six-year-old fart and I was a girl, nobody gonna like neither of us, so we sure as hell better like each other. And you know, I liked you. Always calculating – this gonna mean status? This gonna mean pain? Never a moment when the wheels in your six-year-old head weren't turning like the cogs of one of them old clocks. I could see it in your eyes when you looked at me – she gonna teach me something? She gonna drag me down? She really my friend? There any such thing? Sad, lonely little boy, more friends than I got – all those Launchies you was teaching, big soldier that you were – but fighting battles in your head every day with one hell of a star arrangement. But when a boy win his outside battles while fighting battles in his brain too, he worth something. He worth having for a friend.
And Dink, he see it in you, too. Me and Dink were little farts of Launchies together, the buggers of our launch, as they say – the girl and the nutter. Dink see, you start out the bugger and wind up the admiral of your little fleet of farts, you got something. He see your head battles too every day – this gonna mean high ground? This gonna mean rout? Dink saw, he a soldier at age six, he getting messed around by the enemy real bad. The real enemy, Dink say, that be the teachers; they try and screw you over, he your friend.
But you didn't need no guardian angel. I didn't make you a toon leader in Phoenix Army because I felt sorry for you. Weren't no light shining out of you that only I could see then – you'd have to be one blind son of a bitch to miss it. Ender Wiggin's piss was perfume, the sun shone out of his ass, his every fart was sacred space. I'd have been crazy not to be a little bit in love with you when every bicho in the Battle School was too, and scarce a one of them queer. Then you was a little nine-year-old commander with a joke of an army – green-eared, brown-assed Launchies and the oldest veteran a soldier for what, six months? – fighting battles after three weeks' training, battle every day, never losing a single one. You beat Phoenix Army, best army in the damn school until you come along, and I hated you like poison and loved you at the same time. Just like everybody else – they'd have given anything to beat you; they'd have drunk your piss if they thought it would give them just a little bit of your brains, like savages ate their dead enemies' hearts to get their strength. The ones who loved you would have drunk your piss; the ones who hated you would have eaten your heart.
Was I the only one who saw that you were beautiful too, with your strong, commanding face, your eyes cool and intelligent and full of will and purpose? How could I know that I was the only one who loved you for your beautiful face as well?
But that was just a twelve-year-old girl with a crush on the only boy she knew was smarter than her. When did I know I loved you as more than the baby duck I took under my wing or the "gold-plated fart" (in Dink's words) that every bugger in the Battle School worshiped?
After Bonzo.
Was I the only one who couldn't think straight when I knew your life was in danger? I couldn't see them massing in the halls, all those Salamander uniforms in the green, green, brown that I once called the butt of Battle School. I knew I had to warn you; I thought to save your life and almost killed you. Why didn't Dink's head get fuzzed by panic like that? Why did it hurt fit to make me bleed to hear Bean call me Judas?
And me and Dink were the only ones who knew Bonzo was dead – Dink saw the bloody corpse and figured it out, and I was the only one he'd ever tell. That might have been when I knew I loved you – not because you killed him. I hated Bonzo like he hated me, and that saying something – but I never wanted him dead. No, I loved you cause I knew you never wanted him dead neither. You knew you'd hurt him bad. Dink told me you cried because you knew you'd hurt him. That's when you stopped caring about the game. And when Ender Wiggin stopped caring about the game, he'd stopped caring about everything. Stopped caring about himself. I had this stupid, nonsensical feeling like somebody had to care about you like it was yourself or you'd crumble into dust, and no one knew it but me. I had to care about you like that.
But you didn't even know how bad you'd hurt Bonzo. If you'd known, you'd have hated yourself, hated yourself so much you'd die. I had to love you for you, or no one else would. I had to love you like I was you. I already did.
You got your orders for Command School, and I resolved that even if I never saw you again, I'd love you in your own place from far away. But then I did see you again – or hear your voice, anyway. I heard your voice so full of joy to hear ours, so strong and commanding, cool and intelligent and full of will and purpose that I could see your face in it. That was when I could put words to what I had felt for you all along. I told Dink and Bean about it, and Bean said that Shen had told him the same thing years before. What I'd realized was that I would die for you. You're the sort of leader that his soldiers would follow into anything, come hell, high water, or bloody death. I'd die for you, Ender; I'd kill for you.
And I did kill for you, again and again, knowing it no more than you knew you were killing Bonzo. Maybe you knew I'd do anything for you, knew I'd bear the brunt of the command work if it would save you the exhaustion of body and brain that was beginning to eat at me, because of all your squadron leaders you relied most heavily on me. I didn't die for you; just fell asleep. Collapsed when I told myself day after day that I would hold up, if only for love of you. But I failed you. Hundreds, maybe thousands of real, breathing men died because I was tired and still what hurts most is that I failed you – maybe because I simply can't imagine all those men's lives, but my entire world was the game and you.
I thought I would die, but I just slept, thinking in all my dreams and waking moments that you couldn't lean on me anymore. You had all your other strong, able squadron leaders; you could depend on them; it wasn't the end of the world. But somehow it felt like it. In my crazy, fevered brain, only I knew that you'd fall apart if I didn't care about you for you and do everything you needed.
But I'd failed. I'd broken. I had to tell you that before you told me, to save myself the shame. I had to tell you before you told me that you couldn't lean on me anymore because I'd been exhausted. My pride was still second only to my love for you, and both demanded that I let you know I understood why I could no longer be your anchor.
But on account of both, my heart broke (as the expression goes) to say it, to hear you answer: I know. I have no choice.
And then I watched you fall apart – or listened to you fall apart – just as I feared you would. I knew it wasn't my fault. You'd have felt the exhaustion eventually with or without me to depend on in the game. But still, I felt like it was my fault somehow. I hadn't been strong enough to hold you up and that was why you fell, got sick for three days, sounded more and more tired every time I heard you through the microphone. Now the game was all you cared about, and whether you loved it or hated it, you had no room left to care about yourself; it was eating you alive. So, crazy as a loon like I've always been, I consoled myself by loving you for yourself like it could keep you alive. I carried out my simple, closely supervised assignments and you fell apart day by day while I kept thinking: I'd die for you, Ender. I'd kill for you.
And then came the final battle, the one on which hung the fate of the world, and you relied on Bean. That, too, was bitter in the tears that I shed to find out that men died because I wasn't strong enough.
Then the League War – I had five days cowering in a blacked-out room to think about everything I wanted to run away from. I thought about what the all-knowing adults had told us – that the exhaustion, the stress, and the revelation that it hadn't been a game and you'd destroyed an entire planet had broken your mind. I denied it and wondered if it was true. Dink told me he loved me and ought to say so in case the Russians blew up Eros and we all died, and I thought about how I loved you. I would give everything for you, but could I give everything to you? I would die for you, but could I live for you? And if the Russians blew up Eros and we all died, did it matter?
But, luckily, we didn't die – the Russians lost, that is – and I saw you again. For the last time, but I couldn't know it then. Dink took my hand before we walked into your room – perhaps to lend me strength or comfort; we were both worried about you – and I didn't pull away, whatever that meant. The last time I ever saw you, I took your hand, I stroked your hair, I kissed your cheek – it was the closest I ever came to telling you how I loved you. And the last time you ever saw me, you hugged me (Bean too, which almost made me jealous – that a laugh, neh?); that was the closest you ever came to saying you loved me, too. Like you loved all your other friends and disciples and erstwhile teachers from Battle School. But you know, I think it might have been enough.
Have you ever read Les Misérables, Ender? My launch read it for class; we wrote an essay; the teachers declared we were brilliant and far above our grade level, which of course we already knew, because it we weren't we wouldn't be in Battle School; and we did very little reading after that – all math and science and military history. But I remembered that book. I was more of a reader than most of the class – you know what they say about females and verbal skills (id est, we have them). Well, in Les Misérables, there's a girl named Éponine who loves a man named Marius, but he's in love with someone else and is completely oblivious to how Éponine feels. At the revolutionary barricade where Marius is fighting, Éponine puts her hand over the barrel of a musket aimed at Marius. Naturally, the musket ball simply shatters her hand and goes through it – it is her body that stops the bullet. Marius doesn't see who it was that saved him; Éponine crawls into an alley to die. But Marius finds her before she dies. He sees her shattered hand and realizes it was her who saved him with her life. Her last request is that he kiss her forehead after she's dead; her last words are, "You know, Monsieur Marius, I think I might have been a little bit in love with you." She dies for her love of him, but can only tell him once it's too late.
I'd die for you, Ender. I'd step in front of that bullet to save you; I'd tell it to stop with my hand and make it stop with my body. In a way I did take a bullet for you, thought fat lot of good it did you in the end. Marius, too, was gravely wounded after Éponine saved him from the one musket ball. Unlike Éponine, I was there to feel the oh-so-platonic hug that was my last kiss on the forehead. But Marius heard Éponine's "You know, Monsieur Marius, I think I might have been a little bit in love with you"; it's already too late for Ender to hear Petra's confession. He has gone away forever, and now she might as well be dead to him. And you don't need me to love you for your own self anymore; your sister can fill that role for a while, should you ever stop caring about yourself, or even start hating yourself.
Still – you know, Monsieur Ender, I think I might have been a little bit in love with you. Ah, well. I'll get over it.
Petra