From the first time I saw him in the Games Room, I knew he was special. Yeah, maybe sometimes when we look back at things, we might exaggerate, but I really saw something in the little shit.
Floating around because he was so small, watching everyone else. Learning from them. Yet, even though he watched like a hawk, there was always that compassion, and that hint of fear. I felt sorry for him. He was smaller than the others, the obvious bugger of his group because why would he be here otherwise. I thought that even though he watched, he would be eaten alive, because of that fear. In a way, I guess I was right. The world ate him alive.
At that time I was part of Rat Army, back before he was put under Bonzo's Salamanders. Back before Dragon.
I was just another genius, constantly afraid of icing out. Afraid of failing. Afraid of the buggers. Just like everyone else. Everyone, but Ender. I watched him take the controls in his too-small hands, getting the feeling for them. Just like everyone else, I knew he'd lose the first time. Just like everyone else, I watched him win every game thereafter. Ender never lost a battle after that day. His armies may have, but Ender? Never.
I watched as that school took everything from him, until there was nothing but tiredness in his very soul it seemed. I wasn't raised to believe in a soul, but it's one of those things a person instinctively knows. At least, I like to think so.
When he became the youngest leader of Dragon, a tension fell over everyone. He was the one. Everyone knew it, even those who hated him. Maybe it's why they hated him. Because he thought differently from them. Because they could break his spirit, and his body even, but in the end, he would keep fighting. He was a soldier. Much too young, but then again, so were the rest of us.
I wept the night he won his last battle. The look in his eye clearly said he no longer gave a damn. That the entire world could go to the buggers, and there wasn't a person who he would miss. I prayed that somehow in that I was wrong, and the next morning he was gone. Of course, there were rumors that he had been iced, but Bean himself told me the truth. He had gone on. He was going to win the war for us. And then, one by one, others started vanishing. And the teachers seemed to become distracted. The politics continued, yes, among the students, but the staff, they were clearly elsewhere. The game's rules had been completely destroyed, life as we knew it had changed. I began watching, waiting for news that it was over.
When it came, I couldn't believe it. Xenocide. Except, at that time we didn't call it that. We called it victory. We went home, but there would be no going home for Ender. He left Earth a governor, without ever truly living upon her surface. His life had been the game, and even that had been taken from him. I could only hope that wherever he went, he was happy. But whenever I think of him, all I can see in my mind's eye, is that little boy, watching with compassion and fear. The killer who I could never truly picture killing a soul until I saw the trials and the vids of the Bugger world. The one who I knew would weep when Speaker of the Dead was sent by ansible, if he was allowed to read it. The hero that paid his price with everything. And the one, who would never know that I watched him grow, and that in the end, I loved.
Now I lay here, dying in a world where his story is but legend both loved and hated. And I wonder where he is, and if he ever found the compassion that had once been there again. Ender Wiggins, Xenocide, Soldier and the best of us all.