Title: Old Play

Disclaimer: Andrew and Valentine Wiggin belong to O. S. Card, not me.

Synopsis: One man gets a surprise and two children play.

She was waiting for him outside the changing room. For a moment he was annoyed that they would let a colonist come to bother him here, where he came to be alone; then he looked again, and realized that if the young woman were a little girl, he would know her.

"Valentine," he said.

"Hi Ender."

"What are you doing here?"

"Demosthenes retired. Now I'm going with the first colony.

-Ender's Game, page 310

He looked at his sister for a long moment, just seeing her aging body and the differences in the form from that of a crying eight year old little auburn haired girl whom had implored him to come back to her. He hadn't been able to, not with their last talk being so structured and manipulated or the dark shade of his guilt hanging over his head.

So Valentine had come to him.

Valentine moved towards him then, her empathy beating back her little brother's control. He felt as if someone had pounded him hard across the back, forcing his stressed knees near to failing.

He knew he would go with her, his lovely sister, his only source of the part of his soul that wasn't evil, wasn't Peter. She did not have to ask; he was a grown man (some may still call him boy, boy killer even to his face) now with battle and death in his heart, but he would do what she led him towards. As she held on to him, her red hair seeming to shine in the fluorescent lighting that was part of the base, and he cried for those dead little geniuses humanity in power had killed.

Valentine took him back to her room later that night, wrapping his arm around her the whole way as if she would disappear if he did not hold her there from slipping up, up and into nil gravity of the Battle Room. The hallways of three hundred rooms were mostly that same and Ender almost expected triple lights, like red-red-blue or yellow-green-red, to light their way. Her metal door, before it slid away, had a plaque with D., VALENTINE spelled out in thick black squared letters. D for Demosthenes. He'd read some of the work and had kicked himself for it later. It had taken him six different essays and quotes to recognize this sibling. It had only taken him two for the other, the oldest of the Wiggins children.

A flat bed slipped out of the wall as the door closed, covering her baggage. Meager things lay beneath her bed but he knew there could be more beside the main room in a storage section for the 12-room sector. Ender did not ask her what of his she brought, items he hadn't even considered important when he had left the Earth behind him at six years old might be all he had a hold onto from their own planet.

The room almost seemed smaller than his own until he realized that it was in fact larger; it was not just an empty square box with a bed and threadbare covers. There was a desk sticking from the wall similar the way the bed had come from the wall. Ender remembered his sister as a neat person where he and Peter had always been a little messy-maybe it was that they shared a room? There was no clutter save for the amount of baggage waiting to be unpacked and processed.

Behind him, the door shut smoothly with a soft whoosh and suddenly the two were alone in the universe, nothing outside of that door seeming to matter. In the silence, he wondered what he could ask her. Where are mom and dad-or did Peter keep what he never needed? What are we going to do when we get planet side? How is the Bugger blood not all over my hand? No. This was Valentine. Beside him she was just as quiet and he thought that maybe she was feeling as awkward with peace as he was. There was time for inane questions later.

So he reached over and picked up a pale white encased pillow from the bed he would join her in sleep later. Twirling it in a way he hadn't managed to lose, Ender tossed it over is shoulder before swinging it around only to be met in the face with another soft object. He stilled, gave an expression on his face that twitched with those muscles getting so little use. He heard her laughing sigh and knew this was okay. He launched his pillow then, catching his sister's swing with his arm and striking over her shoulder to where it hit her back sending her plowing into her own pillow before him like some sort of twisted Ender-pillow-Valentine-pillow sandwich.

He almost laughed then, such a foreign sound, and felt more like a human being than before Stillson and the removal of his monitor. In his mind, the world was a memory; Peter may have been watching them from the door and neither cared. In his mind there was a window to the left and two behind him where the sun shone in and they could watch the neighborhood around them. He was suddenly six and small to his sister's eight and matching height and mind.

Ho Valentine. He wanted to say, and in fact thought it in his own mind. The hero of the third battle that had become a little genius boy with another brilliant person on each side could have sworn he heard his sister's soft sigh and reply. Ho Ender.

END