Fire Drill, Outside the Dorms, Oh Dear Lord How Is This O'Clock Wednesday Night

[endsthegame]

Fandom lay peaceful in the night, recovering from its latest brush with invasion. It had reached such an hour that even the teal deer slept soundly in the woods, and the crickets had given up on chirping to go play Texas Hold-'Em in the caves in the cliffs just off the Preserve.

The rain started almost tentatively: a few drops of dew that wrestled loose from the grass and gently made their way upwards. But soon they multiplied, soon they went faster. Soon the dark skies were full of water raining upwards, coagulating into clouds far up above.

And then...

...and then the fire drill alarms went off in the dorms.

Sorry, kids.

[[ this will be your fire drill post for the evening! have at, oh students. ]]

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[endsthegame]

"Everyone has a language they understand best," Ender said, after thinking on that for a moment or two. "Even diplomats in the same country, talking to people from the same city is going to have to be able to speak a thousand slightly different dialects. And even then you rarely know just how the message is going to arrive, and that's without the third party."

He pursed his lips. "Being clear with everyone - now that's a challenge."

[weetuskenraider]

Tahiri gave up on a futile attempt to wring water out of her hair and nodded. "And not my strongest point, as I keep learning lately. It'll be easier once I'm there in person, I think."

[endsthegame]

"It usually is," Ender granted her. "Being there gives them the chance to know you - and you the chance to get them to treat you like you're on equal footing again."

He didn't ask when are you leaving. He didn't want her to, and he already had plans for all of the available options.

[weetuskenraider]

"I'll visit when I can, to help straighten things out, but I'm not in a hurry to settle down there," Tahiri went on, unaware that there was a question that wasn't being asked. "Though I probably shouldn't put it off forever, either; it's a chance to get to know a part of my heritage, and I can't turn that down."

She took a breath. "When it's time." She didn't yet know when that was; she'd trust to the Force for that, and she hadn't felt a prompt yet. Her smile went a little crooked. "Also something I'm not in a hurry for."

[endsthegame]

"It's not like there's any rush," Ender said, with a little smile. "Plenty of months left on the Fandom calendar."

[weetuskenraider]

"True," Tahiri allowed, though her expression had turned a little thoughtful. "I try not to take time for granted, though."

[endsthegame]

"'Time is very slow for those who wait, very fast for those who are scared, very long for those who lament, very short for those who celebrate, but for those who love time is eternal'," Ender quoted. He also looked thoughtful.

[weetuskenraider]

Tahiri tilted her head and gave him a curious look. "That's -- I like that." It all sounded very . . . well, relatable, too. "It isn't something you came up with yourself, is it?"

[endsthegame]

Ender gave her a brief smile in return. "I'm not clever enough for that," he said. "It's Shakespeare; he had a keen talent for delving into the human condition."

Fanboy.

[weetuskenraider]

"The playwright," Tahiri remembered, although that was more or less the extent of her familiarity with his works. "The eternal part -- do you suppose he meant it to be a good thing, or a bad one, or both?"

She could see how it worked either way.

[endsthegame]

"Probably both," Ender mused. He shot a glance up at Fandom's grey walls. "Love is a good thing, but it always opens the gates for pain to sneak in. So when we love, we carry both the joy and the pain with us until we're done. Then again, maybe neither is a bad thing. Everyone has to hurt sometimes."

[weetuskenraider]

"The Yuuzhan Vong believe that pain is one of the three gifts of the True Gods," Tahiri said, absently rubbing at the faint line of a scar on her forearm. Her speech took on a slightly more formal tone the way it tended to when she spoke about that aspect of her heritage. "That life itself is pain, in being separated from the gods, and pain is inevitable. It's why we're taught to embrace it rather than avoid it. Though . . ."

She smiled crookedly. "There isn't much in those beliefs about love, I'm afraid. But it logically follows, I think, that if love is also inevitably a part of life, then they're intertwined, and accepting the possibility of one means accepting the possibility of the other."

[endsthegame]

"And accepting that sometimes they're one and the same, and sometimes one can be used to cause the other," Ender said, having listened quite carefully as she spoke. "And both can twist us all the same, too."

[weetuskenraider]

"Very much so." Tahiri blinked, as if shaking off the more formal mode. "I know I've been there. I know, because I came so close, that there are . . ."

She hesitated, but briefly, and glanced up at him. "Other possibilities where I let both of those things break me."

Which was an incredibly personal bit of information to share, but there had never really been much that could stop her from talking once she got going.

[endsthegame]

Ender's expression had softened as she spoke.

"There are a lot worse things to know you could break over than loving someone too much," he said, at last, when a few moments had passed. "Not that I recommend it."

[weetuskenraider]

"Oh, I imagine there are. I've known a few who have," Tahiri answered, her expression growing briefly distant; Jacen hadn't gone that far yet in her time, but she thought -- knowing what she did about Ben's Jacen -- she could see the signs. And on the other hand there was Kyp Durron, and her own Master, Corran Horn, who had the destruction of Ithor on his conscience, and they hadn't broken. "And a few who haven't, even if you'd think they could have."

But she was looking at Ender now, not with overt curiosity, just the faintest hint of possible comprehension.

"Intellectually, that's one thing to comprehend. It's a little different when someone's more prone to, well, thinking with their feelings."

That was an incredibly awkward way to phrase it, even an absurd one, but it seemed the most accurate.

[endsthegame]

Briefly, Ender thought of Bean, curled up on Ender's bed back in Battle School in the middle of the night-- "They can't break you, Ender." "You'd be surprised."

His mouth folded into a small, distant smile. "Thinking with their feelings," he echoed. "You mean empathy. Intuition." Something his family had more than its fair share of stock in, too, for whatever good it did them.

[weetuskenraider]

"Jedi," Tahiri half-joked. "And trained by Ben's father. I think it's too much a part of me now to be any other way."

[endsthegame]

"I understand," Ender said, corners of his mouth quirking up a little more until they dropped. "They're qualities that run in my family, too, though in ways nowhere as esoteric."

He glanced at Tahiri, then across the field, at the preserve. "I'm not saying it doesn't hurt, that that kind of love can't come to encompass your whole world and not for the better that way," he said, "but you'll know it was because of that that you fell. Something that at least once was good."