fandomhighdorms | The Pool, Sunday Afternoon

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The Pool, Sunday Afternoon

Some days, you just had to crawl out of bed, take off your moping pants, and do something. Anything. Whatever. Today, Karla decided that the thing she was going to do was swim until she was exhausted. The beach being too full of memories, she headed to the pool at the dorms instead.

The pool was nice. Quiet. Just her and the water and lap after endless lap. Maybe if she tired herself out enough, she'd be able to sleep tonight. And then tomorrow, she'd help...research or whatever everyone was doing. Make herself useful. Something.

[One is expected, but post is open!]

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Ender had set out for the library too early this morning to get in his usual swim, and he was trying to make up for that gap in his routine now, before he'd go upstairs to talk to Karla.

As he padded in in his swimtrunks, though... well, he guessed he could always combine the two. "Karla," he greeted, and didn't sound quite as fond as usual.

"Ender," Karla replied, voice neutral as she cut through the water.

Look, she got kept from going home and now people were mad at her. Unfair! She was the victim here!

...She was at least occasionally intelligent, and thus, did not voice that feeling.

What she was was an absolute idiot, that's what.

"Do you have a moment?"

At least Ender was sort of polite while he was revving up to a yelling-at?

"Of course." It was hard not to tack a 'Prince' onto the end of that; too many years of getting called onto the carpet, too many years of defaulting to Protocol.

Though what good was Protocol now when her whole world was dead and gone?

"May I continue swimming while we talk? Or should I climb out?" See? She could be polite, too!

"Do whatever you want," Ender said, casting his towel at one of the beds.

By his stance and his intonation, though, it was obvious that there was only one real answer to that question, and he expected her to fill it in herself.

Karla was tempted to keep swimming. So tempted. Almost beyond tempted.

But that was childish, a physical version of the 'You're not the boss of me' she's been so attached to when she was younger. She was beyond that right now.

...And, also, there was no reason to make Ender's scolding worse. But, you know, mostly the maturity thing.

So she swam back towards the ladder and began to climb, calling her towel over to meet her at the top.

"Yes?" she asked, rubbing her hair with the towel.

"I talked to Warren last night," Ender said mildly. "I'd ask you what the hell you were thinking, but I already know the answer to that question."

"Is he--" Karla clamped down on that question. She didn't care if he was okay. It was just a stupid reflex that had made her ask, like saying 'Fine, and you?' whenever anyone asked how you were doing.

"Well then, if you already know, then I fail to see what further we have to discuss," she replied stiffly. "I'm glad we had this talk, Ender."

Ender's body language hadn't changed, but there was real anger in his voice and in his eyes now. "I know what you were thinking," he said. "I know all the arguments you'll use for your duty, and I can tell you that even your people would say they were stupid."

Karla recoiled from him. That stung. "They would not!" Just, you know, the males. The females would completely understand.

SHUT UP, ENDER, KAELEERAN SOCIETY WAS PERFECTLY FUNCTIONAL.

"Just because none of you understand doesn't mean that what I was doing was wrong!"

"Oh, I understand perfectly," Ender said, voice icy. "Your duty to your people is not to go down with the sinking ship - you understood this perfectly well in the past. Your duty to your people is to be brilliant on their behalf, and if it weren't for Warren, you would have failed them miserably."

Ladies and gents, the son of Hyrum Graff and Mazer Rackham.

There was a mental image the narration would never unsee.

"Right, because we've all been so brilliant these past few weeks what with the uncovering nothing," Karla blared, heavy with sarcasm. "We are talking people who have been waiting years for me. Hoping, waiting, clinging, all so that one day I could come and be the Queen they've been expecting me. Forgive me if I didn't want all of that waiting and suffering to be in vain!"

Karla paused, trying to force herself to cool down. She was never going to win this argument if she lost her temper. "Either the people here were going to find a way to fix this and then, nothing lost, or they weren't. If the last was the case, then my people deserved to have me there with them at the end, whether they knew it was the end or not."

"In other words," Ender said, "You wanted to assuage your guilt, and simply hoped the rest of us would solve the problem for you."

He met Karla's eyes without trouble, and didn't stagger a bit under her temper.

"Yes, Ender," Karla said, rolling her eyes because she was frustrated and certainly not because of any difficulty meeting his. "This is all my problem. I'm just foisting it off on the rest of you, saying, 'La! Save Kaeleer without me!' This most certainly isn't Isabel's problem, or your problem, or Dinah's problem or Momoko's or Leda's!"

It took everything she had not to say 'Valentine' or 'Tahiri' there. But she was done with lashing out simply to hurt, instead of to make a point.

"I wanted to do what was right by the people I'd sworn to protect and cherish and nurture and lead since I was barely old enough to understand what those words mean!"

"You are not the Second Coming of Christ, Karla," Ender said. "Your presence there would not have magically uplifted their spirits and fulfilled this promise you've nurtured into a full-blown guilt complex these past few years; you wouldn't have been able to protect them, and there wouldn't have been time to lead a single soul anywhere besides off a cliff. In the end, it wouldn't have meant a damned thing to anyone but you."

There was a point where understanding and sympathy ceased to overlap. As far as Ender was concerned, it was here.

"You would have been there, and then you would not have been, and it wouldn't have mattered a damned thing to anyone except the people on this island, who are barely keeping it together as it is."

Hey, now, Ender! Don't sell Karla short! She'd been nurturing this guilt complex for way longer than the time she'd been at Fandom! It had just gotten worse since arriving here, is all.

"It would have mattered to Morton," Karla said quietly. "Even if he didn't know why I was there, being with him at the end would have mattered. It would have mattered to Julian." Maybe. "And to Hilda and to Tarl the stablehand and to Cookie in the kitchen and maybe even to my old Protocol tutor. The fact that it wouldn't have mattered very long doesn't take away the fact that it would have mattered all the same."

"Ah, yes," Ender said. "Hilda and Tarl and Cookie and Julian, how glad they'd have been! There she is, our long lost Queen, gone from the one place where she could do any good so she can come here and die futilly with the rest of us. They would have been pleased, I'm sure. If they'd been aware of what was going on at all. If they were around long enough to care at all, I bet they'd have loved it - I bet they'd have felt so comforted, that you were dutiful enough to choose to die rather than to fight for them."

Edited 2011-12-04 22:59 (UTC)

Had anyone else been on the receiving end of this dressing down, Karla probably would have snorted with laughter at that. This time, however, she was left fuming.

"Right! Because my fighting for them has been so damned effective so far!" Karla said. "So far, I've managed to field calls from the soon-to-be-dead, update the board, and gone home to discover my adopted uncle committed genocide throughout time. Yay me!" She threw up her hands in the air and waved them. "There is nothing I have done that couldn't have been done just as easily or as well by someone else! I am not indispensable!"

In fact, without her people, Karla wasn't...much of anything.

"You are very much indispensable to a number of people on this island," Ender said, once it became apparent that she was done shouting at him. "People who rely on you for emotional support, people who look to you to keep their morale up, to show them that we have a chance."

He narrowed his eyes. "Instead, you gave up," he said, "and decided to run off to go soothe the shades in your own head."

"You really think that's what I wanted to do?" Karla asked with disbelief."I'm sorry if I thought my duty was somehow more important than playing cheerleader for people, but believe me, I wasn't leaping up out of bed so I could cheerfully catch my portal. But this was what I was raised to do--when things are at their worst, my place is with them. If there was one thing I learned from watching my mother, it's that."

"You keep saying the word duty," Ender said, "And I'm starting to wonder if you even know what that means. Or maybe you do, but then it's the most counter-productive interpretation of duty I've ever heard, because it's the kind of duty that leads to extinction, it's the kind of duty where you say 'well, let's just let the tigers get us, because I can't bear to be away from you for long enough to go get the stick.'"

Mostly, it was just stupid. And while Ender would never call anything an unforgivable offense, it did offend him.

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The Pool, Sunday Afternoon

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