Fandom High Dormitories

The problem about getting through your epic moment of revelation was that the time afterwards seemed a little... well, too slow. Peter was pretty good at dealing with the nitty-gritty dealings of day-to-day political life, don't get him wrong. He just missed the adrenaline rush.

Which somehow - through intensely convoluted logic that made perfect sense to Peter - meant that this was a perfect time to curl up on the common room sofa with a bucket of popcorn and a three-hour Bismarck biopic-slash-documentary (the producers hadn't been entirely sure which direction to fall in).

Now this was the life.

Sort of.

Maybe he should go back to his room and check his email.

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Okay, so Peter's plan to get some bodyguards had been waylaid by the enormous volume of work that had come crashing down on him the past few weeks. What little free time he'd had he hadn't exactly wanted to spend going around politicking with the student base, but now that he finally did have a day with only minimal work to do, well...

He'd gone out into town and bought two bags full of pastries from JGoB's, and brought them back up into the common room. Now there they were, spread out across the coffee table, Peter lounging ever-casually on the couch.

If that didn't bring in some potential bodyguard candidates, he didn't know what would.

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The weather was nice out - normally Peter wouldn't be swayed from his work by something as simple as this, but frankly, well. He'd been spending the past few days in his room, working furiously, not consciously trying to sublimate the weekend in any way, shape or form, but accidentally ambling into it.

But while it was a little chilly, the sun was shining. And maybe he could use a breath of fresh air.

He took with him a cup of bad instant coffee, a doughnut and a tablet, pre-programmed to keep up with the latest news as it came up. Pulled up a chair on the deck and sank down into it. There.

Now he was relaxing.

...

His gaze dropped down to the tablet immediately.

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And thus it was that on the fifth day, Peter Wiggin came rolling out of Casa Locke for reasons beyond going to class, though really, he'd only come back from Oz's class five minutes ago.

The reason was this: there were gremlins in his room making noise, and he found he couldn't concentrate on feeding new information into the Australian legislative bodies when there were little green things growling and whining their way through Have Yourself A Merry Little christmas.

So he had effectively been relegated to the couch, idly zapping through TV channels as he wondered why people wasted their time on asinine shit like this. Still, he was putting himself to the task of finding something that might attract the unwashed hordes (and keeping himself from thinking about Valentine leaving this weekend) so that at least his unwilling exile had some use.

Sadly, all the TV seemed willing to show today was reruns of reality shows... and The Wiggles.

The latter was the lesser of the two evils by a very small margin.

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Just a few weeks ago, Peter had been celebrating the end of the war he'd set in motion himself - the one that catapulted Locke into political prominence.

Roughly a week later, his parents had kind of squashed his enthusiasm thoroughly with all that crap about Ender.

After some thinking about it, though, Peter had realised there was only one option - Ender would have to go. And not to some interdimensional school he could easily come back from: he needed to leave.

He'd been working on that for a while now, trying to get some interesting footage released while dealing with the minor world leaders who were now interested in Locke's backing. Which went well, generally speaking, except for minor glitches. Like last night. Like last 'drunken Topher calling him on his 21st century phone' night, which had resulted in at least an hour of apologies to the Congolese prime minister because he really hadn't been telling him to 'have a lie-down'.

Peter hadn't slept much last night.

All of this boiled on down to one thing: Peter Wiggin, lying on the sofa in the common room before classes, a bowl of cereal balancing on his stomach and a giant mug of coffee on the tale.

Topher would pay. Right after he finally managed to grab a nap.

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It was Peter's birthday tomorrow, and his parents hadn't even called yet.

Which was fine. He didn't need the old coots anyway. Maybe he'd hear from them tomorrow? In fact, not having to deal with his parents at all meant that he'd gotten his essay for the week finished far ahead of schedule, leaving him time to... well, research the next essay.

Mostly.

Still, after a week of being locked inside because of the cold, he supposed he could take his desk outside with him now that the weather was nice and mild.

Which was where he was working now, fingers flying over the holographic display. Just don't expect him to light the fire.

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The first thing Peter had done when the island moved was-- well, check his bottle of water, just to make sure no one'd slipped anything in it to turn him as nuts as half the people he'd met here so far.

The second thing he'd done was check and see if his internet connection was still holding. If this insane place messed up his plans - and that was starting to look like a distinct possibility - he was going to--

What, exactly?

The question kept bothering him. He didn't like it when he couldn't fully oversee all the possible consequences of something; it made planning for all the contingencies all but impossible.

But the internet connection was holding, and the weather was better than it had been. So on Wednesday morning he finally trudged out with his desk in hand and sat himself down on the deck. The flat little display produced a colorful screen through a holographic emitter that Peter could manipulate with his fingers.

He was doing his routine daily check of all the big blogs, poking around to see if anyone had responded to Demosthenes and Locke's latest essays. And doing up a nice, healthy, respectable tan in the process.

At least that couldn't go horribly wrong.

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