Title: from my bones this feeling grows
Fandom: Ender's Game
Rating: Teen & Up
Length: 703
Summary: Ender sleeps and wakes and in his waking sleeps. It ends, and he wakes once more. Ender's life is not peaceful. This is by design.


Ender sleeps and wakes and in his waking sleeps and in his sleeping wakes.

His eyes are open, but he does not move. He blinks, from nothing to nothing and yet more nothing as his eyes open once more. The barracks are dark, dark as his hand in front of his eyes. Ender does not verify the comparison. He does not move. He barely breathes. The room is quiet. Too quiet. A living, waiting quiet.

Ender cannot move, cannot breathe, but his straining ears cannot hear any sign of the others. No snoring, no rustling, no drag of blanket against metal frame or fitted sheet.

And then, on the very edge of his hearing - a click. Nothing more than a tap, really. Like someone's set down a tablet. He knows that's not what happened. Knows it in his bones, in the slow fizzing of his blood and the ice of his lungs.

It is the softest possible impact against the floor, but he knows what's coming. Not metal, or the scuff of a monitor's undersole against the floor, or a stutter of machinery. Those would be terrible sounds, in their own right - one cannot, after all, live in a metal box without attaching an overwhelming degree of importance on air circulation - but they would fit the environment.

The first is almost enough to ignore, though he bites his tongue and strains every sense he has, hoping against all hope that there will not be -

Another. And another.

As steady and relentless as the pull of gravity, a parade of insectoid claws click their way along the passage from the bathrooms, closer and closer, and he can't think to move, to call out and warn, to do anything but freeze and cower. If he does, he will be found. If he is found -

The skittering closes, closer and closer and -

Ender wakes, and sleeps, and the shadows settle about his bed like a cloak made of the absence of stars.




Ender is running, falling, from nowhere, to nowhere, save away, and each step he takes is an additional failure to reach that one goal.

His legs are heavy things, dragged through mud. His lungs are a white hot burn that fades into the blur of his hyper-focused movement, stuttering and starting like a machine on the edge of failure. Ender trips, stumbles, corrects himself - he has been on the station that is Battle School too long, to be so unable to survive even contact with solid ground - and is caught. Too slow, too weak, too unprepared to succeed. Just a Third, in the end. Nothing more.

Thin arms, plated and segmented in inhuman proportions, hold his own in unshakeable grip, turn him like a package wrapped in paper picked up from the market. The sheen of eyes, larger than his hand, larger than his head, meet his own. He is gasping, but there is no sound to reach his ear. Pincers rise like the fall of worlds, and lower, gentle, to touch the skin pulled across his chest. Rising and falling, the fall of worlds. He is, Ender realises with a numb sort of awareness, naked.

So, strangely, is the form above him. But bugs have no need for clothing. Not when their skin is armor and weapon both.

The points reach further in, digs. There is no pain, just steadily increasing pressure. His skin peels away, and ribs, and wriggling through, like a larval worm, Peter.




Ender turns from the dead bank of screens at the sound of applause and a roaring that resolves into cheering, almost overbalanced in the act by the heavy weight of metal pinned to the front of his tunic. The screens are all blank, but lights coming on - florescent, almost, although something so inefficient would never have been hauled all the way out to Eros, and overly bright to boot - illuminate the gathering crowd.

"Congratulations," they say, smiles breaking wide and their teeth - so many teeth, too many teeth, chitin has nothing on the shine of their enamel - all gleaming like freshly polished medals, "you've finished the final test. Now go and wipe out the Formics."