A Deserted Spot on the Beach, Saturday Night

[glacial_queen]

The beach was cold and and empty; just the waves and the water and the wind right now. It was good. Soothing. Like the wind could just hollow her out, blow everything away. Raven had gone up to the roof for some alone time and Karla couldn't help feeling grateful for that. She needed some time too. To think, to reflect. In so small part, to castigate. What she'd done to Warren...

But more than that, she needed to talk to someone. A very specific someone. The person who had warned her about this very tendency before. And what had she done? Gotten huffy. Now, she wished with everything she had that she had listened. Maybe that they'd had this talk sooner. Something.

Anything to change what she'd done.

Now she was standing and the dust was settling and she had no idea if there was anything left to salvage.

[For one, please!]

Comments

[endsthegame]

"Hey."

Ender's voice was gentle, but firm, carrying across the beach as its owner strolled towards her. He had his coat pulled firmly around him, because it was cold; and he was curious as to why he'd been texted about coming here. Concerned, maybe, too.

[glacial_queen]

"Hey," Karla called back quietly. "Thanks for coming out here tonight. I know it's cold."

Her voice was controlled, with no inflection. She was grateful, she truly was. But there was everything else that gratitude had to get around.

[endsthegame]

"It's fine," Ender said, his eyes trailing up to look at the sky. "I never mind being here anyway." Open skies, still feeling like a luxury after all this time.

But that wasn't really all that he meant.

He stopped by her side, a slight half-smile on his face. He could wait for her to get to whatever it was she needed to.

[glacial_queen]

There was so much she wanted to say. Just to open her mouth and have the words spill out in a torrent. You were right, she would say. You were right all along. I should have just listened, but I didn't and now I don't know what I'm going to do.

Instead, she just quirked a humorless smile in his direction and said, "Raven's alive. Some kind of resurrection spell. She's up on the roof right now. Or maybe crashed in my room. One of the two."

There should have been a lot more joy, there. Or at least something more than that cold numbness.

[endsthegame]

There should, yes-- if this had been a simple operation. If she had just spawned back into everyone's lives like it was nothing, absolving Karla of all blame for anything she'd done, maybe. But people were more complicated than that, and so were resurrections. Or so Ender presumed; this was the first time he'd be party to one.

He just nodded.

"You don't sound relieved," he said, neutrally. Prompting. If she needed him to play this role in this conversation, that was fine.

[glacial_queen]

She did, at least right then. Because talking about what she needed to talk to him about meant confessing it, admitting it, making it real. And she wasn't quite up to that. Not just yet.

"It's great to have Raven back," she said with all the excitement of someone who had just been informed they'd won twenty cents in the local lottery. Though at least she realized that and struggled to sound a little more enthused. "No, it really is. Relief is probably the best way to describe it, too. Just...she's back. Things are right again."

At least, Raven-shaped things. But even that wasn't entirely true, was it?

"Well, sort of." And here it came, at least a little bit. Tears were prickling in her eyes. "In the fight, though, I...did something."

[endsthegame]

"Something small, or something big?"

Ender wasn't going to offer her any comfort, even if he noticed the wetness in her eyes. If she'd wanted comfort, she'd have called Ben, not him. He realised he was here to serve as a confessor, at least for now, and so he didn't betray any concern or emotion at all.

[glacial_queen]

She didn't want comfort. Not now. She didn't want to be told that it was all right or that she could be forgiven. She wanted honesty. Ender would give that to her.

"Something big," Karla said. "Something there may be no going back from. I...used Warren. Got him hurt. Nearly killed. I didn't think. Just reacted. Treated him like a pawn on a chessboard. I was like Graff, or Mazer, or anyone else who ever donned an IF uniform and sent children to play a deadly game. I saw what was expedient. The maximum good for the minimum risk. And I used him."

[endsthegame]

He registered it. Part of him felt saddened, but that wasn't important.

"Did you win?"

Just one question.

[glacial_queen]

She nodded. "Sebastian saw how much Warren meant to me and sent two demons after him. I pretended to beg for his life, which got me close enough that I could get at Raven's chakra from him. The demons--" She stopped to take a long, shuddering breath, but when she continued, her voice was steady. "--They gutted him like a fish and left him to bleed out on the ground. But we saved him. My Craft, his Healing factor, Raven... He doesn't even have a scar."

Physically, anyway. Being sacrificed by his girlfriend might have left one or two emotional ones. You know, possibly.

[endsthegame]

"Then you did think," Ender said, cutting through it all before she'd get herself lost in words about the actual damage. He assumed she'd take plenty of time to overthink them. They weren't important right now. "You thought, and you picked the path you thought would lead you quickest to victory, and you followed it through."

[glacial_queen]

She's already started!

"Yes. I thought about that far," Karla said with a bitter laugh. "Not the repercussions, though. Not what it meant to the people involved. Not if there were other possibilities. I didn't even ask, Ender. I just...did it. I decided what was right and that my will trumped everyone else's."

[endsthegame]

"Pol Slattery once said to me that he was only fair-minded before and after battles," Ender said. He wouldn't have mentioned it if he didn't know Karla had that memory locked up somewhere in her mind, so she'd know the context, and what it meant. "During, he would cheat with whatever he could get his hands on, because that's how commanders win wars. Most of us can afford not to think that way. Most of us never have to figure out whether we can. Most of us are lucky."

He glanced up at the sky.

"The rest of us had better make damn sure we know what we're capable of, so that we only have to use it if we really need to."

[glacial_queen]

"I don't think I fully know, yet," Karla said. "I caught a glimpse of it tonight and it scared me, Ender. I don't know if I could do that again. I don't know if I want to be able to do that again. I'm not sure what kind of Queen all that makes me, but I know it doesn't make me a good person. And it makes me an awful fucking friend."

[endsthegame]

"You can't be someone's commander and stay their friend, Karla," he said, sighing. "Even when the battle's over, there'll be a chasm between you and them a mile wide, because you can't afford to think of them as friends if lives are on the line, if they're everything you have in play."

Clouds, drifting over the ocean through the wide-open sky. Three years, and Ender still hadn't gotten sick of the sight. He wondered if he ever would.

"The convenant between friends, and between a ruler and their soldiers, they're similar, but they're different. One of them says, 'I'll care for you if you care for me', the other says 'I'll look after you if you'll trust me to do what I think is right.'" He glanced at her. "There's a reason why I won't serve you. Why I won't serve anyone."

[glacial_queen]

"The lines are different, back home," Karla said quietly. "Blurred. Or maybe clearer, I don't know. But there's dealing with a friend and then there's dealing with the Queen and it all makes sense there. But that's not here and it wouldn't matter if it were because I'm not his Queen, either. And I acted like I was."

She met his glance. "Would you be able to forgive me? If I had used you like that?"

[endsthegame]

"You know me, Karla," Ender said, rubbing at his forehead. "I don't think I have any right to hate people for their sins. But I'm not Warren. Warren isn't anything like me."

And that was the crux of the matter, wasn't it?

"Most of the people on Fandom are kids. They throw themselves into these issues not because they know what they're getting into, but because they're rebellious, eager to prove that they're capable, and they see a friend getting hurt. They'll leap after you without a moment's thought. Many of them have gone through something, have some power, that makes them think they know what they're getting into. They don't know that sometimes leaders cross lines because they feel they have to, they don't really realise that they might be capable of killing someone pretty badly, or that they might get horribly hurt. On some level, they think they're invincible."

He glanced at her. "And more and more, with every crisis, you're treating them like soldiers. Because that's how it works for the Blood, and you can't help but think of them as part of your Circle. They're not, Karla. Some of them are like Ben and me - we know what we're getting into when we say yes, and that's why we can say no. But most of them aren't. They follow because loyalty trumps everything for them, until it doesn't. And you have to be aware of that."

[glacial_queen]

Karla stared out to the ocean, watching the waves crash onto the beach. Just as Ender could watch the clouds forever, Karla could watch the sea. It was so big and vast and made her feel so small. It was a good feeling.

"How do I draw the line?" she asked. "How do I keep my friends friends and not soldiers? Help me, Ender. Please. I can't...do this again."

[endsthegame]

"It's not that easy," Ender said. He took a moment to collect his thoughts, to feel the wind on his face.

"As far as most of Fandom is concerned, I'm a noncombatant," he said, finally. "I don't have a lot of friends, and I'm usually only peripherally involved when something goes down." Which he didn't mind, no. "But you and I know I'm not. I just know what I'm capable of, and I choose not to."

As far as special abilities on Fandom went, 'the ability to figure out what a person loves about himself, how he functions, so you can wipe them off the skin of the universe by using it' kind of fell in the 'blessed with suck' category.

"I'm aware of what I can do. You have to be, too. You have to realise you can't seem to stop yourself when there's another crisis afoot, and that other people will try to follow you. You have to see why, and make decisions based off that, because they might not be soldiers, but you're a Queen, and you can't ever afford not to think of what people outside yourself are thinking."

[glacial_queen]

"I spent a good part of last year thinking you were meek," Karla said with a watery laugh. "I'm a brilliant judge of character all the way around."

It just wasn't fair! This was the kind of thing Karla was supposed to have years to learn, from older Queens and Warlord Princes. But there was no one to teach her and instead she was just going to get shoved into a role she felt increasingly unprepared for and how could she manage to be a decent Queen over an entire Territory when she couldn't even be a decent friend to a handful of people?!

But she didn't say that out loud. For one, she really didn't have a right to bitch about how unfair her lot was. Not after what she'd done. And not to Ender.

"I used to think I knew myself," she murmured. "Now, I don't think I do at all."

[endsthegame]

"It takes time," Ender said, watching as one cloud drifted past Orion. "God knows it took me years to figure out why I feel the way I do about myself."

But Ender's feelings were only tangential right now.

"And if all things were fair, you'd have years left to figure it out. You're only a teenager," he said. "But they aren't. They never are. And so you need to figure it out quickly, and figure out what you'll have them be to you, too, and keep it straight with them. You don't have to ask all of them to be on the front lines with you. You have that luxury. You should use it more often."

[glacial_queen]

"I think I might be done with rescues and adventures for awhile," Karla said. "Or, at least, I think I'd like to be." Because the Darkness knew that she couldn't say no if a friend asked. "I'm definitely done calling the cavalry for awhile. At least until I get this all sorted out in my head."

Or a start on it, anyhow. She didn't need to have it perfect, but the least she could do is be not so messed up about it.

[endsthegame]

"That's probably a good idea," Ender said, inflecting his voice so she knew he was understating it severely.

That being said, he suddenly flopped back until he was sitting on the sand, knees pulled up a little closer towards him. It made a little shifting noise, and would leave him with a butt-print if he got up. He could remember knowing people who might have found that funny.

"I guess the point is that it's not about being a bad friend, or a good friend," he said, finally. Thinking of an earlier conversation with Ben. "It's about making sure you don't forget everyone's human. And knowing when to use them anyway. That's difficult material to come to terms with."

[glacial_queen]

Karla dragged her fingers through the sand, making little runnels for the seawater to flow through when the tide came in. "And looking at more than just the big picture," she murmured. "I mean, my plan at the church worked exactly right. It gave me a chance to get close to Sebastian, I got Raven's chakra back, Warren survived, and Raven was able to send all the demons away. It worked. But...it wasn't right to do. And Warren may not forgive me for his role in it."

Being torn to shreds was kind of a deal-breaker, to be honest.

"I was so busy looking at results and maximum gain for minimum risk that I stopped seeing my friends as people at all. Like you said. I figured that Warren wouldn't die, but I didn't think of the other consequences my actions could have."

[endsthegame]

"Don't get me wrong, chances are that sometimes you'll have to, and thinking of other consequences will just drag you down," Ender said, leaning back on his elbows. It got him the better view of the sky. "But that's a choice, too. Right now you're reacting, flailing around in the wind, not acting based on rational choices."

[glacial_queen]

"It feels rational, in the moment," Karla said. "Everything emotional just floats away and I'm left with ideas and probabilities. But it's not under my control."

Frustrated, she shoved at some of the sand beneath her hand. "Which is stupid, because it sounds like some kind of new...magic power or something when it isn't. It's just a way of thinking. A habit of thinking, maybe. One that I have to learn to regulate."

[endsthegame]

"It is rational," he said, "So far, you just haven't taken the step back you need to recognise what you're doing and why you're doing it. Now you've seen it. The only thing you can do is remember it, and look a little further ahead into your future so you'll know when you might have to use it. It's like what we talked about last week, Karla. It's about taking responsibility."

[glacial_queen]

"Of all the forms my responsibility could take, I never saw it quite like this," Karla murmured. "For all that you warned me to the contrary. Still, I thought it would be people getting tired of getting a call to arms, not something like this."

Maybe it would be easier to go back to Kaeleer, where she knew how things worked.

...Maybe she should stop being such a self-pitying ninny and work on things herself.

"Are there any books on the subject?" she asked.

[endsthegame]

"There are always books," Ender murmured, "Though their usefulness is debatable."

He glanced aside to catch her eye.

[glacial_queen]

"Any good ones specifically?" Karla asked, before glancing over and catching his look. "What?"

[endsthegame]

"Not all answers are locked up in books," he said.

[glacial_queen]

"It could be somewhere to start," Karla said. "Rather than my usual navel-staring-guilt-complex that I hear tell isn't as effective as I might like to think."

[endsthegame]

He snorted softly.

"I'll see what I can dig up for you," he said, "But don't expect illuminating wisdom."

[glacial_queen]

"I'm not," Karla said with a small shake of her head. "But it'd be nice to have...something solid, I guess. Whether it's to say 'this is helpful' or 'this isn't,' at least I'll have something I can point at as a place to begin. Unless you have a better idea?

[endsthegame]

"Not really," Ender admitted, finally smiling a little. "So let's go with your instincts and see where it gets us. Well. In this case."