Quietly
At the door, a hand on the frame.
Slithers close to the bed, strides over the bugger helmet on the floor.
Ender tenses.
Leans in, Ender's body is not responding or recoiling, just still, just in the pretence of sleep or death, just still. Peter reaches in and touches Ender's face and it almost feels safe. And Ender knows the grin on Peter's face, knows it when he's not even seeing it, knows that this might as well just be his final moment. Peter has always been too dangerous to predict.
This time, he just leans in, breath so hot & close beside Ender's face.
And Ender almost opens his eyes, almost smiles a little at the tickle of it.
Peter, a copper eyed snake, a sheepskined monster, stroking splays of white fingers in Ender's hair, says, "I'm sorry I'm sorry," and other words so confusing Ender does not know what to make of them. Peter's words are dangerous-licking syllables with a tug of submission that is just too believable. Ender keeps his eyes closed since Peter isn't going away at all, his weight is coming down solidly over Ender's own, over the mattress, just on his stomach. So he is going to kill me. He is going to choke me to death. But Peter isn't-his mass shifts a little, just a little, so that Ender is breathing properly with fingers still in his hair and unseen grin still pasted behind his eyelids.
Doesn't move, doesn't say anything.
He turns his head to the right and Peter is at his ear, a whisper of something he can't quite catch because Ender is reciting lines after lines of Machiavelli and Sun Tzu in silence. He can't give in to lies.
(Looks, all crawly-skinned boys, softer and harder versions of their own smiles.)
When he opens his eyes, he does not see the snake's grinning, but that thin, closed line of Peter's mouth so serious and grim and looming above him, like a warning that Peter never gives.
So what is this, this hand on his ear, this put-on tenderness.
"What are you doing?"
"I'm not doing anything." His voice is low and menacing. "Shut up, little Third."
Because none of it makes much sense, and Peter's touches are never a brother's-either too hard or too soft, or no touch at all, just words after words after words. And Ender is always caught in between them, a caged bird or mouse or squirrel, making sure that he never cries or whimpers and show that bared neck.
Ender tenses.
Suddenly there it is, the first move that breaks the ice of battle, the mint-cold lip of Peter on Ender's soft neck, a simple nibble hurting more than anything else ever did. It's like a hole where Peter touches him, his bareness shown to an enemy-brother-how Caesarian of him. So he fights back, he knows this: the claiming of territory in its primal form, ownership marked by blood and bruise, through red-what a color.
He struggles to keep his body from sinking too low down into cotton but find that he can't wriggle out of the weight and mass of Peter, too alive & too ambitious, touching Ender with black black fingers through white white smiles. Mouth of a wolf, killer, his own mouth.
The memories of Stilson, the blood on his face not from a nosebleed, his instinctual smell of fear, right in the air, the stench of everything & pain & tear & blood, because wasn't it true that Ender really meant it when he said what he said, and didn't Peter?
"Stop this."
"Stop what?"
"Stop this!"
"Andrew," Peter breathes, "you fucking bugger."
Ender can feel Peter's teeth now, white little pearls, not sharp but not dull either, gnawing away through stretched pajamas at his shoulder.
"I never meant it, what I said, I never mean any of it, you know that." So Peter's eyes are all sparkle, all wrong, two shinning beads of mendacious promise. Ender wants to punch him but he is too big and heavy, too close; if he doesn't go along with this Peter will just kill him any second, any second now-
So the room is full of silence, bulging from the corners and walls, stuffed in the foolishness of it.
And Peter's mouth suddenly comes down on his own in such an awkward arrangement that it traps Ender there, pins him onto the pillow like a butterfly. All so wrong. Peter's lips are cool bits of flesh that steals warmth from Ender's mouth, steals years and years of accrued courage Ender had picked up along the way. A glassy, porcelain mouth. Ender turns and twists, gives out little noises under Peter's grip, and tries to breathe around him, tries not to push back.
Still that, his breath is rushing in too fast, he can't catch why Peter is doing this, pressing mouth into mouth. It is too foreign, it is what lovers do: weak.
Then Peter snaps back, bolts upright with his mouth still open. For a second there, Ender thinks he can almost discern what Peter is feeling, what his bared eyes are saying, why he is easing his grip, why he stops. For a second there, he thinks he has Peter figured out.
Then it goes away. Illusions, Ender thinks.
(Didn't Ender type up something on his desk and then erased it, wanted the real world to be like that too, where you can just press a button and delete something, eradicate the traces of something to go back to white and easy. It would just be that simple.)
"I love you, Ender."
& kisses Ender on the forehead.
Peter does not fumble when he climbs up to his own bunk in the dark because he knows every inch of their room, and Ender slows down his lungs to squeeze some air in, trembling, fearing, oh god. Tomorrow, how will I face this tomorrow. Peter settles down in his bed above him and the whole bunk bed creaks just a little. Ender is afraid that the whole thing might collapse.
And aren't they doing just that-
But isn't he just a boy, just six, still stinking with milk and diaper and powder, and isn't he just that, a child and nothing more, a Third, an experiment, a boy?
Above the bed, Ender hears the breathing slow & steady. Miles and miles of empty air over his bunk but there it is, breakable by only the upward swing of the arm, and Peter is breathing, only breathing. Ender's head is still swimming from the choking fingers, the bruise and touch. He's remembering, clutching at the blanket, a stupid look on Stilson's face, a resigned blankness; remembering the tender in Peter's voice when he said, "Ender, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I know how it feels, I'm sorry. I'm your brother, I love you."
Peter is only breathing.
And Ender is not asleep, his hand still gripping onto the smoothness of the wall, still fumbling with the buttons on his pajamas, tears drying still in his throat.
Peter's deceit is realer than anyone else's because even Ender wants to believe that, after all, it was only a joke, child's game-play. But they aren't children, it seems that they never really were, and deep inside, Ender remembers that Peter is right, he always is and Ender knows that he is exactly like Peter-even down to the loop and bone.
(Because what else was it? The stupid look over Stilson, the suddenness of how the body gave so stark & sharp, his nose and mouth opened for air, a gawking fish. But Ender pushes thoughts away & away as he grabs at his blanket and turns.)
Valentine is next door, downs the hall so that if Ender screamed, she would come, surely. But that's never good enough and Peter will make sure that Ender cannot scream, ever.
And above him, over a height and an eternity, Peter is asleep.
Ender remembers an electric knot in the back of his neck, tickling, so when he reaches back, he remembers that it is gone. Nothing is all right, he reminds himself. He bites his hand, cries. Quietly.