[Hikaru no Go/Ender's Game] Fic: Wolf Pack
Wolf Pack by flonnebonne
Hikaru no Go/Ender's Game crossover, Waya, Ochi, Shindou, 6656 words, PG-13, no obvious spoilers for either series.
A sequel to my fic Hikaru's Game. Won't make much sense if you haven't read that fic.
[Story edited July 23, 2012] One scene added and some other small changes made. HUGE thank you to cryforthedream for the detailed concrit!
Wolf Pack
(A Sequel to Hikaru’s Game)
One day, Waya reflected sourly, the teachers were going to realize that an internal messaging system that amounted to nothing more than shoving a tiny piece of paper under a student’s door and hoping he managed to blunder into it as he zombied his way out the room at 6am in the morning was actually pretty fucking anachronistic on a state-of-the-art space station with gravity manipulation and holographic video games and, you know, flush toilets.
“So my toon leader has been transferred,” Waya chastised his three remaining toon leaders, “and no one bothered to come tell me until thirty minutes before battle?”
He got a round of sullen looks. No doubt they were all thinking that his inability to blunder into small pieces of paper in the dark at 6am made him a bad commander. “Not transferred. Promoted,” corrected the leader of Toon B. “Got her own army now.”
Even better. His top-performing toon leader was now his enemy. He should have seen it coming; the teachers in charge of the army rosters were pretty consistent when it came to being assholes.
But he couldn’t show weakness in front of his army.
“Who did we get as her replacement?” he asked.
They pointed him toward a short boy, probably fresh out of a Launch group, with a bowl of limp strands for a haircut and a pair of thick glass circles in front of his eyes (Glasses! Who wore glasses anymore?). The kid was sitting on a bottom bunk at the back of the room - and he really was just sitting there, not talking to anyone, not unpacking his things, just watching with small, dispassionate eyes as Waya left his toon leaders and approached the bed.
“Ochi, right?” Waya wondered briefly what kanji the boy used to write his name. “Welcome to Wolf Army.” He stuck out his hand.
Ochi didn’t take it.
“You’re not very good at the whole commander thing, are you?” the boy said. “If you knew what you were doing, you’d make me go to you, not the other way around.”
The other kids around them suddenly stopped pretending they hadn’t been listening. The room went deadly quiet.
Waya’s hand dropped. He felt it forming a fist at his side and had to tell himself not to do anything rash. “You have five seconds to apologize.”
Ochi’s smile didn’t reach his beady little eyes.
“Why are you even talking to me right now? You should be figuring out your battle plan, now that your top toon leader is gone.”
Waya did something rash.
Behind those thick lenses Ochi’s eyes widened noticeably as he was hauled off the mattress, collar first. Waya let the smaller boy hang there for a moment before shoving him backward roughly into the wall.
He was vaguely aware of his entire army’s eyes on him.
Ochi pushed himself upward on his elbows. In the dim light under the top bunk his face was barely visible. There was genuine fear there - good. Anger, too. Even better.
Waya felt a hand on his arm.
“Hey,” said the owner of the hand, one of the kids from Toon A. “He’s smaller than you.”
“I don’t tolerate insubordination,” Waya growled. “Especially from pissant Launchies who think they’re in the big leagues.”
“He’s not from the Launchies,” someone else said from a nearby bunk. “He’s transferred from Condor.”
Waya let out a bark of surprised laughter. “Seriously? Could have fooled me. What are they feeding those dumb birds nowadays?”
That got him a few nervous giggles from the peanut gallery, but it was all from the younger, more fearful ones. None of the older kids laughed.
Waya turned away from the boy on the bunk. He had liked the sound the body made when it hit the wall. He wanted to hear it again.
He told his racing heart to still itself. Tried to smooth the anger from his face. Held his head up like a commander should.
“We have a battle to plan,” he said.
But when he looked to his toon leaders they gazed back at him with sullen, watchful eyes.
Wolf eyes.
- 0 - 0 -
The last moments before battle were always the hardest.
The battle against Ferret was an important one, Wolf Army knew. Not because Ferret was any good. Ferret was terrible.
Just like Wolf.
Ferret was the only kind of army they could possibly beat.
The thing was, Wolf’s record had been decent two months ago, before Waya took command. Their previous commander - Isumi, he could say the name at least in his head, damn it - Isumi had been a very different kind of leader from Waya. More careful, more methodical. Waya just didn’t know what to do with the kind of army Isumi had created, and it showed in the standings.
It didn’t help that he’d been Isumi’s friend. His soldiers probably thought he was a back-stabbing opportunist. Waya sometimes thought he was one too.
He looked into the faces of his army. None of them trusted him. They were all waiting for him to make a mistake so they could tear him apart.
Shut up, Waya, he told himself. Your enemy is over there, beyond the gate. Just win and they’ll fall in line.
He raised his gun high. Forty eyes followed the motion.
Thirty seconds until the gate opened. (thirty of those eyes dull with resentment.)
Ten seconds. (ten eyes flashing with challenge.)
Zero. (zero wolf eyes bright with loyalty.)
The gate opened.
- 0 - 0 -
Ochi’s beady eyes were full of contempt.
“Why are you personally leading Toon A?” he muttered as Waya surveyed the Battle Room’s star formation. “And why do I have to be in Toon A?”
“Quiet down,” Waya hissed, “before I shut you up myself.”
“Who’s watching the overall battle?”
Thankfully, the other boys in Toon A were on his side on this one. Ochi was that annoying.
“Just shut up for once.”
“You wanna give away our position, pissant?”
“Nobody shoots better’n our commander, he better in a toon than back of the room.”
Waya tried not to let the surprise show.
Don’t get carried away, he told himself. It was just one little comment.
But the battle adrenaline was pumping in his veins, and Waya felt for a moment like he was in Tiger again, a toon leader with a bunch of giddy, reckless kids ready to follow him anywhere. He just had forty kids now instead of nine.
“Toon A, give me formation twelve, you know the one. We’re taking the middle star cluster,” he ordered. “Toon B, take the nine o’clock star. C, three o’clock. D, hold back for one minute then wall slide up the ceiling, twelve o’clock. Toon leaders choose the formations. Got it?”
They got it.
Except Ochi.
“I don’t know formation twelve,” he complained.
“Then you stick with me,” Waya told him. “You my shield.”
When he grabbed Ochi’s collar this time, his toon laughed. Waya had a good feeling about the battle ahead.
“You’re making a mistake.” The boy’s eyes looked a little wild.
“You stay still and be a good little shield. But not too little. You gotta cover me. Toon A, ready?”
The five Toon A kids in front made a kind of staggered wall - they would provide cover for the boys in the back, who would exit the gate a moment after them, and at a faster speed. By the time the back soldiers caught up to the “wall” a lot of the frontrunners would be frozen or disabled - but the frozen soldiers could be used as shields, and the whole thing was meant to be a distraction from the other toons anyway, who would be taking the side stars.
Waya liked using distractions. He’d learned all about them from Shindou, his previous commander.
“Vanguard, go!” he shouted.
Four boys launched themselves out the gate in near-perfect synchrony, but Ochi had to be shoved.
“Rear, go!” Waya pushed himself out the gate with the rest of his Toon A boys, each aiming to rendezvous with one of the frontline soldiers. He was throwing himself right out there and hoping his toon leaders would be fine without him. He felt their eyes following him as they began setting up their own formations.
Straight ahead of him, Ochi was flying - more like flailing - and shooting his flash gun toward Ferret’s side of the Battle Room. That was about all that could be said about the kid’s aim. This was what the teachers had given him in exchange for a toon leader?
Waya would have to make up for the little idiot. He aimed carefully and fired over Ochi’s shoulder, managing to freeze an enemy soldier’s gun arm. One down, forty to go. Waya grinned. No one ever doubted he was a good shot.
But the enemy were firing on the shield soldiers with more accuracy than Waya liked. Since when had Ferret been any good at shooting? Worse, Ferret had some good star clusters pretty close to its gate that they were using for cover.
Not a very fair battlefield, Waya realized. It had been hard to gauge the distances properly from the back of the room. Maybe he shouldn’t have gone for the middle so early.
Corners, then sides, then middle, he remembered Shindou saying once. That’s the safe way, if you like safe.
Damn it, damn it.
It was too late now to change the plan. He’d have to trust his toon leaders to take the corners and sides while he distracted the enemy in the middle.
A stray shot nearly got him from below. The shields, separated from the shielded in this first stage, actually weren’t much good when the enemy could attack from any angle. The gap between the shields and the shielded was supposed to lure out the enemy, give the back row a chance to assess the battlefield, but the gap was a liability too. He just hadn’t realized how big a liability.
Fly faster, he told himself, as if he could tell inertia what to do.
And then he was at Ochi’s back. Somehow, the kid was still unfrozen. The enemy had probably seen what a bad soldier he was and ignored him, concentrating on the other shield soldiers. His shoulders were stiff and raised up practically around his ears as he fired away.
Waya put his hand on one of those shoulders.
“Eyah!” Ochi half-screamed, bringing his gun around and shooting it directly at Waya’s face.
The commander of Ferret told him later, during the victory ceremony, as Waya bowed over his hand, that he wished he’d had a camera to take a picture of Waya’s frozen expression.
“You looked like a big loser,” he said.
- 0 - 0 -
At least his army had someone other than their commander to blame this time.
“Pissant,” they jeered quietly. Apparently the name had stuck. “Piss ant.”
Ochi wasn’t fighting back.
“You don’t see so good, huh? Need new glasses?”
“Maybe we do you a favour, break those old ones.”
There was a lot of shoving going on back there. He heard the impact of a body hitting the wall, a muffled cry of pain. It was none of his business. He’d be doing the same thing if they weren’t doing it for him.
Waya kept walking, and his Wolves followed.
Back in the barracks, he kept the post-battle speeches strictly business - praise for things they’d done well, criticism for things they needed to improve on. He didn’t mention Ochi’s slip-up. He didn’t need to. He knew what would happen as soon as he left the room. And they knew he knew, so it was like he was giving his implicit permission.
Maybe they’d hurt him enough to put him in the infirmary. Enough to put him out of his army, or any army, for a long time. And Waya was going to let them.
The thought didn’t make him as happy as he thought it would.
“Ochi,” he said. He didn’t recognize his voice. It sounded cold, like he was still frozen from battle. “Come with me.”
He saw his soldiers freeze too. Some of them were angry. But most of them just looked surprised.
Ochi followed Waya to his room silently. The door shut behind them, sealing them in all alone together, and still the boy said nothing.
Waya couldn’t believe how calm he felt. Must have been all that time he’d spent floating around the Battle Room, watching his army lose without him. I can actually see the battle like this, he’d thought.
But Ochi was still an idiot.
“You are not any kind of soldier,” Waya said bluntly. “You can’t shoot. You can’t launch. You can’t even float without tensing up so bad you don’t know friend from enemy.”
Ochi had the decency to look chagrined at that. But he didn’t apologize. “You sent me out without telling me what I was supposed to be doing.”
“You fired in the completely wrong direction. You fired on your commander. Other commanders would give you a black eye for that.”
“You shouldn’t have been in the middle of the battle to begin with.”
Then Waya did punch Ochi, but it was in the abdomen, not in the head where he could do more damage. Ochi made a whiffing sound and keeled over, clutching at his midsection.
Waya withdrew his fist slowly, wonderingly. He’d never planned to hit someone before. He’d always just done it.
“I could have let you stay in that room with thirty-eight boys and two girls who want to rip your throat out,” he said, voice oddly calm. “Maybe I should have let them, it would have good for morale. But I decided even you don’t deserve that. You can’t help being incompetent.”
That got a reaction. Ochi struggled to his feet, clearly in pain but with a kind of pathetic pride.
“You think this is anything new to me? My last commander called me incompetent too! You think I want to be picked on just for being short and not good at shooting a stupid toy gun? You think I’m not trying?”
He was practically yelling.
“What does athleticism have to do with anything? They told me I had to come here because I’m smart! Use your brains to help save the human race, right? I get near top grades in most of my classes and none of it matters...damn it, none of it matters, because I’m the worst soldier in the school. Incompetent.”
He deflated suddenly, like Waya’s punch had caught up to him, all the hot air knocked out of him. He didn’t sit down or start bawling or anything, but his shoulders dropped and the fire in his eyes flickered out.
It was weird. Waya should have been happy to finally beat the kid down. Ochi’d been doing nothing but mouthing off since he’d showed up with his ugly mug and uglier personality, but....
“Don’t go back to the barracks, and don’t go to dinner,” Waya said suddenly. “Avoid the Wolf bathrooms. Go to the other side of the school if you have to. Sleep in the infirmary tonight.”
Ochi looked up, like he’d forgotten Waya was there. “What should I say when they ask me what I have?” he asked, voice flat.
“Tell them you have a stomachache,” Waya replied. It would be true enough, after that punch.
Ochi nodded, still with that dead look in his eyes. He pushed the button to open the door and stepped out, not looking back.
Once he was alone, Waya sat down heavily on his bed. That had been...it had taken more energy than he’d have thought. He would have to go to dinner soon - he was not looking forward to the jeers he would face in the commander’s mess - but he had some research to do before that.
He found his desk on his bedside table and turned it on.
Being good with computers was a handy thing in Battle School. He’d cracked the teachers’ encryption system, or the part of it they allowed to be cracked, when he’d first gotten his commander’s account. He had way more intel than someone like Shindou did, he was sure.
See, Ochi, brains do matter.
So I’m sure you won’t mind me opening your file.
The first thing he saw was lots of reports from teachers about Ochi’s problems integrating with his fellow soldiers, going all the way back to the shuttle ride from Earth to Battle School. So his bad personality wasn’t a new thing.
Somehow Waya wasn’t surprised to learn that Ochi was from a very old, very rich family. What was it he’d said? If you knew what you were doing, you’d make me go to you, not the other way around. Was that the kind of thing you learned growing up with servants waiting on you? Was that the kind of thing a commander should just know?
Waya was starting to feel uncomfortable about his snooping. But he couldn’t stop now.
Ochi’s last army was Condor, which was doing well in the standings. What was the reason for his transfer?
Probably got kicked out for not shutting his mouth, Waya figured.
Blah blah blah good grades blah blah still can’t aim or launch himself properly blah blah blah.
Student request for transfer to Wolf.
Wait. What?
Waya read it again, not sure if he’d understood correctly. Ochi had asked to be placed in Wolf? Why would anyone leave an army that was in the top ten to come to an army that was in the bottom ten?
My last commander called me incompetent too!
Well, clearly he didn’t get along with the commander of Condor. But that still didn’t explain why Wolf. The teachers hadn’t left any notes to answer that particular question.
Maybe he’d wanted to come to an army that wasn’t already filled up with excellent soldiers, where he would have a chance, any kind of chance, to rise in the ranks? Did he think he could, what, fix Waya’s army? That would explain all the “helpful” comments he’d made today.
But then Waya remembered the terrible hopelessness he’d seen in Ochi’s eyes as he’d left the room.
No, he didn’t come here to be a schemer. He was more desperate than that.
Think, Waya.
Isumi used to tell him he needed to think more. Think about his army, as people and not just as soldiers. Think about the whole game, not only the Battle Room. Why we’re here, who brought us here. Isumi would whisper it, like it was forbidden knowledge to even ask these questions.
Waya still felt weird, remembering Isumi-san’s voice, his kindnesses. When I was second in command of Tiger Army, Isumi-san, I forgot how to be your friend. You were the enemy. I could hardly remember I was just playing a game.
So...maybe I owe it to you now to start thinking.
Why was Ochi in Battle School in the first place?
Why would the teachers recruit a kid with zero charisma for a program designed to create military leaders? Good grades didn’t mean jack shit when it came to getting along with your fellow soldiers, never mind getting kids to follow your command.
Maybe, he thought hazily, some of us are brought here precisely because we have no chance of success. There has to be a few losers to make the winners shine more brightly.
What a horrible role to be given. What a horrible place we have come to.
He felt a stab of sympathy, of empathy, for poor Ochi.
Lying back on his bed, Waya closed his eyes. He decided he wasn’t going to go to dinner tonight after all. He didn’t want to face all those competent commanders.
- 0 - 0 -
He was having that dream again.
Waya was still a Tiger, and Wolf Army was destroying his army.
Aim carefully, he told himself as he pointed his gun at Isumi’s chest. Chop off the head, and the body shall fall.
“Don’t shoot,” said Isumi from a million miles away. “I’ll disappear if you do. And then what will you do?”
I’ll become commander. I’ll take your army.
“Then take it.”
Isumi’s eyes were changing, grey to yellow with pupils narrowed to black slits. The Wolves were gathering close now, watching Waya as Waya watched Isumi, as Waya’s index finger hesitated on the trigger, frozen with regret for things that hadn’t happened yet.
“Fire,” Shindou ordered from somewhere. “Fire, or you’ll never make commander.”
“Fire,” the Wolves jeered. “Fire or you’ll never command us.”
“Fire,” Isumi warned him, “and you’ll never see me again.”
“Fire,” said Ochi, and his was a new voice in the dream, “or I’ll freeze you here forever.”
Waya’s gun arm wouldn’t hold steady. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know whose order to follow.
The Wolves were closing in, and he knew he was going to lose again.
- 0 - 0 -
“Hey Waya! Why-uuuh weren’t you at dinner last night? Huh? You listening to me?”
“Still frozen, eh?
“Poor dumb Waya can’t believe his own soldier shot him in the face.”
“Killed by a face shot, what a way to go.”
“Betcha he liked it.”
“You liking it, Why-uuuhhh? Huh, boy?”
“Goes down real smooth, ne?”
Waya ignored them until eventually they went away, if only because the breakfast line was calling to them. But now Waya couldn’t get his own food. The wolves are merciless today, he caught himself thinking.
His usual table was empty this morning - his “friends” were all eating somewhere else. It was a bitter thing to realize he'd been abandoned. He’d been popular, once, back when he was a toon leader in Tiger Army. Now he wasn’t.
“Hey,” said Shindou, who was balancing a tray on one hand and eating a piece of toast with the other. “Where were you at dinner yesterday?”
“Slept through it,” said Waya. It was more or less the truth. An image of Shindou's face from his dream, a face ugly with contempt, flashed across his mind. He shook his head a little. “You’re not eating with Touya today?”
“I don’t always have to eat with Touya.”
No, on some days you take pity on me. “Usually you do.”
“Not that I’ve never suggested this before, but we could all eat together, you know.”
“I don’t want to be labelled the Japanese group.”
“I think we already are,” Shindou sighed. But he sat down and slid his tray over without being asked so Waya could take a piece of toast. They still understood each other’s signals well enough, even if they weren’t exactly buddy-buddy anymore.
Waya didn’t exactly resent Touya for being Shindou’s friend. He just couldn’t stand the guy. And to tell the truth, his own friendship with Shindou had never recovered from Waya becoming commander. They were equals now, but they were enemies too. They couldn’t bounce ideas off each other the way they used to, couldn’t talk about the game without fear of giving secrets away. And without the game, what kind of friends were they?
He doubted it was like this between Shindou and Touya. They had that dumb board game of theirs to talk about. He’d seen them huddled together over the damn thing often enough to know they were obsessed with it.
Okay, maybe he did resent Touya a little bit. And Shindou too, the ass.
“So, uh, I heard something about you getting nuked by your own soldier.”
Waya choked on his dry toast. The next time someone brought him food he was going to demand condiments. “Did you really have to bring that up?”
“Of course! I heard it was ‘the most epic-est battle in the history of Battle School.’”
Shindou did a pretty good impression of Ferret’s commander.
“I know you’re trying to make me feel better,” Waya said, “but you are kind of lousy at it.”
“Seriously, what happened with that soldier? He was new, right?”
“His name is Ochi.” Waya thought it was important, somehow, to give the name. “Transferred from Condor yesterday morning, but I didn’t find out until half an hour before my battle with Ferret. Somehow missed the note.”
“Ah, the dreaded tiny piece of paper in the dark thing.”
“Yeah. They should really do something about that.”
“I’m sure they’ll figure something out.”
“Yeah, it would make sense, right?”
“Maybe a dinging noise when you open the door.”
“Or a little flashing light.”
“I’m sure they’ll come up with something.”
“Sure.”
Waya took a bite of ham.
“So what was with the soldier, that Ochi kid, why did he fire on you?”
Waya chewed a bit, deciding how he wanted to answer that.
“He didn’t mean to. He’s not insubordinate, just incompetent.” Then he paused, remembering how Ochi had nearly broken down on him yesterday after hearing that word. “I shouldn’t call him that. He hates it.”
“Incompetent?”
“Yeah. He never got trained properly. He can barely fly, never mind carry out maneuvers while the enemy is firing at him.”
“Are you sure?” Shindou asked. “You’ve never seen him outside of that one battle, right? Maybe he’s better than you think. It must have been stressful for him, being thrown into a frontline formation in a new army.”
Clearly, Shindou knew more about the battle than he was letting on. But Waya knew a lot more than he was supposed to, too. “Yeah, trust me, he didn’t learn anything in his launch group or his last army. He had issues with his commander. He’s had issues his whole time here.”
Shindou gave him a speculative look, obviously noticing something was fishy about Waya’s data sources, but smart enough not to ask. And Waya was smart enough to get out of there before Shindou changed his mind.
“Thanks for the food, hey?” he said, standing up. “I’ve got to get ready for practice.”
“You barely ate anything.” Shindou looked up at him in surprise. “You got time, sit down.”
“No, I don’t want to keep stealing your breakfast.”
Shindou stood up too and moved as if he was about to grab Waya’s arm, then thought better of it. “You don’t have to do everything by yourself, Waya, whatever the teachers want us to think. Maybe the commander that they’re looking for has to be some lonely hero, but the rest of us can have friends.”
Waya shook his head.
“Commanders used to have help from their seconds, remember?” Shindou persisted. “And it was fine. We worked well, the two of us.”
Yeah, we worked so well we crushed Isumi and Wolf into the ground.
Shindou was watching him carefully. “We never held each other back.”
“It’s not like that anymore. They decided we have to go it alone.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s the best way for everyone.”
“It’s a sign of weakness, needing help.”
“No, it’s not. It’s not.” Shindou’s voice and eyes went strange, the way they did sometimes. “I used to...have a friend who played go, who couldn’t place the stones himself. But he was brilliant, and he had so much to teach me. So I placed the stones for him, in all his games.”
“Did he have a disability?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then what was wrong with him?”
A wan smile. “Maybe he was just a bit incompetent at certain things.”
- 0 - 0 -
Waya was making his way to the showers, where he could cool his head a bit. He had lied about not having any time before practice. Practice was still thirty minutes away.
It made him so mad when Shindou acted like the teachers. Like he was so experienced and wise. I’m talking about things you don’t understand, Waya. Maybe you’d understand if you had a real childhood, Waya. Too bad you never did and never will.
Here’s what’s wrong with you, Shindou: you play a board game like it matters as much as the real game; you talk about stars and planets as if you’ll own them someday; you say things that sound like they come out of a storybook world, where every kid has some kind of grand destiny waiting for him.
And what did I get, after five years in Battle School? I got to fire a gun at my best friend and steal his army. An army that hates me now, almost as much as I hate myself.
I should have said goodbye to Isumi.
He was getting near the showers now. His route took him past one of the smaller bathrooms, where he saw a crowd of boys laughing and jostling for position as they peered inside. They were mostly from Condor, judging by the number of black and white uniforms. Their laughter had an ugly ring to it.
“What’s going on here?” he asked loudly.
A few of the boys turned to look at him. Most, however, were too caught up in whatever was going on in the bathroom to pay any attention to him.
“We just watching Owchie,” one of them said. As if that explained anything.
“He’s one of our ex-teammates,” someone else said.
“More like our ex-laughingstock.”
“Poor Owchie, always gets the Owchies when he tries to do the Battle Room.”
“Has to come in here to flush it out after.”
“Oh, so that’s what Owchie means.” The boy scrunched up his face and mimed defecating into a toilet. He got a lot of laughs for that one.
Waya had heard enough. “Move it,” he said.
That was when one of them looked a little closer at Waya’s uniform and saw the commander’s pin on his collar. Then he saw the insignia and the colours.
“You’re the Wolf commander!” the kid said, like it was rocket science or something. “Hey, Owchie’s new commander is here!”
The laughter grew exponentially.
“The losers band together!”
“Owchie and Wolfie!”
“Awwwoooooooo!”
“Move it,” Waya said again, “before I lose my patience.”
He didn’t think it would work, but there must have been something in his voice or face this time that made them back away, still laughing, so he could pass.
Inside, there were even more Condor grunts crowding the small bathroom, with several of them banging on the stall farthest from the door. None of them had gone so far as to climb over the tall stall door, but it was probably only a matter of time.
Waya stood near the bathroom entrance and crossed his arms, waiting.
Eventually, they became aware of him. A boy in the back of the crowd nudged another boy, and the nudges were passed around until they were all looking at him.
Waya stared back.
“Lookie, all the Wolves are coming out to play,” said one boy.
“Owchie, your commander here to save your sorry butt.”
“Sorry sore butt.”
“Sowwy!”
“Gotta be sore sitting on a toilet all day.”
“It’s ‘cause Wolves do it like dogs.”
“That’s why cute widdle Owchie meets his big bad commander in the bathroom, yeah?”
“Ochi just wants a little love.’”
“Oh, so that’s why he’s always mouthing off! I get it now.”
“Yeah, it’s all psy-cho-lo-gic-al. Poor little rich boy is tired of giving orders all the time! He wants to be disciplined.”
Don’t do anything that will invite retaliation, now or later, Waya told himself. Just wait them out. They don’t hate Ochi enough to physically attack a commander without provocation. He’s just annoying, not a threat to them.
It took a while, but someone eventually said, “This is dumb as stupid. We been in this bathroom fifteen, twenty minutes and Ochi still not coming out.”
“We gonna rumble?” asked another, gesturing at Waya with his head. “Ten on one.”
This drew a round of laughs. “Seriously, ‘rumble’? No one says that.”
“Yeah, we say ‘ice.’”
“Okay okay.” We gonna ice him?”
But the boy Waya had picked out as the ringleader shook his head. “We got practice soon. Let’s go. This is boring.”
Waya stood aside and let them pass.
When they were all gone, he walked over to the last stall, knocked gently, and said, “Ochi?”
No reply.
“I’d leave you alone to sulk, except you’ll probably get in trouble again if I don’t escort you out.”
The door opened.
“That’s better. You okay?”
“Fine,” said Ochi.
“What were you doing in there?”
“Hiding.”
“From Condor or Wolf?”
Ochi’s face was utterly expressionless. “Both.”
“Smart man.”
- 0 - 0 -
Waya ended up not taking that shower after all, but at least Ochi made it to practice in one piece.
Unfortunately, the kid was still a terrible soldier.
Toon A ignored Ochi, even as he haphazardly tried to do their drills. Everyone was ignoring Ochi. Waya wasn’t happy with the situation--he would have to speak to his newly assigned Toon A leader--but for now he was just glad they weren’t trying to kill the kid.
As he was dismissing his army at the end of practice, he made eye contact with Ochi. Stay, he said with a look.
Ochi stayed. If he was embarrassed at all about his display of emotion the day before, or the incident in the bathroom this morning, he wasn’t showing it. He stared at Waya with a bored expression, a silent “So?” written across his face.
“First of all,” said Waya, “did you manage to go to breakfast this morning?”
If Ochi was surprised by the question he didn’t let it show. “Yeah. I promised Shorty my desserts for a month if he’d protect me during meals.”
Shorty was the biggest, meanest soldier in Wolf. “So now no one is bothering you, but you’ll be without cake for a month. And you’re being shunned.”
“I don’t like dessert or people.”
“I still have no idea how you got into Battle School with that attitude.”
Ochi shrugged again. “I don’t care whether people like me or not.”
“No, I meant the not-liking-cake thing. The teachers usually don’t admit students into the school who don’t clear the cake requirement.”
“What?”
“A joke,” said Waya. “They have those where you come from?”
Ochi gave him a more-sour-than-usual look. He really did need some sugar in his life. “Is this why you asked me to stay? You needed someone to listen to your bad jokes?”
“Maybe I wanted to punish you a little for shooting me.”
“It’s working. Why are you in such a good mood?”
“Practice went well. It usually doesn’t, but today it did, somehow, even though we lost yesterday,” said Waya, a bit surprised to realize that he was in a better mood.
“You were more like a commander today,” Ochi said, eyes assessing Waya’s reaction. “You seemed a lot less wound up than yesterday.”
“Yeah,” said Waya. “Huh.”
He’d been angry after breakfast - at Shindou, at Ochi, at the whole damn school - but, like yesterday after the battle, the anger had turned cold. And apparently that kind of anger sharpened his thinking, hardened his bearing and voice, made him into a better commander.
Useful to know.
“Is that all?” asked Ochi. “Can I go?”
Even Ochi couldn’t make him see red right now. After all, it was Ochi who’d helped him understand himself.
“I just wanted to make sure no one in Wolf tried to beat you up,” Waya told him honestly.
“They’ve had time to cool down. You took me out of there when they really wanted to hurt me.”
“Sure did.” And you’re welcome.
“You should have left me there. ‘To form an army that loves itself, create an enemy it hates,’” Ochi quoted from one of their textbooks. Waya thought it was maybe something a Polemarch said once.
“I’d rather form an army that loves itself because it loves itself,” he replied.
“You’re an idiot.”
“I know. But I don’t punish honest mistakes.”
“A mistake that cost you a battle.”
“We were probably going to lose anyway,” Waya said easily, admitting it aloud for the first time.
“You noticed, then,” Ochi sniffed.
“You noticed right away.”
“I’m pretty good at that.”
“Yeah. That’s why I want your help. I want you watching the battles, and giving me advice.” The idea was still forming in Waya’s head as he said the words, but it felt right. He could already see the possibilities. Shindou was always telling him to think outside the Battle Room box, after all. “You’ll learn a lot, and I’ll learn with you.”
Ochi actually reeled back a little, which was just comical in zero grav. “Pardon?”
“You’re smart, your grades are good, you can read a situation quickly. It would be a waste of talent not to use you. And..." here he hesitated, before leaping, "I want you to analyze me as a commander. You understand what power is supposed to look like, I know you do. Help me figure out this commander thing.”
“You’re asking me?” Ochi didn’t bother trying to hide his shock. “I insulted you five seconds after I met you. I shot you in the face.”
“Yeah, you have to stop doing that.”
“It’ll look bad. The commander asking a new recruit for advice, it just won’t fly.” Ochi kept reaching for counter-arguments, but Waya could tell he was coming around to the idea.
“We won’t tell anyone,” Waya said breezily. “At least not until you get some respect back.”
“How will you keep it a secret during battle?”
“We’ll work something out.”
“And outside of battle? You can’t always hold me back after practice, it’ll look suspicious.”
“Yes, I can." Waya's brain was working furiously. "I can because you need extra one-on-one lessons. You are going to learn to fly, and you are going to learn to shoot, and you are going to learn it from one of the best. I’ll work with you for as long as it takes, you lucky squirt, until you’re good enough that the rest of my army will treat you like a human being.”
Ochi’s mouth was open, but for once he wasn’t talking. He was...there was something in his expression, something vulnerable and young that told Waya he was making the right decision.
You were right, Shindou. Some of us need help, and some of us need to give help. It's not a weakness, because it makes us stronger.
“That’s why you came to Wolf, right?” Waya said gently. “So you could become a good soldier?”
It took a moment, but Ochi croaked out a shaky “Yes, sir.”
“Good. Let’s get started.”
They practiced until Ochi didn’t have the energy to mouth off anymore and Waya thought his voice was going to give out from all the sage advice he was making up on the spot. The practiced until Ochi could finally hit a very slowly moving target from twenty meters away, as long as someone was steadying his gun arm.
Waya was dead tired when he crept into bed that night, but the look on Ochi’s face was worth it.
And, for the first time, the wolves were kind to him in his dreams.
- 0 - 0 -
You need to capture the upper right star.
“Hai, hai,” Waya subvocalized, knowing the sensitive earpiece would pick up his voice, sarcasm and all. “I’m not stupid, you know.”
Could have fooled me.
“Zee and Wilbee!” Waya yelled in Common. “Send your toons to capture that upper right star! Formations four and seven, watch out for wall sliders, have one man on lookout slash cover fire like we practiced.”
Toons C and D took off.
The earpiece is working better today, Ochi admitted. I’m impressed you got the volume controls to discriminate between Japanese and Common. It’s nice to not have my ears shouted off. Not bad for something cobbled together out of desk parts.
Ochi really needed to cut down on the idle chatter during battle. “Concentrate on your formation, oomay, you still fly like a brick.”
A few minutes later, Ochi’s voice came back and said, in its usual deadpan way, I do not fly like a brick. I fly like a clumsily thrown brick.
“Nice, you’re finally developing a sense of humour but please shut up and go shoot things.”
Ochi did shut up, and started shooting things - badly, but not as badly as before.
Waya hung back and watched his army, noting who was flying well, which toons needed to work on their teamwork, which tactics were effective and which were ineffective. He was fairly pleased with what he saw. Even if Wolf didn’t win, the number of disabled or frozen Condor bodies floating around was nothing to be ashamed of.
He couldn’t help but think think that Isumi would approve of what he’d done with his army.
Maybe one day Waya would tell him all about it.
He sent out his last four reserve soldiers, one from each toon, before throwing himself into the battle alongside them.
“Let’s give ‘em the old Wolf calling card, eh?” he grinned at his soldiers.
“Aww, do we have to, boss?” But they were grinning back.
“Yes.”
They took a deep breath.
“AWWWOOOOOO!!!”
-End-
Author’s notes:
This is a story I’ve been trying to write for seven years, ever since I completed “Hikaru’s Game” in 2005. Whenever I tried to think about how I could write about Waya in Wolf Army - and by extension something about Waya’s guilt about beating Isumi - it always ended up being a plotless angstfest of zzzzz. I knew I needed some kind of external conflict, probably in the form of a Wolf soldier or two butting heads with Waya, but I didn’t want to create an OC just for that purpose.
And then I thought of using Ochi! And boy did Ochi have a lot of issues with Waya, and Battle School in general. Ochi is kind of fun to write because he has no social skills. For a while I thought of “Wolf Pack” as “that Ochi story,” though by the end of the writing process it was back to “that Waya story” in my head.
As I was writing, it occurred to me that if Ender’s Game and “Hikaru’s Game” are all about the hero’s journey (even if Graff totally rigged up Ender’s journey), Ender’s Shadow and “Wolf Pack” are all about the people who don’t get to be the hero but who are heroic in their own way. The former two operate on the level of myth, so you have things like the Fantasy Game and Sai and lots of Vaguely Improbable Happenings - while the latter two operate on the level of the mundane, so you have things like Bean crawling through air ducts and Waya choking on dry toast and lots of Overexplaining of Improbable Happenings (and retconning, in the case of Ender’s Shadow).
I like the tragic, heroic myth that Ender's Game treats us to, but I can’t help but think Ender's Shadow has better lessons for us non-heroes. Cooperation is better than competition, yeah? I think my favourite line from Ender’s Shadow (a book I don’t actually enjoy that much, to tell the truth) comes from Graff, who says to Bean after the final battle: "I think perhaps you pulled each other across the finish line." It's a bit of a retcon of Ender's Game, but I'm okay with that one.
These are the longest author's notes in the world. Thank you for reading!
Hikaru no Go/Ender's Game crossover, Waya, Ochi, Shindou, 6656 words, PG-13, no obvious spoilers for either series.
A sequel to my fic Hikaru's Game. Won't make much sense if you haven't read that fic.
[Story edited July 23, 2012] One scene added and some other small changes made. HUGE thank you to cryforthedream for the detailed concrit!
Wolf Pack
(A Sequel to Hikaru’s Game)
One day, Waya reflected sourly, the teachers were going to realize that an internal messaging system that amounted to nothing more than shoving a tiny piece of paper under a student’s door and hoping he managed to blunder into it as he zombied his way out the room at 6am in the morning was actually pretty fucking anachronistic on a state-of-the-art space station with gravity manipulation and holographic video games and, you know, flush toilets.
“So my toon leader has been transferred,” Waya chastised his three remaining toon leaders, “and no one bothered to come tell me until thirty minutes before battle?”
He got a round of sullen looks. No doubt they were all thinking that his inability to blunder into small pieces of paper in the dark at 6am made him a bad commander. “Not transferred. Promoted,” corrected the leader of Toon B. “Got her own army now.”
Even better. His top-performing toon leader was now his enemy. He should have seen it coming; the teachers in charge of the army rosters were pretty consistent when it came to being assholes.
But he couldn’t show weakness in front of his army.
“Who did we get as her replacement?” he asked.
They pointed him toward a short boy, probably fresh out of a Launch group, with a bowl of limp strands for a haircut and a pair of thick glass circles in front of his eyes (Glasses! Who wore glasses anymore?). The kid was sitting on a bottom bunk at the back of the room - and he really was just sitting there, not talking to anyone, not unpacking his things, just watching with small, dispassionate eyes as Waya left his toon leaders and approached the bed.
“Ochi, right?” Waya wondered briefly what kanji the boy used to write his name. “Welcome to Wolf Army.” He stuck out his hand.
Ochi didn’t take it.
“You’re not very good at the whole commander thing, are you?” the boy said. “If you knew what you were doing, you’d make me go to you, not the other way around.”
The other kids around them suddenly stopped pretending they hadn’t been listening. The room went deadly quiet.
Waya’s hand dropped. He felt it forming a fist at his side and had to tell himself not to do anything rash. “You have five seconds to apologize.”
Ochi’s smile didn’t reach his beady little eyes.
“Why are you even talking to me right now? You should be figuring out your battle plan, now that your top toon leader is gone.”
Waya did something rash.
Behind those thick lenses Ochi’s eyes widened noticeably as he was hauled off the mattress, collar first. Waya let the smaller boy hang there for a moment before shoving him backward roughly into the wall.
He was vaguely aware of his entire army’s eyes on him.
Ochi pushed himself upward on his elbows. In the dim light under the top bunk his face was barely visible. There was genuine fear there - good. Anger, too. Even better.
Waya felt a hand on his arm.
“Hey,” said the owner of the hand, one of the kids from Toon A. “He’s smaller than you.”
“I don’t tolerate insubordination,” Waya growled. “Especially from pissant Launchies who think they’re in the big leagues.”
“He’s not from the Launchies,” someone else said from a nearby bunk. “He’s transferred from Condor.”
Waya let out a bark of surprised laughter. “Seriously? Could have fooled me. What are they feeding those dumb birds nowadays?”
That got him a few nervous giggles from the peanut gallery, but it was all from the younger, more fearful ones. None of the older kids laughed.
Waya turned away from the boy on the bunk. He had liked the sound the body made when it hit the wall. He wanted to hear it again.
He told his racing heart to still itself. Tried to smooth the anger from his face. Held his head up like a commander should.
“We have a battle to plan,” he said.
But when he looked to his toon leaders they gazed back at him with sullen, watchful eyes.
Wolf eyes.
- 0 - 0 -
The last moments before battle were always the hardest.
The battle against Ferret was an important one, Wolf Army knew. Not because Ferret was any good. Ferret was terrible.
Just like Wolf.
Ferret was the only kind of army they could possibly beat.
The thing was, Wolf’s record had been decent two months ago, before Waya took command. Their previous commander - Isumi, he could say the name at least in his head, damn it - Isumi had been a very different kind of leader from Waya. More careful, more methodical. Waya just didn’t know what to do with the kind of army Isumi had created, and it showed in the standings.
It didn’t help that he’d been Isumi’s friend. His soldiers probably thought he was a back-stabbing opportunist. Waya sometimes thought he was one too.
He looked into the faces of his army. None of them trusted him. They were all waiting for him to make a mistake so they could tear him apart.
Shut up, Waya, he told himself. Your enemy is over there, beyond the gate. Just win and they’ll fall in line.
He raised his gun high. Forty eyes followed the motion.
Thirty seconds until the gate opened. (thirty of those eyes dull with resentment.)
Ten seconds. (ten eyes flashing with challenge.)
Zero. (zero wolf eyes bright with loyalty.)
The gate opened.
- 0 - 0 -
Ochi’s beady eyes were full of contempt.
“Why are you personally leading Toon A?” he muttered as Waya surveyed the Battle Room’s star formation. “And why do I have to be in Toon A?”
“Quiet down,” Waya hissed, “before I shut you up myself.”
“Who’s watching the overall battle?”
Thankfully, the other boys in Toon A were on his side on this one. Ochi was that annoying.
“Just shut up for once.”
“You wanna give away our position, pissant?”
“Nobody shoots better’n our commander, he better in a toon than back of the room.”
Waya tried not to let the surprise show.
Don’t get carried away, he told himself. It was just one little comment.
But the battle adrenaline was pumping in his veins, and Waya felt for a moment like he was in Tiger again, a toon leader with a bunch of giddy, reckless kids ready to follow him anywhere. He just had forty kids now instead of nine.
“Toon A, give me formation twelve, you know the one. We’re taking the middle star cluster,” he ordered. “Toon B, take the nine o’clock star. C, three o’clock. D, hold back for one minute then wall slide up the ceiling, twelve o’clock. Toon leaders choose the formations. Got it?”
They got it.
Except Ochi.
“I don’t know formation twelve,” he complained.
“Then you stick with me,” Waya told him. “You my shield.”
When he grabbed Ochi’s collar this time, his toon laughed. Waya had a good feeling about the battle ahead.
“You’re making a mistake.” The boy’s eyes looked a little wild.
“You stay still and be a good little shield. But not too little. You gotta cover me. Toon A, ready?”
The five Toon A kids in front made a kind of staggered wall - they would provide cover for the boys in the back, who would exit the gate a moment after them, and at a faster speed. By the time the back soldiers caught up to the “wall” a lot of the frontrunners would be frozen or disabled - but the frozen soldiers could be used as shields, and the whole thing was meant to be a distraction from the other toons anyway, who would be taking the side stars.
Waya liked using distractions. He’d learned all about them from Shindou, his previous commander.
“Vanguard, go!” he shouted.
Four boys launched themselves out the gate in near-perfect synchrony, but Ochi had to be shoved.
“Rear, go!” Waya pushed himself out the gate with the rest of his Toon A boys, each aiming to rendezvous with one of the frontline soldiers. He was throwing himself right out there and hoping his toon leaders would be fine without him. He felt their eyes following him as they began setting up their own formations.
Straight ahead of him, Ochi was flying - more like flailing - and shooting his flash gun toward Ferret’s side of the Battle Room. That was about all that could be said about the kid’s aim. This was what the teachers had given him in exchange for a toon leader?
Waya would have to make up for the little idiot. He aimed carefully and fired over Ochi’s shoulder, managing to freeze an enemy soldier’s gun arm. One down, forty to go. Waya grinned. No one ever doubted he was a good shot.
But the enemy were firing on the shield soldiers with more accuracy than Waya liked. Since when had Ferret been any good at shooting? Worse, Ferret had some good star clusters pretty close to its gate that they were using for cover.
Not a very fair battlefield, Waya realized. It had been hard to gauge the distances properly from the back of the room. Maybe he shouldn’t have gone for the middle so early.
Corners, then sides, then middle, he remembered Shindou saying once. That’s the safe way, if you like safe.
Damn it, damn it.
It was too late now to change the plan. He’d have to trust his toon leaders to take the corners and sides while he distracted the enemy in the middle.
A stray shot nearly got him from below. The shields, separated from the shielded in this first stage, actually weren’t much good when the enemy could attack from any angle. The gap between the shields and the shielded was supposed to lure out the enemy, give the back row a chance to assess the battlefield, but the gap was a liability too. He just hadn’t realized how big a liability.
Fly faster, he told himself, as if he could tell inertia what to do.
And then he was at Ochi’s back. Somehow, the kid was still unfrozen. The enemy had probably seen what a bad soldier he was and ignored him, concentrating on the other shield soldiers. His shoulders were stiff and raised up practically around his ears as he fired away.
Waya put his hand on one of those shoulders.
“Eyah!” Ochi half-screamed, bringing his gun around and shooting it directly at Waya’s face.
The commander of Ferret told him later, during the victory ceremony, as Waya bowed over his hand, that he wished he’d had a camera to take a picture of Waya’s frozen expression.
“You looked like a big loser,” he said.
- 0 - 0 -
At least his army had someone other than their commander to blame this time.
“Pissant,” they jeered quietly. Apparently the name had stuck. “Piss ant.”
Ochi wasn’t fighting back.
“You don’t see so good, huh? Need new glasses?”
“Maybe we do you a favour, break those old ones.”
There was a lot of shoving going on back there. He heard the impact of a body hitting the wall, a muffled cry of pain. It was none of his business. He’d be doing the same thing if they weren’t doing it for him.
Waya kept walking, and his Wolves followed.
Back in the barracks, he kept the post-battle speeches strictly business - praise for things they’d done well, criticism for things they needed to improve on. He didn’t mention Ochi’s slip-up. He didn’t need to. He knew what would happen as soon as he left the room. And they knew he knew, so it was like he was giving his implicit permission.
Maybe they’d hurt him enough to put him in the infirmary. Enough to put him out of his army, or any army, for a long time. And Waya was going to let them.
The thought didn’t make him as happy as he thought it would.
“Ochi,” he said. He didn’t recognize his voice. It sounded cold, like he was still frozen from battle. “Come with me.”
He saw his soldiers freeze too. Some of them were angry. But most of them just looked surprised.
Ochi followed Waya to his room silently. The door shut behind them, sealing them in all alone together, and still the boy said nothing.
Waya couldn’t believe how calm he felt. Must have been all that time he’d spent floating around the Battle Room, watching his army lose without him. I can actually see the battle like this, he’d thought.
But Ochi was still an idiot.
“You are not any kind of soldier,” Waya said bluntly. “You can’t shoot. You can’t launch. You can’t even float without tensing up so bad you don’t know friend from enemy.”
Ochi had the decency to look chagrined at that. But he didn’t apologize. “You sent me out without telling me what I was supposed to be doing.”
“You fired in the completely wrong direction. You fired on your commander. Other commanders would give you a black eye for that.”
“You shouldn’t have been in the middle of the battle to begin with.”
Then Waya did punch Ochi, but it was in the abdomen, not in the head where he could do more damage. Ochi made a whiffing sound and keeled over, clutching at his midsection.
Waya withdrew his fist slowly, wonderingly. He’d never planned to hit someone before. He’d always just done it.
“I could have let you stay in that room with thirty-eight boys and two girls who want to rip your throat out,” he said, voice oddly calm. “Maybe I should have let them, it would have good for morale. But I decided even you don’t deserve that. You can’t help being incompetent.”
That got a reaction. Ochi struggled to his feet, clearly in pain but with a kind of pathetic pride.
“You think this is anything new to me? My last commander called me incompetent too! You think I want to be picked on just for being short and not good at shooting a stupid toy gun? You think I’m not trying?”
He was practically yelling.
“What does athleticism have to do with anything? They told me I had to come here because I’m smart! Use your brains to help save the human race, right? I get near top grades in most of my classes and none of it matters...damn it, none of it matters, because I’m the worst soldier in the school. Incompetent.”
He deflated suddenly, like Waya’s punch had caught up to him, all the hot air knocked out of him. He didn’t sit down or start bawling or anything, but his shoulders dropped and the fire in his eyes flickered out.
It was weird. Waya should have been happy to finally beat the kid down. Ochi’d been doing nothing but mouthing off since he’d showed up with his ugly mug and uglier personality, but....
“Don’t go back to the barracks, and don’t go to dinner,” Waya said suddenly. “Avoid the Wolf bathrooms. Go to the other side of the school if you have to. Sleep in the infirmary tonight.”
Ochi looked up, like he’d forgotten Waya was there. “What should I say when they ask me what I have?” he asked, voice flat.
“Tell them you have a stomachache,” Waya replied. It would be true enough, after that punch.
Ochi nodded, still with that dead look in his eyes. He pushed the button to open the door and stepped out, not looking back.
Once he was alone, Waya sat down heavily on his bed. That had been...it had taken more energy than he’d have thought. He would have to go to dinner soon - he was not looking forward to the jeers he would face in the commander’s mess - but he had some research to do before that.
He found his desk on his bedside table and turned it on.
Being good with computers was a handy thing in Battle School. He’d cracked the teachers’ encryption system, or the part of it they allowed to be cracked, when he’d first gotten his commander’s account. He had way more intel than someone like Shindou did, he was sure.
See, Ochi, brains do matter.
So I’m sure you won’t mind me opening your file.
The first thing he saw was lots of reports from teachers about Ochi’s problems integrating with his fellow soldiers, going all the way back to the shuttle ride from Earth to Battle School. So his bad personality wasn’t a new thing.
Somehow Waya wasn’t surprised to learn that Ochi was from a very old, very rich family. What was it he’d said? If you knew what you were doing, you’d make me go to you, not the other way around. Was that the kind of thing you learned growing up with servants waiting on you? Was that the kind of thing a commander should just know?
Waya was starting to feel uncomfortable about his snooping. But he couldn’t stop now.
Ochi’s last army was Condor, which was doing well in the standings. What was the reason for his transfer?
Probably got kicked out for not shutting his mouth, Waya figured.
Blah blah blah good grades blah blah still can’t aim or launch himself properly blah blah blah.
Student request for transfer to Wolf.
Wait. What?
Waya read it again, not sure if he’d understood correctly. Ochi had asked to be placed in Wolf? Why would anyone leave an army that was in the top ten to come to an army that was in the bottom ten?
My last commander called me incompetent too!
Well, clearly he didn’t get along with the commander of Condor. But that still didn’t explain why Wolf. The teachers hadn’t left any notes to answer that particular question.
Maybe he’d wanted to come to an army that wasn’t already filled up with excellent soldiers, where he would have a chance, any kind of chance, to rise in the ranks? Did he think he could, what, fix Waya’s army? That would explain all the “helpful” comments he’d made today.
But then Waya remembered the terrible hopelessness he’d seen in Ochi’s eyes as he’d left the room.
No, he didn’t come here to be a schemer. He was more desperate than that.
Think, Waya.
Isumi used to tell him he needed to think more. Think about his army, as people and not just as soldiers. Think about the whole game, not only the Battle Room. Why we’re here, who brought us here. Isumi would whisper it, like it was forbidden knowledge to even ask these questions.
Waya still felt weird, remembering Isumi-san’s voice, his kindnesses. When I was second in command of Tiger Army, Isumi-san, I forgot how to be your friend. You were the enemy. I could hardly remember I was just playing a game.
So...maybe I owe it to you now to start thinking.
Why was Ochi in Battle School in the first place?
Why would the teachers recruit a kid with zero charisma for a program designed to create military leaders? Good grades didn’t mean jack shit when it came to getting along with your fellow soldiers, never mind getting kids to follow your command.
Maybe, he thought hazily, some of us are brought here precisely because we have no chance of success. There has to be a few losers to make the winners shine more brightly.
What a horrible role to be given. What a horrible place we have come to.
He felt a stab of sympathy, of empathy, for poor Ochi.
Lying back on his bed, Waya closed his eyes. He decided he wasn’t going to go to dinner tonight after all. He didn’t want to face all those competent commanders.
- 0 - 0 -
He was having that dream again.
Waya was still a Tiger, and Wolf Army was destroying his army.
Aim carefully, he told himself as he pointed his gun at Isumi’s chest. Chop off the head, and the body shall fall.
“Don’t shoot,” said Isumi from a million miles away. “I’ll disappear if you do. And then what will you do?”
I’ll become commander. I’ll take your army.
“Then take it.”
Isumi’s eyes were changing, grey to yellow with pupils narrowed to black slits. The Wolves were gathering close now, watching Waya as Waya watched Isumi, as Waya’s index finger hesitated on the trigger, frozen with regret for things that hadn’t happened yet.
“Fire,” Shindou ordered from somewhere. “Fire, or you’ll never make commander.”
“Fire,” the Wolves jeered. “Fire or you’ll never command us.”
“Fire,” Isumi warned him, “and you’ll never see me again.”
“Fire,” said Ochi, and his was a new voice in the dream, “or I’ll freeze you here forever.”
Waya’s gun arm wouldn’t hold steady. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know whose order to follow.
The Wolves were closing in, and he knew he was going to lose again.
- 0 - 0 -
“Hey Waya! Why-uuuh weren’t you at dinner last night? Huh? You listening to me?”
“Still frozen, eh?
“Poor dumb Waya can’t believe his own soldier shot him in the face.”
“Killed by a face shot, what a way to go.”
“Betcha he liked it.”
“You liking it, Why-uuuhhh? Huh, boy?”
“Goes down real smooth, ne?”
Waya ignored them until eventually they went away, if only because the breakfast line was calling to them. But now Waya couldn’t get his own food. The wolves are merciless today, he caught himself thinking.
His usual table was empty this morning - his “friends” were all eating somewhere else. It was a bitter thing to realize he'd been abandoned. He’d been popular, once, back when he was a toon leader in Tiger Army. Now he wasn’t.
“Hey,” said Shindou, who was balancing a tray on one hand and eating a piece of toast with the other. “Where were you at dinner yesterday?”
“Slept through it,” said Waya. It was more or less the truth. An image of Shindou's face from his dream, a face ugly with contempt, flashed across his mind. He shook his head a little. “You’re not eating with Touya today?”
“I don’t always have to eat with Touya.”
No, on some days you take pity on me. “Usually you do.”
“Not that I’ve never suggested this before, but we could all eat together, you know.”
“I don’t want to be labelled the Japanese group.”
“I think we already are,” Shindou sighed. But he sat down and slid his tray over without being asked so Waya could take a piece of toast. They still understood each other’s signals well enough, even if they weren’t exactly buddy-buddy anymore.
Waya didn’t exactly resent Touya for being Shindou’s friend. He just couldn’t stand the guy. And to tell the truth, his own friendship with Shindou had never recovered from Waya becoming commander. They were equals now, but they were enemies too. They couldn’t bounce ideas off each other the way they used to, couldn’t talk about the game without fear of giving secrets away. And without the game, what kind of friends were they?
He doubted it was like this between Shindou and Touya. They had that dumb board game of theirs to talk about. He’d seen them huddled together over the damn thing often enough to know they were obsessed with it.
Okay, maybe he did resent Touya a little bit. And Shindou too, the ass.
“So, uh, I heard something about you getting nuked by your own soldier.”
Waya choked on his dry toast. The next time someone brought him food he was going to demand condiments. “Did you really have to bring that up?”
“Of course! I heard it was ‘the most epic-est battle in the history of Battle School.’”
Shindou did a pretty good impression of Ferret’s commander.
“I know you’re trying to make me feel better,” Waya said, “but you are kind of lousy at it.”
“Seriously, what happened with that soldier? He was new, right?”
“His name is Ochi.” Waya thought it was important, somehow, to give the name. “Transferred from Condor yesterday morning, but I didn’t find out until half an hour before my battle with Ferret. Somehow missed the note.”
“Ah, the dreaded tiny piece of paper in the dark thing.”
“Yeah. They should really do something about that.”
“I’m sure they’ll figure something out.”
“Yeah, it would make sense, right?”
“Maybe a dinging noise when you open the door.”
“Or a little flashing light.”
“I’m sure they’ll come up with something.”
“Sure.”
Waya took a bite of ham.
“So what was with the soldier, that Ochi kid, why did he fire on you?”
Waya chewed a bit, deciding how he wanted to answer that.
“He didn’t mean to. He’s not insubordinate, just incompetent.” Then he paused, remembering how Ochi had nearly broken down on him yesterday after hearing that word. “I shouldn’t call him that. He hates it.”
“Incompetent?”
“Yeah. He never got trained properly. He can barely fly, never mind carry out maneuvers while the enemy is firing at him.”
“Are you sure?” Shindou asked. “You’ve never seen him outside of that one battle, right? Maybe he’s better than you think. It must have been stressful for him, being thrown into a frontline formation in a new army.”
Clearly, Shindou knew more about the battle than he was letting on. But Waya knew a lot more than he was supposed to, too. “Yeah, trust me, he didn’t learn anything in his launch group or his last army. He had issues with his commander. He’s had issues his whole time here.”
Shindou gave him a speculative look, obviously noticing something was fishy about Waya’s data sources, but smart enough not to ask. And Waya was smart enough to get out of there before Shindou changed his mind.
“Thanks for the food, hey?” he said, standing up. “I’ve got to get ready for practice.”
“You barely ate anything.” Shindou looked up at him in surprise. “You got time, sit down.”
“No, I don’t want to keep stealing your breakfast.”
Shindou stood up too and moved as if he was about to grab Waya’s arm, then thought better of it. “You don’t have to do everything by yourself, Waya, whatever the teachers want us to think. Maybe the commander that they’re looking for has to be some lonely hero, but the rest of us can have friends.”
Waya shook his head.
“Commanders used to have help from their seconds, remember?” Shindou persisted. “And it was fine. We worked well, the two of us.”
Yeah, we worked so well we crushed Isumi and Wolf into the ground.
Shindou was watching him carefully. “We never held each other back.”
“It’s not like that anymore. They decided we have to go it alone.”
“That doesn’t mean it’s the best way for everyone.”
“It’s a sign of weakness, needing help.”
“No, it’s not. It’s not.” Shindou’s voice and eyes went strange, the way they did sometimes. “I used to...have a friend who played go, who couldn’t place the stones himself. But he was brilliant, and he had so much to teach me. So I placed the stones for him, in all his games.”
“Did he have a disability?”
“Not exactly.”
“Then what was wrong with him?”
A wan smile. “Maybe he was just a bit incompetent at certain things.”
- 0 - 0 -
Waya was making his way to the showers, where he could cool his head a bit. He had lied about not having any time before practice. Practice was still thirty minutes away.
It made him so mad when Shindou acted like the teachers. Like he was so experienced and wise. I’m talking about things you don’t understand, Waya. Maybe you’d understand if you had a real childhood, Waya. Too bad you never did and never will.
Here’s what’s wrong with you, Shindou: you play a board game like it matters as much as the real game; you talk about stars and planets as if you’ll own them someday; you say things that sound like they come out of a storybook world, where every kid has some kind of grand destiny waiting for him.
And what did I get, after five years in Battle School? I got to fire a gun at my best friend and steal his army. An army that hates me now, almost as much as I hate myself.
I should have said goodbye to Isumi.
He was getting near the showers now. His route took him past one of the smaller bathrooms, where he saw a crowd of boys laughing and jostling for position as they peered inside. They were mostly from Condor, judging by the number of black and white uniforms. Their laughter had an ugly ring to it.
“What’s going on here?” he asked loudly.
A few of the boys turned to look at him. Most, however, were too caught up in whatever was going on in the bathroom to pay any attention to him.
“We just watching Owchie,” one of them said. As if that explained anything.
“He’s one of our ex-teammates,” someone else said.
“More like our ex-laughingstock.”
“Poor Owchie, always gets the Owchies when he tries to do the Battle Room.”
“Has to come in here to flush it out after.”
“Oh, so that’s what Owchie means.” The boy scrunched up his face and mimed defecating into a toilet. He got a lot of laughs for that one.
Waya had heard enough. “Move it,” he said.
That was when one of them looked a little closer at Waya’s uniform and saw the commander’s pin on his collar. Then he saw the insignia and the colours.
“You’re the Wolf commander!” the kid said, like it was rocket science or something. “Hey, Owchie’s new commander is here!”
The laughter grew exponentially.
“The losers band together!”
“Owchie and Wolfie!”
“Awwwoooooooo!”
“Move it,” Waya said again, “before I lose my patience.”
He didn’t think it would work, but there must have been something in his voice or face this time that made them back away, still laughing, so he could pass.
Inside, there were even more Condor grunts crowding the small bathroom, with several of them banging on the stall farthest from the door. None of them had gone so far as to climb over the tall stall door, but it was probably only a matter of time.
Waya stood near the bathroom entrance and crossed his arms, waiting.
Eventually, they became aware of him. A boy in the back of the crowd nudged another boy, and the nudges were passed around until they were all looking at him.
Waya stared back.
“Lookie, all the Wolves are coming out to play,” said one boy.
“Owchie, your commander here to save your sorry butt.”
“Sorry sore butt.”
“Sowwy!”
“Gotta be sore sitting on a toilet all day.”
“It’s ‘cause Wolves do it like dogs.”
“That’s why cute widdle Owchie meets his big bad commander in the bathroom, yeah?”
“Ochi just wants a little love.’”
“Oh, so that’s why he’s always mouthing off! I get it now.”
“Yeah, it’s all psy-cho-lo-gic-al. Poor little rich boy is tired of giving orders all the time! He wants to be disciplined.”
Don’t do anything that will invite retaliation, now or later, Waya told himself. Just wait them out. They don’t hate Ochi enough to physically attack a commander without provocation. He’s just annoying, not a threat to them.
It took a while, but someone eventually said, “This is dumb as stupid. We been in this bathroom fifteen, twenty minutes and Ochi still not coming out.”
“We gonna rumble?” asked another, gesturing at Waya with his head. “Ten on one.”
This drew a round of laughs. “Seriously, ‘rumble’? No one says that.”
“Yeah, we say ‘ice.’”
“Okay okay.” We gonna ice him?”
But the boy Waya had picked out as the ringleader shook his head. “We got practice soon. Let’s go. This is boring.”
Waya stood aside and let them pass.
When they were all gone, he walked over to the last stall, knocked gently, and said, “Ochi?”
No reply.
“I’d leave you alone to sulk, except you’ll probably get in trouble again if I don’t escort you out.”
The door opened.
“That’s better. You okay?”
“Fine,” said Ochi.
“What were you doing in there?”
“Hiding.”
“From Condor or Wolf?”
Ochi’s face was utterly expressionless. “Both.”
“Smart man.”
- 0 - 0 -
Waya ended up not taking that shower after all, but at least Ochi made it to practice in one piece.
Unfortunately, the kid was still a terrible soldier.
Toon A ignored Ochi, even as he haphazardly tried to do their drills. Everyone was ignoring Ochi. Waya wasn’t happy with the situation--he would have to speak to his newly assigned Toon A leader--but for now he was just glad they weren’t trying to kill the kid.
As he was dismissing his army at the end of practice, he made eye contact with Ochi. Stay, he said with a look.
Ochi stayed. If he was embarrassed at all about his display of emotion the day before, or the incident in the bathroom this morning, he wasn’t showing it. He stared at Waya with a bored expression, a silent “So?” written across his face.
“First of all,” said Waya, “did you manage to go to breakfast this morning?”
If Ochi was surprised by the question he didn’t let it show. “Yeah. I promised Shorty my desserts for a month if he’d protect me during meals.”
Shorty was the biggest, meanest soldier in Wolf. “So now no one is bothering you, but you’ll be without cake for a month. And you’re being shunned.”
“I don’t like dessert or people.”
“I still have no idea how you got into Battle School with that attitude.”
Ochi shrugged again. “I don’t care whether people like me or not.”
“No, I meant the not-liking-cake thing. The teachers usually don’t admit students into the school who don’t clear the cake requirement.”
“What?”
“A joke,” said Waya. “They have those where you come from?”
Ochi gave him a more-sour-than-usual look. He really did need some sugar in his life. “Is this why you asked me to stay? You needed someone to listen to your bad jokes?”
“Maybe I wanted to punish you a little for shooting me.”
“It’s working. Why are you in such a good mood?”
“Practice went well. It usually doesn’t, but today it did, somehow, even though we lost yesterday,” said Waya, a bit surprised to realize that he was in a better mood.
“You were more like a commander today,” Ochi said, eyes assessing Waya’s reaction. “You seemed a lot less wound up than yesterday.”
“Yeah,” said Waya. “Huh.”
He’d been angry after breakfast - at Shindou, at Ochi, at the whole damn school - but, like yesterday after the battle, the anger had turned cold. And apparently that kind of anger sharpened his thinking, hardened his bearing and voice, made him into a better commander.
Useful to know.
“Is that all?” asked Ochi. “Can I go?”
Even Ochi couldn’t make him see red right now. After all, it was Ochi who’d helped him understand himself.
“I just wanted to make sure no one in Wolf tried to beat you up,” Waya told him honestly.
“They’ve had time to cool down. You took me out of there when they really wanted to hurt me.”
“Sure did.” And you’re welcome.
“You should have left me there. ‘To form an army that loves itself, create an enemy it hates,’” Ochi quoted from one of their textbooks. Waya thought it was maybe something a Polemarch said once.
“I’d rather form an army that loves itself because it loves itself,” he replied.
“You’re an idiot.”
“I know. But I don’t punish honest mistakes.”
“A mistake that cost you a battle.”
“We were probably going to lose anyway,” Waya said easily, admitting it aloud for the first time.
“You noticed, then,” Ochi sniffed.
“You noticed right away.”
“I’m pretty good at that.”
“Yeah. That’s why I want your help. I want you watching the battles, and giving me advice.” The idea was still forming in Waya’s head as he said the words, but it felt right. He could already see the possibilities. Shindou was always telling him to think outside the Battle Room box, after all. “You’ll learn a lot, and I’ll learn with you.”
Ochi actually reeled back a little, which was just comical in zero grav. “Pardon?”
“You’re smart, your grades are good, you can read a situation quickly. It would be a waste of talent not to use you. And..." here he hesitated, before leaping, "I want you to analyze me as a commander. You understand what power is supposed to look like, I know you do. Help me figure out this commander thing.”
“You’re asking me?” Ochi didn’t bother trying to hide his shock. “I insulted you five seconds after I met you. I shot you in the face.”
“Yeah, you have to stop doing that.”
“It’ll look bad. The commander asking a new recruit for advice, it just won’t fly.” Ochi kept reaching for counter-arguments, but Waya could tell he was coming around to the idea.
“We won’t tell anyone,” Waya said breezily. “At least not until you get some respect back.”
“How will you keep it a secret during battle?”
“We’ll work something out.”
“And outside of battle? You can’t always hold me back after practice, it’ll look suspicious.”
“Yes, I can." Waya's brain was working furiously. "I can because you need extra one-on-one lessons. You are going to learn to fly, and you are going to learn to shoot, and you are going to learn it from one of the best. I’ll work with you for as long as it takes, you lucky squirt, until you’re good enough that the rest of my army will treat you like a human being.”
Ochi’s mouth was open, but for once he wasn’t talking. He was...there was something in his expression, something vulnerable and young that told Waya he was making the right decision.
You were right, Shindou. Some of us need help, and some of us need to give help. It's not a weakness, because it makes us stronger.
“That’s why you came to Wolf, right?” Waya said gently. “So you could become a good soldier?”
It took a moment, but Ochi croaked out a shaky “Yes, sir.”
“Good. Let’s get started.”
They practiced until Ochi didn’t have the energy to mouth off anymore and Waya thought his voice was going to give out from all the sage advice he was making up on the spot. The practiced until Ochi could finally hit a very slowly moving target from twenty meters away, as long as someone was steadying his gun arm.
Waya was dead tired when he crept into bed that night, but the look on Ochi’s face was worth it.
And, for the first time, the wolves were kind to him in his dreams.
- 0 - 0 -
You need to capture the upper right star.
“Hai, hai,” Waya subvocalized, knowing the sensitive earpiece would pick up his voice, sarcasm and all. “I’m not stupid, you know.”
Could have fooled me.
“Zee and Wilbee!” Waya yelled in Common. “Send your toons to capture that upper right star! Formations four and seven, watch out for wall sliders, have one man on lookout slash cover fire like we practiced.”
Toons C and D took off.
The earpiece is working better today, Ochi admitted. I’m impressed you got the volume controls to discriminate between Japanese and Common. It’s nice to not have my ears shouted off. Not bad for something cobbled together out of desk parts.
Ochi really needed to cut down on the idle chatter during battle. “Concentrate on your formation, oomay, you still fly like a brick.”
A few minutes later, Ochi’s voice came back and said, in its usual deadpan way, I do not fly like a brick. I fly like a clumsily thrown brick.
“Nice, you’re finally developing a sense of humour but please shut up and go shoot things.”
Ochi did shut up, and started shooting things - badly, but not as badly as before.
Waya hung back and watched his army, noting who was flying well, which toons needed to work on their teamwork, which tactics were effective and which were ineffective. He was fairly pleased with what he saw. Even if Wolf didn’t win, the number of disabled or frozen Condor bodies floating around was nothing to be ashamed of.
He couldn’t help but think think that Isumi would approve of what he’d done with his army.
Maybe one day Waya would tell him all about it.
He sent out his last four reserve soldiers, one from each toon, before throwing himself into the battle alongside them.
“Let’s give ‘em the old Wolf calling card, eh?” he grinned at his soldiers.
“Aww, do we have to, boss?” But they were grinning back.
“Yes.”
They took a deep breath.
“AWWWOOOOOO!!!”
-End-
Author’s notes:
This is a story I’ve been trying to write for seven years, ever since I completed “Hikaru’s Game” in 2005. Whenever I tried to think about how I could write about Waya in Wolf Army - and by extension something about Waya’s guilt about beating Isumi - it always ended up being a plotless angstfest of zzzzz. I knew I needed some kind of external conflict, probably in the form of a Wolf soldier or two butting heads with Waya, but I didn’t want to create an OC just for that purpose.
And then I thought of using Ochi! And boy did Ochi have a lot of issues with Waya, and Battle School in general. Ochi is kind of fun to write because he has no social skills. For a while I thought of “Wolf Pack” as “that Ochi story,” though by the end of the writing process it was back to “that Waya story” in my head.
As I was writing, it occurred to me that if Ender’s Game and “Hikaru’s Game” are all about the hero’s journey (even if Graff totally rigged up Ender’s journey), Ender’s Shadow and “Wolf Pack” are all about the people who don’t get to be the hero but who are heroic in their own way. The former two operate on the level of myth, so you have things like the Fantasy Game and Sai and lots of Vaguely Improbable Happenings - while the latter two operate on the level of the mundane, so you have things like Bean crawling through air ducts and Waya choking on dry toast and lots of Overexplaining of Improbable Happenings (and retconning, in the case of Ender’s Shadow).
I like the tragic, heroic myth that Ender's Game treats us to, but I can’t help but think Ender's Shadow has better lessons for us non-heroes. Cooperation is better than competition, yeah? I think my favourite line from Ender’s Shadow (a book I don’t actually enjoy that much, to tell the truth) comes from Graff, who says to Bean after the final battle: "I think perhaps you pulled each other across the finish line." It's a bit of a retcon of Ender's Game, but I'm okay with that one.
These are the longest author's notes in the world. Thank you for reading!