Work Text:
Ender still stands at ease.
Hands clasped behind his back, feet shoulder width apart, knees bent ever so slightly for stability, for endurance.
This is the position you wait in. This is the position you listen in. This is the position you watch in. That was how it was in his childhood. It was drilled into him, driven home without mercy, and he's never seen a need to unlearn it. He's figured out how to make it look a little more natural—he recognizes that the people around him need that—but it will never stop being the default stance for him.
Straighten your back, arms at your side, eyes ahead, when your superior comes in. That, too, has stuck. It's been interesting to see who he respects as his superior, and who, despite rank or authority or experience, simply does not qualify in his subconscious.
He still barks "Yes, sir!" or "Yes, ma'am!" when he's asked a question, as if there's no other answer, as if he needs to be heard across a room, as if he loses points if he's quiet.
He's still careful not to sit down immediately when he walks into a room. He waits for others to, waits for an invitation. He keeps his back straight.
He shines his shoes. He checks his belt and the buttons on his shirt. He misses the jumpsuit every time he puts on his clothes, but the uniform was never meant to be comfortable, and so in his mind, neither are civilian clothes.
When they ask you how you're doing, you don't answer honestly.
There's comfort in these rules—stability, structure, much like the support promised from bending your knees slightly when you stand at attention so that your legs don't start to tremble. It's a system that he knows. It's made him disciplined, polite, respectable. It's made him better.
And he doesn't know how to act beyond those rules. Nobody ever showed him the handbook for being a civilian; no one ever laid out the customs for being off duty. The world beyond the military one still feels odd and strange and uncomfortable, as alien as the monsters he'd battled in his childhood. Wandering the world of humans feels just as uneasy as wandering the winding, disproportional tunnels of Eros. He wonders if it would be harder to learn the rules of his people, harder than it was to learn the mind of the hive queen. Ender decides that it's easier just to hold to what he knows than to try to learn a new rulebook. So he preserves the military customs of his youth.
There's nothing else to live by.