#enddrew

thats not what the death message would have been but "itzzender fell from a high place whilst trying to escape toodrew" is a tad too long for my taste. anyways does anyone else ever think about how drew was apologizing the entire time he was chasing ender down during the purge

a couple extras under the cut

hiiii eid muburak to those who celebrate crow/flux art coming soon. anyway. enddrew

sidefall stayed in aculon until he was seven, during which ender and drew had an embarassingly awkward coparenting agreement. sidefall stayed at turkey's house where he was raised mainly by the duke and raven, ender would be allowed to visit whenever, and toodrew was allowed to visit whenever ender was visiting so he could be supervised.

their relationship was an open secret among the populace. both ender and drew are fairly private people, but at the end of the day (especially after the breakup) the only person who didnt know of the full extent of the relationship was elanuelo, who knew they were courting but didn't know about sidefall.

drew would sometimes bring ender flowers after especially busy workdays. whenever he and ender fought, he would bring him "confiscated" flowers.

ender would ask red to give drew palace food and tell him it wasn't from him (drew knew. no one else in the whole place except the prince and the dukes had access to lobster)

it was toodrew who broke off their relationship, as he couldn't accept ender's reasons for giving up sidefall after he had already refused to acknowledge him as a son at all. that and he suspected ender of treason but yknow. that's the reason he gave ender.

ender doesn't fully believe that drew actually cared that much about sidefall's status to make it an issue in their relationship, but he didn't push the matter. their working relationship returned more or less to what it was before they dated.

and yes this implies enddrew were lovers for seven years. it was less about romantic love for them and more of a pseudo-marriage alliance (ender's more populist, left-wing faction was always at odds with toodrew's more patriotic and isolationist associates). the romance died at some point after sidefall's birth, but they remained together, so to speak, for years after.

HI OKOK YOU ARE NOT ALONE !!!! enddrew burger hot off the grill for you.

ok so first of all youve got to understand that i have an incredibly specific family tree and chronology i adhere to that only makes sense in my head. here is a rough version of the tree:

now where does enddrew fit in this? i know sidefall himself stated that ender had him "alone" before "abandoning him in a box in the plains", but i have chosen to interpret this as "ender didnt want to keep his bastard illegitimate child in aculon."

when i wrote HoA i didnt give any thought to toodrew, or to sidefall's other parent (i wasnt aware of cadastro's existence back then either, as this was early in state's fandom formation where nobody had really been doing any research yet and i was going off @/takeyourthrone's information). but i refuse to subscribe to the idea of ender being a generic shitty father. this is a guy who gave his entire being to the vision of aculon that he wanted to bring to life, up to and including his own family. not just limited to sidefall either; redizlightning, his brother and elanuelo's other son, was one of the knights hunted down after the iron torch was won.

back to enddrew: i think that there was always some element of rivalry there, though the more resentful of the two was actually ender rather than toodrew. ender, after a certain point, didnt really care about getting elanuelo's approval - he knew what he'd have to give up for that - but he resented toodrew for being willing to get it in his place. drew, on the other hand, was polarized from ender because of his siding on the more conservative part of aculon's political scale, being one of the knights.

but i think that before they began genuinely working against each other as per their own agendas but after ender began to form the ideas of a democratic insurrection, ender and toodrew would have actually been fairly close companions. they both felt deep loyalty to the empire elanuelo had built, they were both righteous with strong virtues. im also gonna go out on a limb and say that they were both isolated people even in their large communities. enddrew were kindred spirits, at least for a little bit before life got in the way. Sidefall was an accident, and they broke it off soon after. i think ender's choice to more or less hide sidefall's existence from elanuelo and send him away to the plains alone wasn't supported by drew, who would have wanted any family of his to be born and raised in aculon, but done out of both pragmatism and a genuine love for the kid on ender's part. after all, sidefall, being a bastard, had no legal claim to aculon in the first place, and if worst came to worst, might have been used against ender as a bargaining chip to ensure his complacency by elanuelo.