After the Jacksonian doctor had carried out a few more tests, she left, and Professor Snape went downstairs to brew up some potion, leaving Bothari to keep an eye on General Skywalker.
The bowl of yogurt was lying half-eaten on the bedside table. Bothari was still dubious about the whole idea of yogurt. When he was a boy, nobody he knew had an electricity supply for a refrigerator; when the weather was warm (which didn't happen nearly often enough, in Vorbarr Sultana), food went rotten. He had been amazed to discover, later on, that some farmers who lived in the mountains and kept their own goats deliberately waited for milk to go sour and lumpy because they preferred it that way, and so did people on planets like Beta Colony where milk was vat-grown. Apparently Betans believed that having sour-milk bacteria inside you made it easier to be relaxed and sociable, but was that even something you'd want? Most of his life – definitely as a child, later on as a soldier and as a bodyguard – he had needed to be paranoid to survive.
The Rock, though – the Rock was different. Cheiron had explained that it wasn't a story, it was a place between stories, which meant it didn't run on rules like, 'When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a nerve disruptor in his hand.' You couldn't kill or die here, and not just because so many people, like him and Snape and Skywalker (and Cheiron, for that matter) were already dead.
He used to come here when he was alive, sometimes. Lots of times when he was a kid, and later on during the worst of the bad times with Admiral Vorrutyer, and in the ImpMil hospital. The times when he had a problem he couldn't fight his way out of and couldn't trick his way out of, and just needed to survive until there was a way through. Then, it had always felt like a dream afterwards, and one he couldn't remember properly, but even a vague blur of a memory of a dream about a kind, wise man who was half horse had made a change from the nightmares and the demon voices.
Now, though – he belonged here. For now, anyway. Cheiron said he was welcome to stay for as long as he wanted, but that if he ever felt like moving on, all he had to do was walk across the walkway that was exposed at low tide, to the forest on the mainland, and dive into whichever of its pools he chose, to be reborn as a character in another story. 'But it has to be your decision,' Cheiron had said. 'And if you don't feel confident in making decisions about your own life, then you're welcome to stay here while you work on that.'
When he had arrived here for good, he hadn't been as much of a physical wreck as General Skywalker was now. The rule was that if you came to the Rock because you'd died, whatever injury had killed you disappeared, so he hadn't arrived with his innards blown out by a needler grenade, and Professor Snape hadn't arrived with his throat torn out by a giant snake. But you did bring whatever old injuries or illnesses you already had, and so he had arrived here with a raging headache, because running into someone who remembered him from the Escobar War had brought back all the memories that he wasn't allowed to remember, was programmed to get sick if he did remember, but couldn't not remember when the person from the memories he wasn't allowed to remember was the one who had shot him.
He'd spent two days just lying on his bed, too ill and miserable even to be ashamed of being weak, or to worry about the fact that the man with long black hair, who kept giving him weird potions to drink to soothe the pain, had been a stranger who somehow seemed to know who Bothari was and why he was there, which was just as well, as Bothari himself hadn't been in a fit state to explain. By the third day, he had managed to cope by blanking out everything about the events leading up to his death, and just trying to get used to life on the Rock. He'd found a job as a martial arts instructor at the island's gym, and he and Professor Snape had gone on sharing a house, and Cheiron had insisted on having lots of talks with both of them, both individually and together, about how that was going.
It had been about a year after he'd arrived before he had trusted Professor Snape enough to let him do weird wizard stuff to remove the block around his memories. And then he had cried and cried, as all the memories came back, of all the bad things he'd done and all the bad things that had happened to him. And Snape had awkwardly tried to comfort him, and told Bothari about some of the bad things he himself had done and the bad things that had happened to him, and somehow they had ended up being good friends. He still wasn't sure how that was possible, and he suspected Snape wasn't sure either, but still, they were. If he had commented on this, he was pretty sure Snape would have said something along the lines of, 'And how is our friendship more improbable than being friends with someone whom you tried to kill the first time you met her, and nearly raped, then rescued, then tried to throttle, the second time you met her?'
And, just as Snape had adopted him when he was new here, now they had adopted Anakin Skywalker. Darth Vader. When he had first suggested it, Snape had rolled his eyes and said, 'Do you realise who Darth Vader is?'
Yes, he did know. As Dr Durona had said, being Lord Miles's bodyguard had meant that he had to sit through all the Star Wars vids many times. Well, all except Return of the Jedi. He'd been on standing orders to take a break and get another armsman to cover for him whenever that one was on, after what happened the first time. Back then, he hadn't understood why a vid about a fictional war, made centuries ago before the Earthers had even got further into space than Earth's moon, triggered flashbacks, when he could watch Betan propaganda vids about the Escobar War itself and not feel anything more than annoyance at how unrealistic they were.
He knew now, of course. It was because he had been Darth Vader – or at least, the person Darth Vader would have been if he wasn't Force-sensitive and wasn't an officer, but had been just some street rat who'd joined the Imperial Service as the only way out of the slums. It wasn't that they were linked just because he'd finally done the right thing, killing Admiral Vorrutyer. But also because of all the wrong things he'd done. Like hurting the woman he loved, when all he'd wanted to do was save her life...
'The black-haired woman – was she the boy's mother?' Vader's thin whisper of a voice broke into his thoughts.
Darth Vader was reading his mind! He might read further, find out about Lord Miles, mustn't let him, attack, kill…
Bothari had fast reflexes, but not as fast as Skywalker's. Before he could move forward to attack – certainly before he could remind himself that he was supposed to be looking after a severely injured man, and that they were dead and in the afterlife and nothing Darth Vader could find out from him could be any threat to the living – he found himself picked up and flung against the wall like the drinking beaker.
Author's note: Oh well, it was only a matter of time before they got into a fight! Bothari has had time to heal and mellow somewhat since all the trauma he went through in Shards of Honor, hence his allowing Snape to nurse him when he was ill, but he has had to contend with several people (not just Ges Vorrutyer, but the memory-suppression people in the ImpMil hospital) manipulating his mind for their own purposes, so the realisation that Anakin is reading his mind is jabbing at a barely-healed wound.
The idea that Konstantine Bothari might sometimes have coped with traumatic experiences by mentally escaping to another world – this is just speculation, but I think it's plausible. In the books, he doesn't obviously have fully-developed Dissociative Identity Disorder to the extent that Mark Vorkosigan does, but Aral mentions that at times he had bordered on that, and Bothari himself says that he doesn't remember much of his childhood, which would be consistent with dissociation. As it is often a response to severe, prolonged abuse in childhood, it seems to fit.
Also, a note on names. In some cultures, it's normal to call friends and colleagues by their first names; for example, at Hogwarts, although teachers address pupils by their surnames and pupils address teachers as Professor [Surname], it's normal for adults to think of their friends and colleagues by their first names (with the exception of a few people, like Hagrid and Tonks, who prefer being addressed by their surnames). And Rowan is used to working with members of her family, so obviously they use first names, because all calling each other 'Dr Durona' wouldn't narrow it down much, so she's fine with calling the other people here by their first names as well.
Barrayar, on the other hand, is a much more formal culture, where surnames are more the norm. It also doesn't have an equivalent of 'Mr'; for Vor men who don't have the title Count or Lord, the 'Vor-' prefix is enough of an honorific, and prole men where appropriate are referred to by military rank or job title, such as Sergeant or Armsman, or otherwise just by their surname. (Consider how, in Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, Admiral Oliver Jole is referred to as 'Oliver' in Cordelia's thoughts, but mostly simply as 'Jole' in his own thoughts.)