Sympathy for the Devil
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Written for the ficathon challenge at the lj community bujold (underscore) fic. Philomytha asked for young!Galeni breaking away from his father, and I was happy to oblige. Special thanks to nezuko, Chevira Lowe, telosphilos, and Phoenix of Eternity for beta work and critiquing!
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"I had suspected you were more intimately acquainted with the Komarr Revolt than the Security reports seemed to believe," remarked Miles.
"As a drafted apprentice to my father," Galeni confirmed. "Some night forays, other missions of sabotage—I was small for my age. There are places a child, idly playing, can pass where an adult would be stopped. Before my fourteenth birthday I had helped kill men… ...But I could not see that it made any practical difference to the corpses, ordinary people caught in the cross fire, whether they were burned down by evil invader plasma fire, or blown to bits by good patriotic gravitic implosions."
– Brothers in Arms,181.
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David slipped out of the café with his hands in his pockets and his heart in his throat. Two minutes, his father had said. Two minutes to get as far as he could without attracting any attention at all, without incurring more than a casual glance from the squad of Barrayaran soldiers lounging around with their heavy boots and bloody hands at the café, without triggering any sensors or alerting any suspicions.
Two minutes to kill thirty men.
There was another pair of Barrayarans at the corner thirty meters down the street, black-clad giants hefting plasma arcs, their faces half-hidden behind the masks of combat helmets. David looked straight ahead, an ordinary boy on his way home from school, school crest on his shirt, head filled only with calculus and history and economics. Not timers and gravitic imploders and the moment when he had to not duck—
Sound, and air, and the world, went white. The shock hurled David to his knees, skidded him on his stomach across rough pavement. He lay stunned for half a second, blinded, deafened, thrown beyond thought. Something struck his back, and instinctively he tried to cover his head.
A woman screamed, and screamed, and did not stop.
But the world moved again. The Barrayaran soldiers tore past David, one boot smashing down centimeters from his thigh. He pushed himself to his hands and knees, coughing, still half-blinded by the thick white haze of dust and smoke. His hands came up bloody; his shirt was shredded, his trouser-knees gone. He felt warm liquid running down his chin, and tasted blood between his teeth.
The woman was still screaming.
David lurched to his feet, panting like a man at the end of a race, and glanced back over his shoulder. The street behind him was—
Not there anymore.
Not there anymore.
If the Butcher of Komarr had come around the corner at that moment and ordered David to move—if his father had come—David could not have twitched a muscle. He stared back at the broken crater, the rubble strewn a hundred meters from the center of the blast, the smoke pluming up from shops and businesses and men and women and Barrayarans and Komarrans. Not just the café but everything within twenty yards of the schoolboy's satchel he'd left under a table was gone, wiped away in chunks of broken masonry and shredded flesh.
The imploder did that, David thought numbly. And then, No. I did that.
The two Barrayarans had reached the lip of the crater. One was shouting into a wrist-com, the other swinging his plasma arc down to cover a man trying to drag a woman out of the debris. Half her scalp hung like a veil over her face, long dark hair and bright red blood. The Barrayaran with the wrist-com shouted at his comrade, knocked the plasma arc out of line, reached out a hand to help the injured woman. She screamed and lurched away, and he recoiled, dropping his hand. The other soldier lifted his plasma arc again and swung around, scanning the area, finger tight to the trigger.
Someone pulled at David's elbow. "Best get out of here, lad, they'll be shooting in a moment—"
It was an elderly man with blood all down his shirt and a flap of skin ripped loose on his cheek, puffing out with every breath. "No place for a child," the man said, tugging at David's elbow again. "Get home. Get to your mother. Good God in Heaven—"
David tore out of his grasp and ran, blindly, bent over and retching and stumbling. He made it another block and smacked into the corner of a public lift-tube, and this time when he fell it was harder to get up. Someone bent over him, earnest, horrified.
"A bomb," he stammered. "A bomb, the patriots, I don't know, it went off, everyone's dead, the Barrayarans are there, I don't know—"
He could still hear the woman screaming, faint now, sobbing. Someone else screamed closer, and a big man pulled him to his feet and demanded what his name was, where his parents were, where he lived. David had barely the sense to lie—he'd make it home, he was all right, but there were people hurt back there sir, there were people dead—and he was alone again, the crowd ripping itself apart to run towards or away from the crater. A black aircar dropped out of the sky from the top of the dome, and another, and another.
David forced his raw hands into his pockets and began to walk. Not home, not yet. His father would be home now, and David knew he couldn't face Ser Galen's exultant eyes yet, his gloating over the victory, his lists of only the Barrayaran dead. Not now.
Maybe not ever.