Warning: references to canonical rape and child sexual abuse in this chapter. I didn't want this to be a darkfic, but considering the lives my characters have had, it can hardly avoid referencing past trauma and past crimes.

Bothari returned to the kitchen to find Cheiron and Snape watching anxiously for him. 'How did it go?' Cheiron asked.

'All right,' said Bothari. 'General Skywalker was just dreaming. He's calmed down, now he's awake.'

'What did you do to him?' Snape demanded.

'Held him and showed him memories until he cheered up. Offered him a hot chocolate.'

Snape's eyes narrowed suspiciously. 'You – held him? As in, gave him a hug?' Bothari nodded. 'How did you know he wanted that?'

'I asked,' retorted Bothari indignantly. Did Snape think he was some kind of pervert? Well, all right, he was exactly the sort of pervert who might rape an injured and helpless patient – not that Skywalker was helpless, ever – but it wasn't like that, not this time. But you didn't think it was 'like that' with Ensign Visconti either, did you? You believed she loved you – believed she was your wife – as if anyone would want to be near a creature like you…

'I meant, why did you even think of it?' snapped the wizard. 'We don't behave like that with each other, and we've been friends for years. You don't even like Cheiron to touch you, and you've known him since you were a child. Don't you think it's a bit suspicious that you would suddenly find yourself thinking, "Oh, that mass-murdering Dark wizard whom I tried to kill a couple of hours ago for reading my mind looks sad, so I'd better give him a reassuring cuddle and let him read my mind,"?'

Bothari seethed, unable to frame words into a sentence. Snape, when he was angry, fired off words like blasts from an energy weapon with a seemingly endless charge. Bothari's words needed to be loaded into a sentence one at a time, like the ancient weapons that fired lumps of metal, and when he was angry he couldn't even seem to pick them up.

'Oh, come on!' Snape was almost shouting now. 'You're not exactly a Ravenclaw, but you're not stupid! Or rather, you're not stupid unless someone is interfering with your mind! What's he using? Confundus? The Imperius curse?'

'It does look suspicious,' Cheiron said peaceably. 'But we don't know yet what was going on, and we need to discuss it as calmly as possible. But in the meantime, Anakin is probably thirsty, and if your suspicions are right, taking him a drink is a job for an Occlumens. We'll talk about it when you come back down. In the meantime, you don't know whether Anakin is consciously casting any spells, so be kind to him. Promise?'

'If you insist,' growled Snape, measuring milk into a pan.

'And right now, I'd like to go outside for some fresh air,' Cheiron concluded. 'Konstantine, are you coming?'

They walked out, leaving Snape to make the drink. It was a warm, sunny day outside. Green Earth grass, much softer and gentler than Barrayaran plants, grew all around, except where it was interrupted by buildings – houses, the gym, schools, medcentres. On a fairly flat patch of grass, a group of orcs were playing soccer.

'Do you need to pace?' Cheiron asked. Bothari shook his head. He felt very weary, in a way that had nothing to do with the exercise session earlier. He could feel the skin under his right eye twitching.eiron asked. Bothari shook his head. He felt very weary, in a way that had nothing to do with the exercise session earlier.s were playing soccer.

The house that Snape and Bothari – and, now, Skywalker – shared was on the side of the island that sloped down towards the causeway leading to the mainland. The tide was out, so the causeway was exposed, a road made of smooth-washed stones smelling of seaweed. On the far side was the great forest, with its ponds and trees and grass and the strange tailless rats called guinea-pigs.

The first time Bothari had arrived there, he hadn't known enough to realise that it must be a magical place because the trees shut out the sky and yet there was grass for the rats to eat, instead of just leaf-litter. He had never seen a forest before, or even the posher parts of Vorbarr Sultana that had gardens of Earth plants. All he knew was that one of the men had demanded him, and he knew he had to do as he was told because Ma could earn a lot more from hiring him out to the pervert customers than hiring herself out to the normal ones, and she couldn't afford to feed him if he couldn't earn his keep, and the man had told him to take his pants down, same as usual, and he'd thought the man was just going to feel him up like they normally did, but instead, he had done something that hurt a lot, more than five-year-old Konstantine had ever been hurt before, more than he could stand…

And then he'd been swimming up, out through a pool of water, into the strange green place. There had been one of the rats nibbling grass by the side of the pond, and he'd made a grab for it – rats were good eating, better than cats or dogs, even though they were smaller – but then a big mutant with a horse's body and a man's chest and arms and head had said, 'Don't hurt it. This is their home. If you want food, I can give you supper.'

He'd known that mutants were evil, of course. Ma didn't have much time to tell him the normal children's stories about evil mutant sorcerers and bandits who kidnapped girls to be their brides and flayed their skins off, but he'd seen enough babies have their throats cut because they were mutants to know how it went. But this mutant didn't seem likely to treat him any worse than most of the normal humans he knew did.

If he'd tried to pick Kon up in his arms, Kon might have run off. But instead, he had just said, 'My house is about half a mile – about a kilometre – away, over the causeway at the edge of the wood. I can carry you if you like, but if you'd prefer to walk, that's fine. Now, do you see that notice on the tree?' He had indicated a sign, tied to the trunk. Kon hadn't known how to read, then, but he had memorised the pattern of the letters Барраяр which meant the planet he came from, the pool to jump back into if he wanted to get back home.

A couple of times, on the walk over the stone road with the waves lapping at its sides, the mutant had asked him whether he wanted a lift, but he had just stared at the ground and said nothing, which the mutant had realised meant no. He was tall for five years old, and a kilometre wasn't a long way, but he hurt so much that he could barely walk. But he couldn't bear to let anyone touch him, after what had happened, and the mutant seemed to understand that. Instead he had just led the way to his house, and shown him into a room like nothing Kon had ever seen before, and said, 'You might like to take a bath while I get a meal ready. This is the loo – it's like a privy, only when you've finished, you pull this lever here, and water comes to wash it clean. But before you do that, there's paper here to wipe yourself – you can moisten it in this sink here to make it more soothing, if you're a bit sore right now. And if you'd like to run yourself a bath, you can turn this red tap to run hot water and this blue tap to run cold water, until you get the temperature you want.'

Kon might not have ever been in a building that had plumbing, but he did know about baths. He had said, 'Ma says hot baths don't work. Not even if you drink a bottle of vodka in the bath. There are better ways of getting rid of a baby. Anyway, I'm a boy. Boys can't get pregnant – can they?' he had added fearfully.

'No, you can't get pregnant,' the mutant had reassured him. 'This is just to get you warm and clean. It's easier to stay healthy if you keep clean. Do you need help washing your hair?'

'No.'

'Do you want me to check you over to make sure you're not badly injured? It's all right, I am a doctor.'

'No.'

So the mutant, whose name turned out to be Cheiron, had left him to it, after explaining about the soap and special hair-soap called shampoo (after experimenting with trying to comb it through his matted hair, Kon had resolved that when he was old enough to live how he chose, he was going to keep his hair cut short like the soldiers did), and the jar of ointment to rub on anywhere that hurt, and the fresh clothes called pyjamas to put on afterwards ('I'll wash your other clothes while you're asleep,').

When he'd finished, he had let himself out of the bathroom, and Cheiron had shown him to a bedroom that he was allowed to have all to himself, with a small bed that didn't look as though any grown-up, let alone a man-horse mutant, was going to try to get into it with him. There was a tray of food on a table beside the bed, with a glass of milk that wasn't even stale, and some stuff that tasted nasty but that Cheiron said he needed to drink to ward off infection. After he finished his supper, he snuggled into the safe, warm bed, and Cheiron had told him stories until he was sleepy. He'd slept all night, but in the morning, he'd left before Cheiron had woken up, and run back across the causeway (parts of it were still underwater, but he hadn't cared) and found his way back to the pool with Барраяр on the tree beside it, and found himself back in his own world.

Back home, all the girls (they were all called 'girls', even the ones who were really old) had told him he'd been very brave not to cry, that sex always hurt the first time, especially if you were only five, but that he'd done well, but that some customers liked whores to scream and cry, even if they were grown-ups who'd been doing this for years, and that he'd learn which ones did. He'd wondered what had happened and why he didn't remember it, and how he was going to learn if he wasn't in his body when it happened. While he was on Barrayar, he didn't remember the Rock or Cheiron, but he knew there was a way of escaping when things got too bad. When he was on the Rock, he knew that Cheiron worried about him and would have liked to keep him there where he was safe, but he knew that if he didn't go back, he would forget how to survive on Barrayar.

So he'd managed to get through it until he got good enough at fighting to fight the men off, and then he'd run away from home. Living on the streets had been tough, but better than what he'd got away from, and by the time he was sixteen he'd been tall enough to pass for eighteen and join the Imperial Service. In basic training, the instructor had been amazed that he somehow already knew how to read and even what a bathroom was, and he couldn't explain how he knew. Anyway, life had been all right, and he hadn't needed to escape to the Rock again. Or not until he was assigned to Admiral Vorrutyer, anyway.

Cheiron had always been there when he needed him. But he had to admit, Snape was right. He had never been comfortable with letting Cheiron or any man touch him, unless he was seriously injured. He knew that adults, especially men, don't touch you unless they mean to hurt you. Wrestling practice was different, because that had rules. As for sex – well, considering how the one time he had fallen in love had gone, he had learned that the most he could hope for from sex was that it was brisk, quiet, and not traumatic for anyone involved.

When his daughter had been born, he had been terrified the first time he'd held her in his arms. Not frightened that he might drop her or that she might wet on his smart new Armsman's uniform, but ashamed because he was unworthy to touch someone so new and innocent and perfect, and because he was frightened that if he got too close to her, allowed himself to show love for her, he would end up doing something terrible to her. At the time, he hadn't remembered fathering her, and at the time when he had fathered her he had been too drugged and confused to understand what he was doing, but he could guess that there was a reason why the baby's mother hadn't stayed around long enough to see her born.

It had been different with Lord Miles, because – being shy just wasn't an option. At first he had seen his job as being simply to guard the child, but he'd soon realised that it was simpler if he and Lady Vorkosigan, and sometimes Droushnakovi (who was the only one of them with much experience with babies, as she'd been the Emperor's bodyguard since he was born), and sometimes Admiral Vorkosigan when he wasn't busy being the Emperor's Regent, dealt with baths and nappies and so on themselves, rather than hovering over a hired nursemaid who might be an assassin in disguise. Apart from anything else, even nursemaids who weren't assassins got nervous when there was a large Armsman breathing down their necks, and if they were nervous, they made mistakes, and mistakes could be deadly on a child that fragile…

'Do you understand why Severus is so anxious about you?' Cheiron asked now, bringing him back to the present.

'Because I'm crazy.'

'Sort of. The world isn't divided into people who are 100% sane, and those who are 100% mad. But – because of the way you were brought up, you are particularly vulnerable to being manipulated, in the same way that Miles is particularly vulnerable to fractures because of being poisoned by the Soltoxin antidote.' Cheiron knelt down on the grass, so that he was closer to Bothari in height. If anything, Bothari was slightly taller than him like this.

'We are born knowing barely anything, beyond some basic instincts, and what we learn about the world in foalhood shapes how our minds develop,' Cheiron went on. 'Now, you spent the first twelve years of your life being a victim of abuse, until you were physically strong enough to defend yourself. So, first of all, you were learning that if you aren't capable of beating someone in a fight, then your only chance of survival is to please them and do what they want, and therefore that you have to be very, very quick at reading them and sensing what it is that they want. But the next lesson you learned, as you grew up, was that the only alternative to being passive is being aggressive: that it's better to be the predator than the prey. But obviously, as a child you weren't thinking rationally about why you felt this way, so you came to crave violence for its own sake, without understanding why.

'If you were a truly evil person, you wouldn't care about this. But because you want to be good, you were frightened by your own capacity for evil, and for not being sure how to make the right decisions. So you decided that the way to cope was by relying on authority figures you thought you could trust to tell you what to do. As a teenager, you were still too young and naïve to understand that officers might not always make good decisions either, and that some of them might actually be worse people than you are.

'As an adult, you've learned that it doesn't have to be this way: that it's sometimes right to argue with officers, but that this doesn't usually mean it's right to hit them; that sometimes you may have to kill attackers in order to protect innocent people, but that this isn't the same as killing anyone who's in your way; that on occasion, perhaps the best service a loyal Armsman can perform for his liege-lord is to dangle the liege-lord out of a window by his ankles to frighten him out of trying to assassinate his grandson again, but that this doesn't mean you'd let go of him. It's just that – being assertive, rather than either aggressive or passive, is something you have to make a conscious effort to do, rather than your default mode.

'So, bearing all this in mind, you can see why Severus might worry that you are allowing Anakin to manipulate you. But do you think that was what was going on?'

Bothari thought it over. 'No.'

'Can you tell me what was going on?'

'I just – he needed a hug. So I asked him if that was all right, and he said yes. The way you always asked me, before you did anything.'

'Well done. I think you did the right thing. But I'm surprised you let him read your mind, when that was what you were most worried about. Do you think you had any control over that, or do you think he'd have done it whether you wanted him to or not?'

'I don't know. Maybe he'd have read something, whatever I did. Maybe he can't help doing it. But if I choose what to think about, I can choose what he sees.'

Author's note: I wasn't sure how to write the word 'Barrayar' in Cyrillic. My first guess was Баррайар, but PDB11 warned me that й is used as a modifier in the middle of words, whereas 'Yar' is clearly a word in its own right, meaning 'planet', as in Barra-Yar = Barra's Planet, Serg-Yar = Serg's Planet. PDB11 suggested that a more likely spelling would be Барраяр, which looks right to me, but neither of us is from a Slavic culture, so if any readers are, I would be grateful for their opinion on this.