From the kitchen, Severus could hear rasping snores emanating from upstairs. He snorted. 'So much for "meditating"!'

'He's got twenty-three years of sleep deprivation to make up for,' said Cheiron, keeping his voice low. 'Even allowing for the weeks he was in a coma, he's still going to need a lot of rest for quite a while yet.'

'Whereas I had the luxury of all the sleep I could get in between working an ninety-hour week plus any supply teaching duties when other teachers were off sick, remedial classes, any other duties like refereeing Quidditch matches and supervising detentions, and spying for Dumbledore by pretending to spy for Voldemort while convincing Voldemort that I was spying for him by convincing Dumbledore that I was spying for him by pretending to spy for Voldemort?'

'I know you've had a hard life,' said Cheiron. 'You all have, and you're all in recovery. I don't want to…'

'Shush!' Severus listened hard. Anakin's breathing was becoming more strained. He still wasn't used to breathing by himself, especially with child-sized organs powering an adult-sized body. He couldn't actually die here, but still…

Severus hurried upstairs and eased open the door to Anakin's room. He eased a couple more pillows under Anakin's head and back, pressed the remote controls to tilt up the upper section of the bed a few more degrees, and waited until the Sith's breathing sounded stronger before he left.

It wasn't until he got downstairs that he realised that he had been allowing himself to think of the battered, mutilated man lying on the bed as 'Anakin'. He was in danger of going soft, at this rate. Just because the man wasn't covered in black armour didn't mean he wasn't still a threat.

'That was kind of you,' said Cheiron.

'No, I just don't want him getting brain-damage from asphyxiation and becoming even more dependent on us to nurse him! Don't ever get the idea that I am a nice person!'

'All right, that wasn't you being kind, that was just you being responsible.'

'And that wasn't you agreeing with me, that was you humouring me.'

'Can you think of a reason why I might be doing that?'

'Because, apparently, I've "had a hard life" and am "in recovery".'

'Severus, I don't blame you for wanting to be sarcastic,' said Cheiron. 'But we've only got a limited time to talk as just the two of us, before either Anakin wakes up or Konstantine comes back, so do you think you can answer my questions as honestly and straightforwardly as possible?'

'It depends what they are.'

'Fair enough. Firstly: do you think it would be better if we just don't go through with this? If we ask one of the hospital wards to look after Anakin until he's in much better shape and able to look after himself?'

'No. I promised Konstantine we could look after Anakin here. I can't – won't go back on my word now.'

'Why did you agree to it in the first place?'

'Because it was Konstantine's idea and – it's so rare that he even dares to have ideas that he needs as much encouragement as possible.'

'And because you care deeply about him, as much as if he was one of your Slytherins.'

'Yes.' Although if anything, Konstantine was a Hufflepuff. He was nowhere near ambitious enough to be in Slytherin – though you could say the same of Gregory Goyle. Then again, from what Severus could gather about life on Barrayar, for someone born in an area that made Knockturn Alley look salubrious, managing to achieve anything more than a life of robbing anyone unwary enough to venture in was a considerable achievement.

'Is there anyone here who cares like that about you?'

'No. Konstantine used to. But he can't be expected to any more, now that he's adopted Darth Vader.'

'And you can't rely on me, I take it?' Severus could hear that Cheiron was trying to ask this lightly, and not make it sound like an expression of disappointment.

'Not to care about me forever, no. For a while, when I was the newcomer, yes. Until I was replaced with someone else whose needs had to come first.'

'I'm sorry. Did I make you feel that way, when Konstantine came here? I know we've spent a lot less time talking together about you and your own past, after he arrived.'

'You didn't make me feel that way! You didn't make me do anything! All you did was tell me there was a new arrival coming to the island and that you'd like me to brew some healing potions for him! You didn't tell me I had to invite him to live with me, or nurse him when he was ill, or restore his memories! I volunteered to do all that! So, I – I couldn't complain.'

'Would you have liked to grumble about him, if you thought you were allowed to?'

Severus considered this. 'Mostly, no. But – can I resent being given a free choice instead of being treated like a slave, so that I don't feel I have the right to be resentful?'

He was laughing now, at the absurdity of this. Cheiron laughed too, as he said very formally, 'Permission to feel resentful granted!' It felt the way it had when he had first come here, when there was time to talk about convoluted tangles of emotion.

More seriously, Cheiron added, 'Do you feel free, here?'

'I suppose so.' What did 'free' actually mean, Severus wondered? Well, for a start, it meant he didn't have to be a Death Eater, and he didn't have to be a schoolteacher. If it came to that, he didn't have to brew healing potions for the various physical, mental or magical ailments that various people arrived on the Rock with. He had just found it so interesting, finding out where the rules of magical brewing here did or didn't correspond back to those in his own world, and what some of the plants introduced from other settings could do.

The forest on the mainland had largely been left in its pristine state to consist simply of grass and trees, plus the guinea-pigs, descendants of an escapee from some experiment, who had colonised it long before. However, visitors to the Rock had managed to bring samples of all kinds of strange plants, and create gardens of them. Not that this happened in every case. Sometimes food, or potions ingredients or whatever else people needed, just materialised here, in the same way that people materialised here, especially if they were too ill or injured to make their way out of the forest pools and head over to the island.

Severus had found his own way to the Rock when he died, and so had Konstantine, even though he had been in so much pain that he could barely see his way there. But when it was time for Darth Vader's arrival, a bacta tank containing him had simply materialised in the spare bedroom, just when Severus and Konstantine had finished reorganising the living-room into a makeshift bedroom so that Cheiron could easily come and inspect the patient without having to cope with stairs. Cheiron didn't mind walking upstairs, but hated having to navigate his way back down them. Having human eyesight meant that he could at least see the ground at his front hooves, but that didn't alter the fact that the staircase had been built with human feet in mind, not centaurs and not disabled humans.

At least, in addition to the bacta tank having somehow arrived from Vader's universe (Severus was fairly sure there hadn't been anything in the film about Luke getting him into a bacta tank before he died), there was also a float-chair which Konstantine recognised as a Betan brand he was familiar with, and which was much easier to manoeuvre than a wheelchair. Of course, Severus was perfectly capable of levitating someone without needing technology like that, but most people felt safer when they had something to sit on (a broom, a carpet, even a hippogriff) than when merely dangling in mid-air.

'Did you feel that you could refuse to have Anakin here, if you chose?'

'Yes.' Cheiron wouldn't have forced it on him, and Konstantine, if he felt strongly enough about taking on the role of Anakin's protector and carer, would probably have just gone to wherever Anakin was. Severus just – hadn't wanted that.

'Was indulging Konstantine's wish the only reason you agreed to this?'

'No,' said Severus. He wasn't sure what the other reason was, but there must be one, somewhere. He tried to reach for it in the hope that he would be able to discern from its shape what it was. 'I have only once watched a Star Wars film, and it was the one where Darth Vader dies. I watched it – not long after my own father had died, and I was the same age as Luke was. I remember – it made me cry more than I could understand at the time, but – maybe I was wondering whether I could have forgiven my father, the way Luke did, if I could have spoken with him one last time, and whether he would have saved my life, the way Darth Vader did. I suspect he probably wouldn't, and neither would my mother. Maybe I wished I had any parent, even a Sith Lord.'

'A parent who ultimately cared about you enough that it was enough to make up for their cruelty to you. Perhaps that was easier for you to imagine than a parent who had been kind and reliable and nurturing from the start.'

'Yes. So – does this mean I agreed to invite Darth Vader to live here because I wanted him to be a substitute father? Even though he's only a few years older than I am now?'

'Well, did you?'

'And – Konstantine needs him to be a child-substitute, because he's missed having someone to look after, now that Elena and Miles are grown up and no longer his responsibility. And from what you've told me about Anakin Skywalker when he was younger, it sounds as though he was every bit as insufferable as a teenage Miles Vorkosigan. Or a teenage Harry Potter.'

'Or a teenage Achilles. Not that Achilles was anywhere near as delinquent as Heracles, admittedly.'

'And – you said I treat Konstantine as if he's one of my students…'

'Not in the sense of treating him like a child, most of the time,' said Cheiron. 'But you are protective of him, at the very least.'

'He's a muggle! Muggles need to be protected when there are dangerous Dark wizards around! How is he supposed to defend himself against someone like Vader?'

'Against physical violence, like being Force-choked, he probably couldn't,' Cheiron agreed. 'And that must be galling for him, when he's used to being a tough, dangerous soldier. But did you hear what he said about being able to control how much of his thoughts Anakin can read?'

'Do you believe he actually can?' It was hard enough teaching Occlumency to wizard teenagers, and not usually done before second-year NEWTs. How would a muggle have been able to learn a skill like that for himself?'

'Firstly: he was tortured into suppressing several months' worth of memories by being conditioned to suffer agonising pain whenever he thought about them. He wouldn't have survived if he hadn't been able to find a way of hiding his thoughts from himself. Secondly: in spite of that, he still managed to find a way to smuggle a few memories past the memory-suppression conditioning without anyone noticing.'

'You can't want him to go back to living like that now, surely? Wasn't enduring nineteen years of it enough?'

'No, of course I don't. It's not healthy for him, or for you. Which is why at some point I need to talk to the two of you and Anakin together, and reach an agreement. But that's another topic. In the meantime; as you've said, Konstantine does have parental feelings for Anakin – and after all, he nearly is old enough to be Anakin's father, or he's as much older than Anakin as Obi-Wan Kenobi was, at any rate. And I think, to some extent, Konstantine does look to you to be the responsible parent-figure, even though you're more than twenty years younger than he is, just as Aral Vorkosigan and Cordelia Naismith were parent-substitutes for him, even though Aral was only a couple of years older than him and Cordelia was eight years younger. It's different, because you're not in a position of command over him, so you're his friend on something more like equal terms, but even so…'

'I know. I don't have to like it. He's gone through life expecting to obey orders most of the time and not have to make a decision for himself unless it's an absolute emergency. As far as I can see, being oath-sworn to serve a Vor family sounds about on par with being a house-elf!'

'You probably shouldn't let Konstantine hear you make that comparison,' said Cheiron, with a gentle smile. 'He's very proud of being an Armsman.'

'Yes, yes, I've heard him go on about it, how it's an honour, how they usually only pick the cream of the Imperial Service, the men with twenty years of unblemished military record, as opposed to twenty-six years including time spent in the brig or in the loony bin.'

'And most Armsmen have wives and homes of their own and a life outside being an Armsman,' said Cheiron. 'It isn't so much the job, as that Konstantine just is house-elf-like.'

'If house-elves were the size of orcs and as savage as werewolves.'

'Granted. But nonetheless, becoming part of the Vorkosigan household meant being with people whom he loved and trusted, and who loved and trusted him, people who were more family to him than his own mother had ever been. Twenty years ago, that was what he needed to give him the stability he needed to be able to heal, as far as possible, from some of the bad experiences he'd been through. And now, it helps that you're encouraging him to be more independent and use his own initiative more. But even so – none of you have had good fathers in your own lives…'

'And if we're all looking to each other to be fathers to each other, we've got a problem.' Had that really been his motivation? Had he really been that desperate? This was downright embarrassing.

'Agreed.'

'It reminds me of a picture I saw once. It was a trick drawing of an endless staircase that appeared to go round and round, ever upwards or ever downwards, depending on how you looked at it. There were men on it who were doomed to walk ever upstairs or ever downstairs, like walking a treadmill.'

'Does it feel as though you're walking ever – is upstairs the one that's tiring for a human?'

'Yes. And yes.'

'And it probably doesn't help that, as you've said, you don't feel you can trust me.'

'Do you want me to trust you?'

'I want to be trustworthy. I didn't mean to betray your trust, but something evidently happened to make you feel unsafe.'

'You didn't betray me. I just – thought it was time I stopped taking up so much of your time…'

'In case I hurt you by losing interest in you?'

'It's a lot easier to remain useful than to remain loved. Do you think I haven't learned that, after all these years?'

'It's a very understandable message for you to have learned. But I'm sorry I didn't realise earlier that you felt like this.'

Severus said nothing. It wasn't as if saying sorry had ever made any difference when he said it, so why should it when Cheiron did?

'And, supposing I do care about you, I'm not sure how I could prove that, if you are certain that no-one does. I don't suppose offering you a hug would prove anything?'

'No, it wouldn't.' Honestly, did Cheiron think he was a child? Well, to a centaur who was thousands of years old, anyone with a normal human lifespan looked like a child, probably.

'I thought not.' Cheiron was silent for a few minutes. 'Can you think of anything that would help?'

'No.'

'Well – when Konstantine gets back, we'll need to draw up some schedules of who is working and who is resting when, to make sure you get enough sleep, and at least some leisure time when you're awake. Now, would it help if I set aside an hour of one-to-one time with each of you each day? Or would it be better if you found someone else on the island whom you felt more comfortable talking to?'

Severus considered. Cheiron was a busy centaur, after all. 'I think – it should be you,' he said finally. 'After all, you've known me since I arrived here. Explaining everything to somebody else from scratch would probably take up the next five years.'

'Fine. Shall we agree on that, then? As long as it's only because I'm convenient, and not because you trust me.'

Author's note: the picture Severus refers to is, of course, Ascending and Descending by M. C. Escher