After levitating Skywalker onto the bed, Snape retreated to his own room to rest. Bothari settled the battered Sith lord on the bed and then fetched a tray of food for the two of them, deliberately keeping Skywalker's portions small enough not to be overwhelming: a cup of kefir, half a slice of bread spread with miso, and a dish with a few spoonfuls of sauerkraut, plus the various healing potions Skywalker was supposed to have at this hour. The heavily probiotic meal reminded him of any number of cross-cultural arguments between Barrayarans and Betans over what was a healthy diet. He knew why it had to be like this: Skywalker's new cloned intestines were like a barren planet ready to be terraformed, and these foods were ships of tiny colonists. Still, Bothari had grown up knowing that the most important thing about food is that you don't starve.
Skywalker levitated the cup to his lips to drink, but then sank back against the pillows and allowed Bothari to feed him the rest of his meal in small mouthfuls. His teeth were a mess – not that Snape's or Bothari's teeth were holovid-star straight and white, but at least they were functional. Skywalker's mouth was a bombsite of rotting teeth, gaps and abscesses. They were going to have to take him to a dentist at some time, fairly soon. But for now, he mainly needed rest.
'Will you stay with me?' Skywalker asked. 'Could we – share a room?'
It wasn't a bad idea, in some ways. It would be a lot easier to listen for any signs of illness if they were sleeping side by side. In other ways, it was a terrible idea. Bothari wished he could say, 'It's against the rules,' or, 'Cheiron says you're to sleep on your own,' or, 'Professor Snape wouldn't approve.' But he wasn't allowed to hide behind that, not here. Cheiron, very Betan-like, had insisted that they had to discuss how they were going to do things, and why.
'It's not safe,' he said. 'We could get into a fight again. If I was half asleep and couldn't remember who you were, I might attack you. I'll stay with you till you fall asleep,' he offered. 'Cheiron used to do that for me, when I was little.'
'How old were you when you left home?' asked Skywalker.
'Twelve.' He didn't want to go into details, and besides, Skywalker mainly just needed him to listen. 'Professor Snape was eleven when he went away to the wizards' academy,' he added.
'I was nine. I used to belong to a junk dealer, but he lost me to a Jedi in a bet, so I was sold away from my mother. The Jedi order did not want me, and the Jedi who had wanted me died in battle not long afterwards. I suppose you know all this?'
'Some.'
'Nobody wanted me. The man who took me as a Padawan did so only because he had given his word to his old Master, the man who had wanted me as a Padawan, and who was dead. He never chose me, but – he was all I had. I used to creep into his room to sleep on his floor sometimes, in case I lost him, as I had lost everyone else. I had never slept on my own, before. I used to share my mother's room, at home.' He tensed, as if daring Bothari to laugh at him for being babyish.
'I did, too. My mother – worked in an inn.' Bothari wasn't ready to explain everything, not yet – and customers did occasionally pay to sleep overnight there. 'Bedrooms were just for customers. We – everyone who worked there - slept together in one room. It's warmer that way, so you don't need a heater.' Some of the customers' bedrooms had fireplaces, so customers could have a fire lit if they paid extra, and if they didn't have a kink for setting fire to whores. Of course, you didn't always know which customers were sadists until too late. He'd had plenty of chances to practise the first-aid skills that Cheiron had taught him.
'Did you go away to school?'
'No. Schools were for the rich – for people who had electricity and comconsoles at home. No, I showed I could fight well enough to be useful to a street gang, and lived with them until I was tall enough to pass for eighteen and join the Service.' The gang of street kids had slept huddled together, too, in half-destroyed buildings or under whatever shelter they could make, taking turns to keep watch in case anyone from a rival gang tried trespassing on their turf. It hadn't been until he was much older, overhearing some of the gardeners at Vorkosigan Surleau, that he'd found out that to some people, 'turf' meant a patch of grass.
But he was good at keeping watch. It helped that he didn't like to take drugs, the way most of the others did. Reality was confusing enough without drugs to make it even weirder. The demon voices had already started to mutter to him, but they talked less when he was with other people. When he was on his own, they came swarming in to fill up the silence. It was better being around other people – in the gang's hideouts, or later, as a soldier, in barracks or tents or ship bunkrooms full of other young soldiers snoring or farting or bickering or boasting or making bets.
'When did you first have your own room?' Skywalker asked.
'Thirty. An officer wanted me as his batman, so I had a cabin next to his.' He'd known enough to be wary – everyone had heard of Admiral Vorrutyer, and as a senior officer, he was sure to have the override codes to be able to get into Bothari's cabin. But it turned out that Vorrutyer liked to summon people into his own cabin – the triple-sized one with a bed with handcuffs and drawers full of torture implements. When he got bored, he would just yawn and say, 'You may go,' and let Bothari escape to the privacy of his own bed. Except that it was never private, because the demons would be with him, and drunk on whatever Vorrutyer had fed them.
'You are troubled. And no, I am not reading your thoughts,' Skywalker added. 'Your emotions are too obvious to hide.'
Nobody else had ever said that – or not people who had only known him for one day, at any rate. Most people couldn't believe he even had emotions.
Oh well, if he'd insisted on letting Skywalker know about their pasts, he might as well get this over with. 'You asked about the beautiful lady – the one with long black hair.'
'Was she the mother of the young girl in the memory of the camping trip?'
'Yes.' Bothari breathed slowly in and out, trying to calm himself. He needed to explain this, if only to let Skywalker know why he was dangerous. Using words was harder work than letting the wizard just read his mind, but at least it kept some distance. 'She – she was a prisoner of war. Only eighteen years old, just out of school, never planned on being a soldier, but – we were sent to invade her planet, so they all joined up to defend it. And – and the Prince – the Emperor's heir – he wanted pregnant women. He wanted us to torture and rape the women and herms until they were pregnant, then hand them over to him.' (Not that this worked with herms, but he hadn't learned until years later that Betan herms were a genetically engineered separate subspecies of human, who could have children naturally with each other but needed medical intervention to have children with men or women.)
'Not – the boy with the green-brown eyes? A bit older than the other younglings? The one keeping the journal on the camping trip?'
'No. His father, the one who got killed in the war.' And – it was almost treason to think things like this about the Emperor's Heir, nearly as bad as thinking them about the actual Emperor, but they were lucky that Prince Serg had died when he did. But that wasn't the worst part to talk about. 'Elena – Ensign Visconti – I wanted to protect her – I said she was nearly dead anyway, she'd be dead before the baby was more than a bean, the Prince would give us more shit for spoiling his fun than if he didn't see her at all, so if I could have her to finish off on my own, I wouldn't tell him Admiral Vorrutyer got a bit too carried away playing with vibra-knives. Vorrutyer let me take her – I meant to be good to her, meant to let her sleep in my bed when I'd dressed her wounds and I'd sleep on the floor, but she was so cold, she was barely breathing, I climbed into bed with her as if we were man and wife, and – by the morning I thought we were man and wife. Or maybe I wanted her to believe we were, so that she wouldn't be frightened, and I ended up believing it instead. I can't remember. I wanted to save her, and I just went on hurting her.'
'Did she survive?' Skywalker asked.
'Yes. She healed well. I saw her again, years later. She's still beautiful.'
'Then you did better than I did.'
That wasn't the point. 'I'm dangerous. I'm not fit to share a room with anyone. Most of all, not with someone injured.'
Skywalker considered this. 'That is a story of who you were,' he said. 'Not who you are now. You turned away from the Dark Side. And yet – the Darkness lies coiled within you, always ready to strike. I can sense it. If you cannot exorcise it, after so long, it implies I cannot, either. Your Professor Snape is right not to trust me.'
'I trust you. So does Cheiron. He wouldn't let us look after you in a normal house like this if he didn't.'
'I trust you, too. Evidently, so does Cheiron, or he would not let you look after me. And – you were trusted before you came here. Not only to look after your own daughter, but the other younglings, too. Nobody would have trusted me to bring up my children. And did those younglings you cared for come to any harm?'
'No.'
'If we cannot trust ourselves, perhaps we need to trust each other, and trust Cheiron's judgement,' suggested Skywalker. 'At least until we have any better options.' He sounded very sleepy, as if he was settling down for the night rather than just another short nap.
'I'd better put the oxygen mask back on you,' Bothari said. 'Can't have you stopping breathing in the night.'
Skywalker nodded sleepily, but once it was on, his voice came, rather muffled through the plastic. 'Will you hug me again?'
Bothari leant over the bed as he had done earlier, to wrap his arms around Skywalker's scarred body.
'Will you let me hug you?' Skywalker continued.
Bothari wasn't sure how that worked with someone who didn't have arms, but to humour him, said, 'All right.' It wasn't that he liked being touched, but he could put up with it.
'You are lying,' said Skywalker. 'You do not feel "all right" at all.'
'No.'
'Perhaps you should leave me, for now. Good night. May the Force be with you.'
'Good night.'
They parted awkwardly. Bothari pulled the door to Skywalker's room almost closed, and went down to the kitchen to wait for Cheiron's return. As he sat down, he felt something like a metal gauntlet reach for his hand. He twitched, startled, then grasped the invisible hand in his own. It softened into the feeling of a flesh hand, warm and work-roughened. Bothari held it gently for a moment, then realised that he was being too cautious – this wasn't Lord Miles, it wasn't as if the bones were going to crumble on impact. He squeezed it warmly and firmly. The spectral hand squeezed back, then departed.
Bothari wasn't ready to be cuddled by a man, whether with physical arms or the Force. Still, he thought he could get used to Force hand-holding.
