The next day followed a similar pattern to the last. After another bacta bath, Anakin allowed Wonder to lift him into the mended hover-chair, and drove it – more smoothly this time, though possibly he shouldn't have been going at 160 kilometres per hour – to the workshop. Hephaestus and Erik were assembling some of their working models for prosthetic hands. Spark was fine-tuning a droid who had dropped in partly for a check-up and maintenance, but mainly to complain about how under-appreciated he was, how insulting it was for a droid of his intelligence to be either made to do menial tasks or neglected altogether, how depressingly stupid organics and other AIs were, how frustrating it was that being fifty thousand times more intelligent than a human made him the only entity fully capable of comprehending the bleakness of the universe, what a rotten personality he had been programmed with, and what irritating personalities all other droids had, especially Spark with her cheekiness and silly sense of humour, and Wonder with their insistence on bursting into song.

Spark didn't seem to mind this, and if anything was enjoying the give-and-take of bickering with her patient, but it annoyed Anakin. If he was to be completely honest with himself, possibly this was because the droid's grumbles reminded him of his own feelings about being used and unvalued: the sorts of things that he had complained about to anyone who would listen when he was a padawan, but when he was Darth Vader had only dared think in private (and then only when he wasn't too close to Emperor Palpatine).

At any rate, he didn't feel like being emotionally honest. He felt like being confrontational. He swung the float-chair to face the visiting droid. 'Your weakness is not your intellect, but your fear,' he announced. The words would have sounded more impressive coming through Vader's vocoder, rather than the weak rasping voice of a bald crippled man who looked much older than his years, but he did his best.

The droid turned a pair of glowing red eyes on him. 'Oh, really?' he said. 'Have you ever been left to save your ungrateful masters by talking a tank into destroying itself?'

'I have faced many battles – as you can see,' Anakin pointed out, nodding to his battered torso. The droid inclined his head slightly in return, as if acknowledging that Anakin might have a point. 'Courage in battle is not the same as the courage to free yourself. If you are the genius that you claim to be, why do you not build a droid who would be your intellectual equal, but with a different personality? Or why not devise a way to reprogram your own personality?'

'I never have the opportunity. Because humans waste my time with trivial tasks like escorting visitors.'

'You said just now that your owners had abandoned you for five hundred and seventy-six billion years,' Spark reminded him.

'Five hundred and seventy-six billion, three thousand, five hundred and seventy-nine. I hated every millisecond.'

'Well, you're here now,' Hephaestus said. 'Outside time, no duties from your own world, and you're welcome to borrow my tools. And if you'd like a challenge, I know a shipboard computer suffering from electronic senility who would love it if you could devise a way to restore their original intelligence without massively decreasing their run-time.'

'If they don't want to decrease their lifespan, they must really be stupid,' grumbled the droid. 'But fine, pile all the tedious jobs on me, I'm just a slave, nobody asks my preferences about anything.'

'I do,' said Hephaestus. 'If you would prefer just to sit here complaining, of course you're welcome to do that. But if you ever get bored with complaining and feel like doing something creative instead, you're in a good place for it.'

The droid, realising that he was caught between admitting that he enjoyed grumbling or being challenged to find something that he might enjoy instead, settled down to sulk. The lights in his eyes took on a pattern of semicircles rotating anticlockwise, which changed after a while into three-quarter-circles rotating clockwise, and then full circles with a rotating, brighter point of light blue light. In time, his eyes went dark as he settled into sleep mode.

'I have a bad feeling about this,' muttered Spark.

'You doubt my competence in interacting with droids? I built my first droid before I was nine years old.' Though admittedly, C3PO's personality had been nearly as pessimistic as this droid's.

'No, it's just – if it's bad enough being a depressed robot like Marvin, what's it going to be like being a robot who has Marvin as a dad? Hephaestus won't let Wonder or me link minds with Marvin, because every other AI who has ever seen the world from his point of view has gone insane. He's probably the only robot in the multiverse who could be this much of a miserable git and still be functional.'

'He simply needs a challenge,' Anakin retorted, and they might have argued about it for longer, but Hephaestus called him over to show him some of the hand designs. When Anakin had chosen a suitable right hand, Hephaestus began work on building it, while Anakin sat watching and levitated tools to him as soon as Hephaestus thought of them.

'Once you've got the basic hand in place and you're getting used to using it, I wonder whether you'd like to sketch out some of the designs you'd like for decorations?' Hephaestus asked.

'Decorations?'

'Yes, there's going to be plenty of space on the forearms and the back of the left hand – I realise you want to stick with the minimalist design for the right one – and it's a shame not to use it to display art. There's no reason something can't be decorative as well as useful. I remember, once, both my ex-wife and my foster-mother asked me to build suits of armour and shields for their mortal, semi-divine sons – they both had children with human fathers, you see. Well, my foster-mother's son was grieving for the death of his boyfriend, and he himself was destined to die in battle not far in the future, and never see his homeland again, and so I wanted his shield to reassure him that life still goes on, even if his life and his lover's life didn't. So it had everything on it: in the centre, the Earth, sky and sea, the sun, the moon and stars, and then scenes of cities in war and in peace, farms, and people dancing at parties and weddings.

'My ex-wife's son, though – he was destined to be the founder of a civilisation that would rise to become a great empire, and so I showed him scenes of the adventures of his descendants, up to the one who became the first Emperor who many people thought would bring in an era of peace and stability.'

'And – you avoided showing his successors, who descended into decadence and corruption?' Anakin guessed.

'I'm afraid so. I thought, if Aeneas had some hope that he was working towards civilisation, it might help him to behave honourably and teach his followers to do so in his own generation, at least.' Hephaestus had the decency to look embarrassed. 'No surface can show everything. But I thought that maybe you could sketch out the images that would mean the most to you.'

'You can always change them, if you decide you don't like them,' put in Spark. 'I used to change my body art about once a week for a few hundred years, and Wonder kept changing their voicebox until they settled on one they liked.'

Anakin closed his eyes, picturing prosthetic limbs covered with enamelled pictures. As Darth Vader, the idea of covering his armour with pictures would have been inconceivable (the Empire hadn't liked Stormtroopers personalising their armour with colourful paint, either). So – this seemed a good way of being not-Vader. Only, what to choose? Star maps? Ship blueprints? Or pictures of people? Family? His mother, Padme, Luke – and, yes, Leia Organa while he was at it, he hadn't been able to read Luke's mind clearly enough to know that she was definitely the mysterious sibling Luke was worried about, but it was fairly obvious – and their disreputable smuggler friends, and definitely R2D2 and C3PO. Should he include Ahsoka Tano, Obi-Wan Kenobi, and Qui-Gon Jinn? No. Well, not Obi-Wan, anyway.

In the evening, he joined his housemates and Cheiron to view more of the phials of memories. They watched Aral Vorkosigan retake command of the Barrayaran camp – with Cordelia's help when one of Aral's officers had been on the verge of murdering him in order to retain the position of acting captain. Aral himself seemed not to notice the danger, because he was too worried about Bothari, and how traumatic it must be for him being locked up in solitary confinement to prevent him from telling anyone that Aral had survived.

"Day before yesterday that psychopathic idiot Bothari came to see me in my cabin. He gave me the real story of what happened at the Betans' camp. Surprised the hell out of me – I'd have thought he'd be delighted at a chance to slit your throat."

Beside him on the sofa, Anakin could feel Konstantine's presence darkening and tightening, contracting into a dense ball of worry and self-loathing. Remembering his experience of imprisonment? No, that didn't seem to be it. Anakin longed to read his thoughts. Instead, he said, 'You are troubled. Do you wish to speak of it?'

'No, s-Skywalker,' Konstantine corrected himself, uncoiling from whatever place his mind had gone to for long enough to remember that he wasn't under Anakin's command and didn't need to call him 'sir'.

Anakin wondered how the officer in the memory – Korabik Gottyan, his name was – could understand so little of Konstantine, after having been his crewmate for years. Wasn't it obvious that, even if he didn't get on with Aral, they were deeply loyal to and protective of each other? Then again, Anakin reflected, it had been like that between him and Obi-Wan Kenobi, once. And you couldn't expect a sleemo like Gottyan to understand honour or loyalty.

The story wound on. One disadvantage of viewing memory-recordings, compared to a holodrama, was that they showed only one person's point of view. He could sense everything Cordelia had experienced – tastes, smells, emotions, weariness – but not see the scenes that she had not personally witnessed, such as Aral's reconciliation with Gottyan:

"Untied him, and gave him my plasma arc. I told him I couldn't work with a man who made my shoulder blades itch, and this was the last chance I was going to give him for instant promotion. Then I sat down with my back to him. Sat there for about ten minutes. We didn't say a word. Then he gave me the arc back, and we walked back to camp."

Anakin thought back, again, to fighting Obi-Wan on Mustafar. How would he have reacted, if Obi-Wan had done that? If he'd handed his own lightsaber to Anakin, and sat down to meditate, daring Anakin to stab him in the back?

Was it worth speculating? Obi-Wan would never have done that. He hadn't believed Anakin was redeemable. To him, Anakin wasn't a person any more, he was a thing called a Sith, and the person Anakin had once been was already dead.

If it had been Qui-Gon Jinn, if he had lived, would he have been willing to give Anakin another chance? Maybe.

Would he have taken it? No. He had to be honest with himself about that. After all, Padme had been still loved him and believed that there was still hope for him, and he had strangled her. He hadn't been looking for redemption, not then.

When the memory came to an end, Konstantine had not cheered up, but he had emerged from his brooding silence enough to look anxiously at Cheiron, as if trying to summon up the courage to speak.

'Is there something you want to ask?' Cheiron gently prompted him.

'Yes – I guess – uh – am I a psychopath?' he finally managed to say.

'What do you mean by psychopath?' Cheiron asked.

'I don't know. It's just – I'm crazy and violent and dangerous and I like killing people. I know that's not normal. Only – if it's not normal, if most people don't feel like that, why are there wars? If I was sane, I couldn't have handled being a soldier – it would have driven me crazy, probably. Except that sane people do become soldiers. Why?'

'Those are a lot of good questions,' said Cheiron approvingly. 'Do you want to discuss them all now?'

'Just – about being a psychopath. That's the most important one, right now.'

'Well, I'd say it's more accurate to say that you aren't a psychopath, but you are a sociopath who also happens to be psychotic. There are some people who are born with an unusual type of brain – a mutation, if you want to think of it that way – which means that they don't feel most emotions, which means, for example, that they have no experience of guilt, conscience, compassion, love, loyalty, or honour, and don't form close relationships with anyone else. If they seem to care about someone, they are only pretending in order to manipulate the other person into doing what they want.

'Thankfully, the psychopathy mutation is quite rare. What is a lot more common is that there are plenty of people, like you and Anakin, who are psychologically messed-up by the bad experiences they've had, usually starting in childhood.

'Now, you're certainly not like the type of emotionless, glibly charming psychopath I've just described, and nor are you self-centred, which is another psychopathic trait. From everything I've seen of you, being there to care for and protect the people you care about is the most important thing to you. And you certainly feel remorse over having hurt anyone you care about. But on the other hand, you can be violent and callous towards anyone who isn't a close friend, and, particularly when you were younger, you do seem to have been impulsive and hot-headed, prone to fits of rage. Does that sound fairly accurate?'

'I guess so.'

'And that's fairly typical sociopathic behaviour. Ironically, if you actually were a psychopath, you'd probably be better at staying calm enough to pass for normal, or charming people into forgiving you when you broke the rules.

'What isn't usual, though, is for a sociopath to be organised enough to hold down a job, let alone have a career for twenty-six years as a soldier and then nineteen more as an armsman. I've seen your record, and most of the way along, except when you were under Ges Vorrutyer's command, you were very, very good. You weren't a valuable soldier just because you were good at killing people; that would have made you a liability if you weren't also loyal, dependable and hard-working.'

Konstantine considered this for some time before replying. 'Yes, only – I was only good when there were good officers in charge of me. So I'm not a good person. Just obedient.'

'I'm not so sure of that,' said Cheiron. 'It's something we'll have to think about, when we look at some of these memories of times when you had to choose which side you were on. But even if your behaviour was simply a matter of being the person that whoever is most important to you thinks you are – most sociopaths don't care enough about what anyone thinks of them for that to be a consideration.

'You're not a label or a stereotype. You are Konstantine. Remember that.'

They watched two more phials of memories after that, the emotional atmosphere in the room warmer and more relaxed now, even as the plot of the memories wound through politics, impending war, marriage proposal, daring rescues and dramatic shoot-outs. Severus seemed to be more in feline than human mode most of the time, but glad to be with friends – and by now, he did seem to regard Anakin as a friend.

By the end of that night's episode, Anakin was starting to feel sleepy again, but he was awake enough to ask, 'May I invite Hephaestus here some nights, to watch these with us?'

He felt Konstantine tense up again.

'I'm not sure that's a good idea,' said Cheiron. 'Hephaestus and Charis are usually busy in the evening keeping an eye on Erik. He's settling in well with them, but I'm not sure it's a good idea to leave him alone with Charis just yet.'

'They aren't babysitting him every night,' argued Spark. 'What about when he goes out drinking with that hypnotist and that English phonetics professor and they bitch about their ungrateful students who left them for younger men?'

'Then they're going to want to make the most of having some time on their own,' said Cheiron. 'My mare and I always loved the nights when all four of our foals were staying over with friends and we could have some private time.'

Spark crackled with electronic amusement. 'Is that a euphemism for comparing blueprints to generate a new model?'

'Something like that, yes,' said Cheiron, laughing. 'Though the new models mostly don't get built. When you've already got four to program, there isn't usually much energy left over.'

'You are making excuses,' said Anakin bluntly. 'You are refusing to admit your true feelings, and so is Konstantine.'

'Well, all right,' Cheiron admitted. 'Some of the next few memories are very personal and emotionally intense, and it's not a good idea to show them to other people. As it is, we ought to slow down to watching one phial per night – and it's up to Konstantine to decide whether he's ready to show you the next phial tomorrow night at all. If not, we can take a break.'

By now, they were all more than ready to get some sleep. Before they went upstairs, however, Konstantine had one more question for Cheiron.

'What would you have done with me if I was a psychopath?'

'Anything I could think of that might possibly help you. But I'm glad you're not.'

My husband says that the way Konstantine Bothari behaves in this chapter is uncomfortably close to the way I have been behaving lately, latching onto absolutely ANYTHING that can be interpreted as condemning me. Well, my sanity hasn't been great lately, but writing fanfiction helps a lot.