Severus woke abruptly, to find himself curled up back on his own bed. His tail twitched with irritation at the way the dream had ended so abruptly. He had wanted to ask Anakin more about what he had said about brothers – did Anakin have brothers and sisters of his own, back on Tattooine? After all, Luke had been brought up by his aunt and uncle, hadn't he? – but now, back in cat form, he couldn't. Or not until the next dream, anyway.
In his conversations with child Anakin in some of their past dreams, the blond boy had sometimes talked about missing his mother and worrying about her safety, but never mentioned having a father, or any siblings. But then, if Anakin had started out as a slave on Tattooine – well, the one Star Wars film Severus had seen started there, with the heroes being enslaved by a giant slug. Probably Anakin's father had been someone his mother had been ordered to spend a night with and breed with, rather than anyone she knew personally or had chosen. If Anakin had any siblings, they probably didn't share the same father – or had his owner, realising that Anakin had strange abilities, decided that his mother was too dangerous to breed from again? Even if she wasn't a witch herself, she might have been a Squib carrying the magic gene – and how much magical potential must the Jedi Order have lost by forbidding Jedi to marry?
Severus had been an only child. He suspected that his parents hadn't had sex after his father found out that his mother was a witch – or at least, he hoped they hadn't. The alternative – the thought of his father forcing himself on his mother because he was physically bigger and stronger and she was too terrified to use magic to defend herself – was even worse.
He didn't even know how his parents had got together in the first place. He hoped his mother hadn't used magic to force his father to marry her – but even if she hadn't, his father might well have suspected that she had. As the law said that witches and wizards could not reveal the existence of magic to Muggles except in specific circumstances, such as being married to a Muggle, she couldn't have discussed it before the wedding. For all Severus knew, he might be the product of rape – whichever of his parents had held power over the other at the time of his conception. He remembered Miles Vorkosigan's memory of his friend Elena, Konstantine's daughter, discovering the reality of her parentage: 'The truth is, I am a madman's rape-bred bastard, my mother is a murderess who hates the very shape of my shadow – I can't believe I've inherited no more from them than my nose and my eyes.' Severus had thought before that, if the child of Konstantine Bothari and Elena Visconti had been a boy, it might have looked much like him (the way he looked when he was human, at any rate), with his big hooked nose, lean face, and dark eyes and hair.
He didn't know whether Konstantine had any brothers or sisters, though Muggles tended to be more fertile than wizards. Severus had never heard him mention any family other than his daughter, and all he knew from other sources was Miles Vorkosigan's memory of having hacked into confidential records which stated that Konstantine's mother's name was Marusia, that he didn't know who his father was, and that his mother had been already dead by the time he joined the Imperial Service as a teenager. Severus didn't even know whether the latter was true, or whether it was just that Konstantine was estranged from his mother and didn't want to talk about her, and that claiming to be an orphan was easier. And he had been emotionally closer to Miles than to his own daughter. If anything, the Vorkosigans were his family.
As far as Severus knew, at any rate, he and his housemates seemed to be in much the same situation: lonely boys who didn't have any siblings, either didn't have a good relationship with their mothers or had lost them as children, and either didn't know their fathers or would have been safer if their fathers hadn't been around.
Cheiron had said that Anakin and Konstantine had a lot in common, and that Konstantine was 'almost the opposite of Severus'. But, Severus realised, it wasn't that simple. He had known that he had at least some things in common with Konstantine from the time he had first watched Miles's memory of the Academy entrance exam. The tall, sinister figure in the background, wearing a brown and silver uniform instead of a black robe, protective of Miles but forced to watch him try, and fail, and injure himself, had been like an image of who Severus might have been if he had been born not a wizard, not academically talented, but just an ordinary working-class boy trying to make his way out of abject poverty, who had arrived at adulthood with some dark secrets in his past.
He hadn't expected to have anything in common with Darth Vader, beyond being a wizard with a fondness for long black cloaks. He certainly hadn't expected to find out that Vader had died nearly as young as Severus himself had – it wasn't as if the pale, scarred face behind the mask looked young, after all. But now that he knew something of why Anakin had turned to the Dark Side – and about Anakin, like Dante, having fallen madly in love with a girl he met briefly when he was nine years old, and never ceased to be obsessed with her even though he hadn't even seen her again for another ten years – he had to admit that they weren't as different as he would have liked to believe.
In the next room, he could hear Anakin's thin, rasping snore. Konstantine didn't generally snore unless he'd had a dose of Dreamless Sleep, but to Severus's heightened senses as a cat, his breathing didn't sound like the long, slow breathing of someone asleep. Not that he was crying, but he sounded awake, alert, and – waiting.
Severus remembered how he had woken to find the soldier's big hands caressing him, and had jumped down from his lap and hissed, 'Take your bloodsoaked murderous torturing hands off me!' Even without understanding cat language, Konstantine had obviously known he was being rejected by someone he loved, but he hadn't complained about anything other than worrying about whether Severus would be safe out on his own in the dark.
Severus remembered seeing another of Miles Vorkosigan's memories: the one about trying to kill himself, and Konstantine having to restrain him and wrest the knife away from him, and Miles having slashed at him with the knife, and Konstantine not reacting to the pain, not even bothering to patch up his wounds until he had soothed Miles enough to get him settled and ready to fall asleep. He was nearly two decades older and wiser than the crazed soldier they had seen in the Escobar War memories, and he was used to taking care of troubled, self-loathing people who were ungrateful to him for loving and protecting them.
Severus padded into Anakin's room. Konstantine was lying on the mattress next to Anakin's hospital bed, wearing pyjamas but still awake. He smelled very weary.
Severus gently head-butted him. 'I'm sorry,' he miaowed. Konstantine cautiously reached out a hand to stroke him, and Severus rubbed his face against the man in the scent-marking gesture that means 'You are mine.'
'Feel better?' Konstantine asked.
Severus purred to reassure him that yes, he definitely felt better now. He curled up nestled against the warmth of his friend's body, and they both fell asleep.