Bothari woke to bright sunlight. He should have been up hours ago. No, Cheiron had said they should all sleep in as late as they needed. Skywalker was still asleep, and Spark was recharging from the wall-socket next to his bed. For a moment, he wasn't sure where Severus was until the kitten pounced on him from behind, miaowing something that probably meant, 'Any chance of breakfast?' Severus seemed to be in a surprisingly cheerful surprisingly good mood, mood as he led the way out of the room and bounded down stairs that were almost as tall as himself. He glanced around the kitchen, and miaowed again, plaintively. He hadn't touched the food Bothari had put out for him last night, but it was probably spoiled by now. Bothari had just finished pouring a fresh saucer of milk and putting some fish on a plate when Severus noticed the earlier bowls of food and devoured them.

Bothari poured himself a measure of the potion that he had to take every morning. Professor Snape had been careful to brew several months' worth of everything either Bothari or Skywalker might need, before changing into a kitten. Was he planning to change back into a human when the supplies ran out? Or ever? If he stayed in cat form, would he grow into an adult cat, or would he stay three months old forever? On the Rock, you couldn't grow older than the age you were when you died, but Cheiron said it was normal for people to go back to being children sometimes, to be able to re-learn the things they hadn't got right in their lives. Sometimes they grew up again on the Rock, or sometimes they decided they were ready to go and reincarnate.

In the meantime, Bothari knew, he ought to take his potion as soon as possible, and with food. It wasn't right, eating breakfast in pyjamas, before he'd washed or shaved, but it was safer than delaying the potion any longer. He ate one-handed, as Severus, having finished his own breakfast, was busy rubbing against his ankle, demanding caresses, and, as soon as Bothari had finished his meal, wanting to play. They played tea-towel capture again until Severus vomited over the floor, either because the food was stale or because too much excitement on a full stomach wasn't a good idea. At any rate, he was now hungry enough to finish off second breakfast while Bothari cleaned up, and then to demand a cuddle and a warm lap to curl up in and fall asleep.

Cheiron had said in the past that Bothari tended to treat Professor Snape as a substitute for Admiral Vorkosigan, and that Snape treated Bothari like a fairly bright sixth-year student. But kitten Severus was more like Lord Miles when he was very young: sometimes full of energy and eager to explore everything, sometimes despairing and frantic with self-loathing; sometimes (occasionally, after a busy day) sleepy and cuddly. If Snape turned back into a human, would he even be the same person?

Spark came downstairs, her eyes glowing much more dimly than usual. 'Anakin's awake and hungry,' she announced.

Bothari indicated the sleeping kitten. 'Can't move now,' he explained. 'Can you make breakfast?'

'I'm barely half recharged,' said Spark. 'My charger keeps glitching every time I worry about Wonder. I need to go back to the charging point now, if I'm going to be any use at the workshop today.' And with that she trudged back upstairs, looking every century of her age. She unplugged herself from the wall three times more that morning: once to lift Skywalker into his bacta tank, once to lift him out an hour later and deposit him on his bed (in the intervening hour, Severus kept watch by the tank, so that Bothari finally had time to shower, shave and get dressed), and at last, after Bothari had cleaned the battered Sith lord up and wrapped a robe round him, once to lift him into his float-chair, before she at last declared herself to be as recharged as she was likely to get, and set off for Hephaestus's workshop.

By now it was midday, but nobody felt like lunch so soon after breakfast. They spent most of the afternoon sitting outside, enjoying the warm sunshine and saying little.

'Severus told me he wanted to plant another garden, on this side of the house,' said Skywalker eventually. 'A garden for beautiful flowers instead of useful herbs.'

This was familiar, too. The job of armsman didn't usually include gardening, but when your charge was a six-year-old who had just decided that he wanted to grow flowers from seeds, but was so fragile that he was likely to injure himself just by trying to dig into hard ground, you had to learn. 'I could get it started now,' he offered.

Severus miaowed disapprovingly.

'I think he wants to do it himself, when he resumes human form – if he does,' Anakin translated.

Konstantine nodded. 'I meant I'd fetch the soil,' he clarified. 'There's a big composting centre in the middle of the island. Most of the soil here's only couple of centimetres deep, except where someone makes a garden.'

Cheiron had explained to him that the Rock had originally been, well, just a rock. It had had to be terraformed, just like a planet. The first settlers had spread seaweed on it to rot into a layer of soil, then brought grass seeds from the mainland to scatter over it. There were a few fairly flat places where people came to play ball games, but most outdoor parts of the island sloped, and the stone was exposed where it was too steep for the grass to cling on.

Then, visitors from all the different worlds, coming up through the ponds on the mainland, had brought different kinds of seeds, for flowers and vegetables. There weren't many insects here (not that there had been many Earth-origin insects in much of Barrayar), so most of the pollen was spread by fairies. Snape had said that in his world, fairies didn't do anything more helpful than occasionally acting as Christmas-tree ornaments, but there were plenty here who were the guardians of different types of flowers, and Cheiron said that they might well have planted the first seeds.

And, now, there was the composting centre. All the organic waste went there, and while the sewage section was mostly run by trolls who didn't notice the smell and animals who actually liked it (meeting talking dung-beetles took a lot more getting used to than discovering that fairies were real here), many people on the island helped out in the general composting section from time to time. He'd be welcome to come and collect a few barrow-loads of compost to get a garden started. Maybe they could do that tomorrow.

A little later in the afternoon, Cheiron arrived to check that everyone was all right, and ask them whether they felt up to watching more memories yet. They all reassured him that they did.

While Anakin levitated tufts of dry grass for Severus to play with, Cheiron took Konstantine aside. 'I wonder whether you'd like to look over the next couple of memory phials on your own, first,' the centaur said anxiously.

'Is there something bad in them? Worse than…?' he tailed off.

'Did Cordelia ever tell you about what happened to her between the end of the war, and emigrating to Barrayar a few months later?' Cheiron asked.

'No.' He didn't know whether she had talked to anyone apart from Admiral Vorkosigan about it. But he had heard them sometimes jokingly referring to an incident in which she had supposedly drowned a therapist in a fish-tank. He hadn't let himself think about that. Lady Vorkosigan wasn't like that. She had given him the command to kill, sometimes, in war (he shuddered, remembering the War of Vordarian's Pretendership), but she wasn't a psycho like him. She was the sanest person he knew. He had to believe that.

No. He'd needed to believe that, then, like a child. Now, he needed to be grown-up enough to accept the truth, whatever it was.

'Did – did they make her go to therapy, too?' he asked.

His own experience of the time between being taken to the infirmary on the (what had the flagship even been called? That was one bit of memory he hadn't been able to recover), and being discharged from the ImpMil hospital back on Barrayar several months later, had been a blur of pain and confusion and nightmares. Even before ImpMil had started with the memory-suppression drugs, just being in a solitary room in the infirmary had been terrifying enough. Sometimes, he had been convinced that he was still being kept prisoner by the mutineers on the General Vorkraft, and that Vorkosigan was still out there and in danger, and that everything that had happened since had been a dream. And then he had heard an Escobaran girl screaming in rage and fear, and he had known that it was real after all.

Back on Barrayar, the torture had started, and the physical pain should have been enough to blot out the mental pain, but instead they were all bound up together. He had known that he deserved it for the bad things he had done, even if he couldn't remember precisely what they were, but he'd wished they would stop pretending that it was 'therapy'. Once, he'd heard one ward orderly in the corridor saying to another, 'I don't know why they're bothering with that one. Aversion therapy doesn't work on psychopaths; their brains can't make the connection between action and consequences. Sooner or later he'll have to be put down anyway.'

He had wished, then, that death would come soon, except that he had still known that he knew something important, and that he needed to hide away as many scraps of memory as he could. Even so, after a while it had got to the point where he'd been so tired of fighting against the memory-suppression that he'd just stopped moving and lain there waiting to die. Like the – the black-haired girl, the one whose name he had barely been able to remember. He'd hurt her. He deserved to die for that.

He had been barely aware of what was going on until he'd woken from a daze to hear Admiral Vorkosigan's voice, sounding years older, roughened with despair: 'Maybe the most nearly worthwhile thing I'm doing these days is visiting people in hospital. You, and Ensign Koudelka, and seventeen babies in uterine replicators. The replicator babies don't talk much, either. One of them's yours, did you know that? Your daughter.' And then he had known that he needed to live, that his baby, Elena Visconti's baby, needed him to protect her, and that he would go on remembering Elena as much as he could, and make sure never to lose the lock of her hair that he kept carefully hidden, and that he would name the baby after her, and tell her stories about her mother, and make sure she had a happy childhood, not like him, and that she grew up strong enough to defend herself from men like him.

'What happened to Cordelia wasn't as physically cruel as what was done to you,' said Cheiron. 'It wasn't intended to be cruel at all; the Escobaran and Betan therapists who tried to get her to talk to them about her experiences in the war genuinely thought they had her best interests at heart. It was just that they were making some wrong assumptions. But – do you want to preview these memories, before everyone watches them?'

Did he want to? And if he did, would it even be for the right reasons? He ought to edit them to guard his lady's honour. But was he watching mainly because he wanted to see Lady Vorkosigan – or Captain Naismith, at this point – once more? And because he might catch another glimpse of Elena Visconti?

'No,' he said in the end. 'I'll wait, and watch with the others.'