The following evening, Anakin and his friends settled down to watch the next vial of memories. Konstantine's presence felt clouded with shame and embarrassment, but also grimly determined to go through with the ordeal – whatever it was that made it an ordeal. Cheiron radiated waves of reassurance his way which were so strong that even a non-Force-sensitive must surely be able to pick them up. Severus curled up in Konstantine's lap and Anakin offered a virtual hand-squeeze to offer moral support. (He would probably go on doing that even once he had his replacement prosthetics, he thought. Holding hands with a metal claw just wasn't the same as something that felt like a human hand, even an imaginary one.)

'The first bit is – one of my memories,' Konstantine explained awkwardly. 'One I managed to keep even when they took away nearly all of it. It's just – we need to show you the next bit of Captain Naismith's memories, only they show some – bad stuff happening to her…' he tailed off.

'"Bad" as in chopping limbs off and hurling her into a volcano?' inquired Anakin sarcastically, frustrated at his friend's reticence. Cheiron shot a 'shut up!' look at him.

'No, but – taking her clothes off, and – a lot more that's not right. Only we can't leave it out, but – it's not right to dishonour her by showing things like that, if I don't do it to myself, first.'

The memory was battered and glitchy compared to Cordelia's, like an old holorecording that didn't play very well. But also, because it was shown from a different person's point of view, it emphasised different details. Anakin noticed the silver insignia pins and the different-coloured collar tabs on the forest-green uniforms worn by five of the six men there, and knew the significance of them, even before he picked up their names from the conversation. The handsome but effeminate-looking curly-haired man named Vorrutyer had bright yellow tabs, so he was a vice-admiral, while the man with greying hair and orange tabs, Vorhalas, was a full admiral. As for the man with hazel eyes and a dress uniform almost covered with tasteless gold braid and glittery medals, you could hardly make out what rank he was, but it hardly mattered, because he was Prince Serg, the Emperor's Heir. The Emperor's Son, Anakin reminded himself – this was a universe in which being Emperor was a job you were born to and passed on to your next of kin, instead of a title taken by a lone megalomaniac with no intention of ever dying, for whom an alleged 'heir' was just a convenient lackey.

Unfortunately, Anakin got the impression that both Prince Serg and Vice-Admiral Vorrutyer were evil megalomaniacs with Sith-like arrogance. Vorrutyer seemed to be the Master, and Serg his Apprentice – an Apprentice who was ripe to kill the older man and take over from him any time soon.

He noticed that Vorrutyer, Vorkosigan and the Prince all had noticeably similar facial features, although Vorkosigan was shorter and more muscular than the other two and had grey eyes instead of Vorrutyer's deep brown and the Prince's hazel. They weren't identical like clones, but he suspected that they were cousins, at least.

Aral Vorkosigan had been promoted since the last memory-clip Anakin had seen from captain (dark blue, not to be confused with the pale blue of an ensign) to commodore (amethyst), which left him still the lowest-ranking officer there, apart from the bland-looking young man with light brown hair instead of black, the red tabs of a lieutenant, and silver pins in the shape of eyes, which meant he worked for the Security branch of the Imperial Service. It was a moment before Anakin remembered where he had seen this man before: he had been there, maybe ten or fifteen years older and a lot wearier-looking, in the memory-clip of the family outing to the art museum. The cyborg spy. He looked like a normal human from the outside, not like Darth Vader or General Grievous, but Anakin somehow knew, seeing him through these clips of memory, that he had a brain implant, like Lando Calrissian's assistant, what was his name – Lobot, that was it. Probably, like Lobot, he needed to be strong-willed to prevent the implant from taking him over. But then, brain implants in that universe weren't uncommon – pilots had them, to communicate directly with their ships. Perhaps, in a universe where people had never bothered to invent sentient droids, there was less fear that having artificial upgrades to your body, or even your brain, made you less than human.

The other man in this scene, however, was so defeated-looking that he really did seem less than human. Head bowed, shoulders slumped, he looked as wretched as Vader had frequently felt when summoned to report to his Master. He was not wearing a uniform – or any clothes at all – and his lean body shivered slightly in the air-conditioned room.

The first time Anakin had been in a spaceship, he had complained of how cold it was, and been told, 'Space is cold,' and at the time he had accepted this as fact. When he had learned to read and started researching ship design, he had discovered that, in fact, keeping ships cool when exposed to the glare of a star was as much of a challenge as keeping them warm. Clearly, the thermostat in this room had been set to a comfortable temperature for people wearing clothes. Also clearly, someone – probably Vorrutyer and/or the Prince – liked parading their slaves naked or near-naked in order to humiliate them, just as the Hutts did.

The naked man was Konstantine, probably not long after the previous memories that they had watched, but he was almost unrecognisable from the confident soldier arguing with Aral Vorkosigan, demanding the right to be the first in to face enemy fire. Here, he looked as dull-eyed as if he was dissociating – and he probably would have been dissociating, if he hadn't been burning with shame that Vorkosigan was here to see him like this, and indignation and helpless anger that Vorrutyer was taunting, not him, but Vorkosigan, and that he couldn't do anything about it. Or, Anakin wondered, was he picking up these emotions not from the younger Konstantine in the memory, but the older version sitting watching it now, fidgeting uncomfortably?

'It's not as if my old boyfriend here can complain, after all,' Vorrutyer drawled. 'For all his puritan principles, we can be sure he was doing the same things to that Betan fellow he captured planetside – what was his name, Captain Naismith? Isn't that right, my dog?' he added, for the first time acknowledging Konstantine's existence enough to deign to speak to him, though without actually looking at him.

The Prince laughed.

'Did he take you as his whore, I wonder?' Vorrutyer continued. 'I hear the two of you liked pounding each other in sparring practice – was that the prelude to a spot of S & M in private later? – But no, you're too ugly for his taste, I expect – not that he's exactly pretty himself. Besides, you're not his type. His type are officers – that Impsec weasel there had better watch his back. There are some things the Emperor won't want him reporting in full, unedited detail.'

Konstantine said nothing.

'Not talking to me?' said Vorrutyer. 'You will, you know. It's my hand back on your leash now, and it will be on Vorkosigan's again, soon enough.'

He grabbed Vorkosigan by the shoulders, pushing him against the wall, and kissed him, a wet slobbery kiss that was obviously thrusting his tongue deep into the other man's mouth. Vorhalas moved forward, fist clenched, clearly ready to kill Vorrutyer with his bare hands, but Vorkosigan swung himself between the two admirals to block him.

The memory ended there.

'Was there any more?' asked Anakin.

'No,' Konstantine said. 'It wasn't – one of the bits they locked away, that I could get back. It's just – a blank. There are a lot of blanks like that. Most of before I was twelve, and some bits later, like that.'

'That happens sometimes, when people's brains just stop taking in what's going on, so that there aren't any experiences to record as memories,' said Cheiron. 'It's like the way people sometimes don't remember what they did while drunk. I'm not surprised you didn't let yourself remember any more of that meeting. It was probably worse for Simon, because even if he hadn't remembered it, the chip in his head would still have recorded the whole scene to play back to him. But do you know why that bit of memory was so important to you – why it was one of the scraps of clues that you fought to hold onto?'

Konstantine considered. 'I – I think so,' he said at last. 'It was – when I was first on the General Vorkraft, I used to get nightmares about Lord Vorkosigan, that he might do – what Admiral Vorrutyer said. And he never did, but – he was a Vor queer like Admiral Vorrutyer and Prince Serg, so I knew he could, if he wanted to. This – this was the first time I understood. He wasn't another one like them. He was another one like me.'

'Someone who had been Vorrutyer's slave, and had dared to break free of his control,' said Anakin. 'And so Vorrutyer would want not just to take you both back, but to punish you for straying.' He winced, as the memory triggered a spasm of pain in a nerve damaged by one of the many times Emperor Palpatine had sent an electric shock through him.

Severus miaowed.

'Severus says he knows how it feels, too,' Anakin translated.

'Was that when you knew you could trust Aral enough to ask him for medical supplies for a wounded prisoner whom Vorrutyer thought you were torturing to death?' Cheiron asked.

Konstantine pondered this, too, trying to piece together the fractured timeline. 'No,' he said in the end. 'That was a bit before. But it was when I knew I didn't hate him any more. Only – I didn't look up to him as much any more, either. I knew he was – just a man. Not God.'

'More like a brother, instead of like a father?' suggested Anakin.

'Maybe.'

Yet again, Anakin found himself remembering Obi-Wan Kenobi. Aral Vorkosigan seemed to be a better mentor than Obi-Wan had been (and if Aral Vorkosigan had needed to kill someone, he would have made sure they were actually dead, rather than maiming them and leaving them to die slowly and painfully). But he remembered feeling the same mixture of hero-worship and resentment towards Obi-Wan, seeing him as the ideal Jedi who was everything Anakin could never be. If things had gone differently, might he have grown out of that, and been able to accept Obi-Wan as not a symbol of anything, but just another flawed human being like himself?