For a few minutes no-one said anything, but Anakin could sense everyone's uneasiness, and he knew that Konstantine, even without being Force-sensitive, also could. In the end, Konstantine himself was the one to break the silence: 'Does it mean I'm like Admiral Vorrutyer? Keeping this?'

'Do you think it does?' Cheiron replied. 'Vorrutyer threatened to take a piece of Cordelia's hair just to taunt Aral with, letting him know she was a prisoner and leaving him to worry about whether she was alive or dead and what might be happening to her. You kept this just to help you hang onto as much as you could of the memory of Elena Visconti, when people tried to force you to forget that she even existed. Do you think you're like Ges Vorrutyer?'

'Some. That's why he chose me, to be his – weapon. Not just because I obey orders. But because I – I'm like part of him. When… later on, there was a civil war, on Barrayar. Some enemy soldiers caught Lady Vorpatril – Admiral Vorkosigan's cousin's wife – and, they were going to rape her, and she was hurting and scared and giving birth – her waters had just broken – and I wanted to be there with them, raping her. It was – it made me forget she was someone on our side, Lady Vorkosigan's friend, it was just – sexy, with all the fear and pain. Lady Vorkosigan told me to kill the men, and we got Lady Vorpatril to shelter – she had the baby, good strong boy – and then Lieutenant Koudelka got her and the baby safely back to base, and the rest of us went on. Only – I think Lady Vorkosigan would have rather we'd stunned the men, but – I needed to kill, just to make me wake up. It's not normal, is it? Feeling like that?'

'No,' agreed Cheiron. 'So that means that in one way, you have similar feelings to Ges Vorrutyer. But he embraced being evil as his identity, whereas you've mostly tried as hard as possible not to be evil. That's why you side with people who enable you to be the best that you can be, rather than the worst. It's why you finally did find the strength of will to rebel against Ges Vorrutyer, though not before you'd hurt lots of people. But even before that, you did trick him into letting you save Elena Visconti's life.'

'Yes. But I went on raping her. I ruined her life. She was so young – just a kid. No older than my Elena, my daughter, was when – last time I saw her. Them. She'd had to live eighteen years with the nightmare of me. I did to her what…' he tailed off, but Anakin could hear in his thoughts the rest of the sentence: what had been done to me.

'This is the Reformed Villains' Support Group,' Anakin reminded him. 'Everyone here, apart from Cheiron and Spark, has something to feel guilty about.'

'Hephaestus?' Erik's eyes widened in disbelief at this.

'Yes,' said Hephaestus. 'And I have far less excuse than Konstantine. I came close to raping my best friend, my stepsister. The only reason it was only nearly is that she can run faster than I can,' he added, gesturing to his crooked legs. 'I'd had a crush on Athene since the day she was born – she was born as an adult, out of her father's head. But I was fairly sure she wasn't interested in me, so I'd never tried asking her out, and we were good friends. But then my Uncle Poseidon started teasing me, saying the only reason she insisted on wearing armour all the time was so that she could keep coming to me to be measured and fitted for new pieces, and that she must be getting fed up with waiting for me to take the hint. So, the next time she came to have her breastplate altered, I tried to make a grab for her, she ran away, I chased after her, tripped and fell over and ejaculated all over her leg. Athene wiped the gunk off with a piece of wool and threw it to the ground, but – well, genetics work out in an odd way for gods, and so a child was born who had the genes of me, and Mother Earth, and Athene, and maybe even the sheep the wool came from. He was half-human, half-snake. Mother Earth gave birth to him but didn't want him, so Athene adopted him and named him Erichthonius. He was fine until Athene needed a break and asked three human princesses – daughters of a king called Cecrops, who was also half-snake and born of Mother Earth – to babysit. Perhaps Athene thought the girls would bond with the baby because he looked like their dad, but I don't think she can have been too confident, because she gave him to them in a box and warned them not to open it. So, of course, they did, and went insane with terror and threw themselves off a cliff. I should have offered to look after the baby, but Athene wasn't speaking to me then, as you can imagine. It was years before she forgave me and let Ericthonius spend time with me, and with old King Cecrops, because she thought he needed some role models in his life who had mobility impairments. Cecrops taught him about politics, and I encouraged him to make things. Erichthonius invented horse-taming and chariots so that he could have a horse-powered wheelchair, and he used to win chariot races. And he became a king when he grew up – the first half-snake king Athens had had since Cecrops. They'd had a couple of human kings in between and hadn't been impressed with either of them.'

'But – Athene forgave you?' said Konstantine.

'Yes. A human wouldn't have, but – it's a bit different, for gods. My family are what humans call a Royally Screwed-Up Family. My grandfather castrated my great-grandfather, then tried to prevent himself from being usurped by eating all his children except Uncle Cheiron, who he didn't think would be any trouble, and Uncle Zeus, who was smuggled away just in time. Uncle Zeus grew up and managed to make him vomit the others up, became the new king of the gods, got married to one of his sisters, my mother, and had a daughter with another of their sisters, Auntie Demeter. That daughter is now married to our Uncle Hades, who kidnapped her. When I was born, I was so ugly that my mother threw me out of heaven – thankfully, I found a good adoptive mother – but then my birth mother demanded me back when I was old enough to be good at making pretty jewellery. When my stepfather was torturing my mother for trying to lead a coup against him, I tried to intervene, so this time he threw me out of heaven, and I was badly injured this time, and only just managed to recover in time to travel back to heaven for my wedding to my first wife, Aphrodite, who then cheated on me with my brother. But – these people are my family, they're the people I sit down to dinner with, and we just have to live with each other. The reason Athene was born from her father's head was that when her mother was pregnant with her, Zeus tricked her into turning into a fly and swallowed her, to try to kill their child in case it grew up to be powerful enough to overthrow him, but these days Athene is probably his favourite of all his children. She even gets on well with my mother, who usually hates all Zeus's illegitimate children. My mother and Zeus quarrel and fight constantly, cheat on each other and scheme against each other, but they've loved each other from the day they first met, and there's no way they'll ever get divorced. So the best I can do is just live with it, and try to distract them or do something to defuse the situation when there's a row brewing. When you're immortal, life's too long to bear a grudge.'

'Yes,' said Cheiron. 'But humans have to live with the consequences of their actions. Konstantine, what do you think would be the best thing to do now?'

'Can I do anything to make it up to her? To Elenena Visconti?'

'I don't think you could do more than letting her kill you. You don't belong in that world any more.'

'Does she ever come here?'

'I haven't met her. Maybe she will one day, if it helps her. But it won't be while you're here, unless she's sure she can cope with that. People who knew each other in their own world don't usually meet here – and that's true of friends as well as enemies. After all, if Miles could visit you here, it wouldn't help him accept that you're dead.'

There was silence for several minutes, as everyone considered this. Eventually Spark asked, 'What are you going to do with the hair?'

'Burn it,' said Konstantine.

'Why?'

'I don't know,' Konstantine admitted. 'On Barrayar – when someone you love dies, you cut off some of your hair and burn it. At the funeral, and then after, at anniversaries. Or when you kill an enemy, so they don't haunt you. This' – he ran the long braid through his fingers – 'it's the memory of how I thought it was, as much as I could remember, and how I knew it must have been, and what I told people, all jumbled together. I – I didn't know I was raping her, then – in my cabin, I mean, not when Admiral Vorrutyer told me to – I thought she was my wife, or my girlfriend, or something – I couldn't think properly, it was all a jumble. Only afterwards – I knew it wasn't real, I knew I must have raped her. But then – I couldn't tell a child that, I used to tell little Elena we were married only her Mama died when she was a baby, and – that came to feel more real, and I forgot again. It's different now. Professor Snape gave me back my memory, when I came here – thank you,' he added gently to the small black kitten, who didn't deign to reply. 'So – I should burn this, and burn my hair with it, as a funeral for the dream of how I thought it was.'

'I wish I had hair to offer,' said Anakin.

'You have,' said Konstantine.

'I have?'

'It's growing back, now you're getting better. It's – kind of wispy, like baby hair, and going grey.'

'Platinum,' corrected Erik. 'Blond hair goes platinum, like moonlight.'

'Then would you cut it off, to burn it with yours?' asked Anakin. 'As a farewell to Padmé, and an apology?'

'And mine,' added Erik, twisting the sparse remains of his long black hair.

Severus miaowed.

'I get enough fur off you, just combing you,' said Konstantine, with an affectionate smile in his Force presence even if it didn't reach his face, as he bent down to stroke the kitten.

Severus miaowed more emphatically. 'He wants to do this properly,' Anakin translated.

'May I be included, too?' asked Hephaestus.

'Everyone,' said Konstantine. 'At least – Cheiron isn't like that…' He looked to Cheiron, questioningly. Anakin could read the pleading in his presence: tell me you're not a pervert like the rest of us!

'I was brought up quite strictly,' said Cheiron. 'When I was a colt, the commonest cause of death for centaurs was being killed by human men whose wives or girlfriends they had kidnapped or raped. My foster-mother – my own mother had abandoned me when I was born a centaur, just as Hephaestus's mother rejected him – well, my foster-mother was the goddess of chastity, and she'd killed men just for looking at her the wrong way, so I grew up knowing to treat all females – whether they were goddesses, nymphs, human women, centauresses, or mares – with respect. I suppose Artemis took me in to prove a point that centaurs didn't automatically have to be monsters, just as Nutt was adopted by someone hoping to prove the same about orcs. I don't know what I'd have been like, if my upbringing had been different. But fundamentally, I don't think I'm any different from anyone else here. If you're willing to have me in your burning ceremonial, I would be honoured to donate some of my hair. When do you want to do it?'

'First thing in the morning, before breakfast. Day after tomorrow.'

'Why not tomorrow?' asked Spark.

'There's someone else I want to ask.'

Author's note: I apologise for the mood whiplash here. I didn't want to trivialise the human characters' actions (Snape isn't a pervert, but he feels just as guilty about having accidentally caused the death of the woman he loved as the others do about having directly abused people they loved), but it was inevitable that Hephaestus, being immortal, would have a different perspective from a human.