The second episode of Cordelia's Memories – Season Two was another reminder that, while this might have the exotic setting of a holodrama, it was not a holodrama. An impressive display of martial arts should have taken place in a scene where the heroes battle against pirates, not in a routine sparring practice session. Clearly, Cordelia had downloaded this memory not because of the acrobatics (which were stunning for non-Force-sensitives) but because of what was going on between the people she cared about: the sexist discrimination that Droushnakovi faced from so many of the men (though notably not Konstantine, who just treated her as a normal opponent, without either being chivalrous or using the tournament as an excuse to grope her); the way that Aral and Cordelia were tactfully, discreetly keeping an eye on Konstantine's mental health ('I'm not sure about the psychodynamics of this. Is it safe? I mean for both of them, not just her. And not just physically.' 'I think so. Life in the Count's service has been a nice, quiet routine for Bothari. He's been taking his medication. I think he's in pretty good shape at the moment. And the atmosphere of the practice ring is a safe, familiar one for him. It would take more tension than Drou can provide to unhinge him,'); the unresolved sexual tension between Droushnakovi and Koudelka, and Koudelka's frustration and sense of inferiority about his disability; the way that sparring practice allowed Aral and Konstantine the temporary freedom to be frenemies on an equal basis.

The next scene, which would have made for a gripping moment in a holodrama, completely missed it, because the viewer couldn't actually see Aral and Koudelka barely survive a terrorist attack. This was Cordelia's memory, and what she had experienced was seeing the men staggering in afterwards, shaken and temporarily deafened; and having a conversation with Simon Illyan about it ('Who wants to kill Aral?' 'Do you want the short list, or the long one, Milady?').

Of course, there was a plot to unfold as the week went on, with fatal errors and civil war, including the poison gas attack that had led to Miles's birth defects, his being transferred to a uterine replicator, and his grandfather's repeated attempts to murder him. (Why, why, Anakin asked himself for probably the thousandth time since coming to the Rock, hadn't he investigated the possibility of replicators when he first started having nightmares about Padmé's pregnancy? If even a planet as unsophisticated as Barrayar could get the hang of the technology, the Kaminoans surely could.)

But what struck him most was not so much the plot as the theme: parenthood. How many times did people describe each other in parental terms? 'Don't let a comment like that fall in Admiral Vorkosigan's hearing. Koudelka was one of his officers aboard the General Vorkraft, and was wounded in his defense. He loves him as a son.' 'If that's a matchmaking gleam I detect in your eye – do you suppose it could be maternal hormones, by the way?' 'Kou and Bothari always got on well. He appeals to Bothari's latent fatherly instincts, maybe.' 'Closer than a brother.'

It wasn't as though they were substitute family to each other – Koudelka's mother was still alive, as was Droushnakovi's father , Konstantine was already a father, and Aral and Cordelia were about to become parents. Cordelia had a brother of her own, back on Beta Colony. On Barrayar, you were allowed to have friends who were your found family without having to be cut off from contact with your birth family from toddlerhood onwards. Why hadn't the Jedi Order been able to understand this?

But the Force was guiding the adults into situations that prepared them for being parents. In the first series, Cordelia's experience of caring for a badly injured and incontinent crew member had been preparation for caring for a baby. Now, there were the characters' experiences with the child Emperor – Aral kneeling down to be unthreatening as he explained to Gregor what being Regent meant ('I will do your grandfather's job until you are old enough to do it yourself, when you turn twenty. The next sixteen years I will look after you and your mother in your grandfather's place. For now, your job is to study hard with your tutors and do what your mother tells you.') and, later on, Cordelia and Konstantine having to become temporary foster-parents to Gregor while they escorted him to a safe hiding-place in a mountain village.

But also, Cordelia and Aral's experience of being mentors to Konstantine, Koudelka and Droushnakovi through various personal anxieties was a preparation for having teenagers. Not that I had anyone who was any good at being a mentor when I was a teenager, Anakin thought bitterly. But, he had to remind himself, Konstantine as a teenager almost certainly hadn't, either. Maybe once he was tall enough to pass for eighteen and had joined the Imperial Service, there had been kind, fatherly noncoms who had seen potential in him and encouraged him, the way Aral later had. But almost certainly, there hadn't been a friend he could talk to about feelings, until he met Cordelia. The important thing was that, damaged and guilty as he was, he had found people he could connect with in the end. And Anakin had found Cheiron – and Konstantine and Severus – now.

But what about Severus? He couldn't talk to anyone at the moment, even if he wanted to. He hadn't been joining Anakin for any more shared dreams lately. Sometimes Anakin could sense meaning in his miaows, but he seemed to be spending more of the time in cat mode. Sometimes he seemed to respond to something in the memory – for example, when Droushnakovi expressed amazement that Konstantine had a child – 'I'm not sure I'd want to give custody of a pet cat to Bothari,' – Severus purred with laughter, and Konstantine crouched down to stroke him, and they played tickle-attack for a few minutes. But Severus's emotions were already subsiding into simple, animal emotions again.

At times, Severus was clearly following the story enough to purr in approval – for example, at Konstantine's manipulation of the rules to argue that Cordelia had the same authority as the Lord Regent and therefore the Emperor, therefore he was justified in disobeying his liegelord in obedience to an order from Cordelia; or at his convincing an innkeeper to talk to him by improvising a cover story that he and Koudelka were pimps who were on their way to sell Droushnakovi as a sex slave, complete with gruesome touches like, 'I could've had a better price for that same piece of meat here if I'd had her butchered and dressed.' He was horrifyingly convincing in that scene, as if he wasn't far from forgetting that he was just playing a role – after all, if his life had gone differently, perhaps he actually would have ended up working as a pimp, or else as a smuggler like some of Luke's low-life friends. Anakin hadn't seen this street-rat side of Konstantine's personality before, but it wasn't too difficult to picture him with a Corellian accent instead of Barrayaran.

Konstantine himself was looking back on this account of his earlier adventures with a mixture of satisfaction (his companions hadn't expected him to be an effective undercover agent, and certainly not to turn out to have midwifery skills) and sometimes dismay, recalling how barely the Guarding Dark had managed to restrain his inner darkness – how close he had come to letting a hallucination trick him into murdering his liegelord, or to being too overcome with lust at scenes of violence and cruelty to behave rationally, and how managing to snap out of a lust-crazed trance only by going into a berserker killing spree instead and shooting every enemy soldier in sight was barely better.

By the sixth day of viewing, they were planning to watch memories 16-18. In the scene where Konstantine talked to Cordelia about being a prostitute's son, and having been sexually abused as a child, present-day Konstantine glanced sharply at the group of viewers, assessing whether any of them were shocked or thought less of him for what they knew. None of them did. Anakin didn't know whether any of the others had been victims of sexual abuse. He hadn't, though probably only because Watto didn't fancy humans and Palpatine lusted only after total political power, and Erik had probably always been so ugly that nobody, no matter how perverted, could be attracted to him. Anakin wasn't sure about Severus, but the cat was keeping his mind as furrily non-human and unreadable as possible.

What did trigger a visceral reaction for Anakin was slightly later, when Cordelia told Koudelka that he needed to protect Lady Alys Vorpatril and her newborn baby, while the others went on with their quest.

'I'll try, Milady.'

'"Try" is not good enough. Padma Vorpatril "tried". You bloody succeed, Kou.'

Just like Yoda! 'Typical Jedi!' Anakin spat. You couldn't win. If Yoda challenged you to do something and you were confident, he told you off for being arrogant; if you said, 'I'll try,' he told you off for being negative. Either way, you might get a whack with his stick. Anakin had been settling into a peaceful afterlife here on the Rock, over the past couple of weeks, but now he seethed with fury against Yoda, and Obi-Wan, and Mace Windu, and all kriffing Jedi ever. Well, okay, not Luke, he admitted. But then, Luke was even less a typical Jedi than Anakin himself had been.

'Words aren't necessarily right or wrong in themselves,' said Cheiron. 'There's a time when it's appropriate to say them, and a time when it isn't. Right now, Koudelka needs to know that Cordelia trusts him to get Alys and her baby safely back to Tanery Base, for him to be confident that he can. And, in this situation, it is a matter of life and death. But that wouldn't make it a helpful thing to tell a child setting out to learn a new skill, if it makes him feel that if he doesn't succeed effortlessly the first time, then he's useless and might as well not bother. Or not for every child, anyway,' Cheiron continued with a smile. 'Of the human children I've taught, if I'd challenged them to do something or die trying, Achilles would have triumphed magnificently, and not cared what he did or how many people he hurt in the process. Patroclus wouldn't have done it just for the honour of succeeding, but would charge in if people he cared about were in danger. Jason… Jason would have said nothing, but gone away and found someone more proficient he could persuade to do the task for him.'

Severus purred with amusement, evidently recalling his own students.

'And is Cordelia truly like a Jedi?' Cheiron asked. 'Thinking not just of one line of dialogue, but her behaviour in general?'

'No,' Anakin admitted. 'No proper Jedi would rush off on an unauthorised commando raid because a loved one is in danger. That is the sort of thing I would have done. So would Luke.'

'Yes. And – which is better? To focus on one person you love and want to protect, or on the overall situation?'

Anakin opened his mouth and shut it again, trying to work this one out. Luke had disregarded all commonsense in the belief that he could somehow redeem him, Anakin – and because of that, they had defeated the Empire. But equally, Anakin had disregarded all morality – and all consideration of Padmé's own wishes – in doing whatever he thought could enable him to defy fate and save her life, with the result that he had turned to the Dark Side and murdered her. And he had only realised afterwards that the nightmares might have been not prophetic dreams, but Palpatine tricking him all along, in order to create a self-fulfilling prophecy, because once Padmé was dead and Anakin knew that he had sold his soul for nothing, there would be nothing to give him hope of redemption.

Would everyone have responded the same way? Well, no. Konstantine hadn't, for one, when he had apparently met a mysterious man offering to save his baby daughter's life if he would murder his liegelord: 'There would I be, in deep shit, maybe executed, and who would care for a, a dead man's bastard then? I figured it for a cheat, just another cheat.' Konstantine, even ill and tired and deprived of his antipsychotic medication and desperate with worry since his daughter had been taken hostage, had enough sense to know that whether it was a hallucination or an actual enemy agent who had sneaked into the bunker, it was not to be trusted. And he could also accept that, while his daughter could be executed at any moment, she was a healthy child and had her foster-mother looking after her, and that Cordelia's baby, still a foetus in a replicator and soon to die if the replicator wasn't regularly serviced, was the priority.

'I suppose – it depends,' Anakin said at last. 'Nothing is simple. And – you can never know whether you have made the right decision, until it is too late.'

'But is there anything that can help you decide?'

'Valuing – no – respecting people,' said Anakin. 'Luke respected me enough to believe I was redeemable. I did not respect Padmé enough to talk to her about my fears, and ask her what she wanted to do.'

'It's a good start,' Cheiron agreed.

Severus was the next to react to something in the memory, when Cordelia and Droushnakovi were discussing Konstantine and why he wasn't the role model for what real soldiers should be:

'Bothari is not, even by Barrayaran standards, a sane man. Do you aspire to be a monster?'

'You call him that!'

'Oh, but he's my monster. My good dog.'

Konstantine himself, watching the memory of this conversation, was calm (after all, he had himself described himself as Lady Vorkosigan's 'dog' earlier in the memory, which was what she was echoing here), but Severus's fur spiked with fury, and he let out a yowl of indignation.

'It's not like that,' said Konstantine, irritated.

Severus miaowed in contradiction. His claws were extended.

'It isn't what words mean, but what people mean by them,' said Cheiron. 'Words don't mean anything by themselves, except the meanings people allow them to have. I know you've had experiences where people were angry at things you had said, and refused ever to forgive you or listen to you. But not everyone reacts that way. Konstantine knows that Cordelia knows that he is a brave man – a hero – and someone she can trust to look after her child, but that – especially in the situation they're in here, in the memory, where he's stressed and tired and over-stimulated and doesn't have access to medication – he is also violent and dangerous and barely in control of himself. The point is that she is capable of bearing this in mind, without it stopping her liking and respecting and trusting him. You're used to dealing with children who think in simplistic terms and assume that if you aren't always nice to them, you're an enemy. But Cordelia is an adult, and so is Konstantine, and they're capable of understanding that life isn't that simple.'

Konstantine nodded agreement at this. Severus twitched his tail and said nothing.

'After all,' Cheiron said, 'originally, the word "monster" just meant the birth of any strange being that was an omen of something – so wizards like you and Anakin would qualify. And to almost anyone, a vertebrate with six limbs like me is a monster.'

Severus stalked away. Konstantine followed him, and was on the verge of picking him up, but Severus turned and hissed at him, tail fluffed up like a brush.

'I don't care if you scratch me,' Konstantine told him. 'But you mustn't hurt yourself.'

'He is not planning to harm himself,' Anakin translated, hoping that he had understood correctly. 'He merely wants to be alone to think.'

'There's been a lot to take in,' Cheiron agreed. 'Maybe we should stop here for tonight.'

'But we've only had two memories!' protested Spark.

'But there was a lot in them,' said Cheiron. 'And the next one is the climax of this story, so it's best to save it for when everyone's had time to digest this episode. Severus, are you sure you want to be alone? Would a cuddle help you to relax a bit before you go to sleep?'

Severus bounded up the stairs without looking back.

'Then promise to survive,' called Cheiron.

Severus said nothing. His mind was too closed off for Anakin to detect much in the way of thoughts and feelings, but Anakin could sense that the kitten was nearby and alive and hadn't gone into a coma again, and for now, this had to be enough. Severus didn't want to share his thoughts with anyone yet, and he wouldn't allow Anakin to share his dream that night.

Would Anakin make it worse by forcing his way in? Or would he make it worse if he didn't? Probably he needed to respect Severus enough to accept his boundaries, at least if he wasn't on the verge of death. But probably he wouldn't know whether he had made the right decision until it was too late.