The next sequence of memories felt more like the typical plot of a holodrama. These were Miles Vorkosigan's memories of when he and Elena were young adults in their late teens, longing to be soldiers like their fathers before them, on a planet that didn't allow boys who didn't meet the physical fitness standards into the Imperial Service and certainly wouldn't consider allowing girls to take the entrance exam. And, of course, they had no idea of the roles that either of their fathers had actually played in the Escobar War. And Konstantine, of course, couldn't remember it – though from what Anakin had seen of the previous set of memories, he had worked out for himself what had happened. But he seemed to have forgotten that again by now, as telling Elena a cleaned-up version of her origins throughout her childhood had come to seem more real to him than the truth. (Thinking of people with memories erased – had C3PO ever found out that Darth Vader was his father too?)

Watching the teenagers – their craving for adventure, and Elena's longing to find out more about her supposedly 'dead' mother – gave Anakin a stab of grief, thinking of Luke. They had barely interacted other than fighting each other until he was on the point of death. He dimly remembered appearing to Luke as a ghost, young and healthy once more. But the rules of the Rock meant they couldn't meet again here.

He could sense the same longing in Konstantine, watching the memory-forms of his daughter whom he had never been able to be there for as much as she wanted, and his practically-foster-son. Being separated by mortality wasn't as bad as being arbitrarily separated by the rules of the Jedi Order, but that didn't mean it wasn't frustrating. Did Severus have anyone still alive that he missed? Anakin remembered the glimpse of memory that Severus had shown him of the Death Eater meeting, with his padawan whom he hadn't been able to dissuade from becoming a Death Eater, as he couldn't reveal his true allegiance.

But at the same time, seeing Miles and Gregor as young adults, compared with their five-year-old selves, was an uncomfortable experience. Miles had grown from a cute, impish five-year-old speed demon full of enthusiasm for life into a teenager who felt that everything was unfair to him even if it was the result of his own bad decisions. Gregor had grown from a quietly courageous child who faced the dangers of war uncomplainingly, absolutely his mother's son (thankfully, he didn't take after Serg in any way beyond the colour of his eyes), into a twenty-something who distrusted the man who had been his mentor and foster-father, and his childhood friends, and everyone except the scheming flatterer he should have suspected. Anakin could see the parallels with himself at their ages all too well – though he couldn't imagine Miles or Gregor committing genocide.

And if it wasn't enough that Miles reminded Anakin of himself and his son, he was also infuriatingly reminiscent of Luke's friend Solo. The boy was born to be a scoundrel – of course on failing to qualify for the Imperial Service he would become a smuggler, pull some dodgy deals, and shoot off into space just after sabotaging his ship's radio to get out of an awkward conversation.

More than the first two series, much of this felt at first almost like the sort of fun adventure story that parents would take their children to watch. Okay, probably not the scene where Konstantine tortured a pilot to death – but many people seemed more comfortable about letting younglings watch violence than, for example, nudity. Or swearing, which Konstantine was also doing quite a lot of, but you couldn't blame him when he had all these Milesian antics to contend with.

But Anakin could feel the emotions of Konstantine, who had been there, and Severus, who had seen this series of memories before. This couldn't end well – especially with Miles's quest to help Elena find out who her mother was.

In the meantime, Anakin enjoyed learning everything he could pick up, through Miles's questions, about the ships, weapons and armour in that universe. He snickered at the scene where Miles hacked into an enemy army's powered suits to sabotage them just a little – not enough that the wearers knew someone was using the override code, but enough to inconvenience them. Even so, the description of powered armour that could be used to walk wounded and unconscious soldiers (or corpses) back to safety and the sickbay was uncomfortably reminiscent of the many years that he had been dependent on a suit of armour. He tried to clamp down on his emotions. That was past. He wasn't going to panic…

He really hadn't been prepared for the sight of the soldier who came back with her face burnt off no skin nonose no ears no lips no scalp half a tongue trying to talk…

He regained consciousness to find himself lying on his bed, propped up on pillows. His throat was hoarse from screaming before he'd collapsed, and he had a headache where he had knocked himself out with his own metal hand, which was now lying on the bedside table. Konstantine, who had evidently been waiting by him until he recovered, helped him to put the prosthesis back on, then handed him a glass of water. 'Cheiron says to tell you Trainee Quinn got better,' he said. 'Got a new face built, back on Beta Colony. Everything fixed. Only thing wrong with it was it made her too pretty for anyone to take her seriously as a soldier.'

'Did you see her with her new face?'

'No. I was dead. My lord brought me back, too, Cheiron says – made sure I got a proper burial back on Barrayar. Only that doesn't matter, now, the way I thought it would when I was alive. Except that it means Lord Miles lived. Cheiron says Elena's safe. Says she's doing well.' His presence darkened, doubtless as he reflected that, at the point where they had stopped watching the memories, Elena had been getting all too friendly with Baz Jesek, the Barrayaran deserter whom Miles had sworn in as an Armsman.

'It's not right,' Konstantine went on, interrupting himself before Anakin could probe his thoughts any further.

'About Elena?'

'You. Cheiron should never have let you see that without the training. There are ways to deal with – seeing things that bring back memories. Cheiron taught me. He should've taught you.'

'I should not have been so weak.' Palpatine would have punished him ferociously for this. Obi-Wan or Yoda would have told him off for being over-emotional, and warned him that suffering leads to the Dark Side. Anakin remembered, before he had passed out, Elena explaining to Miles that she was trying to desensitise herself so that she didn't feel empathy, so that she could be a proper soldier like her father, and Miles telling her, as his mother had told Droushnakovi a generation earlier, that empathy didn't make you unsoldierly, it made you human. Anakin didn't know how to be a normal human any more, and probably Konstantine and Erik never had. And Severus, who was the most nearly sane of them, had turned himself into a small furry hunting animal because he couldn't stand all this any longer.

'I need to watch the rest of the memory,' Anakin said.

'You need sleep. Then training.'

'Put me back in my hover-chair.' Anakin belatedly remembered that Konstantine wasn't a droid or a slave, nor a soldier under Anakin's command, and grudgingly added, 'Please.'

'Sleep.' If Anakin was trying to psych the non-com out by going into commanding-officer mode, Konstantine was retaliating by going into adult-dealing-with-tantrumming-toddler mode, which seemed only fair.

'I cannot sleep.'

'We need Scotch.' The drink he had been sedating Miles with when he was working too hard and refusing to take breaks.

'What is Scotch?'

'Whisky.'

Corellian whiskey did sound a good idea, Anakin had to admit. '"Scotch" – is that the planet where it comes from? In your galaxy?'

'Not a planet. It's a place on Earth, somewhere. Northern half of some island. It's where the school Professor Snape taught at was. Anyway, Cheiron says you're not to have alcohol,' he added sourly. 'Says he's seen too many centaurs ruined that way. You can have a calming draught.'

'Please, let me go downstairs to speak to Cheiron. Just for a short while.'

'All right. If you go to bed when he tells you.'

Cheiron was waiting back downstairs, with the memory frozen in the Pensieve at the start of the following scene: an unthreatening view of Miles in some sort of meeting with his officers. (If it had been Darth Vader in charge, that would have been different, but Miles Vorkosigan's leadership style didn't involve murdering everyone who annoyed him.)

'I'm very sorry,' Cheiron said. 'Konstantine has already told me how irresponsible I was, Spark says I'm a dorkhead, and I get the impression that Severus's miaows meant the same. I thought that when you were ready, we could discuss ways of recovering from trauma before you looked back at your own past experience, but right now you seemed to be doing well just settling into life on the Rock and making new friends. I should have realised how much watching someone else's memories could trigger yours.'

'Did you give this training to Severus?'

'No. I offered, when he first came here, but he said he'd had a lifetime's worth of people trying to peer into his mind and that he just wanted to be left in peace to live with his own experiences in his own way. I said that was fine, but that he was welcome to talk to me, or someone else if he preferred, if he ever did feel he could use some help. I thought he might do that after he'd helped Konstantine regain access to his own memories, but he never did. And when I gave Severus back some of his memories that he'd given away, I forgot that he might not be in a good position to deal with them.'

Severus gave a snarling sound which suggested disagreement – not denying that Cheiron had offered him help, but angrily contradicting the suggestion that he hadn't been ready to get his memories back.

'What does this "training" involve?' Anakin asked. He remembered laborious hours practising telekinesis as a boy, trying to stack up balls in an inverted cone by the power of his mind, Obi-Wan reassuring him that he'd get the hang of it, and that no, it wasn't a problem that he was in a beginners' class and he'd soon catch up to where he should be for his age, and that no, he wasn't a reject or useless and the Council weren't necessarily right about him and Qui-Gon had chosen him and… and at that point Anakin had stormed out angrily and slammed the door because Qui-Gon, the only Jedi who had actually liked him, was dead, and he and Obi-Wan were stuck with each other. He remembered training Galen Marek by giving him a droid who was programmed to keep trying to kill him, or dropping him unarmed on Honoghr for the Noghri Death Commandos to kill – and how he had wished his own child had lived, so that it could have been his child he was training as his Sith apprentice.

'There are various tools people can use to cope with painful memories, and different ones work for different people,' said Cheiron. 'Some people like to be able to talk things through, and others feel that it just rakes things up again. If you'd like to talk about anything – the way things are going now and how they make you feel, or experiences in the past that have been preying on your mind – then that's fine. But if you'd like to concentrate on practising ways of staying calm – not emotionless, but not being so overwhelmed by a panic attack that you faint or beat yourself up – and reminding yourself that you're safe, then we can practise that. Or we can do different things on different days and see what works. And there are other techniques that other people here know, even if I don't. For example, a man called Nutt – you might have seen him around, as he's friends with Konstantine and Severus – knows how to help people by talking to them while they're in a trance and can find memories that they suppress while they're conscious. What would you like to do?'

'Anything except the trance.' Putting himself into a trance was fine – come to think of it, he hadn't meditated for weeks now. He had got out of the habit of it when he and Severus were regularly mind-linking for shared dreams, and hadn't resumed meditating after Severus started shutting Anakin out of his mind. He needed to meditate more. But letting another person, who was conscious, talk to him while he was in a trance and put ideas into his head, sounded very dangerous indeed. From Severus's flat-eared, back-arched expression, he agreed.

'Nutt's all right,' Konstantine reassured them. 'He doesn't torture people. Neither does Cheiron.' Konstantine, Anakin remembered, had been tortured not only by Ges Vorrutyer, and by the people who had abused him when he was a child, but most of all by supposed 'therapists' back home on Barrayar after the Escobar War. What must it have taken for him to trust Cheiron, after going through that? And if he could bring himself to trust Cheiron, Anakin could, too.

'No, I won't torture you,' said Cheiron. 'I won't physically hurt you, and I don't want sessions to be too emotionally painful.'

'I am used to pain.'

'I know. But you shouldn't have had to live in continual physical agony, without medication to help control it, in your past life, and it isn't helpful for you to be overwhelmed by emotional pain now. Pain is a warning system to tell you when something is wrong – so it's normal to feel guilt over having hurt someone, or grief at losing someone you love, for example. But being so swamped with pain – physical or emotional – that you can't think or rest, doesn't help. So the first things we need to do are work out ways to help you feel safe, draw up a scale of emotional pain so that you can keep track of where on it your feelings are, and work out a way for you to let me know if it's too much to deal with and you need to stop – in case you don't feel able to talk.'

'What did you do?' Anakin asked Konstantine.

'Tapped out.' Anakin remembered the sparring practice scene, and how competitors tapped three times on the ground to signify surrender. 'Only…' Konstantine looked meaningfully at the prosthetic hand. If Anakin was going to be doing anything stressful, he probably shouldn't be wearing a prosthesis that he could bruise himself with.

Anakin levitated his hand off his arm-stump, lowered it gently to the floor, and tapped three times on the flagstones. Then he drew it back up again to rest in his lap. He could feel the others' amusement (mixed with a disapproving feeling of 'arrogant show-off!' from Severus).

'We will begin tomorrow,' he announced, then remembered, again, that he wasn't in a position to give orders about anything. (Watching Miles must have been rubbing off on him, he thought.) 'May I begin training tomorrow?' he corrected himself.

'All right,' said Cheiron. 'I'm free first thing in the morning, so we could have training sessions then. Are you still having an hour's bacta bath every day?'

'No.' There were still bacta dressings on the incisions from his transplant surgery, but they were healing well. It wouldn't be long before he was recovered enough to have a proper bath in an actual tub of water instead of being washed while lying on a towel on the bed. Anakin hadn't experienced many water-baths in his life – slaves on Tattooine rarely got the luxury of any water for washing, let alone a whole bath, the Jedi Temple allowed only a brief shower unless you were an aquatic or amphibious species, and the only baths he had experienced as Darth Vader had been purely medicinal – but he had a few happy memories of cuddling with Padmé in her bathtub.

'Well, shall we start when you've had breakfast and got washed and dressed, then? Then you can decide whether you need to rest afterwards, or go straight on to Hephaestus.'

'Proposal accepted. Can Konstantine and Severus be there?'

'Yes, of course, if they'd like to.' Konstantine nodded, while Severus groomed his fur as if he was oblivious to the conversation. 'If you want, you can ask Erik if he'd like to come here and join you.'

'Can we still watch the memories?'

'One phial per night, if everyone feels up to it. I think instead of watching a full phial of memories in one go, we'd better pause after each scene, or each time anyone requests a break or wants to discuss anything.'