Second Cream Cake: [Action/Written]

[vor]

It’s a bad night.

Gregor hasn’t slept. The boredom in this place leaves him too much time to think, and his thoughts revolve around what he learned on Komarr. Alone at night, wondering when his genes will start generating monsters in his head. Prince Serg, the longed-for father, the hero of the last generation, also a sadist who tortured pregnant women. Great Uncle Yuri, Mad Emperor Yuri, slaughterer of almost all his relatives. Ezar, who married his own cousin, Yuri’s sister, and produced Serg. Genes doubled and redoubled, madness folded over itself and compressed into Gregor’s own flesh, sleeping, latent. When will it raise its head?

He wishes and doesn’t wish for Aral Vorkosigan, Prime Minister and Puppet Master, foster-father and cousin, former regent and perpetual mentor. Aral would have answers, but Aral is the last person Gregor wants to hear them from. Aral led the retreat from Escobar after Serg’s death, then taken his place in the Imperium and at home until Gregor reached his majority. The truth about Serg can’t be heard from many others. Why has it never been revealed to him? Why didn’t they warn him of this latent threat? Did they think he would go mad simply from the revelation?

I am glass. Drop me and break me.

He finds himself leaning out the third-story window and wondering if it’s high enough. It’s the thought of Cordelia that makes him back away and close the window after several minutes of leaning. Cordelia, wrapping a protective arm around him after he lit his mother’s funeral offering.

Are they going to kill me, too?

No. I won’t let them.

Cordelia was far more a mother to him than Aral was a father. Still, unlike with Serg, Gregor remembers Kareen. She was murdered when he was five, but he still remembers her, maybe because his subconscious has to hold on to all the memories of his mother that it can. Cordelia had been her friend. Cordelia had tried to save her. Cordelia had taken care of her son. But he still remembers a time when someone else was his mother. He still knows he can’t compete with Cordelia’s actual son.

All the same, she might be the only person who loves him for himself. To her Betan mind, all these formal titles are sort of an optical illusion. And she’d be the first to point out that pitching himself over the side would only make him wake up a week later with his life even more in shambles than before. It doesn’t make him stop wanting to test whether or not he’d really come back, if even that escape is closed to him.

He pries himself away from the window. He should go do something else. Not get drunk, because that would make it worse. But it’s three in the morning and there’s not much else to do except wait till dawn. And that’s what he does, curled on his side on the couch, until the sky begins to lighten and he finally falls asleep.

He dreams about Serg melting the skin off one side of Captain Negri’s body with a plasma arc, mouth open with pleasure.

[He wakes up early in the afternoon and doesn’t feel better until after he’s taken a shower. It takes a lot of motivation to go outside at all. He spends a little time in the stables just to remember the smell of horses even if there aren’t any that belong to him. Riding. That’s the only thing he can think of that’s worth going outside for, and he can’t do it.

He tries the library. Barrayaran history won’t hold any answers about Serg, so maybe Escobaran. He doesn’t find Escobaran history. He does, however, find some psychology books that he winds up taking with him to the tea shop on a whim. There, he sits and sips his cuppa while devouring one book about mental illness by a supposedly distinguished author. There’s comfort in looking at it from a curable, clinical perspective. Most of the actual content matter he’s already learned at Cordelia’s knee.

Feeling like he’s doing something helps. He starts to look up more information about missions. He wants at least one horse, dammit, and the currency here seems to be these points earned by doing favors for the Malnosso. Maybe during a research mission, he could even learn something about what happened at Escobar.

He has a plan. Horse, psychology, and Escobar. And after the first horse? Maybe another. Maybe he’ll fill the stables so people can travel more easily within the enclosure. It would be good to have horses around. Maybe he could take up a career as a groom. Ma and Da (Illyan and Aral) would have conniptions. Cordelia would say it’s good for him.

He writes:]

Would anyone ride horses if we had them?

Also: I would like to speak with anyone who has died here and come back, if anyone would be willing to speak of it.

-GVB

Comments

[stillplaying]

[A shrug. It doesn't matter. She glances at the book under his arm. Curiosity gets the better of her.]

What are you reading?

[vor]

[He waves one book in a gesture before setting it down on a nearby table. His journal slips out from under his arm slightly, revealing part of a name turned toward his body.

Grego
Vorbar

In a flash, he has it tucked back under with long, slender hands.]

Just some psychology textbooks. An amateur interest.

[stillplaying]

[It's just a second, but she notices. It's hard not to notice when the slightest movement triggers her defenses. She sees the bits of the name but doesn't say anything aloud. He hasn't offered it yet and there is only so much prying she will do.

Besides, he's mentioned psychology. She's seen those books herself, even flipped through a couple once. Head medicine. Mental illnesses. Like Dr. Aurelius.

But it makes sense, given his demeanor.]

There are a lot of those books here.

[A lot to her, anyway.]

[vor]

I noticed. These authors seem to know what they're talking about, at least.

[stillplaying]

I wouldn't know.

[There had been a couple of sessions with Dr. Aurelius before she arrived in Luceti. Sort of. At least, he talked to her. About something. She never listened. It was especially easy to do when sessions were through the phone.]

[vor]

[A wave of his hand that says "don't sweat it," basically.] My foster-mother is a sort of amateur psychotherapist. She knows more than some professionals I'm familiar with.

[stillplaying]

[Don't worry. She's not. But she is still studying him, very thoughtfully.] Do you know a lot of professionals?

[vor]

[...This girl is sharp.]

Not as a patient.

[stillplaying]

[She wishes she could say the same. But as doctors go, Doctor Aurelius really hasn't been so bad.

She nods. Maybe not quite like her, then.]

[vor]

[A pause, then a sigh. She looks so disappointed. Or if not disappointed, then...slightly colder. Isolated. More so than when he first saw her. In fact, he picks up more and more disturbances from her the more he thinks about it. She could use a little empathy, and Gregor hadn't really been thinking his instance of psychotherapy-as-patient really counted when he barely remembered it. He hardly ever remembers it happened at all.]

For a few months, when I was five. My foster-mother insisted.

[There had been some protests as to how it would look to the staff of the Imperial Residence for their Emperor to see a therapist--one that had to undergo every possible check in order to be trusted with him--but it's hard to overrule the Emperor's appointed guardian.]

[stillplaying]

[Her attention is piqued again at this admittance. Even if she can't exactly see the use of a five year old seeing a head doctor. What would scar a five year old that much that their thoughts were so haunted?

She doesn't want to know.]

Was it effective?

[Because she doesn't know if the time spent on the phone with Dr. Aurelius has been. Not that she does much talking in those sessions. Or listen to much he has to say. Mutual silence. She prefers it.]

[vor]

[He hesitates.] I think it was more monitoring than anything else. I don't remember too much of it, but I think I remember him asking more questions than anything else. My foster-mother sat in with me.

[stillplaying]

[More nodding. It sounds about right. Johanna had said much the same, too.

Cautiously,] They do ask a lot of questions.

[vor]

[He nods, eyes resting thoughtfully on the table, but he makes no other visible reaction. Internally, he's absorbing. He's not the one reaching out here. He's simply taking the hand doing the reaching. Does she even realize she does it?]

They're making a map of you. It sounds worse than it is.

[stillplaying]

[She's completely unaware that she's reaching out. She's spent too long thinking she can rely on no one but herself. Even if by now, she knows that's not entirely true. She has Peeta here. And Rue. Maybe even Rick and a couple of others she accidentally befriended.

More than anything, she's used to depending on no one but herself. And certainly not used to talking to anyone about this kind of thing since rooming with Johanna in District Thirteen.

But she is truly curious.] Map?

[vor]

[He makes a gesture, palm up, fingers spread, as though offering her something.] When you're treated at a hospital, they take scans. [A beat as he considers that her world's technology might not be very advanced.] Or at least, they examine you before they treat you. The mind is more subtle. You can't take scans of it, or even physically look at it, so the physician has to get all their information from the patient. Second-hand and subjective, so it's slipperier, but it's effective if done by a professional.

[stillplaying]

[She knows the scans. Been in too many hospitals, all too recently. The work those doctors do is straight forward. Easier to comprehend than Doctor Aurelius' work. What can he gleam from sessions spent in utter silence?

A chance to sleep. She remembers that.]

You've read a lot on this.

[vor]

[He hesitates.]

My foster-mother knew this sort of thing. Back where she grew up, therapy is...something of a cornerstone for the culture, in a way. They don't have prisons so much as hospital wards. Military vessels have a full-time counseling staff. [Licensed (as always) sex workers have to have at least an associate's in psychotherapy...] She's something of an intellectual sponge, so she picked up a lot of things growing up.

[Which means he picked it up, too.]

[stillplaying]

[She never really encountered therapy before District Thirteen. And even then, she wasn't so willing to listen to it. The bracelet that told everyone who encountered her that she was mentally disoriented was maybe the only good part. It meant that she didn't have to stick to the ordered schedule of the District. She could spend her days hiding in closets. Worrying for Peeta. Missing her home.

So he gets a nod. When it comes down to it, it's hard to imagine the kind of society the man is describing. Almost as if these people really care.]

[vor]

[Gregor's not sure himself. Sometimes Beta Colony sounds like heaven, sometimes like hell. Something about how consent for some of this therapy can be obtained post-facto.

Quietly, he slides one book toward her. It's not a self-help book, just information.]

[stillplaying]

[She looks at the book he passes to her. Picks it up and flips through it. Some of the words she doesn't recognize. But descriptions are familiar enough. Fitting. Her, Johanna, Finnick. Her mother. Mental disorient is not something new. Neither is psychology.

What she doesn't expect is for the book to actually be semi-interesting. Something maybe to leaf through when she has nothing better to do.]

Can I borrow this?

[vor]

Of course.

[stillplaying]

[She clutches the book closer to her chest.]

Thank you.