barrayar | despite everything, I'm still human }

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despite everything, I'm still human }

Nine was often moved to a new location without being informed as to the reason why. She was used to it at this point, being shuffled around by people who looked straight through her-- or worse, the ones who didn't, because they were always the ones that sneered or whose lips twitched in disgust or who jeered at her, often openly. When she'd had her crèche-mates they'd huddled together, and truthfully, child supersoldiers-- even ones with animal DNA-- do not nearly instill the same defensive reaction as fully-formed ones, though Nine by no means would count herself as an adult.

She's fifteen, but no one would look at her and wonder about her age. Nine daydreams sometimes, guiltily, about what it must be like to be a normal girl who others find pretty, and what she'd be doing this year if she were... But ultimately it's all so hard for her to imagine. She's never lived outside of a lab; she has no context for the wider universe.

It's why she's never tried to escape. Where would she go? What would she do? It'd be trivial for Bharaputra to come after her with how huge and noticeable she is, and any Jacksonian would turn her in in a heartbeat for the reward. She'd never get off-planet.

And having tried to escape and failed... seems too much to live with. Looking at the walls around her knowing they would never give.

So she doesn't much pay attention, honestly, as she's directed and prodded into her new home. She's ragged by now, nearly delirious with hunger and thirst, which gnaw away at her insides in disparate sensations. It's hard to keep her gaze focused-- probably intentional, to keep her docile during this dangerous transition period. Nine can practically smell their fear of her as they shuffle her into her new quarters (cage, she knows she's no better than an animal) and, out of sheer desperation, asks for water in a creaky, dry voice, no imploring in the tone, too tired to manage that.

They oblige-- maybe out of not wanting to damage the merchandise, she's not sure-- with a full pail, which tastes like manna as she upturns it, seated on the floor, and gulps at it openly. She saves a full third so as not to make herself sick but clutches it to her protectively, not letting it out of her grasp. Sanity returns to her. Enough to function and start to wonder where she is, try to look around and piece the clues together.

Nine has not yet reached apathy in her captivity. She's merely reached despair.

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She wasn't thinking physical contact specifically, just something without this wall between them, but Nine has felt an insistent warmth to her over the past couple years that is frustrating in the extreme. It seems to come and go, perhaps hormonally, but like with everything else in her system it's overheated. And unmanageable.

Suffice to say she wouldn't mind that exploration either. But at this exact moment it's not where she's focused.

His insistence startles Nine into an assured, "Sure, that's no problem. Though scaling it down for you might be tricky. I use my strength a lot. But we can try, if you like." There's some tendril of eagerness at the end, at getting to do something. Idleness is its own curse, separate from all the rest: sometimes in her tearful, frustrated boredom Nine scratches at herself with her ragged claws, just to feel something, to express something. Energy bursting out of her with nowhere else to go but self-directed.

Having another direction would be... restorative.

"Yeah." She's still not sufficiently quick with the lie. Modulating her agreement, to be honest about her capacities when she needs to be talking about how she's the best at it. He supposes...Someone like him was bred, made, created in a laboratory, as a lie. That's what he's made for. Lies and betrayal for the liars and the traitors. Someone like Nine wouldn't have ever have learned to lie, would she? Bharaputran just like him, but from a different lab. They'd have been honest with her, what she was made for - every inch of her declares what she was made for - not like him. Not like Miles. Raised on a diet of lies to become a liar.

He wonders, melancholy, what diet she was fed, to make her violent.

"Okay." Well, if he's a liar, time to lie, right? If he fails in his training, lags behind, maybe the Komarrans will turn to her as a potential new source of training. And then he can make progress when she's training him. It strikes him simultaneously as a plan that's genius and a plan that's absolutely terrible, because he knows...His stomach clenches as he thinks what he'll have to endure to get her out of there. What Ser Galen's response will be when he sees Miles faltering in his physical lessons. It's...Well. It's not like he doesn't get that discipline regardless, right? It's not courage when it's just making the inevitable happen a little sooner, he thinks.

And besides, it'll be good for him, right? Training with her? It's for the cause. It'll help him fulfill their dreams.

"It'll take a few days," he says. "I'll - need to plan things." He takes a breath. "Just hold on, okay?"

"I'm not going anywhere," she informs him, doleful. But Nine can read his nerves well enough and offers her own slightly nervous, "Don't do anything dangerous for me. I don't want them to take you away."

Nine is already getting defensive of his presence in her life, just from one conversation. She'd rather go back to starving constantly as long as she had this lifeline of humanity. Whatever his motivations, it's something, something she hasn't had since the last of her cohort died, one by one. By the last death Nine had been expecting them, and waiting to die herself.

She's still waiting to die, really. She doesn't know why it hasn't happened yet, why she's the one who gets to survive. There's nothing remarkable about her. She's just an ugly barely-human girl without even a name, who was born in a uterine replicator and will die on a slab, her whole existence sacrificed to greedy men.

"They won't do that," he says quietly. Truth enough. He is valuable to them - the only one who can carry out this task, this vital and important task, but at the same time a wild and undisciplined boy. No; they won't get rid of him, and they won't hurt him.

Not in any way that counts, anyway. Miles' resolve nearly fails within an hour of starting this plan, because failures in training aren't met with a desire to look for a solution; they're met with the reasonable - and correct - assumption that he's deliberately being difficult. And that means, in turn, that Galen tries to re-establish discipline. But he's clearly in a forgiving mood; he has a comparatively light hand, and it only takes a few hours of him trying to prod Miles into better performance before he finally gives up and sends him away for the night. Dinnerless. That's probably the worst part.

It takes three more days before Miles manages to establish that he is hitting some wall in his training, that the shock-stick isn't going to make him better. During those days, he'd also been laying the groundwork: carefully applying descriptions of the Barrayarans as tall and fearsome, contrasting with descriptions of all of his sparring opponents as smaller, pushing their minds closer and closer to thinking of the girl in the cage. Hinting that a new opponent might be necessary. Just to mix things up a bit. And she has training experience, right...?

They'd come to ask her that on day four. Whether she would have any experience training others. God knows that when they let her spar against Miles, there's nothing remotely dignified or humanizing about it. She's given a shock-collar, for God's sake, and two of the Komarrans flanking her with shock-sticks fully charged, just in case she tries something against Miles or damages him in any way. But at least she's out. Miles takes some comfort in that - she's out, breathing and free and stretching her limbs and fighting, and afterwards they're left in the kitchen with two rat bars apiece, a guard watching with wariness that increasingly becomes boredom.

Miles offers her a slightly awkward smile as he bites deep into his rat bar. "I think that was really helpful," he says, voice pitched to carry.

What's hard about this to Nine is that she hadn't been raised this way. The scientists and their guards at Bharaputra's labs had been wary of her and her crèche-mates, but not unduly afraid; they'd genetically programmed them, after all, and raised them to their hands, if not with respect for their personhood then at least as favored dogs. It hadn't been so bad, she rationalizes to herself.

At least, there'd never been shock-collars or shock-sticks except for the one of them that went outright mad, attacking everything. But she's reminded, like this, that dogs can be disciplined as much as they can be favored, and she's really just been deluding herself to appreciate the latter...

Nine has lost hope that she'll ever get anything different. Except for him. Miles. No longer the awkward boy to her-- definitively Miles, and she behaves herself well in the training, not able to lie outright but speaking in a quiet rumble, as close to soft-spoken as she can get, directing him patiently and flipping him neatly and tapping him where he leaves openings. Nine is used to practicing with others of her caliber, or being bombarded with trained soldiers attempting to overwhelm her; this one, spry assassin, under-sized, is an adjustment. It's actually fun, to have this variety.

Still, she unglamorously devours the two rat bars before speaking, nearly weak with relief. Only then does she try to rouse herself to this deception, still uncertain and slow to lie, but Nine isn't stupid. She can follow along well enough.

"You're not bad. Sneaky." Nine herself is glancing around a bit now, taking in the new sights of the kitchen like they're their own feast. She's standing straight up, all eight imposing feet of her, leaning against a counter since she doesn't dare test a chair. His smile makes her feel shy, ugly. But, she reminds herself again, he's still talking to her. Doing things for her.

"Next time we can work on your follow through. You're picking it up already."

Not bad earns Nine an uncertain sort of look - but there's clearly nothing else there, nothing hidden. Ser Galen sometimes praises him, often lavishly - something which had, for the first few months, made him proud and happy to be doing this, proud and happy to be supporting their plans for freedom. But he'd learned in time that he either got that lavish praise, or he got disciplined. Nine isn't Ser Galen: she's honest, and she'd been absolutely gentle when the training hadn't required her to tumble him head over heels. But even so, that modulated praise has him searching her face for some sign that things are going to get worse.

Not that he can ever correctly read Ser Galen's face. Sometimes that lack of enthusiasm is followed by an explosion of violence. Sometimes nothing happens at all. Miles wishes more than anything else that he could tell which one was coming at any given time.

"Uh," he says sort of awkwardly when it registers that he'd responded to her gruff kindness with that wary look. He tries to make up for it with a, "Thanks." And then he takes a breath and tries to say more firmly, "You're kind of amazing yourself. You were really well-trained, weren't you? Not just in strength, but in precision."

He takes another, smaller bite of the rat bar. His every instinct screams at him, eat it, eat it, eat it fast before they can take it away from you, but he contains himself. They're not going to let him just sit idly and talk with Nine. A conversation while they eat, on the other hand, is permissible. So he needs to stretch out the process of eating as long as possible.

Nine merely looks back at him curiously at that wary look, open as a book, not sure what he's scrutinizing her for. Maybe awkward boy hasn't totally left as a mental epithet for him.

"Of course," she says factually. "Good soldiers aren't mindless brutes. They can't be. Not that I'll ever get to be a real soldier." Her vast shoulders scrunch up closer to her ears, morose. She realizes finally why he's eating so slowly, when she knows he's often hungry, too, and grimly resolves herself to eat more slowly next time, too. It was just... so hard. With two rat bars (a reward for behaving?) she feels completely full, and it's amazing. She hasn't felt that way in weeks. If only it weren't a little chilly in here, but she can't have everything.

"I don't know." He swallows down the dry flavorless mouthful slowly, but with real enjoyment. Any food, any food at all, is something to treasure and adore and celebrate. Knowing he has this, feeling the dull ache in his stomach fade - it's the best feeling in the world.

"I mean - " He hesitates, turning over in his mind the amount of information he can safely give her without completely dooming her. "We're fighting for the liberation of an entire planet, you know. A whole world. And we're a small force, no question of that, but we are going to fight. And we'll need good soldiers when the time comes to strike. Not soldiers who'll be part of an army, but still soldiers." His face brightens slightly in inspiration. "I mean - I'll need a bodyguard."

The liberation of an entire planet is not very impressive to Nine, which is to say, this does not seem very likely. She may have a narrow sense of scope from her life migrating from prison to prison, but she has common sense. Nine levels him a doubtful look at this statement of intent.

But his intent doesn't really matter to her, does it. Nine would follow someone that accepted her as a person straight into hell without regret.

Her face lights up when it hits her, a painful scrap of optimism fighting its way to the surface. Nine promises without hesitation, "I'd take out anyone you told me to, Miles." Which is just the truth, and if his keepers think that doesn't include them, that's their own stupidity.

That's...a little surprising. Not the sentiment: she's a soldier born and raised, obviously, and wouldn't shy away from violence. No, what's startling is that appending of his name onto the end of it. Miles, she says. She's not saying she'll take commands; she's saying she'll take commands from him. What's he done to earn her loyalty?

Well. Creche-mates. They're late-in-life creche-mates, aren't they? A pair of two. Unconventional in their pairing: the clone built as a lie, the experiment built as a killer; the boy and the girl. But that's enough for loyalty. And that - that gives him a rush of pleasure equal to the food in his mouth. How good are the forces of the Vorkosigans, of all of Barrayar, compared to her loyalty?

"Hopefully I wouldn't need you to." He hesitates, looks over at the guard. This is something he can tell her. He's pretty sure. "They want me to become the Emperor of Barrayar, you know. With you standing beside me, no one would try anything." And then, earnestly, "And then you could eat all you wanted."

It doesn't take more than a few days of continual gestures of kindness to get Nine won over, and he's fulfilled that. Especially with everyone else she's exposed to so unrelentingly cruel, Miles is like that first drink of water after three days without; it returns her to sanity, it takes her from feeble to strong.

"That would be nice," she sighs wistfully. But Nine isn't so easily distracted, no matter how important food is to her. She meets his eyes, holds them, piercing gold. "I don't know about emperors, but someone always tries something." People lie. They lie a lot. And Nine better than anyone knows how greedy stupid men can be. They'd designed her, after all.

She doesn't care if he's emperor or anything else, her eyes say. It's him, the definable physical presence, his own character, that she wants to hold onto.

"Yeah," he says grimly, Jacksonian to Jacksonian. Someone always does try something. You act weak, you get punished for your weakness by someone jumping onto it and exploiting it. You make mistakes, you solve those mistakes or you pay. Those are the rules. When you grew up Jacksonian, even if you were isolated in a lab or placed amongst carefully-chosen foster families, you learned. That's just how things went. If you let them, someone will try something, and you better make sure you're smarter and meaner and better-protected than whoever it is who does.

He hesitates, then takes a bite. Swallows.

"The bodyguard to an emperor is an honorable position, you know." He looks up, meets her eyes. "You'd be treated really well. You'd have a nice room. And a beautiful uniform."

Nine allows herself a wistful daydreaming moment of fantasy, imagining this. She doesn't think it's ever going to happen, and her desires are basic, just a room to herself and a bathroom and fitted clothes that aren't this scrubs-like kimono shirt and loose pants. Food enough that she isn't hungry. So that the last couple years of her life-- for surely there aren't many more than that-- she'll see something different.

There's some of that lust for life in her voice as she answers. "I want to see things. Emperors get to see things, don't they? All sorts of things, not just labs." She scratches absently at her shock-collar, nudging it out of discomfort, like an itch deeper than skin. "Do you think that'll really happen?"

Her doubt is obvious, and well-founded, in her opinion.

"Uh - " He's not sure of the answer to that. Because, for all that they've prepared him, for all the months of grueling training on mimicking Miles Vorkosigan and on Barrayaran culture and all the Barrayaran rituals, they've never actually discussed what it would be like after he takes over as Emperor. Which is something...he tries not to think about too much. Maybe it'll just come later...

But that lack of knowledge just leaves him free to speculate. And when he thinks about things for himself, he lets himself indulge in deep anxiety. When he thinks of things for himself, he can be pessimistic and grim. But for Nine, he wants to paint a picture that's a little lovelier.

"Yeah, they definitely do," he answers. "They travel to negotiate treaties and things like that. Plus, representatives from all over come to the Emperor to pay homage. So you'll get to see all of them, too. Like - have you ever seen a Cetagandan ghem? Or heard what they look like?"

"No. I haven't seen anything that wasn't in labs or a basement somewhere." Nine sounds wistful, but not in the least optimistic. That doesn't stop her from hopeless daydreaming. They exchange guilty, self-indulgent speculation-- zoo animals dreaming of natural habitats-- before they're dragged away, each to their separate enclosures.

Things continue in this vein for some time, creating a pattern. Nine is let out to lead Miles through a series of exercises, and she grows increasingly more comfortable with that scenario as she gains a sense of his capabilities and becomes less afraid of hurting him. Turns out he's not as fragile as he seems, and a lot more vicious than she'd have expected when properly motivated, which Nine can only approve of.

They eat their ration bars together in the kitchen afterward each time. One day Nine, feeling daring, drinks from the sink tap, and when no one runs in to stop her, it becomes her first move every time they enter. She always spends several minutes drinking, and then, in embarrassment, tries to wash her face and clean under her claws, to some effect. There's nothing to be done about her hair; it's too matted for anything but a concerted effort with a comb.

But Miles never says anything disparaging about her, so Nine slowly starts to feel more human in his presence. Astonishing how much basic respect and furtive conversation can get you.

And then one day Miles's keeper wants to see his progress, whom Nine has never met before, and the whole routine grinds to a crash.

Nine becomes...important to him. Really important. Part of it is that she's from Bharaputra's labs too, and so there's a certain amount of understanding they have for one another. The Komarrans that surround Miles are strange; they talk about revolution and liberating planets and all these wild dreams, and to a certain extent Miles had started to buy into it all but fundamentally he thinks it's sort of insane and pointless. Nine reminds him of his more skeptical, rational self. She's smart as anything, and she cuts through bullshit so effectively that it brings him out of their bubble of lofty visions and grand plans - she grounds him in a way he can't ground himself. And she's funny, too, sometimes. And she's his age. The first person his age since he left Bharaputra's labs...

And she's going to be sent off to die. Just like all his other creche-mates. That knowledge is at the back of his mind from the very beginning, but it grows and grows uncomfortably over the weeks they spend together until he can't ignore it any longer, until it becomes a big hard painful thing that haunts him. Nine is going to be starved and dumped into Vorbarr Sultana and let loose on everyone until they bring her down. Miles' attempts to assign her value have gotten her fed, but there's no indication that the Komarrans have changed their planned purpose for her.

The thing is that Miles is irreplaceable. No one else is as valuable as he is. Not even Ser Galen, the visionary and leader of this plan for liberty, is as valuable as Miles is. So if he frees her, they won't kill him. He knows it'll probably be bad for a really, really long time. He knows that it'll probably be bad until the time that they enact their plan for Barrayar and he's sent out - that all freedoms he's earned will be taken away from him, that he'll go hungry a lot and that his training will get even worse. But seeing Nine eat to her heart's content, seeing her drink until she's not thirsty any longer, seeing her with a clean face and clean hands, gives him far more contentment than he ever gets from being able to pace the halls of the safe house. He decides, one sleepless night, that he'll save her, like none of his other creche-mates were saved.

And so he starts to enact his plan. Reconnaissance, at first. Where are the codes to the shuttle kept. Where is the food kept. He starts stockpiling - not in his room, but in an unused spot in the pantry, quarter-rat bars and eighth-rat bars, enough to last Nine for a few days of travel. Until she can get somewhere else, somewhere where she can earn money. Find a job.

He's two weeks into this plan when it all happens.

In a lot of ways, it's his fault. He knows he's been overeating, and it's apparently evident to Ser Galen the moment he steps into the room. He frowns, grabs Miles hard by the arm and wrenches him around painfully - goes to one of the other Komarrans, demands to know weight and height specs, all the while holding Miles' arm too tightly and lifted up too high so that Miles is all twisted up trying to alleviate the pain in his shoulder, teeth clenched miserably, face taut with fear.

There's so much going on under the surface that Nine isn't privy to, and with regular food and water and conversation she's able to concentrate enough to notice that. Originally, she hadn't been sure what Miles, a Barrayaran lord, was doing here, especially with that damning lack of accent that she'd eventually picked up on. But before long it becomes clear enough to her, especially after she's overheard several conversations between the guards, her sensitive ears having nothing else to listen for apart from the sounds of life going past her room. Nine had started to wonder if he was a clone anyway, just from his sheer familiarity and his presence here, but that had clinched it.

He's a clone, and she knows that made-to-order clones, like herself, are used for something. They're not allowed to just simply live. The details past that are not so important to her. Something about a revolution, something about Komarr-- Nine listens to the tone rather than the content and it all washes over her. Miles is the only real thing to her in this place, the only one she feels really sees her when he looks at her. He becomes her lifeline, the reason she doesn't just lay down and refuse to get up again in her cage. Nine has even mostly stopped scratching at herself from frustration and boredom. She has something to actively think about now: what they'll do when they get out of here.

That, too, is not a daydream Nine believes has any hint of possibility behind it. It's just to give her something to wile away the hours with. Like thinking of what it would be like to have Miles touch her, in a way not combat related...

Seeing someone else touch him cruelly gets her hackles up in an instant. Nine is aware that this is the head of things around here, but that only matters to her as part of her cool assessment of the battlefield around them. She knows you should always cut off the head of the snake first, if it comes to that, and watching him do that to Miles has her snapped into combat mode as training Miles never truly had.

But it's not the pain he's in that spurs her to action. It's the fear. Nine has seen hints of that fear here and there, and now, now she knows the source.

Because she's not an animal, she gives a warning. She steps up closer to them, all eight bristling feet of her, and growls, low and guttural. "Let him go."

It's a different sort of feeling, being afraid for someone else instead of being afraid for yourself. This is strange to realize; he'd have thought that fear is fear, that there'd be no real discernible difference between the one type of terror and the other. But to be afraid for himself - that's a low, dull sort of dread, fear and anticipation mixed with resignation. It's a helpless feeling. To be afraid for Nine is a high nerve-jangling sort of thing, two-thirds terror and one-third anticipatory grief. Being afraid for himself tamps him down, pushes him down, crushes him into a miserable sort of passivity. Being afraid for her makes him jerk up, eyes wide, pushing forward against the grip on his arm.

"Don't, Nine. Please don't," he says to her. God, it's easy to imagine what comes next. Her shocked into unconsciousness. Them deciding she's not worth it. An investment, but not that important an investment - dumping her somewhere to die, dumping her amongst their enemies just to do a little bit of damage...Him losing her, his one anchor and source of sanity. And so he jerks forward, trying to pull away from Ser Galen to go to her, lifting a hand and shoving hard against the man to try to get to nine - for the first time, committing an act of aggression against the man who created him.

The reaction to that is almost casual and thoughtless. He didn't injure Ser Galen when he pushed him, so none of the Komarrans worry about that. It's not a real act of targeted aggression, so there's no ripple of fear about whether they've lost control of Miles. And it's not like they're hesitant about this - they've done it many, many times before. One of the others steps in and delivers a jolt from the shock-stick, near full power; Miles collapses to his knees, gasping in agony, limbs trembling from the electricity.

The fear is worse than the pain.

Nine, don't do anything. Please don't do anything. Just back off. Please don't give them a reason to kill you, please -

Nine has been shocked before, not an inconsiderable number of times herself. The psychological aggression experiments were always the ones she hated the most, because there was nothing to make it stop, no rhyme or reason to its application that she could see. Here, now, there is. She can stop this. And that very same familiarity with being shocked means that tactic is not nearly so effective on her.

Her pain tolerance is already substantial, and adrenaline tears through the rest. As she steps forward with bared teeth, hand raised, her collar goes off, but it barely slows her down. Nine's outstretched hand goes straight for Galen's neck, grabbing him and yanking him up into the air, the abrupt cutting off of his air making him drop Miles's arm and angrily flail against her. The contact transmits the electricity straight through her to her choking captive; his limbs jerk in the air.

It cuts off abruptly.

"Shock me again and I'll tear his throat out before it reaches him," she snarls. "The little clone is mine-- you can't hurt him." But even now, Nine is not a berserker; her gold eyes flash hot, but her words are flat as she goes on, "Miles. Take that weapon from him." Her mind is working at lightning speed, jolted from complacent and sloth-like in subdued apathy to vicious protectiveness. Three guards. That's no problem. Nine has killed fodder like them before in tests plenty of times-- and this one is already in her grasp.

It's Miles she's worried about. They can stop this right here if they think to use him against her.

Miles is paralyzed with fear when she grabs Galen. But perhaps the Komarrans' training works against them, because he learned long ago to just automatically follow orders, even when he's terrified. Or maybe under the cowardice there's some loyalty and bravery that moves him even as his conscious mind is numb with panic. He goes for the weapon -

And then one of them, Lars, moves, grabbing viciously for Miles. Apparently deciding (correctly) that Nine's loyalty will make her prize Miles' life over her revenge on or hatred for Galen. Miles acts automatically, heel flashing out in a kick that shatters his kneecap; when he goes howling to the ground, the other foot smashes into his face, breaking his nose,

Miles goes for the shock-stick again. The other two are too nervous and uncertain to try anything more.

"Come - come on." His half-formed, half-executed plan flashes through his mind. He turns jerkily towards the door, gestures towards it. "We have to get out of here." No. He decides a moment later to repeat that, edited - the terrified bleat of desperation turning instead into a bravura, "We're getting out of here." And then he leads the way. "Come on."

Nine is too focused to waste any time on relief, but she is relieved that he hasn't been totally rendered dead weight by panic. That knee-shattering kick is perfect. Nothing like unfaltering brutality to convince the rest to back off; it's half the principle behind her design.

She takes Galen with them, uncaring if he ends up passing out or getting brain damage or whatever other side effects are from choking someone too long. She fully intends to kill him before they make their escape in any case; Nine just needs to take her collateral with them for the moment.

"We need supplies first," she points out, eating up the ground with her long strides down the corridor out the door. "The access pass to a lightflyer at least. Think he has one?" She holds him up again, from where his legs had been banging along the ground.

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despite everything, I'm still human }

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