Meaning - he agrees with her. Meaning he agrees with her. Mark's eyes remain fixed, unblinking, on that stern face, the face that looks so much like his own in the mirror. That looks so much like his own on the holovids he has to study and imitate. Is he joking? Is this some deadpan joke? No. He doesn't know enough about Aral Vorkosigan - he'd been sent out on that mission undereducated, underprepared, Galen made too eager by too ripe an opportunity, obviously a trap from the very first, why didn't they see that - thank God they didn't see that - but Aral Vorkosigan doesn't joke like that. Black, dire irony is Vorkosigan's humor of choice. Not pranks.

A confused, desperate laugh bubbles up from his throat and gets released into the air. It's followed in the next moment by a sudden, shocking swell of tears, filling his eyes; that finally prompts him to turn his head away, squeezing his eyes shut to try to hide them. Shit. Shit.

I'm no one's son. I don't have a family. I'm just a clone, damn it. My mother was a uterine replicator, not the Butcher's wife. My father was that massacre itself, the hatred it created, which echoed down to make me. I'm not a human, I'm a little monster, a deformed gnome, why would anyone want to claim me...

"She wouldn't - " His voice is shaking. He clears his throat, tries again. "She wouldn't be all soppy or anything, right?" He tries to sound tough and confident, contemptuous of women's weakness, maternal feeling. He does a piss-poor job of it. "I don't want her to end up crying at me or something."