Barrayar

Give me your address here if you'd like a holiday card. I can't really afford to get many gifts this year but I can at least give out cards!

Alternately, you may request: tea, lotion, or a knitted washcloth or hot drink sleeve. No guarantees you will get the thing but I can try.

Comments are screened obv.

A lot can happen to a legend over a period of almost a thousand years of isolation. Although the original settlers of Barrayar were Earth-born scientists-- leading even modern day Barrayarans to consider themselves atheists-- people are still people, and over time, the medieval level of technology they had been plunged into after the wormhole collapse had fostered superstitions. Old folk legends brought from Earth took on a life of their own, and warped.

It takes a while for Barrayarans to start being a presence around the Nexus even after contact is reestablished. They spent the first twenty years in a bloody, gruesome, guerrilla war, after all, and then lurching forward in tech development, using the scraps left behind by Cetaganda after they'd pulled out to launch themselves into space. This means it's not really until around the time of Gregor's father's generation that Barrayarans can be casually seen on space stations and other planets. Infrequently, and always out of place in their old-fashioned military uniforms or full skirts, but increasingly common if not accepted. Most of the city dwellers, probably, are not so prone to buying into superstition, but carrying death-charms around their necks was still fairly standard practice for servicemen and gone unquestioned.

The first time Jack probably notices anything different about the Barrayarans is when one of the country-bred ones looks directly at him on a space station somewhere and shrieks, leaping backward, clutching their chest where the death-charm is. This sets a trend: not often, but occasionally, a Barrayaran will see or hear him, and react dramatically. They are never very cooperative for interacting, though, and certainly not in public where they're trying to combat a galactic reputation of being backwater barbarians barely accustomed to indoor plumbing. (This is unfair; they've had indoor plumbing for a whole generation now.)

As for Gregor, he was one of very few Barrayarans raised by a scientist who is also a theist, and encouraged by her to think openly and freely about the universe around him. He also is prone to trying to make friends with his servants, feeling weird about living in the sprawling Residence with them while having them be quietly underfoot, and as a hungry teenager is similarly likely to sneak into the kitchens for snacks. His servants indulge him at this age, for the most part; and so he'd grown up listening to a good amount of these country stories, and had questions about the supernatural patiently and thoroughly answered by his foster-mother, who always maintained a position of informed skepticism but not certainty.

Regularly he can be found reading outside in the Imperial Gardens, a sweeping expanse of manicured land maintained as green rather than the native reddish-brown of Barrayar by painstaking effort. Gregor's favorite places to read are all off the pruned pathways and out away from easy eyesight, curled up against trees, sometimes doing his studying for classes and sometimes reading books of poetry, guiltily, and sometimes doing neither and wistfully daydreaming. Today is a daydreaming sort of day; he's a lanky, tall form not quite used to his height dressed in overly-expensive hand-tailored clothes, which he is getting dirty on the ground not out of carelessness but simply because he needs to do some things to keep himself sane.

Oh, God. Did he really just say yes to that? Gregor thinks, sardonically, that he imagines Captain Mustang is thinking much the same thing, with perhaps a bit more daze behind it.

But something had just come over him, watching someone who he knows for a fact-- thank you, ImpSec-- does not deserve the suspicion or jeers being laid at his feet, and Gregor, for all his passive non-interference, does have a protective streak a mile wide that has been inculcated in him through a lifetime of expectation as emperor. And one of their oldest and most loyal Komarran agents, whose file is a novel of horrific ill treatment, deserves better. Not to mention, Colonel Vorinnis irritates Gregor on a regular basis with no just cause to retaliate-- the Emperor is allowed few luxuries toward pettiness that way-- but this is one method no one can refute.

So it had just slipped out, a cool, composed, Please allow me the privilege of accepting, one of the more flattered ways of responding to a covert proposal for all that hadn't matched his tone. The blank look on Vorinnis's face had been extremely satisfying-- and for Gregor, the guilty, anticipatory curl in his stomach had set up and not gone away at seeing Mustang's face. He wants to think surely he wouldn't offer if he didn't want him to accept, but wanting him to accept in order to escape his situation is not at all the same thing as wanting him to accept because he wants him, and that shade of distinction leaves an unpleasant bitterness in his mouth that has always motivated Gregor to refuse before. To the point that he's not altogether sure Mustang was prepared for even the possibility of acceptance.

He had backed off, merely made eye contact and nodded once, subtly, a promise for later, and let the rest of the social occasion run its course in a sort of self-castigating, conflicted haze. But... if it did work, if it were genuine, in the hypothetical-- unlikely as that is-- Gregor would like having someone to take care of, someone he could let down some of his masks around and sink himself into in a rather less than physical sort of way.

Mercifully, there is not much of the evening left, and Gregor departs with only a quiet word to one of his Armsmen to escort Captain Mustang to his quarters-- the front room of his suite, specifically, the sitting room-- and to tell him he will be with him shortly. The Emperor's private quarters are not rooms anyone else is ever privy to but his Armsmen; Gregor is ferociously protective of his privacy, and so sexless as to be infamous for it among his court members. But upon arrival they are not anything remarkable, the front sitting room a comfortable, lived in sort of place, with an old-fashioned wood desk in the corner, a mix of incongruous paper books and plastic flimsies set around the console. Everything is shockingly well made, of course, but also... subdued. Lacking personality, due simply to Gregor rarely being there.

He feels badly to make Mustang wait, but he needs to sort out a couple things about his schedule, inform Alys Vorpatril of this social move (with a message rather than a conversation he decides without a shred of pity for her), and most importantly, gear himself up for the oncoming conversation.

What, exactly, is he going to do?