| (no subject) |
[Jan. 7th, 2008|11:39 pm] |
It's midmorning, December 26th. The day after Christmas. Known in some times and places as the Feast of Stephen.
Dressed again in her travel-stained Vor gown, Cordelia lingers awkwardly in the Davies living room. It's a strange leavetaking: she has nothing to pack, and almost nobody to say goodbye to.
Will should be here shortly. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jun. 9th, 2006|12:07 am] |
[After this.]
Cordelia's not sure how long it takes her to get the shaking under control, or at least tamped down to a trembling in her gut and a slight unsteadiness of the hands. Long enough that when she finally rises to start putting things away, the burned-down incense stick is cold to the touch.
Of course, that may just be from the preternaturally chill wind that put it out. |
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| (no subject) |
[Dec. 18th, 2005|10:46 pm] |
She hasn't been avoiding Milliways, exactly. Really she hasn't.
But with Aral's injury last month, she's been busier than usual. She's been handling her own work, along with as much of Aral's work as he'll let her do. Over half; and the fact that he hasn't fought harder to do more of it is truly frightening, if she lets herself think about it too long).
The call on her personal commconsole takes her by surprise. |
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 23rd, 2005|10:39 pm] |
They did not bring Aral to the hospital; the galatic medical technology available on Sergyar is so compact and portable that, as with the mystery plague last year, it was easier to bring the hospital to him. The unspoken assumption behind it is what hurts. His own bed might be better than unfamiliar surroundings, is what nobody says. The fall was trauma enough. Best to avoid unnecessary strain; after all, he's an old man.
The fall was trauma enough, and she finds the truth of that blackly comic. This man has survived so much worse, so many times; from the slaughter of his mother and brothers when he was eleven, through galactic wars, poisonings, and political skirmishes both figurative and literal, down to arterial aneurysm just a few years ago. Survived? Triumphed, frequently with completely inadequate resources beyond his own inner strength. And now he lies there, silent and terrifyingly weak, brought low by a misstep halfway down a flight of stairs.
The Viceroy's Residence now holds the best medical personnel and equipment on the planet ... and Aral still hasn't opened his eyes. |
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| (no subject) |
[Feb. 4th, 2005|08:13 am] |
| [ | mood |
| |  infuriated | ] |
*She comes walking briskly out of the access corridor, and stumbles and nearly falls as the Compulsion releases her.
Her wordless scream brings Aral awake and running, and a half-dozen servants and bodyguards on his heels. She's able to regain some sort of grip on herself for long enough to dismiss the others. Sleepwalking. Nightmares. No, thank you, no sedatives. No, I'm fine, thank you, sorry to have troubled you.
And back in the solitude of their bedroom she clings to Aral, clenching fists in his nightshirt, white and shaking and sobbing with rage.* |
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| After the Plague |
[Dec. 7th, 2004|12:47 am] |
Count Aral Vorkosigan, Viceroy of Sergyar, scanned the flimsy the aide handed him and set down his coffee mug with a deep and profound sigh of relief.
Across the breakfast table from him, curled into an armchair and nibbling at a spiced bread roll, Cordelia raised her eyebrows. "Are we well?"
"We seem to be. No reports of any cases of the disease making it off-planet."
"And the cure?"
"Eighty-nine point two seven percent success rate. So far no relapses."
Cordelia let out a long breath. "Good."
He leaned foward, and searched her eyes. "Are you well?"
She looked at her hands, pressed thumbs and forefingers together, and considered the question. "No."
"Cordelia, this was not your fault."
She raised an eyebrow at him. "It's hard to see how it could have been more my fault, Aral."
He shook his head. "Guilt doesn't become you."
"I'm not sure guilt is the right word. Consciousness of sin, perhaps."
"Sin, or error?" he countered immediately.
She considered that. "The two ... aren't mutually exclusive. An error in judgment, rather than an error against judgment. But a culpable error nonetheless. The fact is, my love, that I have been criminally stupid, and people have died for it."
His blunt-fingered hands flattened and tensed on the table, as though to push himself to his feet. "And you don't consider your actions in ending the plague a mitigating factor?"
"You know better than that." With a tiny sigh, she dropped her gaze to the half-eaten roll in her hands, plucked fretfully at a scrap of crust. "This could have been prevented entirely if I had taken even the most elementary precautions. The sort I would have taken on any new planetary survey as a matter of course. In retrospect I'm astonished this hasn't happened sooner, or more often."
"Dear Captain...." Aral hesitated, and when he spoke his tone was studiedly neutral. "Will you go back?"
She watched her fingers shredding the crust of her roll, making a careful heap of fragments on the plate balanced in her lap. "I don't know."
"It's not like you to abandon a puzzle unsolved."
"This is not like other puzzles. I'm beginning to feel that it doesn't want to be solved."
Aral raised his eyebrows. "It's very unlike you to anthropomorphize."
Cordelia gave him a wry look, and opened her mouth to respond. And then closed it as the aide stepped back into the room, looking at her with an odd blend of apology and curiosity.
"My lady Vicereine? There's a Will Stanton here asking to see you."
Aral's head snapped around. Cordelia came up straight in her chair with a jerk.
"Show him in. At once." |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 17th, 2004|10:28 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  bored | ] |
CALIBAN: Be not afeared. The isle is full of noises;
Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.
Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
Will hum about mine ears, and sometimes voices
That, if I then had wak'd after long sleep,
Will make me sleep again...
*The thought of sleeping again is much less enticing than it has been lately, and Shakespeare somehow less appealing than the thought of getting up and going home. Even though the attempt to make it out of the room, yesterday morning, left her shaking and sweating and just short of having to crawl back to the bed.
But she's feeling better now, she is. Really.
Cordelia sighs. In an hour or so, maybe, she'll see if she can manage going downstairs.
Enough time to finish reading The Tempest.* |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 16th, 2004|10:18 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  tired | ] |
*The sores are beginning to scab over, and the fever's stayed down for most of the day. And she is beginning to feel hungry, for the first time in more days than she can remember. Maybe when Peter comes back she'll ask for something more substantial than broth and juice.
She's found a copy of the Complete Works of Shakespeare in the bedside table's single drawer, and it's keeping her more-or-less-happily occupied during the periods when she's awake enough to be bored.
Home, soon. Very soon. Perhaps tomorrow.* |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 14th, 2004|10:18 pm] |
*They brought her a bowl of broth and some crackers earlier. She was unable to muster any enthusiasm, but she ate it, and it's stayed down.
The exhaustion's starting to fade, somewhat.
It's probably going to be more than three days.* |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 11th, 2004|10:24 pm] |
*She gazes at the ceiling.
There's a spiderweb in one corner. She's just awake enough to find it fascinating, trying to follow the vanishingly thin lines of silk through the pattern.
The aches and fatigue never vanished entirely, and they're slowly regaining their strength, but she's fairly sure the fever's still gone.
Three days, maybe. Enough time to make sure she's completely beaten the disease. Then home.
She wishes Aral were here.* |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 9th, 2004|10:49 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| |  sick | ] |
Red light slanting through the window. Voices, somewhere over her aching head. One of them Aral's.
"...how many deaths are we talking about?"
"Thirteen, my lord. Eight in the past day alone."
"And how many projected over the next week?"
A short silence.
"Hundreds, my lord."
"And how long before you can synthesize a cure?"
Frustration. "At least that long, to get antibodies from one of the surviving victims of the slower version of the illness. Unless someone with the wildfire version survives it, and the recovery period's as fast as the --"
A hiss, scaling downward in pain. "Unacceptable."
"My lord, you need rest --"
"Keep your voice down."
Darkness, and the voices fade, spiraling down the current of the fever-dreams. Then they're back, minutes or hours later.
"...no. Have to ... talk t' Gregor ... tell him ... quarantine --"
"You told him this morning." The second voice, the doctor's voice, is still soothing but underlain with worry. She can see the worry, in the fever; it's like a line of green smoke, curling around the words. "I can give you something to bring your fever down, my lord, but you have to sleep."
Minutes or hours, crawling past like newborn kittens, blind and mewling. Throbbing ache in her head, in her back, in every muscle she has. Sheets rasping against the raw patches of her skin. Heat, intolerable stifling heat, and she can't stop shivering. Aral thrashing at the blankets, Aral's hand groping for hers.
Hundreds of deaths projected over the next week.
It's dark (still? again?), and almost silent. Her legs tremble as she swings them to the floor and tries to put her weight on them, for the first time in ... however long it's been.
She is not yet well, and will not be for some days. The hot blurriness of fever is still there behind her eyes, and she still aches as though she's been beaten with mallets, and her stomach still rebels at the thought of food. But she can stand on the third try, and she can stumble out of the bedroom, leaning on the wall as she goes.
Hundreds of deaths. Unacceptable. We need more time.
The access hallway is close enough. |
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| (no subject) |
[Nov. 8th, 2004|12:24 am] |
| [ | mood |
| | irritated | ] |
*Two days now, and the headache won't go away.
Her back's been aching too, for the past few hours. Aral tried to give her a backrub, but it didn't help, and she finally snapped at him to stop. She's still feeling guilty about that.
She's been snappish a lot lately. Getting irritable in her old age, maybe. Or maybe it's just how tired she's been.
The access corridor is empty, and Cordelia figures she's due a break.* |
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| (no subject) |
[Oct. 9th, 2004|11:19 pm] |
*Cordelia paces the bedroom floor.
There's been no response yet from Miles. And it is still difficult to think of Milliways without thinking of Moiraine and Will, without that thought dissolving into a red-tinged how dared they.
Anything else, almost literally anything else, she could see clear to forgive. This, for some reason, is beyond her capacity. And because she has always coped with stress by becoming overly analytical, she has been attempting to determine why.
Perhaps she and Will should ... talk.* |
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 22nd, 2004|10:33 pm] |
Miles, love --
This may seem like an odd question, but
*Cordelia taps her fingers thoughtfully on the polished wood of the comconsole, eyeing the unfinished sentence. With a sigh, she deletes the line and starts again. For the fifth time.*
When you were about twenty, did you ever
*She makes a small disgusted noise and deletes the line without even attempting to finish it.
Is Miles even the one she should be asking? The boy she saw didn't look like Mark, but she isn't sure what Mark looked like at that age. And if there is a second clone, similarly body-sculpted to match Miles's height (horrible thought, that; Mark has enough identity issues as it is) then neither Miles nor Mark is likely to know of it.
Once phrased that way, the question has an obvious answer. Miles may or may not be the boy she saw, but asking him could be useful in another direction: he has the resources of Barrayar's Imperial Security at his disposal.
Bringing in ImpSec on the larger question hasn't occurred to her before, but it may be worth doing. Possibly the Betan information nets as well, at least the public ones -- though if need be, she may look into calling in a favor or two from someone with access to secured data. She even toys briefly with the idea of getting in touch with the Dendarii, who might be able to acquire information beyond even her considerable reach.
It's to be an all-out effort, then, if the first query fails to turn up results. It will have to be. This is no longer a harmless and intriguing diversion. Her son is involved.
One son or another.
Frowning at the screen, Cordelia taps out a brief message and addresses it to Lord Auditor Miles Vorkosigan, eyes-only:*
Miles, love --
What can you tell me about a place called Milliways? |
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| Waking up... |
[Aug. 8th, 2004|09:43 pm] |
*Cordelia raises her head from an unfamiliar pillow, awake abruptly between one breath and the next with no sense of transition.
Her hair falls across her face in a half-undone tangle of intricate twists. She pushes it aside, wincing at the stiffness of her neck and back, and wonders for a blurred moment where Aral is and why she fell asleep in her clothes last night.
Last night.
Oh dear.
She stretches out a hand and examines it. Hers, her hand. It's a little absurd to be so gratified by such a small thing, but there is a bubble of joy at the bottom of her throat that refuses to be waved away. She rolls over and swings her legs over the edge of the bed (her own legs, stiffer than the legs she had use of last night but still athletic and flexible, even at her age), twitches her skirts out of the way in an unthinking automatic gesture, and pads barefoot over to the room's mirror to try and unravel what remains of last night's elaborate coiffure.
The kinesthetic memory of last night is ... odd. It's been nearly half a century since Cordelia was last a teenager, and though transgender operations are common enough on her birthworld of Beta Colony, she's never been a boy before. To the best of her recollection, it is not so very different from being a girl at that age ... with a few obvious exceptions, of course. Say what he might about the other side of his nature, Will is -- physically, at least -- a normal adolescent male in every respect.
She pauses, fingers still in her hair, and glances at the pale underside of her left forearm. Will has a scar there, she saw last night; like an old burn. Or no, more like a brand, as its shape was sharply defined: a smooth circle, quartered by a cross. Had the Masters he'd mentioned once, the Old Ones who had claimed him at the age of eleven, scarred him so? An initiation of some kind, to mark him as one of them?
Cordelia tugs at her hair, and manages at last to undo the last snarled strands. The roan-red length of it ripples down her back, streaked liberally with silver. Sighing, she gathers it in two hands and coils it back up into a plain bun, securing it with a long pin. She brushes futilely at the wrinkles of her slept-in sleeveless gown, then casts about the small room for her bolero jacket and shoes.
There. She can be back to her home and her husband now, and Will can be back to his unending Duty. Perhaps he has already gone.
Duty. By destiny and birthright and choice, he had said, or words to that effect; and in the words she had felt echoes of the crushing pressures of Barrayar, closing around her son before he was even born.
How much like Barrayar are these Old Ones, these Masters of the Light that Will serves? How much like Barrayar that eats its children?
Cordelia shrugs into her jacket, steps into her shoes, dismisses the aching thoughts as much as possible, and heads downstairs to the bar.* |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 22nd, 2004|11:50 pm] |
[OOC: Pre-Milliways...]
It's been years - decades, actually - since Cordelia was a Betan Astronomical Survey Captain, but she's fairly certain her skills haven't deteriorated that badly.
There's no getting around it, though: the console cannot be persuaded to identify the starfield visible from Milliways as anywhere in the known universe.
Cordelia is aware that she's been stubbornly resisting the obvious conclusion for some time now. The awareness will make it easier to accept the conclusion eventually, but for now it has the unwanted side effect of making her feel just a little petulant and foolish.
Which makes that odd hallway - she's already started thinking of it as the access hallway - just that little bit more attractive. You know you won't let me alone until you've figured me out, it whispers; and if you're going to accept my nature sooner or later, it may as well be sooner.
Well, and so. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 21st, 2004|01:50 am] |
In an innocuous-looking hallway in the Viceroy's Residence on Sergyar, just off the master bedroom, Cordelia stumbles out of thin air and puts up a hand to catch herself on the wall. She blinks in the dimness for a moment, then moves down the hallway as silently as she can.
She peers into the bedroom. Aral is still there, still asleep; and according to the wall chrono, her entire experience in the place called Milliway's lasted approximately two seconds.
Which is impossible, on the face of it. But not really much more impossible than having gotten there in the first place.
Frowning to herself, more in puzzlement than in bad temper, Cordelia moves off down the hall again.
And vanishes. |
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