[ Impossible. Byerly knows what it's like to be a victim. He'd spent half his summers with Richars kneeling on his chest and pressing the breath out of him or chasing him through the woods just to watch him stumble. His father - hard-eyed, stony-faced, sarcastic - he's not a victim. He -
He was a child once, too. He wasn't born like this.
By pulls back just a bit, an anxious odd feeling churning in his gut. ]
The things they said about Ges - That was slander. I know. They've said the exact same things about me.
[ Said, too, things about how - how much Byerly looked like Ges. You could be my brother's twin, Count Oleg had said - and he wasn't just talking about appearances, because Byerly had also heard so often how his character was just like his late uncle's. The same dry, mocking senses of humor. The same libertine spirit. Drinking, gambling, cutting class - screwing, and screwing men - society hated them both in the same way. Ges went and got respectable enough to get promoted up the ranks, By followed a more clandestine path of serving the Imperium, but otherwise, their biographies were impossibly alike.
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[ Impossible. Byerly knows what it's like to be a victim. He'd spent half his summers with Richars kneeling on his chest and pressing the breath out of him or chasing him through the woods just to watch him stumble. His father - hard-eyed, stony-faced, sarcastic - he's not a victim. He -
He was a child once, too. He wasn't born like this.
By pulls back just a bit, an anxious odd feeling churning in his gut. ]
The things they said about Ges - That was slander. I know. They've said the exact same things about me.
[ Said, too, things about how - how much Byerly looked like Ges. You could be my brother's twin, Count Oleg had said - and he wasn't just talking about appearances, because Byerly had also heard so often how his character was just like his late uncle's. The same dry, mocking senses of humor. The same libertine spirit. Drinking, gambling, cutting class - screwing, and screwing men - society hated them both in the same way. Ges went and got respectable enough to get promoted up the ranks, By followed a more clandestine path of serving the Imperium, but otherwise, their biographies were impossibly alike.
By knew that. That was just fact. ]