[It's not as if he hasn't known that Byerly paints one image of himself over the outlines of something quite different. He's just been willing to take that duality as enough truth for now - never tried to push too far beyond the sketch of feckless dissolution to exactly what it masks.
There's something so startlingly earnest about an oath.
Prior thinks, unbidden, of Louis, and his love for their flawed, fucked up and - in his belief - ultimately fixable fatherland. Maybe Louis' own vision of his country was never really America at all but some idealized possibility. And it wouldn't count, would it, if telling anyone who'd listen meant they got the same version of Barrayar as they do of Byerly.]
I tell people I care about. The stories that mean something to me. So I know they'll be taken care of in return.
[It does mean you have to care about people. Perhaps a fatal flaw.
no subject
There's something so startlingly earnest about an oath.
Prior thinks, unbidden, of Louis, and his love for their flawed, fucked up and - in his belief - ultimately fixable fatherland. Maybe Louis' own vision of his country was never really America at all but some idealized possibility. And it wouldn't count, would it, if telling anyone who'd listen meant they got the same version of Barrayar as they do of Byerly.]
I tell people I care about. The stories that mean something to me. So I know they'll be taken care of in return.
[It does mean you have to care about people. Perhaps a fatal flaw.
Softly.]
Were you a soldier?