nysalogs | [open] channeling angels in a new age, now.

I don't know, I think I'd rewind a little, if I could. [As much as he tries to keep anything too sorrowful from his voice, there's something not entirely steady to it, for a moment.] But as a friend told me, not long before we were swept into the storm - the world only spins forward. If it spins here at all, of course. We could be a disc balancing on a pole for all I know. Still.

[He lifts his eyes to Byerly's, whatever was there before pulled back.]

Still. If I ever do find myself missing my younger years, all those hormones and constant emotional tumult raging just beneath the surface of my skin, I have some neat little orange pills that induce a frighteningly similar effect.

Heavens. Please tell me they give you something else, as well. I can't possibly imagine wanting to take one of those pills if that's all you got from them.

[ He lifts his hand to stroke a lock of hair out of Prior's eyes. A little meditatively: ]

I'll admit...I do miss the excitement of it, sometimes. Being young. There's a singular pleasure in finding things out for the first time. [ A little wistfully: ] It would be thrilling to be here if the circumstances were different.

[ Earlier that evening, of course, he was feigning indifference to the death of his world - but this is Prior. Prior gets fewer lies. ]

Oh they all do something. Nothing pretty enough to talk about.

[Blinking under Byerly's careful touch, he half-smiles]

Visitors rather than refugees? There is something about a lack of choice in the matter that makes even the most fabulous of adventures galling. And this is far from fabulous. Though you aren't so old yet, cherie.

[He pushes himself up on an elbow, hair sweeping merrily back into his eyes - not low enough to hide a wicked glint]

Are you? I'm sure you can't be older than say.. forty-five?

[ Byerly's lips twitch in genuine annoyance. Careful, Prior. ]

I'm not going to dignify that with a response.

You're a very well preserved fifty. [Don't pout, come now. It's more than plain he's teasing.] Well, you will be, how's that? I for one have always enjoyed the prospect of growing old disgracefully. A stately homo. Don't you think I'd be beautiful in silver?

[ The response is automatic: ]

You'd be beautiful in any color, dear Prior.

[ Then, returning to the previous point: ]

And it is less the matter of choice. It's more the matter of...thinking about what happened.

Well. [The smile dims.] Rather implied by refugee, don't you think?

[And he pauses.]

I keep thinking we'll go back. This will all be over - a strange dream - and things will be as they were. Or healed somehow, renewed. If I let myself dwell on it I'll feel almost sure one moment, and despair of it the next.

Mm. I don't.

[ A small shrug. ]

But Barrayarans are pessimists by nature. We're just also pessimists with a deep contrary streak. Keeps us fighting on. What about you Terrans?

We're hardly a homogenous mass, your progenitors. [You terrans, indeed. Prior's learning the lingo by now.] And neither are you, I suspect. But in my circle? ...A positive realist, a pessimistic idealist - they're the most hopeless of people, all that dreaming, never getting anything done and. Hm.

[He stops, turning his hand over, glancing at his poor chipped nails.]

I'm not certain what I am, anymore.

Anymore?

[ He lifts an eyebrow. ]

Well, what were you before, the last time when you were sure of yourself?

Oh... [It still takes thought, not something he's summed up before.] Stubborn. And... hopeful.

[He's a melodramatic optimist. Terminally.]

The problem with hope is one can end up so terribly let down.

Too true. That's the reason I always make a habit of abstaining from it.

Mm. Or you could be pessimistic and call it a contrary streak.

[Just saying. He's no mary sunshine after all: the world is bleak and brutal but things survive there. That's his optimism. And that's on shakier ground than it was.

He shrugs, closing his eyes, his face turned upward.]

Even beaten down so often that it grows wary of raising its head, it seems it doesn't die easily.

Well, that's the nature of life, isn't it?

[ He gives a little shrug. ]

The stubborn survive. Live to pass on their genes. On Barrayar we joke - joked - that that's why we were all so cursedly ornery. All our milder predecessors were killed off by the Time of Isolation. So hope, too - it's a stubborn thing itself. So it can pass itself along.

Hm.

[Prior doesn't see the shrug - he's tired and his eyes are reluctant to drag themselves open again. But he smiles. Byerly. There's hope for - and in - you yet.]

When I die, the only genes I'll be passing on will be a pair of Gloria Vanderbilts. Indigo blue denim with pink stitching: tight as a latex glove. I like to think some twink with a tiny ass will pick them up in a thrift store and regain his joie de vivre. Anyway.

[He turns his head just enough that his words are muffled by a verdant shoulder.]

Until then: Barrayar. I like these little glimpses, you bring the place to life. So I'll hold onto that for you.

[ Byerly lets loose a little laugh at the joke. Still, there's a little bit of melancholy in the way he toys with Prior's hair. ]

I wish I could. [ Bring it to life. My poor homeland. ] But yes, hold her in your heart. Prince Prior. She's your inheritance. If I disappear or return to sleep, you'll have to be the one to defend her.

You do. I don't know about all that you'll live on in our hearts crap, but in the mind? That's different. Stories are important, ask thirty-three prior Walters. So if I'm living? The little pieces you tell me do too. I do believe that, sentimental as it may be.

[As long as he can close his eyes and hear the roar of midtown traffic, it can't quite be gone.]

...But don't you goddamn dare go back to sleep. I'll come up there and drain you.

And here you say you're not a vampire. That's a vampiric-sounding threat if I've ever heard one.

[ He hesitates a moment, just a little uncertain in spite of the joking. ]

So what should I do, then? Spread stories? Tell everyone who'll listen about Barrayar? [ With the slightest little pause, he confesses - ] I am oath-bound to defend her, but I fear I don't entirely know how to fulfill my oaths in these circumstances.

[That's new, worth cracking an eye open for.]

Who was the oath to?

[ It is new information. Deliberately, if a little warily, given. ]

My Emperor.

[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.

Softly.]

Were you a soldier?

[ Byerly answers him with a soft laugh. Not humorless, but not exactly amused, either. Just quietly thoughtful. ]

Why do you ask that in the past tense, dear fellow? Were you. Do oaths end? [ Then: ] No. Not a soldier. Or at least not a regular one.

[ A moment. ]

Are you trying to...get people to feel sympathy for them? The people you know? Is that why you tell stories? It's canny, if so.

I fear you'll be sadly disappointed in my lack of guile. No, I mean that I tell stories that are important to me to people who are just as important. Perhaps part of it is the art of picking true guardians, but it's more that they're who I want to know me best.

[Whatever drowsiness was tugging him down into the pillow has been displaced now. He pushes himself up further.]

As for oaths, we have entire legal processes dedicated to dismantling them. What does an irregular soldier do?

Haven't I been transparent enough about my skill set already?

[ Why's he telling Prior? He's not getting anything in return. No extra information, no revelations of his own. This is sharing with no advantage. Maybe it's because he knows that Prior can find out anyway, with his odd little powers. Controlling the flow of information. Maybe - maybe it's because the building of trust is advantageous in some way. Or - Oh, hell, he doesn't know. It just feels right. ]

I listen and I report. [ So that there can be no ambiguity: ] I work as a high-level surveillance operative in the employ of Imperial Security. [ And, a little quietly: ] It was our job to see this coming. This...storm. And we didn't.

[ Perhaps that's why. Because that's a secret agony that's eating him from the inside out. And he hasn't been able to voice it to anyone. ]

The skill set you've been so transparent about - [A little murder - not ambiguous at all.] did I miss where that included weather forecaster? A galaxy of planets didn't see this coming. No one did.

[Except.

The fabric of the sky unravels. Before life on Earth becomes finally merely impossible, it will for a long time before have become completely unbearable.

Prior rests a hand, palm flat against Byerly's chest.]

What could you have done, if you'd known?

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