#droushnakovi

Fighting, now fighting could hold his attention for a brief moment. After she put a man in a beautiful chokehold at the Vorkosigan guardsmen’s home tournament, she could have sworn that his eyes on her were different, wide and wild. At least until he remembered himself, and took to his new post as referee with a vengeance, ruling against her over and over until the Lady Cordelia had to let her step in. Hearing the distaste, the dismissal in his voice, she was almost glad to go up against Bothari and get thrown soundly from the ring.

That is how it went on, unless he forgot for a moment, when she surprised him with some piece of miltech knowledge, or he got too carried away explaining whatever he figured out about ImpSec’s internal conflicts about which private letters to open and which to keep hidden even from their own lower ranks. Those times, he seemed to be more alive, for a moment, more real. She loved the boyish enthusiasm of his rare smiles, the way he nodded when he listened to her, the way he would strike his swordstick against the floor to drive home a point. And then there came the night he was jumped while he was out at the caravanserai with Bothari (whyever was he out at night in the caravanserai with Bothari), and when he came back from the hospital, almost a month later, he seemed worse off. He was pale, and stiff, and cold, cold, cold. Not just cold to her, although that hurt worst, but somehow cold in general, like life just drained out of him somehow.

When she got up in the middle of the night for a snack, and ran into him, still awake and sitting ghostlike in the darkened library, she knew she had to talk to him. She was standing there barefoot, in her nightgown, with her hair down, and she knew how improper that was, but also knew that she could not possibly leave him alone. They talked about unimportant things just for the sake of talking, about the palace kitchens and the officers’ mess, about the emperor’s taste in confectionary and about whoever even tailored his child-size military uniforms, and then suddenly they were kissing, warm and wet and exciting and just as suddenly, he was on top of her, inside her, and it didn’t even occur her to say no. She knew that she could have, that she should have, she knew that he had made her no promises and maybe she was throwing herself away for nothing, she knew that while the house may have been asleep, the room wasn’t locked. She knew that it hurt. But she also knew that she had to do this, had to put her arms around him tight as she could and let him, because he needed this and she needed to give this to him, no, she wanted to give this to him, and the pain was nothing, she played contact sports after all, and it started letting up too, the sharp edge of it turning into a sweet glowing ember of heat, but before she could stoke that fire he gasped and it was over. And before she could get her bearings and catch her breath and muster up the courage to ask him what it all meant, she heard the sound of shattered glass.

They caught the assassin. They caught the assassin too late, after he had already hurt the Lord and Lady, but she did drag the little fool of a Vor to justice, even if she had to do it in her nightgown, with blood and all dripping down her leg. The whole house saw her like that, and that none of them remarked on it, that maybe none of them even noticed, was a sign of how the attack terrified all of them.

She did not have time for regrets that night. Those came in the morning when she was finally allowed to take time off and shower, then later in the day when she first saw Kou all but fall over himself to get out of the room and avoid talking to her, then three days in with the realization that she could possibly be pregnant with no husband, no ring, no promise, from a man who would not give her the courtesy of looking at her, a courtesy that men gave even to concubines. She was sick at the thought of being with child, and relieved but lost to find out she wasn’t, and outrageously angry to realize he paid her so little attention he thought he had forced her, and just when she thought it couldn’t get any worse, the coup happened. Drou found herself blocked from her work as a bodyguard, sick with worry over both her previous and her present charges, locked up and interrogated about treason she didn’t commit, and finally dosed with fast-penta and telling Illyan things she definitely didn’t want him to know, and some things she didn’t even want to know about herself.

Afterwards, when she met Kou again, drawn and tired and looking as worried as she was, all he asked her was if she could operate the recon lightflyers at the base, and all she said was yes, given a navigator. They sped off towards the pick-up point to find their Lady Cordelia. Forty minutes into the tense nighttime flight, he apologized again. He sounded truly sorry, even if he didn’t sound sure what he was sorry for, and so she accepted.

*

Mornings she worked as a parlourmaid, fetching and carrying Princess Kareen’s shoes and hats and address books, all the while learning palace poise and etiquette. Afternoons, she trained with ImpSec, learning security protocols and countersurveillance techniques and even more hand-to-hand combat. Negri had her fight men twice her size, men she had no hope of beating, until she no longer even wanted to win, and understood a bodyguard’s prerogative: stall the intruder until the alarm is raised. In the evening, she was quizzed and questioned, on fast-penta and off of it, until the emperor was sure of her loyalty, and her real training could begin. She memorized things that were never printed or even said out loud, maps that Ezar sketched by hand on a piece of paper then burned immediately. She was let on in family secrets that nobody knew about, and warned about family secrets that even she was not allowed to know. And when all that was done – although it was never done, Ezar summoned her once a forthnight to read and memorize increasingly complex new contingency scenarios, escape routes for coups, for uprisings, for natural disasters – when it was close to done, she was finally promoted to the princess’s formal security detail.

The years that followed were hard, and hard to speak of. She got used to a daily routine of complicated clothing and meaningless pleasantries and endless, repetitive safety precautions. She got used to the mind-numbing boredom, she stood to attention while Vor ladies talked about absolutely nothing for hours, she served tea and biscuits while they dropped sly insinuations about the princess’s demeanour or her husband’s manifold affairs, she held still and smiled with a tight grip on the stunner held behind her back, waiting for yet another military bigwig to step away from the little imperial heir already, to stop crowding him before she had to step in. And worst of all, she got used to the aching, unfair knowledge that her judo skills and her security clearances were completely useless against the worst danger her charge was facing: she couldn’t protect Kareen from her husband. She did her best: she stayed near her, serving as witness and deterrent until the princess herself ordered her to leave, she made sure to always be on hand when called, and to make her nearness known to the prince as well. But mostly, she did what Kareen had ordered her to do the first time they talked about why she was hired. She looked out for Gregor. She prioritized his safety, she tried to shield him when Serg was around, and promptly spirited him away to the other side of the palace when Ges Vorruyter came to visit. She tried to distract him from what was going on around him, singing him songs, listening to the stories he made up, and taking him on a secret tour of the palace kitchen that one time Kareen gave her the desperate, whispered order that he was not to be near the imperial residence for the next few hours.