yet more Vorkosigan saga fic ...

[a_t_rain]

... on the general theme of Vorrutyers Being Performative, because apparently that is all that I want to write in this universe.

Missing scene from toward the beginning of A Civil Campaign, in which Byerly goes to work on Richars. Gen, but contains Richars, and hence, discussion of sexual-violence-related ickiness.



... And Cry “Content” to That Which Grieves My Heart

Dono had bet him two hundred marks it couldn’t be done; but Dono didn’t know he was getting professional services at an amateur price. One of ImpSec’s rules was no white-knighting, a vague term that encompassed a multitude of sins, most of which Byerly seemed to be guilty of most of the time. But as this was a private, family affair, ImpSec’s rules didn’t apply, and he was looking forward to having full scope to play the game his way. What he was planning was more like dark-knighting, anyway.

He’d been shadowing Richars on and off for a while, wearing sunglasses and jogging shorts; one of the benefits of cultivating a vivid public persona was that nobody noticed you when you weren’t playing yourself, particularly if your public-self definitely didn’t jog. His cousin, having been pre-empted in his plans to move into Vorrutyer House, had rented a flat in a neighborhood that was probably beyond his present means, although, of course, Richars thought he’d be Count Vorrutyer before the bills came due. By now Byerly had a fairly good sense of his routine, which included nothing so plebeian as work, although he did spend a fair amount of time socializing with members of the Conservative voting bloc and their associates. His afternoon and evening locations weren’t very predictable. Morning, alas, would be the best time to catch him en famille.

Byerly knocked at the door, and, when Richars unwisely opened it without looking to see who it was, wedged his foot in the doorway and then oozed the rest of his body in around it. It was a trick which he’d picked up, oddly enough, from his cat.

Getting a foot in the door, literally, was the easy part. The next few minutes would be much trickier; he would have to start off playing the annoying-and-disreputable-but-harmless relative, and then, by degrees, transforming himself into the Potentially Useful Relative. Richars, of course, would have to be the one to see the potential for usefulness. You always let them think it was their idea.

“What are you doing here?”

Richars was looking at him in annoyance but not outright suspicion. Good, By thought, he doesn’t remember what he did to me. Judged by military-prep-school standards, most of it had been within the normal range of bullying – just relentless, inflicted on a much smaller and younger child, and tinged with a psychological subtlety that had forced Byerly to develop subtleties of his own. Hmm. Perhaps it made more sense to think in terms of what Richars had done for him. Yes, he thought he preferred that way of looking at it.

“Oh, nothing much. I heard you were in town, so I thought I’d pay a friendly social call.”

“Like hell it is. I’ve been warned about you, people say you always want something.” (Naturally, he had taken care to make sure Richars had been warned about him. People who always wanted things were people who could be used.) “So what is it that you want from me?”

“Coffee would be nice, for a start.”

Richars did not seem inclined to oblige, but his wife, who looked about as haggard and long-suffering as one would expect Richars’s wife to look, said, “I’ll go and make some.” Excellent. At least five minutes to brew, and another fifteen or so to sit around sipping at it. He’d gotten full confessions out of people in less time, although it helped if they were drinking something stronger than coffee.

He looked around the apartment, taking in the smeared, child-sized fingerprints on the coffee table and the rather shoddy workmanship beneath the shiny veneer. Two could play at the game of dealing with people who want things, and there were a lot of potential wants here. The place spoke eloquently of too many children, not enough money, no servants, and a great deal of quiet desperation. Unfortunately, the wife was likely to be more desperate than the husband, and he had no particular quarrel with Richars’s wife. He asked after the children and the District, gauging how best to ingratiate himself. Richars’s answers suggested no very deep affection for either.

“Did Donna send you?” Richars was finally awakening to some belated suspicions.

Donna, not Dono. It appeared that Richars had not yet accepted certain ... facts. Very well, the quickest way in was also not to accept those facts.

“No, I haven’t seen much of Donna lately, although I shall be interested to observe the results of her little ... masquerade.” (A half-smirk: knowing, ironic; direct eye contact with Richars. People trusted eye contact, which was almost always a mistake.)

“You always used to be such good friends.”

“Oh yes, I’m very fond of Donna, but the fact remains that you’re going to be the Count. And a man who has just come into possession of a Countship is always in want of new friends. It’s one of those truths universally acknowledged.” (Jane Austen’s novels had been required reading for ImpSec’s Social Nuance course – all ten of them. It had been a task that Byerly had begun in the anticipation of tedium and had ended in considerable appreciation, although Persuasion and Imperium and Impetuosity had been a bit dry.)

“I’m not in possession yet. Did you hear what that bitch did with the town house?”

“I heard. You will be, though. The most she can do is put up a temporary roadblock. Rather a nuisance, but ultimately ... ineffectual. I really don’t think this is a game she can win.” (A little emphasis on I really don’t think; just enough to make Richars wonder, subconsciously, why By had needed to add a qualifier. And a tiny upturn at the end of the sentence, not-quite-questioning.)

“How’d she even know when the guards were going to show up? The Lord Guardian’s undersecretary was right there to meet them with a counter-order, like someone had tipped him off.”

Time to drop in a bit of gossip. Gossip about their cousin’s personal life, under the circumstances, was bait. “Ah. It seems that our Donna used to be very ... friendly with one of the municipal guard officers. Not a bad-looking fellow for a prole, by all accounts ...” (plebe might have been better, but he didn’t much like using that word, even in character) “... and since she was getting a bit long in the tooth, she couldn’t afford to be choosy. Oh, and apparently he’s a married man. Wife’s expecting, and you know how ... lumpy they get just before a body-birth.” Byerly shuddered fastidiously, and then sniggered. “I don’t imagine he’s going to be too happy about her little ... switch. Would have loved to see his face when she came back!”

Richars looked slightly disgusted at this speech, and By began to think he might have laid it on a bit too thick. Damn it all, one didn’t expect Richars to react the way a decent person would. But all that he said was, “You know him?”

“Ah, no. Just heard about it from Donna. Plus a few details from other sources which shall remain nameless.”

“Did anybody say what the guardsman’s name was?”

Yes! Hooked!

“Don’t know. I’ll have to ask Donna about that.” Byerly made a mental note to ask his contact in the municipal guard for the name of a suitable colleague, preferably married, who had recently put in for an off-world holiday. Good looks and a pregnant wife weren’t required, since Richars wouldn’t be catching up with the couple.

“Would she tell you?” Richars asked, a little too eagerly.

“Oh yes. Donna trusts me. Not quite enough to tell me beforehand about her little trip to Beta, mind, but ... in most things.” (A touch of jilted-friend pique, just catty enough to suggest it might be kindled into a deeper resentment.)

“Donna’s a deep one,” said Richars. “I’m not sure she absolutely trusts anybody.”

Perfect: now Richars thought he was the one doing the manipulation. Time to self-efface, bit by bit: react, agree, listen. “I’m starting to think you might be right.”

“What’s she got against me, anyhow?”

Oh holy hell. He doesn’t remember what he did to Donna.

Byerly had been rather enjoying himself, with the enjoyment of an artist who usually worked on commission and had suddenly been handed unlimited scope for creativity, but this game had abruptly become less fun. He adopted an utterly blank expression, and shrugged. “Oh, you know. Women. Not always the most reasonable creatures.”

“I wouldn’t think you’d know much about that,” said Richars.

Belatedly, he realized his hands had locked up, the way they did when people disgusted him. Thanks to an overactive imagination and considerable acting abilities, he’d been top in the class in disinformation training, but Captain Lenahan had docked him a few points for having overly expressive hands, and then taught him a variety of useful gestures that could conceal any lingering tension about the fingers. They were mostly of the grand, swishy, limp-wristed variety, and he trotted a few of them out now. “There’s where you’re wrong. I am a man of varied tastes and experiences, coz.”

He was most certainly going to need a shower after this. Too bad he couldn’t bill ImpSec. (He had argued, years ago, that one really needed a shower after dealing with certain crowds of people, and that he ought to be able to claim it as overtime. McSorley, his handler, had been in a tolerant mood after the Vorchandler case, and had granted the request. A week later, By had received a terse message informing him that normal people didn’t take forty-five-minute showers, to which he’d dashed off a reply to the effect that if ImpSec could find a normal person who was as good at the job as By was, they were welcome to hire him. Whereupon McSorley, damn him, had sent an even terser message indicating that he’d just forwarded the whole exchange to Simon Illyan, and for several terrifying minutes Byerly had believed it.)

“What are you smirking at?”

“Guess.”

“You’re thinking ... we might be useful to each other,” said Richars.

“Useful? In what way?”

“You know a lot about Donna. She talks to you. She wouldn’t ever talk to me. If you ... went on being yourself, and you did talk to me, that would amount to the same thing.”

“Breaking a confidence,” Byerly mused, “is rather ... disloyal. Of course, they do say that loyalty always has a price, and now that you’ve mentioned it, I’m not sure Donna has been keeping up with the payments, of late.”

“What sort of payments do you usually expect?” (Good. Now they were talking business, and that meant By had already won.)

“Oh, my price isn’t terribly high. Bargain-sale loyalty.” (And worth exactly what you’re going to pay for it, dear cousin.) “In your case ... what do you say to an invitation to the Emperor’s wedding, standing invitation to whatever parties you may be hosting as Count, and drop-by privileges at Vorrutyer House with access to the wine cellars?” (There wasn’t, as it happened, anything worth drinking in the Vorrutyer House wine cellars, unless you were desperate. The last two Counts had had appalling taste – but so did Richars, so he wouldn’t know the difference.)

“Indefinitely?” Richars looked a little alarmed at the prospect, which was heartening. Byerly had just been wondering whether, in his haste to ask only for things Richars could grant as Count, he had set his price suspiciously low.

“You’re going to be Count indefinitely.”

“Fair point.”

“And you won’t find me ... ungrateful.” He allowed Richars to fill in the blanks with whatever his preferred form of gratitude might be, and hoped to God that it didn’t involve sex.

The long-suffering wife finally turned up with coffee. Byerly wondered what she was thinking of all this. He added a splash of cream; Richars, meanwhile, took a bottle of tablets from the pocket of his jacket, which had been draped over the back of the chair, and stirred one into his coffee.

“Keeping your girlish figure, coz? Good idea, given the familial tendency toward middle-aged spread. Poor Pierre was looking positively inflated toward the end.” No, those aren’t artificial sweeteners, are they? I think I recognize the prescription. You’d do much better to pass it off as recreational, like I do with mine ...

Richars glared at him, but refrained from saying anything. The bottle went back into the jacket. Not a good pocket in which to keep your vulnerabilities, dear coz. Pickpockets, you know.

It occurred to By that it would be trivially easy to pick up some real artificial sweeteners, and effect a substitution. If Richars should become Count, he might need to keep up the new-best-friend act, and keep doing it with every new batch of medication ... Simple, unlikely to be detected, and not so very immoral, really. He was pretty sure that Richars had committed two murders, and maybe even three – although he hadn’t been about to burden Donna by pestering her with questions about her third husband’s death, so three was just conjecture.

Except. Richars would still have time to do plenty of damage, since the Vorrutyer heart defect didn’t kill very quickly or very reliably – or at all, nowadays, unless it went completely untreated. Like, a-decade-of-being-too-paranoid-to-see-a-doctor untreated.

Oh. Luckily his fingers were already wrapped around his coffee cup; he forced himself to keep them exactly as they were, no telltale motion, no visible tightening. Make that as many as four murders, the last a slow but nearly perfect one. If this were official business, this would be the part where he let Richars run, lead, take the Countship, overreach, entrap himself, fall into a slowly-woven but exceedingly fine net of justice. Except, where did that leave Dono and the District? That was the whole damn problem with justice; by the time you got the evidence, innocent people were already screwed.

There was a sudden squall from another part of the flat, presumably the nursery, and the long-suffering wife scuttled off. Richars abruptly leaned forward, in a confiding sort of way.

“Somebody needs to hold her down and teach her she isn’t a man, if you get my drift,” he said.

So that was Richars’s deepest want. Vile, but not at all surprising. But almost immediately, the instincts that By had honed over the last eight years kicked in: This is a test. He’s a thug, but he isn’t stupid. You don’t arrange fatal lightflyer accidents and get away with it if you’re stupid.

The problem was that he wasn’t sure in which direction he was being tested, or what Richars’s ideal man would say at that moment. It was just – just – possible that it was only a test, and that Richars wouldn’t trust anyone who wasn’t properly revolted. It was more likely that the desire was real, but that he’d have better sense than to give his confidence to a visitor who agreed too heartily, particularly one who was known to be friendly with his potential victim. But, on the other hand, maybe what he wanted, needed, and craved was someone to listen to the things he couldn’t say in respectable company, and to accept. That had happened before; people got remarkably unguarded when they thought they were talking to someone even more amoral than they were.

So he let Richars talk, keeping his own expression carefully neutral and throwing in the occasional nod. People liked to talk, and they usually gave their real intentions and desires away if they talked long enough.

And oh, did Richars give himself away. His ideas about what ought to happen to their cousin were vivid, detailed, and graphically violent, in ways that suggested he’d been spending years working them out. Even more disturbingly, they’d undergone one crucial revision now that the potential victim was male: they now involved someone else doing his dirty work. Specifically, he had a job in mind for a conveniently-bisexual cousin who was also conveniently rumored, however wrongly and unfairly, to be a complete pervert.

He had to hand it to Richars: whether deliberately or accidentally, his cousin had managed to come up with a test that no decent man could pass: one that made By feel slightly sick just thinking about it, and he had a strong stomach. He hadn’t known that private family affairs were so ... squalid. Well, maybe it was just his family.

He suppressed a rising sense of panic, and fell back on a rule that had often served him well: When all else fails, say the most outrageous thing that comes to mind and see where it takes you.

“Rape fantasies,” he said, “are so played out.”

“Um-what?” said Richars, which wasn’t too surprising, because Byerly felt like saying “Um-what?” even though the words had come out of his mouth. Possibly not a good sign, that. “What do you mean, ‘played out’?”

“I mean, coz, that they are passé. Boring. So last season.”

Where did that come from? he wondered, and then realized where it had come from. If you disregarded the aspects of Richars’s monologue that were terrifying or nauseating or both, you were, in fact, left with boring. He was willing to bet good money that the man bored himself, with his mind perpetually running round and round in the same grooves.

And sure enough, Richars was leaning forward with an expression that was plainly intrigued. Quite accidentally, Byerly had just offered his cousin something that Richars hadn’t even known he wanted: the promise of a brand new fantasy, instead of the same tired old one he’d been having since he and Donna were children.

The dots began to connect and form a shape. They always did. Byerly started to see the potential for a particularly audacious endgame (ImpSec did not actually have a rule against audacity – he’d checked – but it was strongly discouraged). It was one that would have to be played very carefully, but he could see an elegant payoff if everything lined up just right, one that promised not only victory but at least a half-measure of justice.

Richars was still staring at him, half-flabbergasted and half-eager. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Use your imagination, cousin. But if you haven’t any ...” (of course Richars hadn’t) “... you’re welcome to use mine.”