Miles holds up the bottle of wine in response. Though - looking at the state of her and her quarters, maybe he shouldn't have. Ah, well. He needs some himself. "A victory celebration, of course," he says, "if only a temporary one." The UC will be back, he can just feel it. Better to take some joy while he has it; better to do what he can while he has time.
He looks past her into the room, then back up at her. And - before she can potentially object - he slips past her, his small frame easily twisting around hers. "Get me a pair of glasses and I'll get us started."
He's quick, she can give him that. He's in there the second he has a chance and there - wasn't much to say to that. Bemused perhaps for the first time since she had returned, it makes it a little easier to relent. Alright then, glasses it was.
She beckons him to sit on the low couch that had been pushed aside for by her people, going to a cupboard herself and the glasses. What she fetches aren't the right ones for it, she suspects, she'd never had wine like this before. But they're deep cups, which is quite probably to both their tastes regardless of whatever they're losing out in on etiquette. "As you wish."
Lakshmi settles one the other end from him, putting both the glasses down in front of them on the low table.
That's how Miles gets what he wants half the time: just go for it and hope the other person doesn't care too much. He settles down after a moment, carefully uncorking his bottle. "Thank you, your highness," he says. And once the glasses are in place, he pours them each a liberal portion of wine.
She falls silent as he does so, only venturing to move when the glass was poured. She reaches for it, then shifts herself in her seat. Letting her legs curl under her, so she could sit to face him more directly. Her bare feet tucked away under the wrap of her skirts.
"I am surprised, Admiral. I thought you would be celebrating with your own men."
She lifts her wine to her lips, sipping slowly. It wasn't like she hadn't already drunk her fair share this evening. ( Thank Goodness she had hidden the already empty bottle elsewhere. ) Though this tasted far, far better than whatever else she'd been able to get her hands on.
"I'll do that too," he says, tilting his own glass towards her. Then taking a sip himself. He doesn't know how drunk she is, but - well, surely she's had some already. "But I thought it best to enjoy your company as well."
She wets her lips, taking - a bigger sip, this time. She ought to know better, Vishnu forgive her for her weakness, the wanton destruction she had wrought. There - the thought sits ugly and heavy in her mouth as she swallows down. Her fingers held on either side of the glass carefully.
"Before... in the battle... I am glad to know I did not startle you with my... actions. Though, if what I have heard of them, I am sure it is nothing to what you must have seen on Barrayar."
Ah, he means the viciousness. He has to pause for a moment, to order his thoughts. Honestly - he'd been goddamn turned on by it. Barrayaran roots and all, plus a huge weakness for tall, dark-haired women kicking all of the ass. But he needs to be a bit more subtle.
"You would fit in very well there, I think," he says, slowly. "I am not certain that is a compliment, though."
Rather than be put off, there's a smile, her eyes turning down, looking at her glass to hide it away. Whether it was that apparently, he hadn't been too bothered by it, or that Barrayar would like her.
"I am glad to hear it. My advisors told me if I had no luck with you, I ought to go to them, next. Propose a marriage to honour both our people and secure the alliance." Another mouthful, laughter filling her words. "A dry serious Barrayaran. I've heard they barely even dance except when they drink." The filter through of stories by propaganda from the UIC. Tall tales and exaggerations.
He's clearly not that upset about it. Trying to pretend he is, maybe, but secretly thrilled. And wishing he could find a way to convince her to come home with him.
Just as he has that precise thought, this woman says that. Oh god. He chokes on his wine, nearly spilling the whole damn glass all over him. Would that even have worked? Well - yes, obviously. He might even have retired from the Dendarii for that. Alas, alas ... "They're not as boring as you would assume," he says, a bit affronted despite himself. "Traditional, yes. But tradition includes drinking. And very good wine."
That was - she gives him, then the glass a look. "This is theirs - ? Alright, wine then." She can agree to that. ( Alright, another sip - the flush that is steady in her cheeks as she raises a toast to his point with it. )
"But what then, if I were to marry a Barrayan, will I have nothing but drink and my husband to occupy my time? No singing, weapons or prayer? Everything I've heard says I may as well lay about in bed all day." It's faintly challenging, go on then, prove her wrong.
He really, really shouldn't. It cuts too close to his true identity; he'd be much safer just saying he knows nothing of it and moving on. But. Goodness. These are some first rate lies he has to clear up here. "Nothing of the sort," he says. "You'd marry a Vor, first of all, and their women are famously violent. Have you not heard of a Vorfemme knife?"
"No?" He has her at an interest there, and she straightens more. For the first time in hours, not punishing herself in her own severeness, eager. She liked, as it turned out, nothing half so much as blades.
"They're quite beautiful. I've been after one for years, but never managed to add it to my collection." True, but - not quite so difficult for him as he makes it out to be. "It's true Barrayar has issues with wanting to keep her women in traditional roles, but those traditional roles are still quite violent. I could tell you many tales about Vor women being the ones to hold her ground during a siege, for example."
"Tell me." It's ordered, where she doesn't quite have the right but it's breathless. Eager. She wants to hear victory, she wants determination to try and dress herself in it when otherwise she might fall. "Tell me the most famous."
Miles sits back a bit, his bright eyes gray with interest. He'll never turn down an opportunity to discuss this, for sure. "I heard of one whose adult sons were kidnapped by the siegers. Her response was to get up on the battlements, hike up her skirts, and inform them that she could just as easily make more where they came from."
She listens, avidly, all brightness that the drink doesn't dull, all open in her face as quickly as he begins. Then still, quiet, watching him -
- Before she falls back, her face breaking into a wide blinding smile and peels off laughter. The wine spilling in the glass over her fingers as she settles. Her other falling over her eyes, covering her as she laughs and laughs and laughs. Still breathless, still earnest. Her laughter turning to giggles, letting her bemusement fill her utterly. "They should have sent their wives. I am sure they looked utterly stunned."
Good, that had the intended effect. He quite likes the look of her smile. "I imagine so," he says with a grin. "She made them pay for kidnapping her sons, of course. With her knife."
She quiets, letting her hand move enough that she can peer through her fingers at him. "Of course she did. They dared threatened her family, her honour. They should pay with their lives."
She settles back, swapping the glass between her hands so she can lift the one with the wine spilt onto it to her lips, pressing her mouth softly to the side of her finger to kiss away the spilt wine. Little movements still, measured, but comfortable enough in his presence to not be bothered that he saw her doing it. "How did you come to know so much of the place? I heard that they were like us -" Paused, a correction. "That they were hidden away, rather." Not kept impoverished.
He finds himself watching her, utterly charmed by all those little gestures. God, he really shouldn't be getting attached here. Soon enough this fight will be over, and she'll return to her newly freed home...
And if he's not careful, he'll give himself away. Goodness. Focus, Miles. "It is a long and sordid story," he says. "But - to put it simply, I am the clone of a Barrayaran Vor lord. Escaped from my captors, then raised on Beta Colony. But I know a significant amount about my progenitor's homeworld." Sorry, Mark. He's stealing your backstory here.
Somewhere, Mark wakes up with a need to punch Miles.
As for Lakshmi - she looks downright alarmed. Her eyes going wide, pushing herself up. She'd heard - a lot of things. Of course she had, some of them she even knew to be UIC propaganda. Others, they had simply been notions she had been raised with, wary, unsure as she watches him. "But you're... so," mouth opening, closing. Trying to be polite. "Slight." She winces even as she says it.
But that wasn't polite either. She struggles, again, the drink didn't make it easier. "Aren't clones meant to be ... impossibly made? Big men and women who have tiger claws and fangs and have purple skin." Alright, that sounded more ridiculous when she heard it out loud, but that was the stories at least. "That was what the... UIC told us, about other places." Definitely, definitely embarrassing.
Miles just winces a bit as Lakshmi seeks politeness and lands on ... probably the best description he could hope for. But it still drives all of this home: he's a lowly mercenary who's just helping her win back her homeworld. After all this is done, they will be strangers again. As it must be. As is best, really; he will not force his ugly body upon her any more than he must. But he will take a large gulp of wine to wash down his pain with.
"Quite slight," he says, giving her a weak smile. "I am quite the failure. In attempting to build my progenitor a better body he could take over, they just duplicated his issues. Which is part of why I was able to escape, I believe." Another small smile. "Clones tend either to be younger body doubles - for transferring - or as outlandish as you say." Sometimes also for transfer, but.
There is a horror on her face - rather than revulsion for him. That had been his fate, that he had only escaped it by chance of what he had been made to be. How could they do that to him? How could anyone? Many, Lakshmi, you have learned that lesson, many would.
And she'd been just as bad.
"I have hurt you. I am very new to... this." Means forgive me, but such things are hard for any royal, after all. Instead, she sits up, putting the wine aside. Though there is no pretending the drunkness she's inevitably falling prey makes her bolder than she would be when she moves closer to him. "Curse them that made you with so little imagination to see all that you might be, curse the Vor Lords then, and me too. Damn them all. If they cannot know you for what you are - my people and this planet, and I as their Queen will always know you for the hope you give us. Even if that comes to nothing. That will always be yours."
Miles' expression is grim. He'd hated the practice even before meeting Mark, but now that he has ... he's even more infuriated by it. Slavers and murderers all of them.
Though - he has to step in to defend his planet a little bit. He hadn't quite expected that reaction - nor how she moves towards him, good god. He has to swallow thickly, looking up at her with no small amount of pink dusting his cheeks. "Do not damn all the Vor Lords," he says hesitantly. "Just the one who commissioned me. The rest of Barrayar abhors the practice, by all accounts." He quiets after that, touched by her words. Hope, eh. He'll take that gladly. "I'll be more than just hope, if I have anything to say about it. We will finish this job successfully." Or die trying.
She watches him still, blinking owlishly as she does, that lightness to his fair face under her gaze. Strange. She knows how she speaks of those that had misused her, her people.
It wasn't kind. "Perhaps I have been fighting too long." young as she is, old as that makes her. "The man today, he would take the oldest who could not pay their taxes up against a wall and set starving dogs on them. When the fester in our desert heat became too much, he sent their widows to clean up the pieces. I let my rage blind me, its true, for every minute those widows wept at my floor for justice. I would have killed him, his men, every single person who served him, if you had not been present."
Those that made her, were as much the cruelty of the UIC as the love of her father, the steadiness of her husband. She did not have his apparently magnanimous nature it seemed, could think of no other way to say it more plainly. But to that she wondered.
"Do you love the Vor, even as they are?" because his words, his stories of them - she couldn't help but think of otherwise if not for the life he had told her.
A small flinch of guilt; he's still not certain he should have stepped in to save anyone. As she says, the whole lot of them likely deserved it. But. Dammit, he hates wasting life, even evil life. The commander and the casualties was enough. "Mercy is a heavy thing to grant," he says after a moment. "I find it best to provide when possible." Even when the cause is that just. God.
As for the Vor ... Another small wince. He should probably not speak of them in such loving terms, but. He just can't help it. "I admit to a certain fascination," he says with a soft sigh. "And I have met those who are not so bad as the stories make them out to be. The Vor lord's parents attempted to adopt me. As their second son."
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He looks past her into the room, then back up at her. And - before she can potentially object - he slips past her, his small frame easily twisting around hers. "Get me a pair of glasses and I'll get us started."
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She beckons him to sit on the low couch that had been pushed aside for by her people, going to a cupboard herself and the glasses. What she fetches aren't the right ones for it, she suspects, she'd never had wine like this before. But they're deep cups, which is quite probably to both their tastes regardless of whatever they're losing out in on etiquette. "As you wish."
Lakshmi settles one the other end from him, putting both the glasses down in front of them on the low table.
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"I am surprised, Admiral. I thought you would be celebrating with your own men."
She lifts her wine to her lips, sipping slowly. It wasn't like she hadn't already drunk her fair share this evening. ( Thank Goodness she had hidden the already empty bottle elsewhere. ) Though this tasted far, far better than whatever else she'd been able to get her hands on.
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She wets her lips, taking - a bigger sip, this time. She ought to know better, Vishnu forgive her for her weakness, the wanton destruction she had wrought. There - the thought sits ugly and heavy in her mouth as she swallows down. Her fingers held on either side of the glass carefully.
"Before... in the battle... I am glad to know I did not startle you with my... actions. Though, if what I have heard of them, I am sure it is nothing to what you must have seen on Barrayar."
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"You would fit in very well there, I think," he says, slowly. "I am not certain that is a compliment, though."
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"I am glad to hear it. My advisors told me if I had no luck with you, I ought to go to them, next. Propose a marriage to honour both our people and secure the alliance." Another mouthful, laughter filling her words. "A dry serious Barrayaran. I've heard they barely even dance except when they drink." The filter through of stories by propaganda from the UIC. Tall tales and exaggerations.
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Just as he has that precise thought, this woman says that. Oh god. He chokes on his wine, nearly spilling the whole damn glass all over him. Would that even have worked? Well - yes, obviously. He might even have retired from the Dendarii for that. Alas, alas ... "They're not as boring as you would assume," he says, a bit affronted despite himself. "Traditional, yes. But tradition includes drinking. And very good wine."
He indicates the bottle for emphasis.
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"But what then, if I were to marry a Barrayan, will I have nothing but drink and my husband to occupy my time? No singing, weapons or prayer? Everything I've heard says I may as well lay about in bed all day." It's faintly challenging, go on then, prove her wrong.
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- Before she falls back, her face breaking into a wide blinding smile and peels off laughter. The wine spilling in the glass over her fingers as she settles. Her other falling over her eyes, covering her as she laughs and laughs and laughs. Still breathless, still earnest. Her laughter turning to giggles, letting her bemusement fill her utterly. "They should have sent their wives. I am sure they looked utterly stunned."
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She settles back, swapping the glass between her hands so she can lift the one with the wine spilt onto it to her lips, pressing her mouth softly to the side of her finger to kiss away the spilt wine. Little movements still, measured, but comfortable enough in his presence to not be bothered that he saw her doing it. "How did you come to know so much of the place? I heard that they were like us -" Paused, a correction. "That they were hidden away, rather." Not kept impoverished.
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And if he's not careful, he'll give himself away. Goodness. Focus, Miles. "It is a long and sordid story," he says. "But - to put it simply, I am the clone of a Barrayaran Vor lord. Escaped from my captors, then raised on Beta Colony. But I know a significant amount about my progenitor's homeworld." Sorry, Mark. He's stealing your backstory here.
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As for Lakshmi - she looks downright alarmed. Her eyes going wide, pushing herself up. She'd heard - a lot of things. Of course she had, some of them she even knew to be UIC propaganda. Others, they had simply been notions she had been raised with, wary, unsure as she watches him. "But you're... so," mouth opening, closing. Trying to be polite. "Slight." She winces even as she says it.
But that wasn't polite either. She struggles, again, the drink didn't make it easier. "Aren't clones meant to be ... impossibly made? Big men and women who have tiger claws and fangs and have purple skin." Alright, that sounded more ridiculous when she heard it out loud, but that was the stories at least. "That was what the... UIC told us, about other places." Definitely, definitely embarrassing.
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Miles just winces a bit as Lakshmi seeks politeness and lands on ... probably the best description he could hope for. But it still drives all of this home: he's a lowly mercenary who's just helping her win back her homeworld. After all this is done, they will be strangers again. As it must be. As is best, really; he will not force his ugly body upon her any more than he must. But he will take a large gulp of wine to wash down his pain with.
"Quite slight," he says, giving her a weak smile. "I am quite the failure. In attempting to build my progenitor a better body he could take over, they just duplicated his issues. Which is part of why I was able to escape, I believe." Another small smile. "Clones tend either to be younger body doubles - for transferring - or as outlandish as you say." Sometimes also for transfer, but.
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And she'd been just as bad.
"I have hurt you. I am very new to... this." Means forgive me, but such things are hard for any royal, after all. Instead, she sits up, putting the wine aside. Though there is no pretending the drunkness she's inevitably falling prey makes her bolder than she would be when she moves closer to him. "Curse them that made you with so little imagination to see all that you might be, curse the Vor Lords then, and me too. Damn them all. If they cannot know you for what you are - my people and this planet, and I as their Queen will always know you for the hope you give us. Even if that comes to nothing. That will always be yours."
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Though - he has to step in to defend his planet a little bit. He hadn't quite expected that reaction - nor how she moves towards him, good god. He has to swallow thickly, looking up at her with no small amount of pink dusting his cheeks. "Do not damn all the Vor Lords," he says hesitantly. "Just the one who commissioned me. The rest of Barrayar abhors the practice, by all accounts." He quiets after that, touched by her words. Hope, eh. He'll take that gladly. "I'll be more than just hope, if I have anything to say about it. We will finish this job successfully." Or die trying.
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It wasn't kind. "Perhaps I have been fighting too long." young as she is, old as that makes her. "The man today, he would take the oldest who could not pay their taxes up against a wall and set starving dogs on them. When the fester in our desert heat became too much, he sent their widows to clean up the pieces. I let my rage blind me, its true, for every minute those widows wept at my floor for justice. I would have killed him, his men, every single person who served him, if you had not been present."
Those that made her, were as much the cruelty of the UIC as the love of her father, the steadiness of her husband. She did not have his apparently magnanimous nature it seemed, could think of no other way to say it more plainly. But to that she wondered.
"Do you love the Vor, even as they are?" because his words, his stories of them - she couldn't help but think of otherwise if not for the life he had told her.
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As for the Vor ... Another small wince. He should probably not speak of them in such loving terms, but. He just can't help it. "I admit to a certain fascination," he says with a soft sigh. "And I have met those who are not so bad as the stories make them out to be. The Vor lord's parents attempted to adopt me. As their second son."
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when will my phones auto correct no longer be upset with vor names and try to fix them
Re: when will my phones auto correct no longer be upset with vor names and try to fix them
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