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When Simon first started coughing about a month after the end of the Pretendership, he thought, I don’t have time to be sick , and then ignored it entirely.
He was the Chief of ImpSec, suddenly and without warning. In his less generous moods, in between crises, he thought about how even Aral had at least had warning, and had already been an admiral and a count’s heir to boot. Simon Illyan had been absolutely nobody, chosen for an experiment expressly because he was so disposable, and now three years later he was the damn Chief of ImpSec .
Not that Simon didn’t admit he was the right man for the job. At the moment, he was practically the only man in ImpSec he could trust, which meant he had to do everything himself. And there was So Much Everything.
Mopping up after the Pretendership all on its own was a job and a half. Aral had said to shake out Negri’s boots like it might be simple. It was more like Simon had to tear down ImpSec and build it again from scratch. And the files! Negri had so many files, so many dark secrets which Simon would really, really prefer not to know about, but now very definitely needed to know as soon as possible. He spent his nights going over files, glancing at one page after another as quickly as he could until his eyes ached from staying open and until his head ached because even the chip had trouble processing that much information that quickly, and he had to take a break to get it all straightened out and organized in his head.
And there were the Komarrans.
And he had to ration the damn fast penta because Barrayar was still under embargo for that sort of thing.
So really, it was no wonder that he got sick, but he really, really did not have the time.
The Residence was his first priority. Simon tried not to think about all the other priorities that were slipping through his fingers, except that he had to think about them all, actually so that he’d be ready for them when they all inevitably came back to bite him in the ass later.
When Simon had gone to Lady Cordelia to ask her about the servants she was intending to hire so he could vet them, Lady Cordelia had blinked at him and said, “Do we really need servants? What do they even do?”
And Simon did not himself know why Vor, and especially the Emperor needed armies of servants, nor what they all did, but he was absolutely certain that they were necessary. He had a vague sense of the Imperial Residence as a grand, complex machine, requiring a small horde of highly qualified servitors to do numerous inscrutable and arcane things to keep it running, lest the whole, hulking artifice of it come crashing down on the young Emperor’s head. He didn’t have time to explain all that to her, however, nor was he Vor enough to explain it properly, so he just said, “Never mind, I’ll handle it all, my lady.” And went to ask Lady Alys Vorpatril.
Lady Alys was terrifyingly Vor, and she was the most beautiful woman Simon had ever seen (the chip tried to show him every single woman he had laid eyes on since its installment for comparison when that thought crossed his mind, and Simon had to hastily stop it from derailing him). She agreed to help without hesitation when Simon asked, and had a list of all the sorts of people they’d need to hire ready in moments, then told him where such people might be found, with reference to specific names and families that she thought ought to be trustworthy.
“Not that I would presume to do your job for you, Captain,” she said.
“Please do,” Simon said, “You have been of inestimable help, I almost feel as though I know what I’m doing, at the moment.”
Lady Alys had a staggering amount of information about what went on in Vor households stored in her head; who everyone was related to, and who had worked for which families, which families treated their servants well, and what seemed to be every scandal that had occurred in the past ten years. He almost suspected her of having a memory chip of her own, he certainly could never have kept it all straight without his.
So by the end of the first month he had all the people he most needed to protect: the Emperor, Lord and Lady Vorkosigan, and Lady Alys and little Lord Ivan Vorpatril all bundled up together in the Residence, and had stuffed the Residence full of people he could more or less trust, and then parked himself there, as much as he possibly could. Because he hadn’t been there during the soltoxin attack, and he hadn’t been there when Negri was killed, and when the next disaster happened, he was damn well going to be there. (Simon had a perpetual twitch due to the fact that little Lord Miles in his replicater was not, in fact, at the Residence, but instead in ImpMil, where, rationally, he was as safe if not safer than he would have been at the Residence, except that not all of Simon’s anxieties were rational. But Simon was busy so he ignored the twitch.)
But the next months were no less busy than the first, so when Simon developed his little cough, he didn’t pay attention to it. He had about a million things to worry about at any given moment, and his own health was a very long way down the list.
It wasn’t a bad cough, anyway, it didn’t impede him in his work, which was the important thing. If it got worse over time, instead of better, he didn’t notice. He might have caught that sort of pattern on his chip, of course, but his chip was being deluged by a veritable ocean of data, and his little health problem was lost in the flood.
(Another thing he did not notice was how often his mind turned to Lady Vorpatril in spare moments, her dark, warm, intelligent eyes, her calm, confident poise in her mourning grays. That information was not stored on his chip at all.)
So Simon worked. He vetted ImpSec agents, most of whom were allergic to fast penta. He poured through ImpSec files and analyzed them, collating all the data to figure out what the hell was actually going on, who he could trust in ImpSec and out of it. That was work only he could do this quickly and thoroughly, no one else could hold so much information in his head at once, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t difficult.
(If, when Aral ordered him to sleep, sometimes Simon would just lie in bed with his eyes closed and do data analysis, no one else could know. But of course sometimes he was so tired that he would fall asleep right then with his chip still working on overdrive, and that was a very, very bad thing for the equilibrium of his brain.)
And there was always some sort of fire in need of his immediate attention. Ordinary disasters didn’t stop because ImpSec was in the process of being turned inside out and upside down and beaten with a stick to see what vermin might crawl out, quite the opposite in fact. The coughing was a small annoyance, one he did his best to hide, the last thing they needed was rumors that the new chief of ImpSec was ill. He always intended to speak to his doctor about it (he had one of his very own, now he was the Chief of ImpSec) but he never had time, there were always ten other things in urgent need of being done first.
That’s how things were going when Lady Alys caught him at the tail end of a particularly bad coughing fit.
“Captain Illyan,” she said, “Are you alright? How long have you been sick? You haven’t been poisoned, have you?”
Simon consulted his chip, he’d been coughing for… three months and four days. Oh hell, how had it been that long? That was worrying. That was probably very bad.
“It’s nothing my lady,” Simon lied, “I just have a bit of a cough. I feel perfectly fine otherwise.” He straightened up from where he had been leaning against the wall for support and tried his best to look healthy.
“You don’t look alright,” Lady Alys said, “You look terrible, Captain, you should be resting.”
“I haven’t time,” Simon said.
“Well, sit down and catch your breath for a moment, at least,” she said.
Lady Alys took him gently by the arm and, in a very correct and ladylike manner, frogmarched him over to a sofa and made him sit down.
“I’ll send for some tea,” she said, and did so.
“I really can’t—“ Simon began, but Lady Alys interrupted him.
“I know for a fact that your next meeting isn’t for another half an hour,” she said.
“Well, yes,” said Simon, “But I was meaning to use this time to work on a problem that’s come up in ImpSec’s logistics. Nothing urgent, I don’t think, but if it’s not solved there will be trouble.”
“But Captain,” Lady Alys said, “Think of all the trouble there would be for us all should you pass out from exhaustion and overwork. Sit still now and drink your tea.”
The tea had arrived, and Simon sighed and complied. It surprised him how good the tea felt to drink, he hadn’t realized how sore his throat had become. It surprised him how nice it felt to sit down somewhere that wasn’t in front of his com console, to almost let his shoulders relax.
“What sort of logistical issue is it, may I ask,” said Lady Alys, “Or is it classified?”
“We would be nowhere, my lady,” Simon said, “If I did not by now trust your discretion as much as I can trust anything.”
And he described the problem to her. It was, of course, not at all her department, but still she asked intelligent questions, and even just putting it all into words helped him make a surprising amount of progress on it.
That evening Simon coughed up a rose petal.
Shit, Simon thought, I really don’t have time for this.
Simon saw his doctor about it the first thing the next morning.
“It’s Hanahaki,” Simon said, showing the petal as evidence and doing his best to be unembarrassed about it.
“Hm,” said the doctor, and ran his scanner over him. Then he ran his scanner again.
“When did the coughing begin?” The doctor asked.
“March twenty second,” Simon replied. The day before had been the day they all moved into the Residence. He had done one final check of the security, and Lady Alys had gone over everything to see that it was all just so. They had met in the main hall, and Lady Alys had smiled at him and said, “Well, at least that’s done.”
“ March twenty… Captain Illyan, it’s nearly July !” The doctor said, aghast.
“I’m aware of the date,” Simon tried to say in his best dry manner. Unfortunately he was interrupted by a vicious and extended fit of coughing, which rather spoiled the effect.
“Sit down,” the doctor said. He was giving Simon that Look, the Look that Simon himself had often had cause to give Aral Vorkosigan, the one that said, “It’s my job to keep this idiot alive, and how the hell am I supposed to do that if he’s hell bent on getting himself killed.” It was rather uncomfortable to be on the receiving end of it, and unfair. Simon wasn’t suicidal, just… preoccupied.
“Well,” the doctor said, after Simon had sat down and stopped coughing quite so loudly, “Your case is extremely advanced. We’ll have to have the flowers removed immediately, and by that I mean today, not whenever you might see fit to make space for it in your schedule.”
“But—“ said Simon.
“No buts,” said his doctor firmly, “Think of how much more convenient this would have been for you had you come to me about it immediately.”
“It can’t be that urgent can it?” Simon protested weakly, “I mean, the flowers only need to be removed once a year.”
“Yes. Once a year in the spring. At which time the flowers increase very rapidly and grow to their full size, which is why you haven’t been coughing up any petals or buds, by the way, you seem to be afflicted by large roses. You should know that you chose the worst possible time to become affected by the disease. Why ever did you fail to address this problem sooner? You’ve been ill for three months. ”
“In all honesty, I didn’t notice it had been so long.”
“You didn’t notice. Aren’t you supposed to have a chip in your head that makes you remember everything? Aren’t you supposed to be intelligent? ”
“Just because I remember everything doesn’t mean I notice everything,” Simon said, a little stung, “Quite the opposite sometimes, in fact. I have been exceedingly busy lately, and have to split my attention between numerous problems of varying levels of priority.’
“And I suppose you classify your own health as a low-priority concern,” The doctor said.
“Well, yes,” said Simon, “In comparison.”
“Well then, for the sake of my peace of mind, if not the good of the whole Imperium, I would suggest you reassess your priority hierarchy and reallocate a little of your attention to the state of your own physical wellbeing. You realize that, had this gone on any longer, you might have died of this.” You idiot boy went unsaid, but very much not unheard.
“Yes,” Simon said meekly, “I won’t make the same mistake in future.”
“Hmph,” said the doctor, and proceeded to do a series of tests. He found Simon’s blood oxygen levels to be distressingly but unsurprisingly low, but apart from that Simon appeared to be more or less fine, the Hanahaki having not yet done any permanent damage to his lungs.
“I would assume that after three months you would know who you have fallen for, but apparently you might not have noticed, such things not being of a high enough priority,” The doctor said, in tones Simon found quite unnecessarily sarcastic.
“I know who it is,” Simon said. And he did know, with absolute certainty, had since the moment he saw that rose petal. Lady Alys Vorpatril, with her sharp mind and will of steel beneath the silk. Lady Alys with her brisk practicality and unerring kindness. She had held him by the arm just yesterday. The chip did not record physical sensations, but it didn’t need to.
The doctor looked at him thoughtfully.
“Well,” he said, with a sort of brisk professional kindness, “I don’t suppose you’re in a position to pursue a relationship at the moment.”
“No,” Simon said, his lip quirking up in a rueful half smile. Apart from everything else to make it impossible, Lady Alys was a High Vor lady in her mourning year . It was like something from a bad holodrama.
“Well then, the most sensible thing would be to distance yourself.”
Simon considered this seriously.
“I don’t know that I can, in this case,” he said, “Purely in terms of proximity, I work with her frequently and unavoidably. And as to distancing myself emotionally… frankly I haven’t the time or energy to spare on the problem. And regardless, she will not cease to be herself and I, I don’t think I can afford to stop being me. I think I shall simply have to go on as I have done.”
“Excepting, of course, that you will take the medication I prescribe you and have the flowers removed from your lungs at the proper time every year, regardless of what other disasters might be distracting you.”
“Of course.”
“Well, then. I shall consider hanahaki a permanent chronic ailment of yours until further notice. I’m sorry,” the doctor said kindly, “And good luck.”