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Simon had been prepared for this sort of emergency. He had contingencies within contingencies for exactly what he would do if he ever needed to take the Emperor and flee Barrayar. And so everything went smoothly. Nothing catastrophic happened all the way from Barrayar to Jackson’s Whole. At which point Simon stood all alone in the tiny kitchen in the tiny apartment he’d rented for the week, and suddenly realized he had no idea how to cook anything that didn’t in some way involve groats, goat dairy products, or both, neither of which could be found on Jackson’s Whole.
It was an utterly ridiculous thing to have a breakdown over. Aral Vorkosigan was dead, and so was Cordelia. Barrayar had descended into a civil war with no good options, all of them likely trying to track down the emperor. And all of it under Simon’s watch. What did groats matter in light of all that?
But the groats were right in front of him, or not as the case may be. There were no groats on Jackson’s Whole. There were no groats and milk of any description was likely to be synth milk, and all the meat was vat meat (and he could in fact tell the difference, whatever Cordelia said, used to say) and any oranges that could be found on this frozen wasteland of a planet likely had to be shipped from several jumps away and would therefore be even worse than what they sold in Vorbarr Sultanna. He was alone on Jackson’s Whole with three children to look after and he would never go home again, and he would never see the groat fields or dive off the cliffs into the ocean or climb that one orange tree that grew near his mother’s house and never seemed to have oranges on it because the other boys would pick them before they were ripe. And it wasn’t as though he was ever likely to have gone back to his home village anyway but it was something different to find himself in exile knowing with certainty that he could never go home. And his mother had died exactly a year ago in two weeks, and his mother had always, always fed him when he was a boy, no matter how bad things got, and no matter how little they had they had always at least had at least a handful of groats and milk from his grandfather’s goats.
So that’s how Gregor found him crying silently over the kitchen sink.
Gregor’s eyes were very wide as he stared at him, and Simon thought fuck . To top it all off he was crying in front of his Emperor. And Gregor’s eyes went from Simon to the empty kitchen and back again, and he must have understood what the problem was, or something like it, because he spoke for the first time since they’d left Barrayar and said very quietly, “It’s alright Uncle Simon, we can just eat ration bars.”
And that made Simon want to cry all over again, but he didn’t, and instead found it within himself to offer up a small smile to his brave, kind Emperor and say lightly, “You only say that because you’ve never had them before.”
And then he took a deep breath and gathered himself up, and laughed at himself a little in the privacy of his own mind, and said, “I’m going to go out and buy some ready meals. Make sure Miles doesn’t get into too much trouble while I’m gone, alright?”
And Greggor looked deeply relieved that Simon wasn’t crying anymore and nodded very seriously, even though Miles hasn’t done anything even remotely resembling causing trouble since he woke up on the ship to Komarr. Because none of them were alright, not even resembling it, but the least they could do was pretend.