Work Text:
Captain Simon Illyan presses two fingers to the center of his forehead as if he can will away the incipient headache. Unfortunately, it promises to be massive.
The document currently displayed on his comconsole screen is riddled with an abnormally high number of weasel words, even for an ImpSec report. But there is no mistaking the meaning of the agent’s convoluted analysis: the Prime Minister of Barrayar is having an affair with his military aide-de-camp.
Illyan's head throbs.
Aral is cheating.
On Cordelia.
With his secretary.
His 27-year-old male secretary.
Well, at least Aral's impromptu trip to the District, complete with overnight visit to Vorkosigan Surleau in the dead of winter, makes sense now. It also explains why he is avoiding Illyan, despite being back in Vorbarr Sultana for nearly two days.
[Time since last in-person meeting: 12 days, 7 hours, 36 minutes.]
He suppresses a sigh and turns back to the lead of Aral’s close-in detail. “This is to be classified at the highest level. Need to Know only. Not even the Emperor sees this, yet.”
“Yes, sir.”
The young agent gives a vague wave of two fingers in the general direction of his forehead and leaves the Chief's office.
Goddamn Aral Vorkosigan! How can the man still have the self-preservation instincts of a sugar-addled toddler?
The chip supplies him with wholly unnecessary reports, cross-referenced and annotated, on then-Lieutenant Vorkosigan's scandal-ridden relationship with one Ges Vorrutyer, along with each one of the fourteen times Illyan had pulled a drunken Admiral Vorkosigan out of the gutter following his post-Escobar retirement. He has never wanted the damned thing out of his head more than at that moment.
He contemplates the letter of resignation that has been sitting at the bottom of his desk drawer for several years now. He’d written and printed it - on real paper no less! - after his release from his own prison cells in the aftermath of the first debacle with Miles’ mercenary fleet. He had not signed it; there'd never been any question of actually presenting it to his Emperor, whatever he’d suffered for the boy's delusions. Not when Aral, who’d endured far worse, had gone back to work as if it was nothing, as if he hadn’t come within a hair's breadth of losing everything.
Illyan doesn’t open the drawer, dismisses the very idea of resigning. Horrified as he is with this turn of events, at the epic levels of stress this is bound to cause him, quitting is simply impossible to contemplate. No one else can be trusted to watch Aral’s back.
And, oh God! He is going to have to tell Cordelia. Damn her for leaving the planet, whatever the reason. Doesn’t she know the kinds of thoughtless, self-destructive things Aral gets up to when left to his own devices?
That is when the full force of fear drops on him.
Cordelia.
She loves Aral beyond all reason. She quite literally gave up everything – career, reputation, planet of origin and all – for him. And while she still acts as if she is a Betan anthropologist studying their very backward world, she once admitted to Illyan, some five years into the Regency, that she took her marriage oath deadly seriously. Deadly seriously. A phrase not to be taken lightly when uttered by Captain Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan, Betan or no.
Someone’s head is going to roll for this. Possibly Jole's. Or, more horribly likely, Aral’s.
He tries to tell himself he is beyond paranoid to seriously consider it. And possibly he is. But the chip unhelpfully supplies him with images from a failed mutiny. Of a blood-drenched bed. And a blood-streaked table. Illyan is, above all else, a good analyst and there is no denying the pattern of terrible things that have happened to men who cross Cordelia Naismith.
He sits at the desk for long, long minutes, unsure of himself in a way he hasn’t felt since Regent Vorkosigan dropped the Chieftainship on his shoulders.
Feeling like a man who has crawled out onto a ledge and cannot retreat, he clears the report from his display and begins to compose the vaguest damned message he can think of that will unfailingly bring the Countess home.