Vorkosigan Fic: Frequently Suggested Sexual Practices: An Aid to Communication
Let's never, ever discuss how long this story has been in progress. Let's just say 2011 is my year of finishing things and leave it at that.
Many, many enormous thanks to![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
ellen_fremedon, petra, fairestcat, and iuliamentis for beta, as well as everyone else who read or otherwise encouraged this in the last ... unspecified span of time.
Set during Shards of Honor. Aral/Cordelia. Explicit. Pegging. 8000 words.
Despite the title/rating/etc., this is a story about all the sex Aral and Cordelia didn't have with each other before they got married.
Frequently Suggested Sexual Practices: An Aid to Communication
Aral knew that someone followed him each time he left that green silk room. Maybe it was Negri's bland young lieutenant, but more likely it was one of the older, harder ImpSec men. Negri would send someone who could and would kill him if he made a wrong move between the Imperial Residence and Vorkosigan House.
And they would wait for him, of course, to see if he made any other wrong moves. Each night Aral changed out of his uniform in the knowledge the gesture was futile. He could as soon set aside his own skin for the night. He made the gesture anyway.
Aral wandered Vorbarr Sultana each night, looking for the wrong turn that would save him from having to go back in the morning. He'd tried, two nights in a row, to find it in the caravanserai, and each time he just found an old friend who conveniently wanted to escort him somewhere more comfortable. It was an officers' club with Aristide one night, and the next night it was Padma, who didn't make much pretense about the thing, once they were in an aircar. Padma just took him back to Vorkosigan House and said, "I'll be around tomorrow night, if you need anything."
When tomorrow night came, Aral walked down to the river and sat on a bench, watching the lights of the city glimmer off the surface like stars dancing in that last instant of visibility before a wormhole jump. ImpSec would fish him out if he jumped, and he didn't actually want to jump.
The fourth night, Aral wandered as aimlessly as he honestly could through the city. He identified the University district mostly by its foreignness to him, and wondered what his life might have been like as a scholar instead of a soldier--but that would also mean that his brother had lived, for Aral to have had the option. And if his brother, perhaps his sister, perhaps his half-Betan mother, who might have rather liked--
He'd been doing so well, all week, at not thinking of her, but he knew perfectly well that the Betan Embassy lay just two blocks beyond the edge of the University. Maybe he hadn't been wandering at all. Maybe wandering in her direction was the best he could ever do.
He considered whether this was a wrong turn that would get him shot. Would an assassination too near, or within, the Betan Embassy constitute a premature opening of hostilities, to be avoided at all costs--even if it meant losing him? Aral felt suddenly reckless enough to experiment, though not foolish enough to start running when he knew perfectly well he would be chased.
He kept his steps slow and his hands in his pockets, but his thoughts raced in circles. What if he could go? What if there were no one following him and no unspeakable disaster in the offing? What if he were free to simply travel to Beta Colony--he could say he wished to pay a visit to his grandmother's family. He had to have cousins of some kind there. Betans lived a long time when they didn't get mixed up in Barrayaran politics; there might even be some living who remembered his grandmother, back before her marriage. Perhaps they had visited her on Barrayar--for her daughter's naming party, though probably not her daughter's wartime wedding. Or funeral.
If he paid a visit to someone else after his familial duties were attended to, well. That would be entirely his own affair, if only he were allowed to have his own--ha!--his own affairs. If only everything else were different. If only he dared to try. And here he was, playing at trying, just to see if he'd be shot down like a dog before he made the hollow gesture.
Surely, given what Cor--what Commander Naismith must have told her government by now, if he so much as applied for a visa he'd be seized and fast-pentaed. And he did not have the fast-penta allergy, nor a convenient capsule of poison. All the same, he surely had instant death available for the asking, from some quietly tracking man somewhere behind him. Ezar and Negri would never let him walk around free with this much intelligence, otherwise.
And so Aral simply stood on the doorstep of the Betan Embassy without doing anything, waiting to see who jumped first. It was well past ordinary business hours, and he shouldn't go ringing their bell and bothering some Betan civil servant just to play out his own half-suicidal half-romantic half-witted gesture to the hilt.
The door opened, startling him. On the other side was a tall young man who looked athletic without being soldierly. He was wearing a thick, fluffy sweater and a brightly-colored cloth wrapped around his waist--too smooth for a towel, too small for a sheet. Aral found himself staring, trying to make it out.
"I'm up here," the young man said, sounding amused and, oh, just like her. Aral jerked his gaze up to the young man's face, wondering how he could possibly feel homesick for a foreign accent. It had been a worse idea to come here than he'd thought, and he wasn't even drunk.
"I know, I know," the young man said. "You're not embarrassed, you're just laconic. No need to say a word, sir, just let me get a packet."
Aral did not say a word, wondering what cue he'd missed--what cue he'd given, all unawares. At the same time he was all too aware that there must be a scope-sight on the chest of the young man who sounded so much like her, just waiting for one of them to say the wrong word, make the wrong gesture.
The young man disappeared briefly--to safety, but if Aral warned him away surely that would alert his watcher--and returned as promised, holding a sealed, unlabeled packet. It was big enough to hold a sheaf of flimsies. He offered it and Aral took it automatically; something shifted inside, smaller and denser than flimsies. A book disc.
"That's a printout of the list, up to date as of this year, plus a disc with all the explanations and diagrams," the young man said briskly, while Aral wondered distantly if it looked like he had just scored some sort of intelligence coup--surely they would not imagine he was such an idiot as to accept a bribe in this manner. "And before you ask, no, Embassy staff do not give live demonstrations.”
The young man looked Aral up and down pointedly and added, "Usually we don't, anyway. Come back with flowers and a dinner reservation and I might be persuaded."
Aral realized he was being flirted with and mocked at the same time, and wondered if the ImpSec agent could see that as well. Inexplicable as it was, it might be the only way to keep them both safe from his idiocy. Aral tucked the packet under one arm, placed his hand on his heart, and made a courtly bow straight out of a melodrama, surely visible to the man lurking somewhere behind him.
"Thank you for giving me hope," he said solemnly, and then turned on his heel and walked away. No one intercepted him. He never spotted his tail.
Back at Vorkosigan House, he shoved the packet blindly into a drawer in his bedroom, and went to sleep with a Betan accent echoing in his ears. By the time he was back in the green silk room the next morning, it seemed like something he'd dreamed once, long ago. No one ever asked him about it, which only seemed to prove that it couldn't have really happened.
Cordelia left the bar alone, and walked back toward her mother's apartment with her hands in her pockets, rolling the grand new name around in her head. Betan Expeditionary Force. A promotion, too--well, they'd owed her that much for her intelligence, in the end. But everything she'd debriefed meant war against the Barrayarans. She hadn't hesitated before signing up, but the longer she was out drinking with other Survey-officers-turned-BEF-ers, the less she could ignore what it really meant.
He couldn't avoid it any more than she could. Less, in fact. And it was scarcely to be hoped that Escobar, even backed by Beta Colony, could intimidate the Barrayarans into letting the idea go. The Cetagandans hadn't intimidated the Barrayarans a generation ago, despite dirty nukes and a twenty-year occupation. They weren't going to be scared now by a lot of scientists so peace-loving they had to start an army from scratch to support their ally.
So now I'm a hired killer, too, Cordelia thought. And if I ask the best man I know for advice about it, I'll be fraternizing with the enemy.
Cordelia wasn't really surprised when she looked around and realized she was nowhere near her mother's apartment. She'd gone the wrong way straight out of the bar, in fact, and while she'd gotten a little buzz on with everyone else there was no excuse for being miles away from home in the embassy district. She gave up on the pretense of moving aimlessly and navigated efficiently down a couple of levels until she found the unassuming door with a little plaque that said BARRAYAR twice, in their native script and in the galactic-standard alphabet.
Cordelia rocked on her heels, thinking about closed doors and what might be on the other side. She wondered how long she could loiter without some alert Barrayaran in a uniform popping out to ask what she was doing.
Two and a half minutes, as it turned out. The boy who opened the door reminded her--with a miserable pang--of Koudelka, though he was darker-haired, with luminous brown eyes.
Cordelia felt an unaccustomed, instantaneous surge of desire. She'd been amiably propositioned by half the new-minted officers of the BEF, back at the bar--people had been calling out offers by the numbers, and half of them had made it through the single digits right there at the table, without even spilling their drinks. The prospect hadn't appealed no matter what activities anyone suggested, but Cordelia desperately wanted to take this young man--young soldier--to bed just to hear him say her name.
When he opened his mouth, though, he said, "May I help you, ma'am?" in a tone which was both frosty and wildly unlike Vorkosigan's warm, guttural accent.
The frisson of lust evaporated instantly, and Cordelia fell back a step, shaking her head, and turned on her heel to march toward home.
Only slightly drunk one night, a few weeks after finally freeing the last of his prisoners of war and returning to Barrayar, Aral sat down to write Captain Naismith--Cordelia--Captain Naismith a letter. She'd said they could write even as she rejected his proposal, and if they were nothing else to each other he thought they must be friends. He'd never had a woman as a friend before, but she refused to be anything more, and she knew too many of his secrets to be anything less.
She was not his enemy, he thought. Aral knew perfectly well who his enemies were.
And yet what could he write to her? I think of you often--but he could hardly elaborate on that without giving offense, when she didn't want anything to do with him.
On the other hand, she was Betan. And she hadn't minded the thought of him so much, only the thought of Barrayar.
I should have emigrated the first time around, Aral thought, and remembered for the first time in months--how could it be only months?--his late-night visit to the Betan embassy. Aral glanced around the room. He still had that packet somewhere, he was pretty sure. Didn't he? What the hell had it been, anyway? He remembered vaguely being worried that it was intelligence--no, that it would look like intelligence--but that wouldn't have made any sense.
He only remembered the Betan embassy guard--or whoever he was--had been half-dressed and had flirted with him. He'd said something about a list, hadn't he? It must be immigration requirements. If he could find it he could see how far down the list he got before he hit outstanding charges and had to accept that Beta would never take him any more than Barrayar would let him go.
Maybe he could make some kind of claim for asylum. Maybe he had a blood-right, from his grandmother. Where had he put the packet?
He'd half-ransacked the room before he found it halfway down the drawer in the bedside table. He thought this was it, anyway--a blank, sealed packet of flimsies with something else inside. Aral sat down on the bed and tore it open, spilling the little book-disc out onto the mattress beside him. The sheaf of flimsies slid out slower, giving him plenty of time to read the block-capital title on the checklist.
Frequently Suggested Sexual Practices: An Aid to Communication
Oh. Well.
That made a bit more sense, he supposed. That was the sort of thing Betans would think Barrayarans needed. Betans loved to communicate. And perhaps this meant Cordelia really wouldn't be offended if he wrote to her about what he'd been thinking; he'd written those sorts of love letters a few times, although he'd been younger and drunker and cribbed half his material directly from the letters Ges wrote to him first. Ges had hardly ever noticed....
Ges was dead, deservedly and mercifully dead. Aral was staring at the first item on the list. It said, kissing: mouth on mouth.
Surely that didn't count? But then Cordelia had said something about starting young, hadn't she? Fourteen. The checklist had to cover everything from the beginning, for the young ones' sakes. That made a kind of sense.
Aral remembered being fourteen. He would have taken the checklist as a challenge, he was fairly certain. He knew Ges would have.
He wasn't thinking about Ges. Who was dead. Aral wasn't nearly drunk enough to be thinking about Ges.
He tugged the flimsy a little further out of the packet, and his eyes skipped down over a series of increasingly reasonable items that began with manual stimulation and oral stimulation. He stopped short at number nine, simultaneous manual stimulation of partner's penis and vagina. Aral blinked--that was perfectly fine if you were both paying attention, except that it was phrased as if.... He silently mouthed the words, but there was no other way to read the Betan letters.
Aral tugged the entire sheaf of flimsies out of the packet, and a bright pink sheet headed Frequently Asked Questions: An Aid for Barrayarans fell out.
The first line under that title read Items 9 through 14 refer to activities involving one or more Betan hermaphrodite or otherwise non-binary-gendered partners. For equivalent acts achieved through the use of sexual accessories or temporary recreational body modifications, see items 91 through 96.
Aral turned the pink sheet over--oh hell, there was printing on the back, too. His eye fell on specially formulated lubricants are recommended--inquire for the Thick and Juicy brand at any import shop. Aral folded the stack of flimsies in half without really looking at them again and shoved the lot back into the packet, book-disc and all. He hid the packet at the bottom of the drawer, and gave up on the idea of writing to Cordelia, who probably knew all about all of these things.
He also gave up on only being a little bit drunk; luckily he'd brought a fresh bottle upstairs with him, just in case.
Cordelia had a bad moment when she stepped into her hostel room in Vorbarr Sultana. It looked, at first glance, very much like Vorrutyer's cabin, and then her eyes went panic-glazed and she knew she was beyond seeing it properly at all. The bed was ornate, huge, wooden; she couldn't see anything but that. She forced herself to close the door and step far enough into the room to assure herself that she was alone (the single crucial difference, Cordelia told herself, but it didn't stop the shaking in her hands). When she was sure, she forced her staring eyes to close.
She dropped to her knees there, in the middle of the room--not an entirely voluntary motion--and spread her hands on her thighs, doing nothing but breathe and listen. The faint ambient sounds that reached her were nothing like the endless background noises of a ship, which were as familiar to her as her own heartbeat.
She could hear two women talking, not far off, distance and the closed door blurring their words to an impression of Barrayaran vowels and the tones of a cheerful nearing-end-of-shift conversation. There was traffic audible outside, the dizzying uncontrolled mix of air and ground vehicles that she'd navigated to reach this hostel, not far from the tram that served the spaceport. There was some sort of animal chittering sound--likely to be an actual animal, here, not a biology-mimicking code-alert. There were probably birds outside the window. She'd seen them in the street outside. Barrayar was full of unregulated organisms, burning through abundant oxygen and sunlight and empty surface space.
Cordelia had come here to be one of them. She was not aboard a ship; she had not fallen back through time. She had come to Barrayar to find Aral. Ges Vorrutyer was thoroughly dead, and whatever had become of the bed he'd tied her to, it was surely not here in this room.
Cordelia opened her eyes and got to her feet, distracting herself for a moment with the unfamiliar motion of skirts as she did so. She looked down, straightening the fabric, and then went to the outer wall, pushing the curtains aside to reveal a real window, not just a screen showing some distant surface. There was an inviting pair of handles set in the frame, showing that the glass could be pushed up, creating an unmediated opening to the outside.
With the glass out of the way, she bent to lean out and look down at the street, only to find her progress impeded by a fine mesh of metal wires stretched across the opening. Cordelia prodded it curiously--it was nearly transparent, and far too lightweight to provide the crude security she'd seen on ground-level windows elsewhere, armored with iron bars or semi-decorative grilles. The wires were thick enough not to cut her skin, but fine enough not to really obstruct the view.
Thwarted, Cordelia let her forehead rest against the barrier and watched the birds in the nearest tree. The summer sun was going down at last, and the birds seemed to be in a flurry of activity in the last of the daylight. One took sudden flight, passing barely a foot from her nose before coming to rest at the next windowsill over, and Cordelia understood. There were no force fields here to keep a building's exterior free of weather and pests. Barrayarans had to make this mechanical barrier between inside and outside, permeable to air and light, but hopefully not to birds or bugs.
Bolstered by that small insight, Cordelia turned away from the window to face the bed. The ugly shock of recognition was already fading, and she could see it properly, now. This bed was of much plainer construction, and the wood was a lighter, redder color. All it really had in common with Vorrutyer's furniture was a general Barrayaran idea of what made for a comfortable bed; this modest hostel could surely never offer anything in Vorrutyer's league for decadence. Cordelia stood a moment longer, letting the dusk settle and thinking things through.
She had been assuming, on some level, that Barrayar--the good parts of Barrayar--would be like Aral's cabin, an ascetic refuge from all she had fled. But in terms of interior design, most of Barrayar would be at least as luxuriant as what Vorrutyer had been able to get away with dragging around on board a military ship. Certainly the parts where Aral lived, being titled and a military hero and so on. Aral's plain, sensible bunk had been a matter of utilitarian military design; when he was at home he probably slept in a bed every bit as ornate and enormous as Vorrutyer's.
And she had come to Barrayar intending to sleep beside him. Among other things.
Before she could overthink it any further, Cordelia undid the fasteners at the back of her dress, shrugged out of it and let it fall to the floor. Of course then she had to pick it up and lay it neatly over a chair--it was the only dress she had, and looking presentable when she met Aral, and more importantly whoever was closest to Aral on Barrayar, was even more important than looking not-too-foreign while renting a room. She took off her underthings, too, and took them into the bathroom only to find there was no convenient sonic cleaner to drop them into. She left them on the counter, and walked back naked to the bedroom to find her bag; she'd dropped it just inside the door. She moved it over near the chair, where she'd be slightly less likely to trip over it, and then there was nothing left to do but climb into bed for the night, so she did.
The sheets were cool and smooth against her skin--a homely sort of washed-smooth, smelling of strong soap, rather than the perfumed luxury of Vorrutyer's bedding. The mattress was soft, and she found herself tilting inexorably toward a slight hollow in the center. She gave in to the pull, curling herself up at the center of gravity, and after a few moments spent convincing herself that this wasn't bad, nor even very strange when she had her eyes closed, Cordelia ran a cautious exploratory hand over her own thigh, hip, belly, breast. She'd scarcely touched herself since the war--one or two deliberate experiments, to prove to herself that she could, that she wasn't in need of an LPST's expert attention. She'd done just fine with her own hands and the memory of Aral's voice, Aral's hands, Aral's body, and she'd thought that that was all she needed to know.
It occurred to her now that none of those experiments had taken place in bed, and that there might just possibly be a reason for that. And tomorrow she would see him face to face, and he wouldn't be a fantasy or a theoretical refuge. He would be real again, a man, a Barrayaran man, and she would have to negotiate on the fly all the things that she'd have sorted out with a Betan on the first date, or before. Beyond those stolen kisses and the fact of his marriage proposals, she hadn't the first idea what he liked.
Vorrutyer's words came back to her--your Puritan lover, in his silkily poisonous voice--and Cordelia's tentative hand closed into a fist, knuckles pressed to her own flesh. Vorrutyer was dead, and whatever he had been to Aral was dead with him. Not relevant, except as a negative: Aral would be Not Like Vorrutyer to her, she knew that above all. But that left virtually every potentially-pleasant sexual possibility on the table, and Cordelia couldn't begin to guess what he would be to her, what she would be to him, what they would be together.
They wouldn't even have recourse to an LPST if they got themselves really muddled, and Cordelia wasn't as confident as she'd been an hour ago of her ability to handle whatever missteps might occur with the aplomb everyone expected of Betans when it came to sex. Aral would surely expect her to be the knowledgeable one--or at least, he had to realize she was more or less as sexually experienced as he was, and constitutionally inclined to talk about it. She wondered if sexual negotiation would turn into another round of "I had a friend" stories, or if they would just wind up doing hand-puppet role play like primary school children.
Cordelia unclenched her fist and rubbed her open palm across her face. She knew it was pointless to try to guess before she had even seen Aral, but she couldn't stop trying to guess. She didn't know anything about Barrayarans and sex, not really. She couldn't even think of any jokes about Barrayaran sex, and that was truly strange, because her time in the BEF had exposed her to plenty of unfunny jokes about Barrayarans. Cordelia opened her eyes and stared toward the dimly-lit rectangle of the window, wondering why there weren't any sex jokes about Barrayarans, and then felt the corners of her mouth tighten grimly when she worked it out.
Betans didn't tell sex jokes about Barrayarans because rape wasn't funny. And that was, all by itself, the only unfunny semi-joke a Betan needed to tell her what to expect of Barrayarans in bed. Or out back of the camp-shelters, or called away alone to his office....
But it had never been like that with Aral, no matter what Mehta had wanted her to remember, and it would never be like that. They would figure it out somehow. They would invent their own kind of Barrayaran sex if they had to, hand puppets and all, and then they'd make their own jokes.
Someday we'll laugh at this, Cordelia promised herself. Not only herself, she realized, as she finally relaxed toward sleep--it was a promise to Aral, too, wherever he was. Someday, love. Starting from tomorrow.
As time dragged on, Aral's life had become a matter of competing necessities. It was necessary to drink. It was necessary not to drink every day.
It was necessary, now that he had left the Imperial Service, to find some other way to serve. For the first time in his adult life, he was Lord Vorkosigan before anything else, and so he neatly combined his days of not-drinking with days of doing whatever his father needed done around the District by a younger man in--ostensibly--better health. The tasks were never really onerous, nor overtly political; his father knew Aral's limits. They merely required Aral to leave his father's property and associate with people who hadn't seen him vomiting the day before, or dead drunk the day before that.
Vorkosigan's District and Vorbarr Sultana were both horrifyingly populated with people who seemed to believe he was some sort of hero of the Escobar disaster. He knew that that was the way Negri had spun him to the public, but it was another thing to speak to people who believed it, to see it in their eyes. He soldiered--ha!--soldiered on, usually with Bothari along as guard and driver and general support. Even Bothari didn't hate Aral properly since he'd gotten out of the hospital, but at least he didn't share the awful delusion that gripped everyone else.
After a day like that it was necessary to sleep, so that the day would be over, and so that he could escape himself for a while. Even his nightmares paled in comparison to his realities, and his better dreams... they hurt no worse, when they shattered on waking.
But sleep was elusive, and drinking himself unconscious was tomorrow's project. If he started tonight, eventually someone would realize why. Starting early tomorrow would only seem like a reaction to a bad night, and anyone would forgive an old soldier that. But first he must sleep, and if sleep would not come easily then it must be courted.
Twenty years ago he'd have thought himself too old and dignified to take some token of an absent lover to bed with him. Ten years ago he'd have thought the same of taking pornography. The Betan checklist was neither, exactly--precise as it was, it wasn't graphic, and Cordelia had never touched it, never spoken of it.
Still, the Aid for Barrayarans had clarified the purpose of the list, including the fact that it was a part of the standard education of all young Betans, of both--of all--sexes. Therefore Cordelia had read it, and while he couldn't quite fathom the circumstances, the fact was that he could be assured that she knew of these things, had pictured them herself if only from curiosity at the logistics. He had no memento of her; she had left nothing behind when she departed the prison camp. She had never sent a letter. He had never succeeded in writing one.
What he had was this packet of flimsies--much-handled, by now, folded over to particular points of interest and blacked out in a few places where there had been items he'd rather not contemplate. If the list was what it claimed to be, then it constituted a kind of permission for the things he imagined, alone in his bed at night. Almost a benediction. A breath of another world, free and fearless.
He dropped the pages on the pillow he never used, the always-empty side of the wide bed in the rooms that had been his all his adult life at Vorkosigan Surleau.
He undressed quickly and lay down in his own accustomed place, turned on his side toward the pages, shut his eyes and stirred a hand through them, finally setting one finger down firmly enough to hear the flimsy crackle under it. He opened his eyes and discovered that he was denting item #97, female partner penetrates male partner's anus with a temporarily-attached phallus.
Aral let out a shaky breath. He'd been eyeing that one for a while--he'd looked it up on the book disc just to see how they explained it. The article on the book disc had featured a few helpful illustrations that he'd barely been able to look at, though they remained quite distinct in his mind afterward. The toy in the illustration had been quite... realistic. He supposed they had such things on Beta Colony--given some of the other items on the list, he supposed they had quite a lot of interesting features, practically fully-functional prostheses. (The book disc had explained some things about the possibilities for stimulating nerve endings through technology that had taken Aral entirely out of the topic at hand, leaving him grinding his teeth at the thought of using such technology for sex toys when there were amputees walking around Barrayar with dead metal legs, men of his father's generation up in the Dendarii mountains with hooks for hands. But he wasn't going to think about that now, not if he ever wanted to get to sleep.)
He'd have to pretend, firstly, that Cordelia would own such a thing, but given how many times that sort of thing appeared on the checklist, perhaps that was quite normal. He remembered--for the thousandth time--the casual way she'd mentioned the use of pornography, when they were telling each other stories. And if she had owned and used pornography for a lover--hadn't entirely liked it, to judge by the way the story had gone, hadn't wanted it all the time, but had been willing to indulge that fool who squandered her love--why not one of those toys? Why not a quite good one, one which would make it as good for her as if she really felt it when she fucked him? And if she owned such a thing, she wouldn't think anything of him asking her to use it. She might well ask first, so he wouldn't even have to betray a special eagerness for it.
Aral closed his eyes and put aside the question of how they'd gotten here. He drew up one leg to expose himself for her, leaning a little forward. The flimsies rustled beside him, but Aral turned his face down into his own pillow as he reached down to take his cock in hand, imagining her there behind him. She would have the thing in place already, plastic pale as her skin but incongruously erect, nearly hiding the red curls between her legs.
It looked obscene--literally, like something he oughtn't be allowed to see--but there she was, showing him. She was fearless, confident, approaching this temporary transformation with the same improbably good grace she brought to a forced march, conspiracy, imprisonment. Once she chose to indulge him in this she entered into it entirely, taking her own pleasure from it as well--stroking the cock between her legs, a flush rising on her cheeks at the sensations it transmitted to her, her nipples standing up hard, breasts rising and falling quickly with her deep breaths.
And all the while Aral waited for her to do as she liked to him. He'd already surrendered himself to her before she even touched him. Not tied up, nothing like that--he'd crossed those lines out firmly, after the very first time he read through the list--but he held himself still for her gaze, for whatever she wished to do next. She gave him that crooked smile, made a gentle joke or two--he couldn't think what she'd joke about, but he knew she would, could hear the warm tone of it, the twang of her Betan accent around the shape of the words. She was careful about it, gentle and coaxing as if he were a virgin, as if he'd never been taken this way before.
And he hadn't been, had he? What he'd actually done before now was another item entirely--much further up the list, close to the top. It was altogether unremarkable on Beta Colony. Item #97 would be entirely new to him when she tried it on him--when they tried it together, as the Aid to Barrayarans emphasized. Regardless of directions of physical motion, all sexual practices involving two or more participants are undertaken together by partners, not done to one partner by another. He was participating as much by lying still, waiting, exposing himself to her, as she was by slicking her fingers--Aral slipped his own fingers into his mouth, licked and sucked and imagined them being hers, slender, softer, nails sensibly short but undeniably feminine--and pressing them--just there.
She went slowly--not intending to tease, only being careful. She made some joke about making a proper Survey--he could almost make out the words of that one--and all the while her fingertips were circling, pushing a little, circling again, testing gingerly, until he was pushing back into the touch, wanting it too much to be still and wait.
The rough shove of his fingers into himself made the fantasy fade--he could scarcely imagine his fingers as hers, his frantic movement as hers. It would be better with her, but for now the mere sensation was enough. He crooked his fingers inside himself, finding the place--she would find it easily, fill him completely--and jerked his cock in a rough, impatient rhythm--she would tell him to slow down, if she were here, make him enjoy it, make it last.
It didn't last.
He came with a shudder, over and around his own fingers. He lay still, catching his breath, trying to hold the image of her for another moment, but it faded fast, leaving him alone and wrung out.
He rolled out of bed and washed his hands, and only then gathered up the flimsies and put them away. When they were safely secured against any servant who might come in to check on him, Aral fell into bed and soon into sleep.
Aral was still for long enough that Cordelia thought he might have fallen asleep--passed out--and was starting to wonder how she would get him down the hill. There were probably some other able-bodied fellows in uniforms like Bothari's around somewhere. Meanwhile, Aral's breathing sounded clear and there was no especial rush to move him, or herself, anywhere. It was a novel situation, having reached her destination at last. She'd found Aral; the place she'd found him in was second to that.
Cordelia closed her eyes, shifting her hand to settle it over his heart. His fingers brushed her elbow and then traced slowly, shiver-lightly, up her forearm to the bare skin of her wrist.
"Cordelia," he murmured into her hair, and Cordelia smiled.
"Aral," she returned, tilting her head a little to nuzzle past the collar of his shirt.
He huffed a soft laugh, and then said, "I should ask now. I might not, when I'm sober."
Cordelia opened her eyes at that, but didn't move to make it easier to look him in the eye. He might not want to look into hers. His fingers tightened briefly on her wrist. Cordelia ducked her head and kissed his nearest knuckles, and then settled back into place. "Ask anything. Whenever you're ready."
He hummed a low, uncertain noise, and then said, "Is it true that--"
He pressed his face into her hair and his body shook under hers. Cordelia pressed her hand harder against his chest, and he turned his head, letting something like a giggle escape against the back of Cordelia's neck.
She smiled helplessly and said, "Goodness, this should be fun."
"Someone--I found--this checklist. About sex. Aid to Communication, it says."
Cordelia was startled into a laugh at that, and picked up her head to look him in the eye. He had his eyes closed, a boyish flush coloring his pale cheeks. He had lovely eyelashes. Cordelia kissed his cheek and then settled back down to lean her head against his shoulder.
"Where did a nice Barrayaran like you get a copy of the FSSP?"
He shook again, and this time Cordelia was able to interpret the motion as laughter even without hearing it. "No one's accused me of being nice in a very long time."
"But indisputably Barrayaran," Cordelia said. "It's out on the information nets, of course, but--was it the Aid to Communication part? Were you expecting... procedures...?"
Aral laughed again, soundlessly, and repeated, "Procedures," in an almost unintelligible wheeze.
She picked her head up again to watch him laughing--his eyelashes were wet with it now, and he tilted his head back against the chair. He raised a clumsy hand as if to cover his face, and Cordelia caught it halfway there and held on firmly.
He opened his eyes at that, and the humor fell away as he looked her in the eye. "So it is--you know those things."
She nodded cautiously. There was nothing either accusing or hopeful in his voice, and she didn't know what to hope for herself. "I can't say I've tried all of them--"
"I crossed out the seventies," he blurted, and Cordelia tightened her hand on his and closed her eyes for a moment.
"Quite all right," she assured him after a few seconds, opening her eyes to look again. "I was thinking we could start in the single digits and work our way up. As slowly as necessary, and skipping anything we don't like. Or not physiologically applicable."
"Hmmm," he said, not disagreeing. He licked his lips, and Cordelia leaned in and took a quick kiss.
"One," he murmured, their mouths close enough that Cordelia shivered at his breath on her lips.
"Oh," Cordelia said. "There's more to it than that. Remember, we can go as--slowly--"
Cordelia tilted her head to a more promising angle, slanting an open kiss onto his mouth, and Aral followed her lead beautifully. The kiss was languid, extending into a long sunlit stream of kisses, deep and soft and thorough. Cordelia was pleasantly breathless when she pulled away to look down at him, and Aral looked up through his eyelashes, a smile on his parted lips.
"That's much better," Cordelia sighed, leaning her forehead against his and closing her eyes. "It doesn't hurt at all when you stop, now."
"Good," Aral said, sounding slurred for the first time, and then snored.
Cordelia's head jerked back, and she looked down at him, finally asleep. Passed out. Still smiling.
Cordelia giggled and shook her head, but she tilted his head to optimize his airway, and reassured herself that she wasn't putting undue pressure on his lungs before she settled back into place against his side.
"First joke," Cordelia said, tapping a finger thoughtfully against the button of Aral's shirt. "Something about Barrayaran men abusing the local crude intoxicants and falling asleep right before sex, instead of right after."
Cordelia's arrival had thoroughly thrown off his schedule; he'd stopped drinking about twelve hours earlier than usual, which meant that he got to the vomiting phase in the middle of the night. Once it was over he felt both wide awake and hardly hung over enough to be worth mentioning.
When he was quite sure he was done being sick, Aral took a shower. Afterward, just in case Cordelia had been serious about not retreating to a guest room no matter how long he spent throwing up, he put on the dressing gown that always hung beside the towels.
When he stepped out into the bedroom, he found that Cordelia had not only been serious about not leaving, she'd made herself at home. She was wearing a pair of his pajamas--a proper little suit, grey and silky, which only appeared in his wardrobe because it was the sort of thing some servant thought it was right and proper for Lord Vorkosigan to own. The fabric was nearly the color of Cordelia's eyes. She'd left a couple of the shirt buttons undone, and was lying on her side; he could see her entire right collarbone, and the top swell of her breast.
He seriously considered going back into the bathroom to hyperventilate for a few minutes. This was the first sober moment he'd had to really consider the fact that Cordelia had just come to Barrayar, for him, forever. Now she was lying in his bed, wearing his clothes much more attractively than he ever had--if he'd ever worn those at all, which he doubted--and reading....
Aral made some sort of noise; he couldn't have said what, over the sudden rushing of blood in his ears. Cordelia looked up with a bright, cheerful smile.
"We match," Cordelia observed, as if that were what was worth commenting upon, and not the flimsies in her hands, much-folded and carefully blacked out in places. "Are you meant to wear it all together?"
"Probably," Aral said. He'd never paid much attention to the dressing gowns, either. He was still staring at Cordelia, lying in his bed, her red hair tumbled across his pillow, her eyes silver-bright. Terrifyingly erotic or erotically terrifying? "I don't mind sharing."
"Good," Cordelia said, and lifted the flimsies slightly, as if he might not have noticed them before. "I found these while I was looking for clothes, and--you did mention you'd crossed some things out, so I thought I'd see what was off the table."
"Naturally," Aral said, his voice coming out a little faint.
Cordelia's smile turned gentle, and she said, "You should really lie down, love. I don't imagine you're entirely recovered just yet."
"Perhaps not," Aral agreed. Better not to explain that the way he felt just now compared well to his better days, since Escobar. He walked over to the bed and climbed under the covers, curling onto his side facing Cordelia. It put his back to the door--he wouldn't be able to sleep this way--but at least he was between her and it.
When he looked at Cordelia again, her gaze was well below his face. Aral looked down to see that the dressing gown had fallen further open than the pajama shirt Cordelia was wearing; she seemed, from her distracted expression, to be rather enjoying the view.
Aral had a sudden, crystal-clear flash of memory. He smiled as he said, "I'm up here."
Cordelia's eyes snapped up to his and her cheeks flushed a little, though her grin was wide and shameless. "Can't blame a woman for looking."
"Not you," Aral agreed, reaching out his hand for hers. She dropped the flimsies and took it at once.
Aral considered moving closer--he could acquit himself respectably now, and she deserved a better welcome than she'd had thus far.
Before he'd actually moved, Cordelia asked blithely, eyes still on his, "Tell me, do Barrayarans tell sex jokes about Betans?"
Aral stared at her for a moment, unable to breathe or think, until she began to look concerned, and scooted across the distance between them, laying her hand on his cheek. "Aral? Did I just violate some massive taboo?"
Aral shut his eyes and set his hand over hers, exhaling something that would have been a laugh, if he'd only still been drunk for this. "All of them. Violently. It's all right, they were asking for it."
Cordelia made a faintly disapproving noise, and Aral was startled into opening his eyes, uncertain what he'd just done wrong. Cordelia took back her hand to wave it off. "Do you, though? Tell jokes about Betans?"
"I don't," Aral said. "Not since I was nine years old and my brother told me I could either apologize to my half-Betan mother and Betan grandmother and never tell another one, or I could meet him behind the stables with two swords."
Cordelia raised her eyebrows.
Aral shrugged. "There's only one, really, it just gets dressed up in different language. The punchline is always, It's all right, she's from Beta Colony!"
"Hmm," Cordelia said, reaching into the small space left between them to rescue the folded, crumpled, much-marked flimsies. She didn't sound offended, merely thoughtful. "That could be useful. I mean--I realize it's not intended as a compliment, coming from Barrayarans, but it does mean that the general stereotype about Betans is that we're sexually knowledgeable."
"...Useful?" Aral managed, after several stunned seconds.
Cordelia looked up, and her eyes went wide. "Not in practice! Not like that! I just--I thought--I mean, Betans all take the FSSP for granted, you know. We hardly even bother to use it directly, we're all so used to negotiating. But this was good, for you and me. I was just thinking--I’m bound to have time on my hands, now, and I expect I’ll have to be in touch with the Embassy anyway, sooner or later. Perhaps I could work with whoever put the packet together and find some systematic way to distribute the FSSP here--an edited version, maybe, with your input on what really needs explaining to the average Barrayaran--"
"The average Barrayaran..." Aral heard himself repeat her words, but couldn't quite find his own to even begin to tell her what was wrong with the idea.
"Of course, of course, you belong to a very specific demographic. I'd need to interview some people in your father's household, or in the village--women, obviously, and people who've had a different sort of education, and--"
"Women," Aral repeated, very faintly, and had a very vivid mental image of what his cousin Padma would do to him after Cordelia showed the checklist to Padma's very proper young bride. Two swords behind the stables indeed.
To say nothing of what his father was going to do if this thing appeared with Lady Vorkosigan’s imprimatur right beside the emblem of the Betan Embassy.
"Or..." Cordelia trailed off, seeming to finally read the expression on his face. "Perhaps not...?”
She sounded more puzzled than disappointed.
"The average Barrayaran may not be quite ready for this," Aral offered. "And, really, we don't know how well it's worked for us yet. Perhaps we should, ah--"
Cordelia's smile was decidedly mischievous. "Make sure we've gotten all the kinks out?"
Aral groaned even as he hauled her into a kiss, preventing her from saying another word. He was sure they'd gotten the hang of kissing, at least. They'd doubtless find their way through the rest.
Many, many enormous thanks to
ellen_fremedon, petra, fairestcat, and iuliamentis for beta, as well as everyone else who read or otherwise encouraged this in the last ... unspecified span of time.Set during Shards of Honor. Aral/Cordelia. Explicit. Pegging. 8000 words.
Despite the title/rating/etc., this is a story about all the sex Aral and Cordelia didn't have with each other before they got married.
Frequently Suggested Sexual Practices: An Aid to Communication
Aral knew that someone followed him each time he left that green silk room. Maybe it was Negri's bland young lieutenant, but more likely it was one of the older, harder ImpSec men. Negri would send someone who could and would kill him if he made a wrong move between the Imperial Residence and Vorkosigan House.
And they would wait for him, of course, to see if he made any other wrong moves. Each night Aral changed out of his uniform in the knowledge the gesture was futile. He could as soon set aside his own skin for the night. He made the gesture anyway.
Aral wandered Vorbarr Sultana each night, looking for the wrong turn that would save him from having to go back in the morning. He'd tried, two nights in a row, to find it in the caravanserai, and each time he just found an old friend who conveniently wanted to escort him somewhere more comfortable. It was an officers' club with Aristide one night, and the next night it was Padma, who didn't make much pretense about the thing, once they were in an aircar. Padma just took him back to Vorkosigan House and said, "I'll be around tomorrow night, if you need anything."
When tomorrow night came, Aral walked down to the river and sat on a bench, watching the lights of the city glimmer off the surface like stars dancing in that last instant of visibility before a wormhole jump. ImpSec would fish him out if he jumped, and he didn't actually want to jump.
The fourth night, Aral wandered as aimlessly as he honestly could through the city. He identified the University district mostly by its foreignness to him, and wondered what his life might have been like as a scholar instead of a soldier--but that would also mean that his brother had lived, for Aral to have had the option. And if his brother, perhaps his sister, perhaps his half-Betan mother, who might have rather liked--
He'd been doing so well, all week, at not thinking of her, but he knew perfectly well that the Betan Embassy lay just two blocks beyond the edge of the University. Maybe he hadn't been wandering at all. Maybe wandering in her direction was the best he could ever do.
He considered whether this was a wrong turn that would get him shot. Would an assassination too near, or within, the Betan Embassy constitute a premature opening of hostilities, to be avoided at all costs--even if it meant losing him? Aral felt suddenly reckless enough to experiment, though not foolish enough to start running when he knew perfectly well he would be chased.
He kept his steps slow and his hands in his pockets, but his thoughts raced in circles. What if he could go? What if there were no one following him and no unspeakable disaster in the offing? What if he were free to simply travel to Beta Colony--he could say he wished to pay a visit to his grandmother's family. He had to have cousins of some kind there. Betans lived a long time when they didn't get mixed up in Barrayaran politics; there might even be some living who remembered his grandmother, back before her marriage. Perhaps they had visited her on Barrayar--for her daughter's naming party, though probably not her daughter's wartime wedding. Or funeral.
If he paid a visit to someone else after his familial duties were attended to, well. That would be entirely his own affair, if only he were allowed to have his own--ha!--his own affairs. If only everything else were different. If only he dared to try. And here he was, playing at trying, just to see if he'd be shot down like a dog before he made the hollow gesture.
Surely, given what Cor--what Commander Naismith must have told her government by now, if he so much as applied for a visa he'd be seized and fast-pentaed. And he did not have the fast-penta allergy, nor a convenient capsule of poison. All the same, he surely had instant death available for the asking, from some quietly tracking man somewhere behind him. Ezar and Negri would never let him walk around free with this much intelligence, otherwise.
And so Aral simply stood on the doorstep of the Betan Embassy without doing anything, waiting to see who jumped first. It was well past ordinary business hours, and he shouldn't go ringing their bell and bothering some Betan civil servant just to play out his own half-suicidal half-romantic half-witted gesture to the hilt.
The door opened, startling him. On the other side was a tall young man who looked athletic without being soldierly. He was wearing a thick, fluffy sweater and a brightly-colored cloth wrapped around his waist--too smooth for a towel, too small for a sheet. Aral found himself staring, trying to make it out.
"I'm up here," the young man said, sounding amused and, oh, just like her. Aral jerked his gaze up to the young man's face, wondering how he could possibly feel homesick for a foreign accent. It had been a worse idea to come here than he'd thought, and he wasn't even drunk.
"I know, I know," the young man said. "You're not embarrassed, you're just laconic. No need to say a word, sir, just let me get a packet."
Aral did not say a word, wondering what cue he'd missed--what cue he'd given, all unawares. At the same time he was all too aware that there must be a scope-sight on the chest of the young man who sounded so much like her, just waiting for one of them to say the wrong word, make the wrong gesture.
The young man disappeared briefly--to safety, but if Aral warned him away surely that would alert his watcher--and returned as promised, holding a sealed, unlabeled packet. It was big enough to hold a sheaf of flimsies. He offered it and Aral took it automatically; something shifted inside, smaller and denser than flimsies. A book disc.
"That's a printout of the list, up to date as of this year, plus a disc with all the explanations and diagrams," the young man said briskly, while Aral wondered distantly if it looked like he had just scored some sort of intelligence coup--surely they would not imagine he was such an idiot as to accept a bribe in this manner. "And before you ask, no, Embassy staff do not give live demonstrations.”
The young man looked Aral up and down pointedly and added, "Usually we don't, anyway. Come back with flowers and a dinner reservation and I might be persuaded."
Aral realized he was being flirted with and mocked at the same time, and wondered if the ImpSec agent could see that as well. Inexplicable as it was, it might be the only way to keep them both safe from his idiocy. Aral tucked the packet under one arm, placed his hand on his heart, and made a courtly bow straight out of a melodrama, surely visible to the man lurking somewhere behind him.
"Thank you for giving me hope," he said solemnly, and then turned on his heel and walked away. No one intercepted him. He never spotted his tail.
Back at Vorkosigan House, he shoved the packet blindly into a drawer in his bedroom, and went to sleep with a Betan accent echoing in his ears. By the time he was back in the green silk room the next morning, it seemed like something he'd dreamed once, long ago. No one ever asked him about it, which only seemed to prove that it couldn't have really happened.
Cordelia left the bar alone, and walked back toward her mother's apartment with her hands in her pockets, rolling the grand new name around in her head. Betan Expeditionary Force. A promotion, too--well, they'd owed her that much for her intelligence, in the end. But everything she'd debriefed meant war against the Barrayarans. She hadn't hesitated before signing up, but the longer she was out drinking with other Survey-officers-turned-BEF-ers, the less she could ignore what it really meant.
He couldn't avoid it any more than she could. Less, in fact. And it was scarcely to be hoped that Escobar, even backed by Beta Colony, could intimidate the Barrayarans into letting the idea go. The Cetagandans hadn't intimidated the Barrayarans a generation ago, despite dirty nukes and a twenty-year occupation. They weren't going to be scared now by a lot of scientists so peace-loving they had to start an army from scratch to support their ally.
So now I'm a hired killer, too, Cordelia thought. And if I ask the best man I know for advice about it, I'll be fraternizing with the enemy.
Cordelia wasn't really surprised when she looked around and realized she was nowhere near her mother's apartment. She'd gone the wrong way straight out of the bar, in fact, and while she'd gotten a little buzz on with everyone else there was no excuse for being miles away from home in the embassy district. She gave up on the pretense of moving aimlessly and navigated efficiently down a couple of levels until she found the unassuming door with a little plaque that said BARRAYAR twice, in their native script and in the galactic-standard alphabet.
Cordelia rocked on her heels, thinking about closed doors and what might be on the other side. She wondered how long she could loiter without some alert Barrayaran in a uniform popping out to ask what she was doing.
Two and a half minutes, as it turned out. The boy who opened the door reminded her--with a miserable pang--of Koudelka, though he was darker-haired, with luminous brown eyes.
Cordelia felt an unaccustomed, instantaneous surge of desire. She'd been amiably propositioned by half the new-minted officers of the BEF, back at the bar--people had been calling out offers by the numbers, and half of them had made it through the single digits right there at the table, without even spilling their drinks. The prospect hadn't appealed no matter what activities anyone suggested, but Cordelia desperately wanted to take this young man--young soldier--to bed just to hear him say her name.
When he opened his mouth, though, he said, "May I help you, ma'am?" in a tone which was both frosty and wildly unlike Vorkosigan's warm, guttural accent.
The frisson of lust evaporated instantly, and Cordelia fell back a step, shaking her head, and turned on her heel to march toward home.
Only slightly drunk one night, a few weeks after finally freeing the last of his prisoners of war and returning to Barrayar, Aral sat down to write Captain Naismith--Cordelia--Captain Naismith a letter. She'd said they could write even as she rejected his proposal, and if they were nothing else to each other he thought they must be friends. He'd never had a woman as a friend before, but she refused to be anything more, and she knew too many of his secrets to be anything less.
She was not his enemy, he thought. Aral knew perfectly well who his enemies were.
And yet what could he write to her? I think of you often--but he could hardly elaborate on that without giving offense, when she didn't want anything to do with him.
On the other hand, she was Betan. And she hadn't minded the thought of him so much, only the thought of Barrayar.
I should have emigrated the first time around, Aral thought, and remembered for the first time in months--how could it be only months?--his late-night visit to the Betan embassy. Aral glanced around the room. He still had that packet somewhere, he was pretty sure. Didn't he? What the hell had it been, anyway? He remembered vaguely being worried that it was intelligence--no, that it would look like intelligence--but that wouldn't have made any sense.
He only remembered the Betan embassy guard--or whoever he was--had been half-dressed and had flirted with him. He'd said something about a list, hadn't he? It must be immigration requirements. If he could find it he could see how far down the list he got before he hit outstanding charges and had to accept that Beta would never take him any more than Barrayar would let him go.
Maybe he could make some kind of claim for asylum. Maybe he had a blood-right, from his grandmother. Where had he put the packet?
He'd half-ransacked the room before he found it halfway down the drawer in the bedside table. He thought this was it, anyway--a blank, sealed packet of flimsies with something else inside. Aral sat down on the bed and tore it open, spilling the little book-disc out onto the mattress beside him. The sheaf of flimsies slid out slower, giving him plenty of time to read the block-capital title on the checklist.
Frequently Suggested Sexual Practices: An Aid to Communication
Oh. Well.
That made a bit more sense, he supposed. That was the sort of thing Betans would think Barrayarans needed. Betans loved to communicate. And perhaps this meant Cordelia really wouldn't be offended if he wrote to her about what he'd been thinking; he'd written those sorts of love letters a few times, although he'd been younger and drunker and cribbed half his material directly from the letters Ges wrote to him first. Ges had hardly ever noticed....
Ges was dead, deservedly and mercifully dead. Aral was staring at the first item on the list. It said, kissing: mouth on mouth.
Surely that didn't count? But then Cordelia had said something about starting young, hadn't she? Fourteen. The checklist had to cover everything from the beginning, for the young ones' sakes. That made a kind of sense.
Aral remembered being fourteen. He would have taken the checklist as a challenge, he was fairly certain. He knew Ges would have.
He wasn't thinking about Ges. Who was dead. Aral wasn't nearly drunk enough to be thinking about Ges.
He tugged the flimsy a little further out of the packet, and his eyes skipped down over a series of increasingly reasonable items that began with manual stimulation and oral stimulation. He stopped short at number nine, simultaneous manual stimulation of partner's penis and vagina. Aral blinked--that was perfectly fine if you were both paying attention, except that it was phrased as if.... He silently mouthed the words, but there was no other way to read the Betan letters.
Aral tugged the entire sheaf of flimsies out of the packet, and a bright pink sheet headed Frequently Asked Questions: An Aid for Barrayarans fell out.
The first line under that title read Items 9 through 14 refer to activities involving one or more Betan hermaphrodite or otherwise non-binary-gendered partners. For equivalent acts achieved through the use of sexual accessories or temporary recreational body modifications, see items 91 through 96.
Aral turned the pink sheet over--oh hell, there was printing on the back, too. His eye fell on specially formulated lubricants are recommended--inquire for the Thick and Juicy brand at any import shop. Aral folded the stack of flimsies in half without really looking at them again and shoved the lot back into the packet, book-disc and all. He hid the packet at the bottom of the drawer, and gave up on the idea of writing to Cordelia, who probably knew all about all of these things.
He also gave up on only being a little bit drunk; luckily he'd brought a fresh bottle upstairs with him, just in case.
Cordelia had a bad moment when she stepped into her hostel room in Vorbarr Sultana. It looked, at first glance, very much like Vorrutyer's cabin, and then her eyes went panic-glazed and she knew she was beyond seeing it properly at all. The bed was ornate, huge, wooden; she couldn't see anything but that. She forced herself to close the door and step far enough into the room to assure herself that she was alone (the single crucial difference, Cordelia told herself, but it didn't stop the shaking in her hands). When she was sure, she forced her staring eyes to close.
She dropped to her knees there, in the middle of the room--not an entirely voluntary motion--and spread her hands on her thighs, doing nothing but breathe and listen. The faint ambient sounds that reached her were nothing like the endless background noises of a ship, which were as familiar to her as her own heartbeat.
She could hear two women talking, not far off, distance and the closed door blurring their words to an impression of Barrayaran vowels and the tones of a cheerful nearing-end-of-shift conversation. There was traffic audible outside, the dizzying uncontrolled mix of air and ground vehicles that she'd navigated to reach this hostel, not far from the tram that served the spaceport. There was some sort of animal chittering sound--likely to be an actual animal, here, not a biology-mimicking code-alert. There were probably birds outside the window. She'd seen them in the street outside. Barrayar was full of unregulated organisms, burning through abundant oxygen and sunlight and empty surface space.
Cordelia had come here to be one of them. She was not aboard a ship; she had not fallen back through time. She had come to Barrayar to find Aral. Ges Vorrutyer was thoroughly dead, and whatever had become of the bed he'd tied her to, it was surely not here in this room.
Cordelia opened her eyes and got to her feet, distracting herself for a moment with the unfamiliar motion of skirts as she did so. She looked down, straightening the fabric, and then went to the outer wall, pushing the curtains aside to reveal a real window, not just a screen showing some distant surface. There was an inviting pair of handles set in the frame, showing that the glass could be pushed up, creating an unmediated opening to the outside.
With the glass out of the way, she bent to lean out and look down at the street, only to find her progress impeded by a fine mesh of metal wires stretched across the opening. Cordelia prodded it curiously--it was nearly transparent, and far too lightweight to provide the crude security she'd seen on ground-level windows elsewhere, armored with iron bars or semi-decorative grilles. The wires were thick enough not to cut her skin, but fine enough not to really obstruct the view.
Thwarted, Cordelia let her forehead rest against the barrier and watched the birds in the nearest tree. The summer sun was going down at last, and the birds seemed to be in a flurry of activity in the last of the daylight. One took sudden flight, passing barely a foot from her nose before coming to rest at the next windowsill over, and Cordelia understood. There were no force fields here to keep a building's exterior free of weather and pests. Barrayarans had to make this mechanical barrier between inside and outside, permeable to air and light, but hopefully not to birds or bugs.
Bolstered by that small insight, Cordelia turned away from the window to face the bed. The ugly shock of recognition was already fading, and she could see it properly, now. This bed was of much plainer construction, and the wood was a lighter, redder color. All it really had in common with Vorrutyer's furniture was a general Barrayaran idea of what made for a comfortable bed; this modest hostel could surely never offer anything in Vorrutyer's league for decadence. Cordelia stood a moment longer, letting the dusk settle and thinking things through.
She had been assuming, on some level, that Barrayar--the good parts of Barrayar--would be like Aral's cabin, an ascetic refuge from all she had fled. But in terms of interior design, most of Barrayar would be at least as luxuriant as what Vorrutyer had been able to get away with dragging around on board a military ship. Certainly the parts where Aral lived, being titled and a military hero and so on. Aral's plain, sensible bunk had been a matter of utilitarian military design; when he was at home he probably slept in a bed every bit as ornate and enormous as Vorrutyer's.
And she had come to Barrayar intending to sleep beside him. Among other things.
Before she could overthink it any further, Cordelia undid the fasteners at the back of her dress, shrugged out of it and let it fall to the floor. Of course then she had to pick it up and lay it neatly over a chair--it was the only dress she had, and looking presentable when she met Aral, and more importantly whoever was closest to Aral on Barrayar, was even more important than looking not-too-foreign while renting a room. She took off her underthings, too, and took them into the bathroom only to find there was no convenient sonic cleaner to drop them into. She left them on the counter, and walked back naked to the bedroom to find her bag; she'd dropped it just inside the door. She moved it over near the chair, where she'd be slightly less likely to trip over it, and then there was nothing left to do but climb into bed for the night, so she did.
The sheets were cool and smooth against her skin--a homely sort of washed-smooth, smelling of strong soap, rather than the perfumed luxury of Vorrutyer's bedding. The mattress was soft, and she found herself tilting inexorably toward a slight hollow in the center. She gave in to the pull, curling herself up at the center of gravity, and after a few moments spent convincing herself that this wasn't bad, nor even very strange when she had her eyes closed, Cordelia ran a cautious exploratory hand over her own thigh, hip, belly, breast. She'd scarcely touched herself since the war--one or two deliberate experiments, to prove to herself that she could, that she wasn't in need of an LPST's expert attention. She'd done just fine with her own hands and the memory of Aral's voice, Aral's hands, Aral's body, and she'd thought that that was all she needed to know.
It occurred to her now that none of those experiments had taken place in bed, and that there might just possibly be a reason for that. And tomorrow she would see him face to face, and he wouldn't be a fantasy or a theoretical refuge. He would be real again, a man, a Barrayaran man, and she would have to negotiate on the fly all the things that she'd have sorted out with a Betan on the first date, or before. Beyond those stolen kisses and the fact of his marriage proposals, she hadn't the first idea what he liked.
Vorrutyer's words came back to her--your Puritan lover, in his silkily poisonous voice--and Cordelia's tentative hand closed into a fist, knuckles pressed to her own flesh. Vorrutyer was dead, and whatever he had been to Aral was dead with him. Not relevant, except as a negative: Aral would be Not Like Vorrutyer to her, she knew that above all. But that left virtually every potentially-pleasant sexual possibility on the table, and Cordelia couldn't begin to guess what he would be to her, what she would be to him, what they would be together.
They wouldn't even have recourse to an LPST if they got themselves really muddled, and Cordelia wasn't as confident as she'd been an hour ago of her ability to handle whatever missteps might occur with the aplomb everyone expected of Betans when it came to sex. Aral would surely expect her to be the knowledgeable one--or at least, he had to realize she was more or less as sexually experienced as he was, and constitutionally inclined to talk about it. She wondered if sexual negotiation would turn into another round of "I had a friend" stories, or if they would just wind up doing hand-puppet role play like primary school children.
Cordelia unclenched her fist and rubbed her open palm across her face. She knew it was pointless to try to guess before she had even seen Aral, but she couldn't stop trying to guess. She didn't know anything about Barrayarans and sex, not really. She couldn't even think of any jokes about Barrayaran sex, and that was truly strange, because her time in the BEF had exposed her to plenty of unfunny jokes about Barrayarans. Cordelia opened her eyes and stared toward the dimly-lit rectangle of the window, wondering why there weren't any sex jokes about Barrayarans, and then felt the corners of her mouth tighten grimly when she worked it out.
Betans didn't tell sex jokes about Barrayarans because rape wasn't funny. And that was, all by itself, the only unfunny semi-joke a Betan needed to tell her what to expect of Barrayarans in bed. Or out back of the camp-shelters, or called away alone to his office....
But it had never been like that with Aral, no matter what Mehta had wanted her to remember, and it would never be like that. They would figure it out somehow. They would invent their own kind of Barrayaran sex if they had to, hand puppets and all, and then they'd make their own jokes.
Someday we'll laugh at this, Cordelia promised herself. Not only herself, she realized, as she finally relaxed toward sleep--it was a promise to Aral, too, wherever he was. Someday, love. Starting from tomorrow.
As time dragged on, Aral's life had become a matter of competing necessities. It was necessary to drink. It was necessary not to drink every day.
It was necessary, now that he had left the Imperial Service, to find some other way to serve. For the first time in his adult life, he was Lord Vorkosigan before anything else, and so he neatly combined his days of not-drinking with days of doing whatever his father needed done around the District by a younger man in--ostensibly--better health. The tasks were never really onerous, nor overtly political; his father knew Aral's limits. They merely required Aral to leave his father's property and associate with people who hadn't seen him vomiting the day before, or dead drunk the day before that.
Vorkosigan's District and Vorbarr Sultana were both horrifyingly populated with people who seemed to believe he was some sort of hero of the Escobar disaster. He knew that that was the way Negri had spun him to the public, but it was another thing to speak to people who believed it, to see it in their eyes. He soldiered--ha!--soldiered on, usually with Bothari along as guard and driver and general support. Even Bothari didn't hate Aral properly since he'd gotten out of the hospital, but at least he didn't share the awful delusion that gripped everyone else.
After a day like that it was necessary to sleep, so that the day would be over, and so that he could escape himself for a while. Even his nightmares paled in comparison to his realities, and his better dreams... they hurt no worse, when they shattered on waking.
But sleep was elusive, and drinking himself unconscious was tomorrow's project. If he started tonight, eventually someone would realize why. Starting early tomorrow would only seem like a reaction to a bad night, and anyone would forgive an old soldier that. But first he must sleep, and if sleep would not come easily then it must be courted.
Twenty years ago he'd have thought himself too old and dignified to take some token of an absent lover to bed with him. Ten years ago he'd have thought the same of taking pornography. The Betan checklist was neither, exactly--precise as it was, it wasn't graphic, and Cordelia had never touched it, never spoken of it.
Still, the Aid for Barrayarans had clarified the purpose of the list, including the fact that it was a part of the standard education of all young Betans, of both--of all--sexes. Therefore Cordelia had read it, and while he couldn't quite fathom the circumstances, the fact was that he could be assured that she knew of these things, had pictured them herself if only from curiosity at the logistics. He had no memento of her; she had left nothing behind when she departed the prison camp. She had never sent a letter. He had never succeeded in writing one.
What he had was this packet of flimsies--much-handled, by now, folded over to particular points of interest and blacked out in a few places where there had been items he'd rather not contemplate. If the list was what it claimed to be, then it constituted a kind of permission for the things he imagined, alone in his bed at night. Almost a benediction. A breath of another world, free and fearless.
He dropped the pages on the pillow he never used, the always-empty side of the wide bed in the rooms that had been his all his adult life at Vorkosigan Surleau.
He undressed quickly and lay down in his own accustomed place, turned on his side toward the pages, shut his eyes and stirred a hand through them, finally setting one finger down firmly enough to hear the flimsy crackle under it. He opened his eyes and discovered that he was denting item #97, female partner penetrates male partner's anus with a temporarily-attached phallus.
Aral let out a shaky breath. He'd been eyeing that one for a while--he'd looked it up on the book disc just to see how they explained it. The article on the book disc had featured a few helpful illustrations that he'd barely been able to look at, though they remained quite distinct in his mind afterward. The toy in the illustration had been quite... realistic. He supposed they had such things on Beta Colony--given some of the other items on the list, he supposed they had quite a lot of interesting features, practically fully-functional prostheses. (The book disc had explained some things about the possibilities for stimulating nerve endings through technology that had taken Aral entirely out of the topic at hand, leaving him grinding his teeth at the thought of using such technology for sex toys when there were amputees walking around Barrayar with dead metal legs, men of his father's generation up in the Dendarii mountains with hooks for hands. But he wasn't going to think about that now, not if he ever wanted to get to sleep.)
He'd have to pretend, firstly, that Cordelia would own such a thing, but given how many times that sort of thing appeared on the checklist, perhaps that was quite normal. He remembered--for the thousandth time--the casual way she'd mentioned the use of pornography, when they were telling each other stories. And if she had owned and used pornography for a lover--hadn't entirely liked it, to judge by the way the story had gone, hadn't wanted it all the time, but had been willing to indulge that fool who squandered her love--why not one of those toys? Why not a quite good one, one which would make it as good for her as if she really felt it when she fucked him? And if she owned such a thing, she wouldn't think anything of him asking her to use it. She might well ask first, so he wouldn't even have to betray a special eagerness for it.
Aral closed his eyes and put aside the question of how they'd gotten here. He drew up one leg to expose himself for her, leaning a little forward. The flimsies rustled beside him, but Aral turned his face down into his own pillow as he reached down to take his cock in hand, imagining her there behind him. She would have the thing in place already, plastic pale as her skin but incongruously erect, nearly hiding the red curls between her legs.
It looked obscene--literally, like something he oughtn't be allowed to see--but there she was, showing him. She was fearless, confident, approaching this temporary transformation with the same improbably good grace she brought to a forced march, conspiracy, imprisonment. Once she chose to indulge him in this she entered into it entirely, taking her own pleasure from it as well--stroking the cock between her legs, a flush rising on her cheeks at the sensations it transmitted to her, her nipples standing up hard, breasts rising and falling quickly with her deep breaths.
And all the while Aral waited for her to do as she liked to him. He'd already surrendered himself to her before she even touched him. Not tied up, nothing like that--he'd crossed those lines out firmly, after the very first time he read through the list--but he held himself still for her gaze, for whatever she wished to do next. She gave him that crooked smile, made a gentle joke or two--he couldn't think what she'd joke about, but he knew she would, could hear the warm tone of it, the twang of her Betan accent around the shape of the words. She was careful about it, gentle and coaxing as if he were a virgin, as if he'd never been taken this way before.
And he hadn't been, had he? What he'd actually done before now was another item entirely--much further up the list, close to the top. It was altogether unremarkable on Beta Colony. Item #97 would be entirely new to him when she tried it on him--when they tried it together, as the Aid to Barrayarans emphasized. Regardless of directions of physical motion, all sexual practices involving two or more participants are undertaken together by partners, not done to one partner by another. He was participating as much by lying still, waiting, exposing himself to her, as she was by slicking her fingers--Aral slipped his own fingers into his mouth, licked and sucked and imagined them being hers, slender, softer, nails sensibly short but undeniably feminine--and pressing them--just there.
She went slowly--not intending to tease, only being careful. She made some joke about making a proper Survey--he could almost make out the words of that one--and all the while her fingertips were circling, pushing a little, circling again, testing gingerly, until he was pushing back into the touch, wanting it too much to be still and wait.
The rough shove of his fingers into himself made the fantasy fade--he could scarcely imagine his fingers as hers, his frantic movement as hers. It would be better with her, but for now the mere sensation was enough. He crooked his fingers inside himself, finding the place--she would find it easily, fill him completely--and jerked his cock in a rough, impatient rhythm--she would tell him to slow down, if she were here, make him enjoy it, make it last.
It didn't last.
He came with a shudder, over and around his own fingers. He lay still, catching his breath, trying to hold the image of her for another moment, but it faded fast, leaving him alone and wrung out.
He rolled out of bed and washed his hands, and only then gathered up the flimsies and put them away. When they were safely secured against any servant who might come in to check on him, Aral fell into bed and soon into sleep.
Aral was still for long enough that Cordelia thought he might have fallen asleep--passed out--and was starting to wonder how she would get him down the hill. There were probably some other able-bodied fellows in uniforms like Bothari's around somewhere. Meanwhile, Aral's breathing sounded clear and there was no especial rush to move him, or herself, anywhere. It was a novel situation, having reached her destination at last. She'd found Aral; the place she'd found him in was second to that.
Cordelia closed her eyes, shifting her hand to settle it over his heart. His fingers brushed her elbow and then traced slowly, shiver-lightly, up her forearm to the bare skin of her wrist.
"Cordelia," he murmured into her hair, and Cordelia smiled.
"Aral," she returned, tilting her head a little to nuzzle past the collar of his shirt.
He huffed a soft laugh, and then said, "I should ask now. I might not, when I'm sober."
Cordelia opened her eyes at that, but didn't move to make it easier to look him in the eye. He might not want to look into hers. His fingers tightened briefly on her wrist. Cordelia ducked her head and kissed his nearest knuckles, and then settled back into place. "Ask anything. Whenever you're ready."
He hummed a low, uncertain noise, and then said, "Is it true that--"
He pressed his face into her hair and his body shook under hers. Cordelia pressed her hand harder against his chest, and he turned his head, letting something like a giggle escape against the back of Cordelia's neck.
She smiled helplessly and said, "Goodness, this should be fun."
"Someone--I found--this checklist. About sex. Aid to Communication, it says."
Cordelia was startled into a laugh at that, and picked up her head to look him in the eye. He had his eyes closed, a boyish flush coloring his pale cheeks. He had lovely eyelashes. Cordelia kissed his cheek and then settled back down to lean her head against his shoulder.
"Where did a nice Barrayaran like you get a copy of the FSSP?"
He shook again, and this time Cordelia was able to interpret the motion as laughter even without hearing it. "No one's accused me of being nice in a very long time."
"But indisputably Barrayaran," Cordelia said. "It's out on the information nets, of course, but--was it the Aid to Communication part? Were you expecting... procedures...?"
Aral laughed again, soundlessly, and repeated, "Procedures," in an almost unintelligible wheeze.
She picked her head up again to watch him laughing--his eyelashes were wet with it now, and he tilted his head back against the chair. He raised a clumsy hand as if to cover his face, and Cordelia caught it halfway there and held on firmly.
He opened his eyes at that, and the humor fell away as he looked her in the eye. "So it is--you know those things."
She nodded cautiously. There was nothing either accusing or hopeful in his voice, and she didn't know what to hope for herself. "I can't say I've tried all of them--"
"I crossed out the seventies," he blurted, and Cordelia tightened her hand on his and closed her eyes for a moment.
"Quite all right," she assured him after a few seconds, opening her eyes to look again. "I was thinking we could start in the single digits and work our way up. As slowly as necessary, and skipping anything we don't like. Or not physiologically applicable."
"Hmmm," he said, not disagreeing. He licked his lips, and Cordelia leaned in and took a quick kiss.
"One," he murmured, their mouths close enough that Cordelia shivered at his breath on her lips.
"Oh," Cordelia said. "There's more to it than that. Remember, we can go as--slowly--"
Cordelia tilted her head to a more promising angle, slanting an open kiss onto his mouth, and Aral followed her lead beautifully. The kiss was languid, extending into a long sunlit stream of kisses, deep and soft and thorough. Cordelia was pleasantly breathless when she pulled away to look down at him, and Aral looked up through his eyelashes, a smile on his parted lips.
"That's much better," Cordelia sighed, leaning her forehead against his and closing her eyes. "It doesn't hurt at all when you stop, now."
"Good," Aral said, sounding slurred for the first time, and then snored.
Cordelia's head jerked back, and she looked down at him, finally asleep. Passed out. Still smiling.
Cordelia giggled and shook her head, but she tilted his head to optimize his airway, and reassured herself that she wasn't putting undue pressure on his lungs before she settled back into place against his side.
"First joke," Cordelia said, tapping a finger thoughtfully against the button of Aral's shirt. "Something about Barrayaran men abusing the local crude intoxicants and falling asleep right before sex, instead of right after."
Cordelia's arrival had thoroughly thrown off his schedule; he'd stopped drinking about twelve hours earlier than usual, which meant that he got to the vomiting phase in the middle of the night. Once it was over he felt both wide awake and hardly hung over enough to be worth mentioning.
When he was quite sure he was done being sick, Aral took a shower. Afterward, just in case Cordelia had been serious about not retreating to a guest room no matter how long he spent throwing up, he put on the dressing gown that always hung beside the towels.
When he stepped out into the bedroom, he found that Cordelia had not only been serious about not leaving, she'd made herself at home. She was wearing a pair of his pajamas--a proper little suit, grey and silky, which only appeared in his wardrobe because it was the sort of thing some servant thought it was right and proper for Lord Vorkosigan to own. The fabric was nearly the color of Cordelia's eyes. She'd left a couple of the shirt buttons undone, and was lying on her side; he could see her entire right collarbone, and the top swell of her breast.
He seriously considered going back into the bathroom to hyperventilate for a few minutes. This was the first sober moment he'd had to really consider the fact that Cordelia had just come to Barrayar, for him, forever. Now she was lying in his bed, wearing his clothes much more attractively than he ever had--if he'd ever worn those at all, which he doubted--and reading....
Aral made some sort of noise; he couldn't have said what, over the sudden rushing of blood in his ears. Cordelia looked up with a bright, cheerful smile.
"We match," Cordelia observed, as if that were what was worth commenting upon, and not the flimsies in her hands, much-folded and carefully blacked out in places. "Are you meant to wear it all together?"
"Probably," Aral said. He'd never paid much attention to the dressing gowns, either. He was still staring at Cordelia, lying in his bed, her red hair tumbled across his pillow, her eyes silver-bright. Terrifyingly erotic or erotically terrifying? "I don't mind sharing."
"Good," Cordelia said, and lifted the flimsies slightly, as if he might not have noticed them before. "I found these while I was looking for clothes, and--you did mention you'd crossed some things out, so I thought I'd see what was off the table."
"Naturally," Aral said, his voice coming out a little faint.
Cordelia's smile turned gentle, and she said, "You should really lie down, love. I don't imagine you're entirely recovered just yet."
"Perhaps not," Aral agreed. Better not to explain that the way he felt just now compared well to his better days, since Escobar. He walked over to the bed and climbed under the covers, curling onto his side facing Cordelia. It put his back to the door--he wouldn't be able to sleep this way--but at least he was between her and it.
When he looked at Cordelia again, her gaze was well below his face. Aral looked down to see that the dressing gown had fallen further open than the pajama shirt Cordelia was wearing; she seemed, from her distracted expression, to be rather enjoying the view.
Aral had a sudden, crystal-clear flash of memory. He smiled as he said, "I'm up here."
Cordelia's eyes snapped up to his and her cheeks flushed a little, though her grin was wide and shameless. "Can't blame a woman for looking."
"Not you," Aral agreed, reaching out his hand for hers. She dropped the flimsies and took it at once.
Aral considered moving closer--he could acquit himself respectably now, and she deserved a better welcome than she'd had thus far.
Before he'd actually moved, Cordelia asked blithely, eyes still on his, "Tell me, do Barrayarans tell sex jokes about Betans?"
Aral stared at her for a moment, unable to breathe or think, until she began to look concerned, and scooted across the distance between them, laying her hand on his cheek. "Aral? Did I just violate some massive taboo?"
Aral shut his eyes and set his hand over hers, exhaling something that would have been a laugh, if he'd only still been drunk for this. "All of them. Violently. It's all right, they were asking for it."
Cordelia made a faintly disapproving noise, and Aral was startled into opening his eyes, uncertain what he'd just done wrong. Cordelia took back her hand to wave it off. "Do you, though? Tell jokes about Betans?"
"I don't," Aral said. "Not since I was nine years old and my brother told me I could either apologize to my half-Betan mother and Betan grandmother and never tell another one, or I could meet him behind the stables with two swords."
Cordelia raised her eyebrows.
Aral shrugged. "There's only one, really, it just gets dressed up in different language. The punchline is always, It's all right, she's from Beta Colony!"
"Hmm," Cordelia said, reaching into the small space left between them to rescue the folded, crumpled, much-marked flimsies. She didn't sound offended, merely thoughtful. "That could be useful. I mean--I realize it's not intended as a compliment, coming from Barrayarans, but it does mean that the general stereotype about Betans is that we're sexually knowledgeable."
"...Useful?" Aral managed, after several stunned seconds.
Cordelia looked up, and her eyes went wide. "Not in practice! Not like that! I just--I thought--I mean, Betans all take the FSSP for granted, you know. We hardly even bother to use it directly, we're all so used to negotiating. But this was good, for you and me. I was just thinking--I’m bound to have time on my hands, now, and I expect I’ll have to be in touch with the Embassy anyway, sooner or later. Perhaps I could work with whoever put the packet together and find some systematic way to distribute the FSSP here--an edited version, maybe, with your input on what really needs explaining to the average Barrayaran--"
"The average Barrayaran..." Aral heard himself repeat her words, but couldn't quite find his own to even begin to tell her what was wrong with the idea.
"Of course, of course, you belong to a very specific demographic. I'd need to interview some people in your father's household, or in the village--women, obviously, and people who've had a different sort of education, and--"
"Women," Aral repeated, very faintly, and had a very vivid mental image of what his cousin Padma would do to him after Cordelia showed the checklist to Padma's very proper young bride. Two swords behind the stables indeed.
To say nothing of what his father was going to do if this thing appeared with Lady Vorkosigan’s imprimatur right beside the emblem of the Betan Embassy.
"Or..." Cordelia trailed off, seeming to finally read the expression on his face. "Perhaps not...?”
She sounded more puzzled than disappointed.
"The average Barrayaran may not be quite ready for this," Aral offered. "And, really, we don't know how well it's worked for us yet. Perhaps we should, ah--"
Cordelia's smile was decidedly mischievous. "Make sure we've gotten all the kinks out?"
Aral groaned even as he hauled her into a kiss, preventing her from saying another word. He was sure they'd gotten the hang of kissing, at least. They'd doubtless find their way through the rest.
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