#droushnakovi

[winter-wise]

Koudelka voice Aral I've messed things up so badly with Drou, what can I do? Aral voice Okay here's what you do Step 1 you crawl to her on your knees Step 2 you flop onto your back so you're completely vulnerable Step 3 you let her stamp on you. This is your only intelligent course of action.

(He's correct but also. Aral. I know what you are.)

[sweetpeachlantern]

Finished up Shards of Honor again. I feel like Droushnakovi and Gregor never interact again. Does anyone have fic recs for Gregor Vorbarra Centric stories? Esp as a kid. Shards ending makes a big deal about Cordelia raising him but we never get to see that. 

[maykendehoutman]

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Chapters: 2/? Fandom: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold Rating: General Audiences Warnings: Major Character Death Relationships: Oliver Jole/Aral Vorkosigan, Aral Vorkosigan & Miles Vorkosigan Characters: Aral Vorkosigan, Oliver Jole, Miles Vorkosigan Additional Tags: The Vor Game AU Summary:

A nightmare for Aral comes true

[voyaging-too]

WIP Amnesty: Drou gets a man, sort of

This is the final snippet of the Droushnakovi fic I never managed to actually finish.

Courting was the man’s job. A girl was supposed to wait to be approached, and generally conduct herself with maidenly reticence. A few coy glances, a small smile, maybe a bit of dancing, these were the appropriate ways to signal one’s… well, not interest, that was not entirely proper, but maybe lack of disinterest. Drou had thought of herself as a reasonably attractive woman, and a rather good dancer at that.

But the first few weeks at the Vorkosigan townhouse quickly let her know that nothing could pass through Koudelka’s reserve. He flinched at glances, frowned at smiles, could be chivvied into a little dancing after he’s had two drinks but clearly hated it. Overall he ignored her when he could, and when he couldn’t, he conducted himself with such stilted, miserable politeness that she would have thought he had a gun to his head.

Fighting, now fighting could hold his attention for a brief moment. After she put a man in a beautiful chokehold at the Vorkosigan guardsmen’s home tournament, she could have sworn that his eyes on her were different, wide and wild. At least until he remembered himself, and took to his new post as referee with a vengeance, ruling against her over and over until the Lady Cordelia had to let her step in. Hearing the distaste, the dismissal in his voice, she was almost glad to go up against Bothari and get thrown soundly from the ring.

That is how it went on, unless he forgot for a moment, when she surprised him with some piece of miltech knowledge, or he got too carried away explaining whatever he figured out about ImpSec’s internal conflicts about which private letters to open and which to keep hidden even from their own lower ranks. Those times, he seemed to be more alive, for a moment, more real. She loved the boyish enthusiasm of his rare smiles, the way he nodded when he listened to her, the way he would strike his swordstick against the floor to drive home a point. And then there came the night he was jumped while he was out at the caravanserai with Bothari (whyever was he out at night in the caravanserai with Bothari), and when he came back from the hospital, almost a month later, he seemed worse off. He was pale, and stiff, and cold, cold, cold. Not just cold to her, although that hurt worst, but somehow cold in general, like life just drained out of him somehow.

When she got up in the middle of the night for a snack, and ran into him, still awake and sitting ghostlike in the darkened library, she knew she had to talk to him. She was standing there barefoot, in her nightgown, with her hair down, and she knew how improper that was, but also knew that she could not possibly leave him alone. They talked about unimportant things just for the sake of talking, about the palace kitchens and the officers’ mess, about the emperor’s taste in confectionary and about whoever even tailored his child-size military uniforms, and then suddenly they were kissing, warm and wet and exciting and just as suddenly, he was on top of her, inside her, and it didn’t even occur her to say no. She knew that she could have, that she should have, she knew that he had made her no promises and maybe she was throwing herself away for nothing, she knew that while the house may have been asleep, the room wasn’t locked. She knew that it hurt. But she also knew that she had to do this, had to put her arms around him tight as she could and let him, because he needed this and she needed to give this to him, no, she wanted to give this to him, and the pain was nothing, she played contact sports after all, and it started letting up too, the sharp edge of it turning into a sweet glowing ember of heat, but before she could stoke that fire he gasped and it was over. And before she could get her bearings and catch her breath and muster up the courage to ask him what it all meant, she heard the sound of shattered glass.

They caught the assassin. They caught the assassin too late, after he had already hurt the Lord and Lady, but she did drag the little fool of a Vor to justice, even if she had to do it in her nightgown, with blood and all dripping down her leg. The whole house saw her like that, and that none of them remarked on it, that maybe none of them even noticed, was a sign of how the attack terrified all of them.

She did not have time for regrets that night. Those came in the morning when she was finally allowed to take time off and shower, then later in the day when she first saw Kou all but fall over himself to get out of the room and avoid talking to her, then three days in with the realization that she could possibly be pregnant with no husband, no ring, no promise, from a man who would not give her the courtesy of looking at her, a courtesy that men gave even to concubines. She was sick at the thought of being with child, and relieved but lost to find out she wasn’t, and outrageously angry to realize he paid her so little attention he thought he had forced her, and just when she thought it couldn’t get any worse, the coup happened. Drou found herself blocked from her work as a bodyguard, sick with worry over both her previous and her present charges, locked up and interrogated about treason she didn’t commit, and finally dosed with fast-penta and telling Illyan things she definitely didn’t want him to know, and some things she didn’t even want to know about herself.

Afterwards, when she met Kou again, drawn and tired and looking as worried as she was, all he asked her was if she could operate the recon lightflyers at the base, and all she said was yes, given a navigator. They sped off towards the pick-up point to find their Lady Cordelia. Forty minutes into the tense nighttime flight, he apologized again. He sounded truly sorry, even if he didn’t sound sure what he was sorry for, and so she accepted.

*

(And then they don't talk about it until Cordelia makes them.)

[voyaging-too]

WIP Amnesty: Drou has a crush

This is yet another snippet of my unfinished Droushnakovi epic.

A girl was supposed to get acquainted with potential suitors at a ball. Of course only the Vor could afford to attend a ball twice a month, families like Drou’s had to be content with the occasional, drably respectable summer dance in the town hall or on the village green, if their district was even up to organising one. Which realistically meant that weddings, name-day feasts and various other celebrations were also acceptable venues to set eyes on a possible mate, it was still right and proper as long as they were introduced to one another by family members. (It’s not that marriages were all arranged by the families, it’s more like that marriageable girls were only introduced to men that their parents already knew and regarded favourably.)

Drou sort of spotted Koudelka by herself, no sister or aunt whispered in her ear about who he was and what she was supposed to think about him. She noticed his uniform first and his infirmity second, the rest of it later (nice shoulders, nice face, blush the colour of redcurrant jam), and asked after him, she thought casually. Instead of a sister or an aunt, it was Lady Cordelia who gave her a brief explanation of his injury and his promotion to the Lord Regent’s secretary. Looking at him, struggling to keep up with his lord, carrying a pile of datapads in both hands and also one tucked under his left arm, she felt something that was definitely not pity. Lady Cordelia wasn’t the one to introduce them, though. They both know who the other was, so maybe a formal introduction wasn’t really necessary – she was a working woman, a palace servant, a busy person at the beck and call of even busier people, so she was used to being told who people were without observing any pleasantries. She sort of wished she had the crutch of formalities though, so she would know how to talk to him, now that they were to live and work together.

The first time they actually talked was the morning of her second day at the Vorkosigan townhouse. Morning was a strong word, it was half past five when she sneaked downstairs to make herself a cup of tea before her Lady summoned her, and almost set off the housewide alarms. She could see that the pressure pad activated the moment she stepped on it, and she could tell how loud it would scream the moment she stepped off it, after all she was trained especially to spot this sort of thing. But being new to the household, she decided not to shout and cause a fuss. She decided the most professional,  least embarrassing option was to wait for someone else to wake, and she resigned herself to being trapped on the landing of a grand marble staircase for the time being. Fortunately, only a few minutes later Koudelka clambered down the stairs, already in full uniform, but still a little bleary with sleep, or lack thereof. He was carrying the swordstick the Lady got her last night, and seemed in a really good mood about it, which might be why, instead of mocking her soundly for getting tangled in the security system of her new workplace, he immediately shut it off, cursed anyone, including himself, who neglected to tell her about the additional safety measures active between midnight and reveille, which was apparently only at six o’clock. He then accompanied her downstairs, got his own mug of bitterly strong tea, and launched into an explanation of all the quirks and peculiarities of the domestic security system she needed to know in order to keep the Lady safe. He told her about the heat-vision cameras and the metal detectors and the downstairs weapon cache and the fortnightly change in the access code sequences. He didn’t simplify any of it, he didn’t talk down to her, he answered her follow-up questions and he didn’t pry into how it was different from what they had a the palace – it was definitely less elegant than what Negri’s men had set up around the young heir’s rooms, but definitely no less paranoid.

It was a strange experience. As the Princess’ bodyguard, she has more or less accepted that all soldiers and most ImpSec agents were going to condescend to her, except for Negri who hired her in the first place, and the Emperor himself, who didn’t require her intelligence, only her undying loyalty. So she was quite pleased that when she asked about countersiege protection, he clued her in about the sniper-nest embrasures hidden in the façade’s geometric decoration, instead of wondering why she even worried her little head about it.

Armed with a top-to-bottom knowledge of the townhouse and the next six days’ auxiliary passcodes, she felt much more prepared to face the next day of aimless hob-nobbing and potential assassination at Lady Cordelia’s side. She thanked Koudelka with a big, bright smile of quite honest gratitude, and was quite surprised when he froze in response. He froze, frowned, told her she was welcome in a strangled voice, then all but ran from the room, half a mug of steaming tea left abandoned on the counter.

[voyaging-too]

WIP Amnesty: Drou gets a job in the palace

I started a longer story about Drou, but the pieces refused to fit together, so I'm posting them separately.

Drou may have grown up in a household of men, without a mother or a sister to guide her steps, but she still knew how matters of marriage and courtship were supposed to go.

She began suspecting that things were not going to be that simple around the time when she started winning judo matches against boys three or four years her senior. If you could lift men over your shoulder and throw them to the mat, you were unlikely to get courted by them – her brothers told her so, and so did the boys she beat, and the few boys that in the end managed to beat her. For some time, Drou was quite seriously conflicted about whether to continue training if it meant giving up any hope of a good match, especially since being a soldier’s wife was the closest she was ever going to get to the army. But then one of Negri’s men came to her with a job offer, and the question was decided for her.

Mornings she worked as a parlourmaid, fetching and carrying Princess Kareen’s shoes and hats and address books, all the while learning palace poise and etiquette. Afternoons, she trained with ImpSec, learning security protocols and countersurveillance techniques and even more hand-to-hand combat. Negri had her fight men twice her size, men she had no hope of beating, until she no longer even wanted to win, and understood a bodyguard’s prerogative: stall the intruder until the alarm is raised. In the evening, she was quizzed and questioned, on fast-penta and off of it, until the emperor was sure of her loyalty, and her real training could begin. She memorized things that were never printed or even said out loud, maps that Ezar sketched by hand on a piece of paper then burned immediately. She was let on in family secrets that nobody knew about, and warned about family secrets that even she was not allowed to know. And when all that was done – although it was never done, Ezar summoned her once a forthnight to read and memorize increasingly complex new contingency scenarios, escape routes for coups, for uprisings, for natural disasters – when it was close to done, she was finally promoted to the princess’s formal security detail.

The years that followed were hard, and hard to speak of. She got used to a daily routine of complicated clothing and meaningless pleasantries and endless, repetitive safety precautions. She got used to the mind-numbing boredom, she stood to attention while Vor ladies talked about absolutely nothing for hours, she served tea and biscuits while they dropped sly insinuations about the princess’s demeanour or her husband’s manifold affairs, she held still and smiled with a tight grip on the stunner held behind her back, waiting for yet another military bigwig to step away from the little imperial heir already, to stop crowding him before she had to step in. And worst of all, she got used to the aching, unfair knowledge that her judo skills and her security clearances were completely useless against the worst danger her charge was facing: she couldn’t protect Kareen from her husband. She did her best: she stayed near her, serving as witness and deterrent until the princess herself ordered her to leave, she made sure to always be on hand when called, and to make her nearness known to the prince as well. But mostly, she did what Kareen had ordered her to do the first time they talked about why she was hired. She looked out for Gregor. She prioritized his safety, she tried to shield him when Serg was around, and promptly spirited him away to the other side of the palace when Ges Vorruyter came to visit. She tried to distract him from what was going on around him, singing him songs, listening to the stories he made up, and taking him on a secret tour of the palace kitchen that one time Kareen gave her the desperate, whispered order that he was not to be near the imperial residence for the next few hours.

She learned a lot in the palace, and she served her Emperor in ways she could not ever have dreamt of. She felt lonely sometimes, but spending all her waking hours around the woman married to prince Serg, she suspected that solitude had its upsides.

[voyaging-too]

One day when I have more of my shit together I really should write a fic about the unfriendly but very efficient comradeship between Drou and Bothari, especially in the fraught early years of the Regency. They are responsible for the security of the Vorbarra and Vorkosigan heirs respectively, paranoia abounds and so do genuine assassination attempts, fealty demands their best and so they must remain alert even if they’re off duty, it’s been years and they still don’t like each other, at all, but their communication about security issues is damn near telepathic.

They start sparring regularly, always in light body armour, always with a spotter present. An armed spotter. Drou is there to practice hand-to-hand fighting against someone who’s big, strong, mean, and fighting not to disarm but to kill.  And Bothari, althought nobody ever says so, is there to practice stopping - hence the spotter, hence the stunner.

[crocordile]

@kareenvorbarra Drou/Kareen, forehead kiss