#warrior's apprentice

[notjustaclone]

Ivan Vorpatril in warriors apprentice missing the jump to hell by sleeping w/the first person he saw on beta colony is one of the best cases of good luck in the whole series. And it feels justified in Canon.

I think about it alot.

Ivan got called in the middle of the night to be not even an ensign on this ship to find miles. Tell miles he need to come home and to stop committing treason (miles, you idiot) running off.

But Ivan is just starting military school. Besides his normal vor oath I don't think he's technically even vor sworn to Gregor as an officer yet.

No wonder he wanders away on the first chance he got. Miles went to school on beta. But I dont think Ivan did or he'd be mentioned in some of miles stories there. Is this Ivan's first off planet trip?? Of course he wants to do cool/fun things before being stuck on this weird mission to find miles (and go back to military school).

And Ivan doesn't know miles is accused of treason yet anyway. Miles is just off lost in adventure from Ivan's point of view.

Why shouldn't he have that fun too?

And because of that, Ivan missed the suicide jump and finds miles and stops that plot to destroy Aral and make a puppet of Gregor.

Just great good luck that makes total sense in universe.

Thanks Ivan!

[winter-wise]

The wild thing about Miles not knowing that Aral is bi is that it gets referenced. In front of Miles. In multiple books. And he just... never connects the dots. Miles even references the possibility of Aral being gay himself in The Vor Game and still doesn't get it. In Mountains of Mourning he hears the rumour of "you're disabled because your dad had sex with too many men" and instead of thinking "maybe my dad had sex with men" his thought in response is "huh. weird rumour. Anyway."

[mzminola]

Reread Warrior's Apprentice for the first time in ages, fresh off of Shards of Honor and Barrayar, and see parallels between Miles-Arde and Cordelia-Bothari.

When Cordelia is a prisoner of war about to be tortured, she projects onto Bothari as a form of control over the situation, repeating There are two victims in this room, to herself mentally, and telling Bothari out loud, "I believe that the tormented are very close to God. I'm sorry, Sergeant."

Which is when he recognizes her, and is able to mentally supplant Aral Vorkosigan's Rules For Prisoners over Ges Vorrutyer's rules, first refusing to hurt her, and then stopping Ges from doing so.

Bothari's actions in that moment could theoretically happen even if Cordelia said nothing, if he simply looked at her face and Aral's rules kicked in. And Piotr, at Aral's request, making him a Vorkosigan armsman puts him in place plot-wise to do things.

But Cordelia reaching out to him, speaking, empathizing, is what forms the connection between them, leading to Bothari picking Cordelia as His Person To Make Rules. Their senses of identity & personal destinies are intertwined after that.

Almost two decades later, we get Miles & Arde. Miles is a teenager with a lot of cultural & personal baggage that make flunking out of the Imperial Military Academy entrance exams The End Of The World. He's wrapped his entire identity up in getting in & excelling.

When Miles fails the exam, when that path is barred to him, he has no back-up plan. Nothing. He refuses to consider anything. Full on depression spiral, worsened by his grandfather dying. The space adventure starts because Miles wants to help & impress Elena, but if they'd done that a couple years earlier he wouldn't have shattered his imagined future yet, and probably wouldn't have latched onto Arde.

Arde Mayhew is a Jump Ship Pilot. He has implants in his brain to do this work, he & other jump pilots can never truly describe their experiences to non-pilots. His class of ship is being decommissioned, his ship just got sold to a scrapper, he's medically ineligible for updated implants. We meet him holed up in the decommissioned ship refusing to come out, with no plan, just despair.

Miles feels like his entire world is over. Arde's actually is.

Miles empathizes. Miles projects. Miles cannot change the universe to get back his dream, but he can throw himself into finding a solution for Arde. He shoves himself into the situation, digging himself a deeper & deeper hole, never truly considering backing out until they are all literally in an active war zone multiple wormhole jumps away from home.

And one of the first things he does, to protect Arde from arrest, is swear him in as an armsman.

Arde, for his part, is befuddled by Miles' involvement, but latches on too. Miles gives him the chance to keep his calling, and Arde, in turn, risks that very calling ramming his ship into a hostile vessel to protect Miles. During the course of the book, Arde is slowly reshaping his identity from solely a jump pilot to jump pilot & Miles' Armsman.

Our original misfit Vorkosigan armsman is right there judging both of them for it. Arde doesn't understand Barrayar at all. Bothari is extremely pissed about the entire situation; swearing in outsider Arde is only eclipsed by Miles swearing in military deserter Baz Jesek. Bothari eventually comes around on Arde, thanks to the ship-ramming and Arde's reasoning for it, but never on Baz.

Naismiths: insane levels of projection, insane levels of resulting loyalty.

[lurkinglurkerwholurks]

Miles To Go

Rating: Teen

Archive Warnings: None

Category: Gen

Fandom: Batman - All Media Types ; The Vorkosigan Saga

Characters: Bruce Wayne; Dick Grayson; Jason Todd

Additional Tags: Inspired by the Vorkosigan Saga; You do NOT have to have read the Vorkosigan Saga to understand or enjoy this fic but I'm tagging it because I hope that the fandom will appreciate the nod; T for profanity; Lots of plot off-page; A good hug; Good Parent Bruce Wayne; Good Sibling Dick Grayson; written in just a couple hours so I do not apologize for typos or sloppiness

——

Opening note:

But I have promises to keep And miles to go before I sleep.

Inspired heavily by the council scene in The Warrior's Apprentice by Lois McMaster Bujold, which, yes, does make that the absolute stupidest pun of a title I've ever written. I am delighted in myself, both for the stupid title and in continuing my fic Breathing's tradition of borrowing from truly excellent works of literature and not matching their glory in the slightest.

——

Jason swiped the back of one gloved hand against his upper lip, wiping away the drops of sweat and, he hoped, a layer of jangling nerves. Next to him, Dick bounced up and down on his toes, which also could have been nerves, except it was Dick and Dick was pathologically averse to standing still.

“Do you think–” Jason began.

“We’ll be on time,” Dick said again, for the tenth, hundredth, thousandth time. There was no reality in which they wouldn’t be. Couldn’t be. Dick glanced over, scanning Jason from head to toe from the corner of his eye. “How are you holding up?”

That was a well-worn question, too. Jason supposed he couldn’t blame him for asking. Couldn’t, but would. He bared his teeth in a sharp mimic of a smile. “Not dead.” It was a reassurance in more ways than one.

Read now on AO3

[starfishlikestoread]

WA-era Miles my beloved <3

(Reference, by faestock)

[artfrostedleaf]

Ah yes, Miles’s specialty: bullshitting

[krakenartificer]

“You may address me as Mr. Naismith.” There, let them build theories on that. 

“Then how do we know who to obey?” asked the original hard-eyed heckler. 

Miles bared his teeth in a scimitar smile. “Well, if you disobey one of my orders, I’ll shoot you on the spot. You figure it out.” 

A mercenary held up her hand, serious as a child at school. 

“Yes, Trainee Quinn?” 

“When do we get copies of the Dendarii regulations?”

OK, so this is when the entire momentum of the conversation (and therefore the book, and therefore Miles’ life) shifts. Before that it’s “Who the hell are you people, anyway?” and “I don’t want to hear any more back-chat”; after that it’s “Will our pension plans transfer?” and “We know their Oseran codes but they don’t know our Dendarii ones.” Knowing what we now know about Trainee Quinn, there’s every reason to believe that she has a rather strong (if possibly unofficial) leadership role among the crew. If she’s decided this thing is legitimate, and has communicated that decision by way of this question, it’s perhaps less shocking that everyone else would decide to go along with it also.  And I would really love to see a fic looking at Quinn’s role in the first week of the Dendarii.  What made her decide that? What conversations did she have with the other mercs between training sessions? I think there’s a lot of good stuff here to explore

[mzminola]

Fascinated by the difference in how Aral & Cordelia treat Elena, and how Miles does (in Warrior's Apprentice, at least, I haven't reread the later books yet).

Aral & Cordelia are very firmly paying all of their liege-lord obligations to Bothari. He won't let Elena get an advanced education, he's got a very firm idea of the kind of person she should marry (and that marriage is a certainty), and he's lied to her her entire life about where she came from.

Miles rightly points out that Elena is their liegewoman as surely as Bothari is their liegeman, and they cannot owe him everything and her nothing. Don't they have obligations to her? Why does Bothari's narrow plan for her overrule her desires for her own life?

Aral dismissing Elena from the equation makes unfortunate sense from the Barrayar patriarchal structure. Cordelia's dismissal is harder to swallow. She's from Beta Colony and has never accepted Barrayaran sexist cultural norms. She actively rails against them. But when it comes to Elena, suddenly she's hands-off. The trauma bond and sense of debt towards Bothari overrides everything else.

Miles eventually also tries to deny Elena a future of her own choosing by invoking oaths to Bothari...but it's not what he's motivated by (he's motivated by his crush on her, his own personal desire to keep her tied to him), and he reverses that decision.

Aral & Cordelia have kept Elena in ignorance of her origins for 18 years. While there are a lot of secrets wrapped up in the Escobar war, the abuses of prisoners and the origins of the uterine replicators are not a load-bearing one. Outside Barrayar, they're not even a secret at all. Supporting Bothari's lie leads to Elena finding out the truth in the worst way possible (much like keeping the truth of Serg's actions from Gregor also lead to disastrous results). They also spend those 18 years never asking Elena what she wants out of life.

Miles at seventeen years old with no authority but that he borrows from his parents or can bluff, sets out to answer questions Elena has, and when he learns going home will be dangerous, he gives his blessing to the marriage she chose, and tasks her new husband (because Baz has practical experience in this field) with teaching Elena everything she wants to know about her chosen vocation. He dowers her with a fleet.

While Miles definitely knows Elena personally better than his parents do, as she's a peer, he still actually has spent far more of his life with Bothari than with Elena. He's extremely aware that Bothari has saved his life multiple times. But for Miles, a life-debt to Bothari does not override supporting Elena as an independent person, while for Aral & Cordelia it does.