"In my firm and well-researched opinion, the likelihood of Aral Vorkosigan secretly ordering someone to commit a massacre against his openly sworn word is best described using phrases like 'when pigs fly' and 'a cold day in hell'."

"Just checking. So some idiot kills a bunch of people and Aral Vorkosigan gets blamed, and this through some circuitous route leads you to having healthy bones."

"Patience. I'm getting there. You asked for the six-century version, I remind you. So, Aral Vorkosigan went on to marry a brilliant woman named Cordelia Naismith, and they had one son, Miles. Thanks to an assassination attempt while Cordelia was pregnant, Miles was born with a rather atrociously malformed skeleton. Modern medicine did the best it could and he's still pretty short and funny-looking. Then, when Miles was about six, the ongoing unrest on Komarr broke out into active rebellion. One of the leaders of the rebellion, when he saw that rebellion per se did not appear to be getting the job done, decided to make things a little more personal. He faked his death, stole some of Miles's tissue samples - not hard, the kid was in and out of hospitals on nearly a weekly basis while they monitored his bone development - and took them to an illegal cloning lab on Jackson's Whole."

"...Oh."

pause

"I'm sorry."

pause

"Also sorry, I wasn't trying to be impatient, I just thought we had gone on a bit of a tangent, and. Yes."

"It's fine," he says cheerfully. "Yeah, so, I'm the result of a clone substitution plot. I was supposed to impersonate Miles, kill his father, and then murder my way to becoming Emperor of Barrayar, which was sold to me as a valid possible outcome but was actually supposed to activate cultural tensions about visible deformity and lead to a nastily divisive civil war so Galen could take back Komarr while the Barrayarans were busy killing each other. And I don't in fact have my brother's bone disorder, but for obvious reasons I was surgically altered to look exactly like him, which is why it's not quite accurate to say I 'don't have the bone thing'."

"Oh, wait, I misremembered. It wasn't the mutant thing, it was when I told him I was in the habit of bringing home medical technology to reverse-engineer, and he wanted to see if he could get a safe painkiller for his cousin."

"Yeah, Miles's metabolism is a bit of a clusterfuck as far as drug reactions. As far as I can tell I don't have it nearly as bad."

"Better than not, I suppose. So is Galen still around in any capacity, is that a thing that needs taking care of?"

"Nah. Killed him."

"Good for you! So does Ivan in fact know you exist, or..."

"Oh, yeah, we've met."

"It didn't go well?"

"Well, I did kidnap him, but then I also rescued him afterward. It's complicated."

"...You know, I think he might have mentioned you after all. Did he get locked in a seawall?"

"Yeah."

"Your assumption is correct."

"Generally when someone is at the nonexistent mercy of an older terrible person for significant lengths of time their unfortunate actions can be blamed on their captor."

"Yeah. Well, not entirely. If I'd killed someone for Galen, they'd still be dead and I'd still have done it. I still am the person who kidnapped Ivan in the first place, even though I neither knew about the seawall plan at the time nor agreed with it when I found out."

"I suppose. I just don't hold much with grudges against people who aren't terrible when there's a convenient dead awful person to direct the negative feelings towards instead."

"Mm. Enlightened of you."

"Well, there's a reason I already had a 'held captive by an evil person for many years' archetype in my head, let's just say that. It's easier to learn to forgive people for a thing when someone you love did the thing."

"That does make sense. And who do you know who was held captive by an evil person for many years?"

"My best friend's dad. He was...do future people still remember the Holocaust, I will be moderately disturbed if the answer is no."

"You might find worse recognition among ones who aren't interested in history and have never lived on Earth, but since I fulfill both criteria, yes, I know of it."