"Drive like what?"

This is intended as a detour around the traffic; he's making a lot of turns to stay loosely parallel to the curving main artery.

"Right then." Zoom, back onto the artery past the breakup of the traffic jam. Zoom zoom.

Presently they are back at the embassy.

"Right then. We'll shuffle on past his door. Probably he's talking to the fellows I brought with me right now anyway."

Ivan leads the way, nodding politely at intervening security, and parks Mark in his room.

"Need anything before I go? Probably be about an hour, give or take."

"I haven't outgrown them, no."

"And you are still little enough to pick up, lucky you."

Scoop.

Yeah, Miles would probably kick him and then run off muttering.

Hug, hug, hug. Ivan is sorry for the delay, Earlier This Afternoon Extra Small Mark.



Ivan's comconsole chimes.

"That'll be th'captain getting impatient. Back in a bit. Make yourself at home."

Down goeth Mark.

He hugs Ivan one extra hug once he's on his feet.

"Thank you," he says. "Go appease your captain."

Mark curls up on the non-Ivan-occupied bed in the room, and acclimatizes to the idea that all this is really happening and he really has been rescued, and somewhere in this process the fear hits.

Expecting it does not make it any better. Worse, if anything.

It's going to last more than an hour.

Ivan goes to Galeni's office.

"Everything went quite according to plan, sir," he reports. "Unless the men didn't take a detour and the prisoners are currently waking up in the traffic jam on the main drag."

"No, they're in custody. All of them. Where's our extra Vorkosigan?"

"Mark's in my room having a panic attack, sir, bit stressful being rescued of a sudden like that. I don't think he'd care to meet you, he didn't, er, get along with your relative."

"No. No, I suppose he didn't," murmurs Galeni.

"Oh, and Mark says our courier to Tau Ceti is Galen's bought and paid for as of years ago."

"God. That'll be a nightmare and a half... I'll have someone confirm with fast-penta and arrest him when he comes back, assuming he does now we've captured his employer. No complications on the mission?"

"Not particularly, sir. Unless liberating a jam sandwich from their kitchen because Mark was locked up and ravenous counts."

"The ambassador's staff are going to want everything on how - Lord Mark?"

"Going by his mother's probable Betan sensibilities in the absence of Barrayaran precedent, sir, yes, Lord Mark."

"Everything on how he was kept and treated - mistreated - so we have a solid case for intervening immediately instead of leaving it to the natives, but you can extract it if he's more comfortable with you, I suppose, and we'll confirm it all during the fast-penta interviews. Withholding food counts, obviously."

"Of course, sir."

They go over minutiae of the raid as planned versus as executed - the discrepancies are pretty minimal; Ivan was on today - and Ivan asks just where the prisoners are being held in case Mark would not care to walk uninformedly down that corridor, and then he goes back to see how the panic attack is coming along.

It seems to be in progress. Ivan's sort of tempted to pick him up again but perhaps picking up panic-attacking people is like waking up sleepwalkers: vaguely bad in some unremembered fashion.

So he sits at his comconsole and pokes at current events and waits for Mark to calm down.

The quiet sound of heavily distressed breathing transmutes gradually into the quiet sound of Mark muttering to himself, too softly for the words to be intelligible through the blanket under which he is curled up in a shivery lump.

That too fades after a minute or so, and he pokes his head out from under his blanket and sits up. His eyes are red and his hair is a mess and he looks generally in much worse condition than when Ivan pulled him out of that closet.

"Hello, Ivan. How'd it go?"

"I'll go grab something from the cafeteria. Probably not jam. And then the legal folks want whatever you have on how the fellows we arrested should never have been let within a mile of you and we were extremely justified in breaking into their house and shooting at them on your behalf Your Judgmental Title sir insert legalese, but that can wait till you've had dinner."

Ivan goes off and comes back with cheesy pasta and a spinach puff and a cut of vat steak (pretty hard to get the real stuff on Earth) and some almond cake.

Mark seems very pleased about the food. Or maybe just about Ivan's existence generally. Or maybe both.

"As far as reasons they shouldn't have been let within a mile of me," he says over dinner, "you saw what they were like when I was five. They didn't get any nicer as I grew up. I made fewer escape attempts, but they also didn't approve when I - oh - snuck out to visit an unauthorized museum. The closet's a recent addition, last few years or so, before that they'd just hurt me until I demonstrated appropriate penitence, but then Ser Galen seemed to realize boredom and loneliness were a more effective deterrent than pain. Since then, the shock-stick mostly comes out when he loses his temper, or when whatever I've done is worth more trouble than hitting me a couple of times but less than locking me in a closet for several hours."