"A little. Mostly just how into it you are. How you're thinking about finding out, and it gets you going even though you don't want to injure me. You could try it," he says. "If you wanted. I won't mess around, promise. And it's okay if you get it wrong. I've had worse, and modern medicine can fix a lot of shit."

"See," says Stalas, "when you say you've had worse, it doesn't make me want to hurt you. It makes me want to cuddle you and give you neck rubs and maybe kiss you a little."

"You can do all that too," says Mark.

"...Mm."

"You're bluuuushing."

"Shut your face."

"Make me."

Mark contemplates this delightful occurrence for a few seconds, and then wriggles closer and kisses him.

Stalas is hampered in his ability to kiss back by the fact that he's still laughing, but he does put forth a noticeable effort in that direction.

Giggly kisses!

That's good too.

"You can get upset and protective," says Mark. "I won't mind. Even if it kills my chances of getting to experiment with you and pain today. I... hell, Stalas, I don't even know where to start."

"It's okay," he says, "if you don't want to..."

"No, fuck no, I have been aching to unload this on somebody since I first realized that was a thing I could potentially someday do. It's just there's a lot of... background required. I could just say the man who had me made was a vicious, emotionally incontinent control freak who hated me equally for succeeding or failing at the things he wanted me to learn, but that doesn't cover the half of it. He had reasons, and his reasons go back a long way, and I grew up knowing them..."

"Okay," says Stalas. "So what are they?"

"It all goes back... more than six hundred years, if you really want to start at the beginning," he says. "When humanity first discovered they could transit the horrifying void - I love that phrase, by the way - fast enough and far enough to get to other livable planets and back. The definition of 'livable' was pretty broad, as broad as they could make it, because it was hard to find any planets so they had to work with what they could get. That's when humans first came to Barrayar. Fifty thousand of them. And pretty soon after, the wormhole linking Barrayar to the rest of humanity collapsed. A collapsed wormhole isn't like a collapsed tunnel; you can't dig it back out. Gone for good. Rare as hell, but devastating when it's the wrong one. Barrayar lost touch with everyone else, lost hold of technology, government, social structure, everything. The Time of Isolation was hell in a lot of ways. They had to build themselves back up."

"I've heard it alluded to," he says. "Go on."

"Right, so then another wormhole opened up, through Komarr. Komarr's another broadly livable planet, even farther from ideal than Barrayar - Barrayar has breathable air. Komarr not so much. Everybody has to live under huge domes that rebalance the air for them so there's enough of the parts people need to breathe. Their main resource is a lot of wormhole connections through the system, so they can make people pay to come through. And a little while after Barrayar was rediscovered, the Cetagandan Empire made the kind of stupid decision to invade 'em, and Komarr made the even stupider decision to let the Cetagandans bribe their way past. I mean, I'm sure everyone thought Barrayar would be easy pickings, but they should've thought about it harder first."

"They didn't go down easy," Stalas guesses.

"Occupied for twenty years, resisting the whole time, and then they finally kicked the Cetagandans out. And the first thing they did afterward was invade Komarr. Right? Because there's nothing else they could have fucking done. It was easy pickings - Miles's father wrote a book on it. Didn't have to fire a shot, just show up in force and offer good terms of surrender, because those domes are a huge vulnerability and everybody knew it."

"Something went wrong," he says. It's not hard to pick up on the rhythm of Mark's storytelling.