For once, nothing seems to be burning down on either side of the lake.

How refreshing! In that case, he checks in with Ténië, who is happily refining generator designs, and then crosses the lake to see if he can get more language lessons or tell Maitimo more stories.

"Morning. Breakfast is experimental, some of the quick-oat sprouted, so if you'd like something more normal I think they kept dinner warm."

"I'm still subsisting on my horrible yet impeccably nutritious travel rations, although I gave a bunch of them to the folks across the lake, so my previous estimate of how long I can maintain myself on them should be halved. Thanks, though."

"Our pleasure. Did you desire to speak with Maitimo again? He's awake at the moment. He was unimpressed by the oats."

"Yeah, if Maitimo wouldn't mind."

"I've endured worse," says a voice from inside, but it sounds almost friendly.

"I don't doubt it," says Miles. (A memory of harsh unending light surfaces in the back of his mind, and he isn't entirely sure why.)

He steps into the library.

"Good morning. Where was I? Late childhood, shading into early adolescence, envious of Ivan?"

"Sounds familiar."

"I also wasn't having the best time at school. The other children didn't think much of me."

His thoughts explain just how drastic an understatement this really is. The picture his mind paints of Barrayaran schoolchildren is fairly brutal, although actual violence never got far because Bothari was always just around the corner.

"So when my mother suggested sending me to Beta Colony for a year or two, when I was around fifteen, I thought it was a fantastic idea. I'd get to go to school on one of the most cosmopolitan and advanced planets in the galaxy, learn amazing things, get away from the troubles of my home planet, maybe even meet a girl who looked at me with something other than disgust." He remembers his adolescent hopes with wry sympathy for his past self. "It... didn't quite work out that way. Well, the learning did. The girls, not so much. That is to say, while it's true that they didn't always look at me with disgust, I didn't find pity or morbid fascination to be much of an improvement. In retrospect I think I was some combination of unlucky and looking in the wrong places, but at the time it felt like I was just fundamentally unlovable. It got so anytime someone looked at me I'd want to claw my skin off."

He makes some effort to dull the sharp edges of these memories; it's possible to get the point across without being maximally vivid, and he has a strong preference not to cause needless suffering in his listeners.

"I tried to kill myself, after a particularly bad one. Bothari had to wrestle me for the knife, a delicate operation since I'm definitely capable of breaking my own bones by grabbing something and pulling too hard. I don't think Grandma Naismith noticed, so I suppose until just now I was the only person left alive who knew about that." He hasn't thought about it in years, but the memory springs into his mind with crystalline clarity.

"Among the Eldar that is considered a very serious crime; Mandos is very slow to pardon it."

"It's not highly thought of by most humans either, but I faced no expectation that I would persist in any form to be judged for it afterward, and in fact was terrified by the idea that I might."

At that, he slips a little on dulling the memories, and the old pain flashes pure and clear in his mind: the intense urge to destroy himself down to the last subatomic speck, the terror when he contemplated his mother's notions of Heaven and wondered if he might find himself there afterward, the comforting certainty that he was such an awful worthless piece of wreckage that Heaven could not possibly want him.

"Sorry. As you can see, it wasn't the happiest time of my life. I survived, though, and eventually came to be glad I had done so."

Familiarity, recognition. Then annoyance. "Yes."

"Hm?"

"I found your past self relatable, including his preference not to be alive, and resented on his behalf his abrupt conversion into someone who rejoiced in life. Nothing of significance."

"Yeah, that's fair," says Miles. "My past self appreciates your support. It sure didn't feel like an abrupt conversion at the time, although I grant that if it had taken the entire rest of my life so far it would probably still seem abrupt to you. At the time... well. They're very impressed with themselves, on Beta Colony. They have reason to be, but they take it a little far. We were studying old literature, in one of my classes, and in the very first class I was thoughtlessly asked to read the opening monologue of a play with a deformed and bitter villain protagonist. Not to say that I resented the request, exactly. It gave me a chance to make something useful and - I'm not sure I'd go as far as 'beautiful', but at least to make art - out of my otherwise unrelentingly and unproductively miserable emotional state. But certainly the teacher hadn't thought about it beforehand, and had no idea what to do with my pain once I'd made it obvious to everyone. I can probably dig the whole performance out of my memory if you're interested."

He raises an eyebrow. "In Valinor one - wouldn't write a play with a deformed and bitter villain protagonist."

He laughs. "I'm very fond of that play. Creative works often don't endure in relevance very long among Men - too much turnover, the culture changes too quickly - but this playwright has been renowned for his ability to continue resonating with modern audiences for thousands of years."

"Then please do share."

"Mm, let's see..."

He runs through the text in his head to be sure he's got it all, then recites in the original English, holding the translation and the memory of his earlier performance in his thoughts. He's getting really good at this osanwë thing.

"Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun of York, and all the clouds that lour'd upon our house in the deep bosom of the ocean buried." (At the time, his actual emotions and his interpretation of the character happened to coincide perfectly, so that he could speak straight from the heart: amusement, satisfaction, and imperfectly suppressed rage.) "Now are our brows bound up with victorious wreaths; our bruised arms hung up for monuments; our stern alarums changed to merry meetings, our dreadful marches to delightful measures. Grim-visaged war hath smooth'd his wrinkled front; and now, instead of mounting barded steeds to fright the souls of fearful adversaries, he capers nimbly in a lady's chamber to the lascivious pleasing of a lute."

(His audience was beginning to realize what had gone wrong at that point, but Miles was too caught up in his work to pay much attention to the uncomfortable silence that came over the room as he spoke, faster now and angrier.)

"But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks, not made to court an amorous looking-glass; I, that am rudely stamp'd, and want love's majesty to strut before a wanton ambling nymph; I, that am curtail'd of this fair proportion, cheated of feature by dissembling nature—deformed, unfinish'd, sent before my time into this breathing world, scarce half made up, and that so lamely and unfashionable that dogs bark at me as I halt by them—why, I, in this weak piping time of peace, have no delight to pass away the time, unless to spy my shadow in the sun and descant on mine own deformity."

(The looks of horrified fascination he was getting from the other students sharpened the edge in his voice, and underneath the pain and anger that he poured into his words, he felt a deep pride and satisfaction in being able to bring this character so vividly to life.)

"And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover to entertain these fair well-spoken days, I am determined to prove a villain and hate the idle pleasures of these days. Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous, by drunken prophecies, libels and dreams, to set my brother Clarence and the king in deadly hate the one against the other: and if King Edward be as true and just as I am subtle, false, and treacherous, this day should Clarence closely be mew'd up, about a prophecy which says that 'G' of Edward's heirs the murderer shall be. Dive, thoughts, down to my soul; here Clarence comes."

He shakes his head slightly, pulling himself out of the memory, and smiles. "Two days after a suicide attempt over personal troubles startlingly similar to the ones described in the text, I'm sure you can see how it would've spoken to me so deeply. I wrote an essay on the character of Richard III for that class, later. It made the teacher cry. I was pleased with that result to a degree I kind of regret in retrospect."

His eyes are gleaming. So are Macalaurë's, actually. 

"That is beautifully written, for one so young."

"I was and remain very proud of the depth I can give to that performance. Sometime I should sit down and write out everything I have memorized by that author - he's very easy to memorize, excellent use of meter - and add translations and put it all on the readers. I'm not sure if I can get that whole play out that way, but I might be able to if I used a memory aid."

"I'd enjoy reading that. Anyhow, you spent your adolescence wanting to die and reciting epic poetry about it, proving that the differences between Men and Elves are smaller than anyone thought. Then?"

...Miles giggles at this summary.

"All the Betans were very Betan about it. It got wearing. By the time I went back to Barrayar I was glad to be back among the people who were openly disgusted with me and away from the people who pitied me equally for being deformed and for being Barrayaran. My culture may have problems, but it's still mine. Anyway, I had an all-right couple of years before things started getting depressing again. I watched adventure holos and learned to pilot a lightflyer," he glosses these concepts in his thoughts with ease, "and cemented my ambition to become an officer in the Imperial Service when I grew up, because it was the proper Vor thing to do and people kept thinking I couldn't do it. The entrance exams to the Imperial Service Academy are half academic, half practical - a series of written tests and an obstacle course. Normally you have to pass both to get in. I expected that would be difficult for me, so I petitioned to have my scores averaged rather than taken separately; then all I'd have to do was turn in a bunch of flawless tests and make it through the obstacle course without literally hospitalizing myself. Guess what I did!"

"I assume from your tone that you literally hospitalized yourself."