façade

[isthisart]

Linya gradually feels her way around being proper friends with Ekaterin, not wishing to wreck things with a premature "will you be my Second at my duplicate wedding" request. There is companionable gardening. There is, when Linya and Jocelyn make an unexpected sudden breakthrough in causing the nibs to behave, which holds when they fabricate a prototype and test it out, a fountain pen for Ekaterin. (In addition to Miles's and Count Vorkosigan's. And one for Emperor Gregor, which has got to be worth all the R&D in advertising alone.) When Miles's legs are more or less completely healed, they skip off to Vorkosigan Surleau for a few days and he teaches her to fly a lightflyer, which she enjoys very much and picks up very quickly. Linya writes Miles a song. (It has no words, she doesn't feel up to lyrics, but it is very pretty and slightly different every time she plays/sings it.) With the nibs handled and all the Barrayaran languages learned Linya spends more time reading textbooks and signs up for a university placement exam to see how far ahead into advanced classes on various things she can skip, and awaits her results.

And snuggles her tiny Barrayaran.

Comments

[whyexit]

About which Thorne sighs.

But then it is time for Miles to be transferred elsewhere for his roundabout route home.

"Say hi to the wife for me," suggests Thorne, not particularly expecting Miles to follow up.

[thisvorlunatic]

"It'd only make her jealous," he jokes, grinning. "See you around, Bel."

And homeward he goes. Happily, he doesn't even have to delay on his way in, although he is required to make his report to Illyan in person before contacting anyone else.

Illyan listens with limited sympathy to Miles's tirade on the subject of complete mission briefings, reminds him that Bharaputra was the house they were supposed to be stealing from and it's not Illyan's fault if Miles insists on assigning himself quixotic side missions, allows that it would nevertheless have been a good idea to offer him a more thorough background on the target planet, agrees that he will keep this in mind for future briefings, sighs and shakes his head when he gets to the part of the written report about the abandoned cargo, and then turns Miles loose to do what he will.

What Miles wills is to see his wife. His wife, it turns out, is on Komarr. He sighs and sends her a message.

[isthisart]

Linya sends back a message (voice, no vid) detailing her estimated time of return in one week (she needs to assign someone to look after pen things on Komarr and then get on a ship).

And then a week later she is home!

[thisvorlunatic]

Miles bounds down the stairs to greet her in the front hall.



He skids to a halt just past the bottom step with one hand still on the banister, utterly arrested by the sight of her.

[isthisart]

Linya beams and giggles and scoops him up. "I missed you!"

[thisvorlunatic]

"I forgot how pretty you were," Miles says in a small, embarrassed voice. Then he beams and hugs her fiercely. "I love you. I missed you too."

[isthisart]

"Oh goodness, you forgot?" chuckles Linya, squeezing back as snugly as is wise. "I'll have to have a nice holo taken for you to remember me by. I love you too." She kisses him.

[thisvorlunatic]

Kisses!

"It's not that I forgot exactly. I certainly continued to be aware that I had the prettiest wife in all the galaxy," he explains as soon as there have been adequate kisses to be going on with. "It's just the, the impact of the prettiness was refreshed by lack of exposure."

[isthisart]

"Aha." Nuzzle. She goes - still holding him - to the nearest couch, on which she flumphs with him in her lap. "I wonder if that will keep happening or if in the long run you could hare off for an entire year and come back and just think 'oh, there is Linya'."

[thisvorlunatic]

"I'm not sure which outcome to hope for. Although I know I hope not to have to hare off for an entire year."

[isthisart]

"Yes, I hope you will do no such thing." Snuggle. "I'd say welcome home, but you got here first. Pens are up and running on Komarr," she adds. "And seeing quicker early adoption, too."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Well, welcome home to you, then. Do they come in any exciting new colours? Have you gotten any interesting design feedback? Did you see an enormous bump in sales when Gregor started using his?"

[isthisart]

"The standard colors are the same, and there will be only four until we have better statistics on which of the custom colors get ordered most frequently. Ekaterin had a suggestion that I'm working on - the projection range for pens is short, but they technically have enough hardware to notice if you move around and how, so if she takes hers out to her garden and draws something over the dahlias and then wanders to the runner beans, it ought to be able to remember where these things are relative to each other - and then resize to an arbitrarily scaled map of the garden for later investigation. There's a software update planned to let it handle that in the standard drawing program within the next few months. And the sales bump was significant but not enormous."

[thisvorlunatic]

He kisses her on the cheek. "Good for Ekaterin, then. Are you getting along? Do you like her?"

[isthisart]

"We are and I do. I think I could probably ask her to be involved in a groatful wedding now."

[thisvorlunatic]

Groatful.

"Groatful," giggles Miles. "I love you. Groatfully. Well, ask her whenever you feel comfortable, and I suppose I'll call Ivan, and then we can start planning the wedding."

[isthisart]

"All right." Nuzzle. "And there will be colorful groats and oaths and it will be very wedding-y."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Yes. Wedding-y and groatful." He's not going to let that one go anytime soon.

[isthisart]

"You are easily charmed by neologism."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Yes."

Pause.

"Groatful," he whispers.

[isthisart]

This inspires her to get up off the sofa so she can twirl him around. "You are so cute."

[thisvorlunatic]

Miles squawks and then clings to her, giggling. "I'm very pleased you think so!"

[isthisart]

She flumphs down again and kisses him.

[thisvorlunatic]

He snuggles into her lap and kisses back. "I love you. You're delightful. An absolute treasure. I'll even let you get away with picking me up and twirling me around. Because I love you so."

[isthisart]

"Is it a matter of getting away with it?" she wonders. "I'm not certain I could kick the habit of scooping you up in the first place if I tried - well, I could, but it would be legitimately challenging - but if you do not care to be twirled I can do without."