"...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."

"My best friend's dad is a Holocaust survivor. One of the evil Nazi doctors took an interest in him."

"That does sound like approximately a Galen level of terrible."

"To be completely honest, most of the things that have cause to be laid at Dr. Schmidt's feet were done while Edie's dad was hunting him down for revenge, after the war, not while he was a captive. So it's not quite the same thing."

"Yeah. I... would not have been able to hunt Galen. I'm lucky I got the opportunity I did. Well, I say 'lucky', in large part I have Miles to thank for it."

"He was fourteen when it started and got out a handful of years later. It's not the same thing. It wasn't even the time he spent suffering himself that he was trying to get revenge for, it was that Schmidt had killed his mother to try to motivate him to do better. Edie's named after her, it was the only thing he had left of her."

"Not the same thing, no," he agrees.

"So it's a very good thing he's dead without anyone having to spend almost two decades tracking him down."

"Yeah."

"I mean, it wasn't all bad! That's how he met my father, is that the nazi was trying to do evil things again and my father was trying to thwart him."

"Oh, good for your father."

"Yeah. And then of course the whole mutants thing went public..."

"Oh?"

"Ah--when I say mutants, I don't just mean blue eyes or lactose tolerance or the shit that apparently goes down on Barrayar. 'Mutants' in my world are people with something called the X-Gene that activates a bunch of what would otherwise be junk DNA. Results range from blue skin to fully-functional wings to less explicable superpowers, often in the same person. I do magnetism." She flutters her fingers, and her steel bracelet divides into three pieces and floats off her wrist. "Evil Nazi Doctor was also a mutant, he did some really nasty stuff with energy. He took an interest in Edie's dad because he manifested his mutant powers trying to avoid being separated from his mother. He...had no way of knowing how badly that was going to backfire. Anyway, thwarting Schmidt--who was using the name Sebastian Shaw at that point, we still don't know which if either was his real name--ended up being very public. Do you know about the Cuban Missile Crisis, Ivan didn't but he was neither raised on Earth nor did he display any particular historical interest that I observed."