Twenty-Year Man by ellen_fremedon (explicit)
Title: Twenty-Year Man
Fandom: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Pairing: Ivan Vorpatril/Byerly Vorrutyer
Categories: slash, action/adventure, drama, political, post-canon/futurefic
Length: long, 24,908 words
Warnings: non consensual drug use
Author on Livejournal: ellen_fremedon
Author Website: ellen_fremedon on AO3
Summary: Lord Ivan Vorpatril and Byerly Vorrutyer, making Vorbarr Sultana safe for (highly limited experiments in) democracy.
Review: "Looks like they're pulling in everyone who was at Vortashpula's last night." Lecoq grinned; he was even more apolitical than Ivan, and wouldn't have been caught dead at a campaign event. "Heard you treated everyone there to your thoughts on civic governance. Never suspected we were harboring a political genius in our midst." He pitched the last sentence to carry, and several passers-by stopped in the doorway to agree that Ivan had, in fact, shared a great many keen political insights. Not all of them had been at the party.
"Yeah, well. If that's what passes for genius these days, the state is doomed." It had the twin virtues of being true, and not particularly funny, and that was the end of it.
Or an end; Ivan kept having the same conversation at intervals all day.
This is fantastic. Sometimes I feel a bit of a fraud reccing something that is clearly this popular, instead of seeking out hidden gems, but it hasn't been recced here before and since it virtually gives the impression it could've been written by Bujold herself, recced it is getting.
It's time for Ivan Vorpatril - nearing 20 years of service and no longer a young man - to grow up, is the contention of this fic, which embarks on a quest to make him do just that. A new drug that also functions as a truth serum at a party outs him as not being as politically dumb as he's pretended to be all these years... and also to Byerly, who's trying to run damage control and pack him off home, as harbouring a crush that he'd never normally act upon because of his internalized homophobia.
The latter thread almost gets lost at times beneath the avalanche of politicking plottiness, which has a distinctly Bujoldish edge of irreverence in the novel approach to vote fixing, but just in case you missed the slashiness, it definitely delivers toward the end (er, I had a paragraph here expanding on that but I'm not honestly sure how nsfw I can get on a main post here so... um yes, hot), and in fact the missteps and twists of the romance itself also spin out in rather Bujoldish fashion through the story.
Twenty-Year Man
Fandom: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Pairing: Ivan Vorpatril/Byerly Vorrutyer
Categories: slash, action/adventure, drama, political, post-canon/futurefic
Length: long, 24,908 words
Warnings: non consensual drug use
Author on Livejournal: ellen_fremedon
Author Website: ellen_fremedon on AO3
Summary: Lord Ivan Vorpatril and Byerly Vorrutyer, making Vorbarr Sultana safe for (highly limited experiments in) democracy.
Review: "Looks like they're pulling in everyone who was at Vortashpula's last night." Lecoq grinned; he was even more apolitical than Ivan, and wouldn't have been caught dead at a campaign event. "Heard you treated everyone there to your thoughts on civic governance. Never suspected we were harboring a political genius in our midst." He pitched the last sentence to carry, and several passers-by stopped in the doorway to agree that Ivan had, in fact, shared a great many keen political insights. Not all of them had been at the party.
"Yeah, well. If that's what passes for genius these days, the state is doomed." It had the twin virtues of being true, and not particularly funny, and that was the end of it.
Or an end; Ivan kept having the same conversation at intervals all day.
This is fantastic. Sometimes I feel a bit of a fraud reccing something that is clearly this popular, instead of seeking out hidden gems, but it hasn't been recced here before and since it virtually gives the impression it could've been written by Bujold herself, recced it is getting.
It's time for Ivan Vorpatril - nearing 20 years of service and no longer a young man - to grow up, is the contention of this fic, which embarks on a quest to make him do just that. A new drug that also functions as a truth serum at a party outs him as not being as politically dumb as he's pretended to be all these years... and also to Byerly, who's trying to run damage control and pack him off home, as harbouring a crush that he'd never normally act upon because of his internalized homophobia.
The latter thread almost gets lost at times beneath the avalanche of politicking plottiness, which has a distinctly Bujoldish edge of irreverence in the novel approach to vote fixing, but just in case you missed the slashiness, it definitely delivers toward the end (er, I had a paragraph here expanding on that but I'm not honestly sure how nsfw I can get on a main post here so... um yes, hot), and in fact the missteps and twists of the romance itself also spin out in rather Bujoldish fashion through the story.
Twenty-Year Man