plot-bunny: Vorkosigan series

[marbleglove]

I like my stories to be relatively light and fluffy. None of these dark and depressing stories for me. Except, of course, for the random exceptions which really just prove the rule that I like happy endings. However, my current plot bunny is definitely one of the exceptions.

In the Vorkosigan series, the history of the Barrayaran empire includes the Cetagandan invasion which ended the Era of Isolation and created a few radioactive zones which were once thriving cities. After that, there was a whole history of socially promoted infanticides of mutants. Cordelia Vorkosigan nee Naismith had to defend her right repeatedly to not kill her son Miles because of his birth defects. In The Mountains of Mourning, Miles Vorkosigan has to judge an infanticide case. The message is (quite rightly) that infanticide is a terrible thing.

However, I just saw a short video The Legacy of Chernobyl by Paul Fusco. It's about the children who were born after the Chernobyl disaster and the effects of the extreme radiation poisoning. It's disturbing but very well done.

I would like a fic showing an early part of the Barrayaran infanticide tradition, and what it must have been like for those young mothers who were stealing themselves up to kill their own children because they couldn't care for them, because they would harm society, because they were "wrong". Maybe show how Mara Mattulich grew up to be the woman she was, whose own mother had supervised her killing her own children and who killed her own grand-daughter rather than put her surviving daughter through the same. It's a tragedy when someone is trying so hard to do the right thing but all the possible choices are wrong.