Work Text:
Ezekyle should have killed her.
It was a mistake he had made from the very start. Hesitating. Regretting. Stopping to consider what he was doing because something like a prophecy spoke within.
He should have done what he did with everyone else the second she was tripping over her own feet with exhaustion and spilling some liquid from the dregs of Commorragh over his arm.
It would have been easier if he did.
Not that she lived. No. He would have spent an eternity to bring her back if she died like all the others; like she should have. One look in those eyes and he realised that he was never getting out of this with his own sanity intact. This was simply about her.
The face that haunted anything close to a dream that he experienced. The face that looked back at him when a question was made about his morality that he couldn’t confirm or deny. The face that reminded him of the very fraction of an ounce of humanity that was stilled buried deep inside of his burned and possessed body.
Something told him that a different universe might have been kinder. Might have held a different future for them both. Together, apart, he didn’t care at this point.
This universe hadn’t afforded him such a feat.
This universe couldn’t ever put kind in the same sentence as either of their names.
“Update.”
The command echoed around the halls, such a simple word that had come to mean so much over time to the Black Legion. A few knew that he didn’t want something generic, that he didn’t specify for a reason. It was something too individual that he wanted.
Her.
Diana.
“No change,” Iskandar Khayon, someone he had trusted with this information despite himself, returns. He never looks up from his data slate, expression barely changing. “They haven’t moved in 75 hours. Perhaps there are changes we do not yet know of internally.”
“Such as?”
“Confession.”
Abbadon didn’t breathe. “Never.”
“Would you be so sure?”
“She would be killed, at best.”
Iskandar Khayon hums. “Is that not a favourable outcome in such a world as ours?”
Truthfully, yes.
“She would not allow it.” Abbadon’s words were not a lie entirely. He corrects himself seconds later though, the truth seemingly important to him for this one thing. “I would not allow it.”
“Yet she is held prisoner, awaiting trial for claims of heresy, including conspiracy with the Warmaster. She is not the kind of prison the imperium would allow to leave so easily.”
They meet eyes for a moment. Neither speak until they look away.
“You will not save her from the fate that awaits her.”
“Because I do not change fate.” Abbadon flinched at his own words. Has he always been so cruel in his words about her? He felt they were just, once upon a time. A reflection of what they were to each other. “If she dies, she will serve our cause in another way.”
Perhaps his own cause.
He would rip her from the immaterial and build her back together with his own flesh and blood if he had to. That was his own, selfish cause. Having her with him.
It didn’t end so easily in his head.
He thought he could have found solace in the awful quiet of the ships bowels, somewhere near the engine room that chugged along. Somewhere that he had forgotten so briefly was full of memories from when he barely knew her.
In his own mind, he thought it was a sign.
Where she stood across from him with that flavour in her eyes that said ‘try me, you’ll enjoy it’. Which, for the record, he very much did.
“It would be unwise,” she told him, in jest he had believed at the time, “for you to continue with what you are doing, Ezekyle.”
He hummed. Let his hand slip further down her body that felt so tragically human beneath him. “It would truly be unwise for you to call me that again.”
“Oh?”
He should have relished the look she gave him in that moment. It had been lost to time, the true essence of her eyes and her smile and the laugh that patched a broken web of tragedy between them. But he recalled how her eyes narrowed so slightly at him, how her lips curled with a desire so many could never have admitted to.
“Would you prefer me to address you as Warmaster, even now?”
He raised his brow. “I would prefer if you didn’t say another word and let me continue with what I was doing.”
She never would have kept to that promise, even if she made it.
But, she did call him Warmaster far too many times. The worst of which was when he turned her around and pressed against her, the curve of that human body which he had come to appreciate far beyond anything else he wanted.
She was so delicate; he could crush her with a hand spare, yet she opened herself up to more of him like she knew he would never harm her like the others.
“Don’t hold back, Warmaster.”
Oh, he’d groaned so loud the engines grew silent in comparison.
“I want it all.”
If he could have ever tried to pin-point the exact moment he knew he needed her in his every waking moment, it was then.
Never that he was in love with her.
Perhaps, that he was more than obsessed with her.
For all of his faults, Abbadon could never be called inconsistent. Especially with her.
Especially when he watched her from across the room with that god-ending smile that she reserved for him, plastered over her face like it meant more to her than life itself did at points.
But that was the essence of it, really.
Diana meant more to Ezekyle than life did.
More than the eternal war, more than the gods who turned him to fight their battles. More than the God-Emperor and everyone else who blindly followed the very thing the emperor hated, turning brother against brother over nothing that really even mattered.
He wished, sometimes, that he’d have met her before the heresy. She wasn’t even a concept at the point, but how simple of an existence would it have been when the galaxy was not burning each day?
When he was not a heretic. When she was not a conspirator, a traitor, or even a confessor.
“Do not tempt me,” he says, voice low compared to normal. His fingertip traced the scar on her face, carefully running down the broken and fused skin like it told the story of the whole world. “I will not resist.”
She smiles. A billion cracks of light inside of him show at once. “Why must you try to resist?”
He was afraid.
Of hurting her. Destroying something good. The truth.
“Be tempted,” she urges. Her hand drifts over some remains of his human flesh. Her touch is so light he’d have missed if without. “Let yourself fall to the desires so many of your brothers have. You deserve it more.”
His eyes drift to her lips. Such an unusual response. “Stop.”
“Not until you stop too.”
There was a moment of silence. The engines whirl on.
“I offer you what you want,” Diana continues, her hair falling loose over her shoulder as she leans into him. “Unless things have… changed.”
That was the precise issue. They had.
It always changed so quickly for them. Always a reckless thing between them which pushed and pulled in directions neither could understand. He should have known, though.
That was then the second issue. He let it happen.
“Do it.”
Her words are so certain. He can feel it in both simple syllables, even the breath she takes afterwards.
Yet he hesitates.
Abbadon had only hesitated as many times as he had fingers on his left hand. Most of those times related to her.
She knew the second he didn’t respond that this was more. That there was something beneath the surface that he wasn’t telling her. That something wasn’t so simple anymore.
Yet she never asked him.
“I will not beg, Warmaster,” she said, eyes never leaving his. Her hand moved to his bicep, fingers curling around his muscle, not to encourage him but to stabilise herself. “If you tell me to leave, I’ll go now. I’ll serve you like every other serf onboard and scurry away from you whenever you come near.”
He shouldn’t have leant into her then. Let those lips, haunted with the ghost of a thousand unspoken feelings, ever brush against his and catch him, never to give him the opportunity to let go again.
But she tasted like the sweetest honey that couldn’t exist in the galaxy ever again.
“Tell me to go.” His hairs stand on end, spine shivering as the words linger against his pale lips, starved of anything but war for so many years. “Say it.”
He breathes in.
Looks at her one last time.
“Never.”
He’d seen her run. Watched as the only thing that gave him a reason slip away without a consideration of his feelings towards this all. Waited to see if she’d return because she felt the universe crushing her like he did. Listened as the Imperium ruined another thing he loved.
Perhaps at first he didn’t understand; he never told her to go.
He never wanted less of her. Never wanted to be without her.
It sounded pathetic in fact. To see someone like him confess that he suddenly felt the weight of the world because one person had moved on? It sounded like obsession.
It was. Really.
“Say it.”
His body felt electric when she whined in response. A whimper, in fact, the feeling of his body so close behind her. She fit perfectly against him, perhaps even better than the god-awful body glove that prevented him from feeling all of her.
“You’re mine,” he prompts her, thick fingers digging into the flesh of her thighs as he spreads them wider.
He’s breathless at the way her body, her heat, pressed against his untouched cock, ready to take him like its personal sheath. He growls, groans, something near a moan when she arches her back into him and feels the thick head of his cock against her entrance.
“Mine,” he repeats, a reminder to one of them, maybe both, of their words. “Say it, Diana.”
She’s stubborn. He loved it, really. Her mewling and incoherent babbling as his burning hot cock throbbed against her sensitive clit, the shallow thrusts turning her into the mess he wanted.
She wouldn’t say it yet.
She always made him work for it.
“You wish for me to believe,” he starts, teeth sinking into the soft flesh of her neck, never doing more than the slightest of bruises, “that all of this is because of someone else? That there is another who makes you come undone so easily?”
Her head rolls back, grants him better access to one of her prettiest features. “P-Please…”
“No.” He pulls back from her skin, dark eyes meeting her own with a command that could be felt in his chest. “Say it.”
A roll of his hips. The feeling of his cock down her soaked folds. Two fingers circling her clit to replace the feeling from earlier.
That’s what it takes.
“Yours..!” she manages to choke out, voice shaking, grinding back against him. “I need… want more.”
He hums, taking his time to plunge his thick cock into her. He makes her feel the stretch, take it nice and slow like he’d imagined each time she said ‘yes, warmaster’ and looked at him with eyes that invited more.
But just as quickly, with one hand splayed over her hip, he pulls her back onto his cock, taking all of him.
She gasps, gags a moan as he holds her in place, his cracked lips brushing against her ear. “I’ll always give you more.”
He never should have taken it further, but this wasn’t a regret. He lived with too many of those to have ever considered anything that involved her to be a regret. He should have limited himself. Prevented the inevitable so he could still look across the war table and feel something other than hatred for everything around him.
He should have left her where she wanted to be, too. She ran, she fell into the arms of the imperium, maybe thought they’d take her back without a question of where she had been the past fifty years.
But like always, he never knew when to stop.
Not when he was consumed by her with each breath.
Nothing was ever enough.
He’s pulled away from the vox recording by the sound of metal steps behind him. He doesn’t turn, only looks disinterested in everything around him. “Awaiting your command, Warmaster.”
He nods once, eyes falling over to Iskandar Khayon.
Perhaps someone who had grown to understand. Perhaps someone who thought him weak. Nonetheless, someone who listened.
“Burn them before they run.” He looks across each of the cameras until he finds the one in particular he’d been focused on before. He lingers over her white hair, the hopelessness in her eyes, the fear hidden behind the stare. “Except the girl. Let her run.”
He feels the uneasiness behind him, though no one would question him. It was an easy excuse. She had secrets of their legion that he could not let be shared if she cracked when they tried her over a burning pit.
It was far simpler, in reality.
He’d give her the chance to make her own way back to him.
If she chose to run again, he’d keep his distance. Burn whatever tried to harm her.
Leave her to realise that the only person who would ever have the opportunity to be her demise, was him.
She had said it, after all.
“Every part of me is yours,” she told him, eyes bright under the lights, voice rasped but carrying an emotion he hadn’t seen before. Her fingers brush over his cheek, palm settling between there and his jaw, holding him in place like she was confessing to the gods themselves. “My life. My body. My death.”
But never her love.