Archive of Our Own

It was a rather violent fall from your hard-earned station, to say the least.

You weren't demoted, or court-martialed, nor found grossly negligent. Not a single choice you made factored into the whole situation happening at all.

No, that blame lay squarely on the bastard whims of fate and chance.

Or, more accurately, the blame lay on the auspec-sweep personnel failing to adequately address both a Gloriana-class Battleship using a nearby sun's gravitational field to slingshot herself near; and a Strike-Cruiser hurtling towards your own in a prime flanking position.

You were First Officer to the Shipmaster, the lady Marmeladov. She was an aged woman, yes, but not dulled, or made any less a sight to behold by her many, many years. In her infinite wisdom, she commanded an egress from the oncoming assault via the command dais; a raised platform of polished metal and stone. An impossible, unachievable egress—or at very least, enough of one to bank starboard, attempting to round on the vessel and give a clear fire pathway.

She was not quick enough to cripple the enemy Cruiser, even if the hits had landed.

The punishment followed immediately thereafter, streaks of artillery racing across the void, lighting up the holo-display's threat recognition.

The Sword-class Frigate escorting your ship tried to intercept the barrage, valiantly taking the Gloriana's attack—you watched through the huge, armoured viewport windows as her void-shields burned back in waves like gossamer, and saw the flash of her reactor collapsing—the air within the vessel causing a rare combustion within the void. It birthed a new star in the endless dark for a fathom of a second, as fire tore through her in her death throes.

Marmeladov seized the opportunity given by a thousand, thousand lives thrown to the nothing and sent a lance at the approaching enemy Cruiser. Only for your ship to be jolted by a hulking laser-battery stampeding across the port side, as the Gloriana took another pot-shot over the ghastly distance it was quickly reducing.

High on the command deck, elevated above the crew on a vaulted loft, you had the perfect view of the slurry of internal dialogue recounting how the void shield seethed at the blow, still standing.

Servitors twitched at their stations on the platform below, some freezing mid-task, others repeating the same motion over and over as if caught in a loop—then, you watched them drop dead under the strain of the machine spirit's protests.

A return volley of lance-fire jetted from your ship, but the angle was wrong; your crews could not account for the enemy Cruiser's steep approaching angle.

Still, the hit caught an accidental mark against the looming Gloriana, even if it only glanced off her immense shielding.

Nigh in tandem, a ghastly lurch rattled your vessel again, sending the void shields to breaking. But the blow upon your ship was not from the assailing Cruiser. It was, instead, the Gloriana's immense artillery that decisively crippled your protective cocoon, slowing you down while the massive vessel charged closer. Marmeladov nearly fried the ship's thruster vectors desperately trying to outmanoeuvre the incoming Gloriana's hulking ram—causing the carcass of your escorting Frigate to be devoured in place of you.

Then, everything got even worse.

Scrawled in plating the size of hive-spires across the Gloriana's bow, the wretched signage of the VIIIth Legion came into view. Just as the traitor Cruiser jammed its snout into the side of the launch bay, bearing with it turned-heretic, skin-wearing abominations.

In response, your vessel's machine spirit screeched. The cogitator interfaces, wired directly into the ship’s systems, sparked up with her anger.

Some fool in the gantry barked a prayer to the Emperor of Mankind. It redoubled among other staff, murmured here and there—not officially, never officially—but often enough that it became a background hum beneath the battle. Wasting time on faith in a situation like this never even occurred to you. There was only action, only following through on your Shipmaster's rapid contingency response. Only her commands to seal as many bulkheads between the bay and everything else as quickly as possible.

There was no decisive reason to board, not when a meagre display of broadside firepower—let alone a few laser-batteries—from the Gloriana could've killed everyone on the ship anyway.

You realised what Marmeladov already knew. Nothing could stop what worse death was coming. No amount of coordination or codifying logistics could stand against the tide hellbent on crashing.

Even then, Shipmaster Marmeladov tried to do something—detonate the artillery stores, have the soldiery collapse as many bridging walkways as possible—but the Night Lords buried their claws in, regardless.

It was simply sport for them.

Howls began to rattle up from the deck plates. Horror running rabid and rife in the innards, still far away enough to maintain proper process, but near enough that the itch of terror had begun to creep up everyone's backs.

The intership vox cut in, then cut out, and finally vaulted across a channel in a flurry of crackles, from one station to another. One section of the ship reported boarders. Another reported nothing at all; then stopped responding entirely. Internal pict-feeds were brought up on the secondary hololithic displays, but instead of clarity, they showed disjointed, flickering scenes: a corridor empty one second, then filled with something tall and jagged the next.

Attempts to hail the Astropathic choirmaster fell dead as the hundred separate vox-links quickly became an overlapping cacophony of gunfire, las-discharge, wet tearing, and screaming. It all blended together as the other officers coordinated sabotage efforts; as much as they could when their proxies were faced with trans-human man-flensers. The orchestra of communications grew louder and louder until each line cut to static, one by one.

They all went out the same way: wet crunching, the scrape of armour against the plated floors, until finally, came the fizzing of dying vox.

Then, at last, silence reigned supreme.

Your Shipmaster insisted upon a last stand, as she was wont to.

First, a remote tripping of the actions. She tried—and tried—and tried, again and again, to override the Ship-spirit's prerogative, but the old girl would not abide the risk of taking her master down with her. Too many years spent with a single person at her helm had made the great vessel fussy over how she died. Ever a stubborn thing. Too spiteful to perish as anyone commanded, itching for a confrontation rather than a gutting, but the great ship would get no say in a matter already decided by the armoured parasites crawling about in her guts.

And so, another contingency was enacted.

In a command deck full of fear-frozen fellow officers and elite staff, it was you who volunteered to manually engage the detonations of the bridge.

No one protested, even knowing it was suicide for you. Namely, because it was suicide for everyone on the deck. The entire structure would crumple in on itself—and yet the task had to be done. Deny the traitors their spoils. Deny them access to the records. Deny them their man-flesh pelts. Take them all down with you.

Your peers opened the blast-doors enough for you to slide through the middle parting, detonator in hand.

The very instant you were out, you were doused in amber warning lights flashing in swirling arcs, warning of a reactor meltdown. Shadows festered in the hallway at the end of the long, open gantry as the lumens flickered in and out of life, painting the cavernous passageway, broad enough to march a whole human regiment through, in strobing confusion.

The ship groaning was no anomaly. It would do that constantly, regardless of whether she was hurt or not: ever a deep, metallic chorus of creaking machinery, thundering engines, and the distant roar of her reactors.

Truthfully, that noise never stopped.

Now, though, it was overpowered—by agony.

There was no sense to the way screams travelled up from the depths below as you crossed the overpass. It had only worsened as you stepped over the threshold into the familiar halls and stopped in your tracks. Somehow, the clamour chased up the pipes, down the vents, and back from the command deck. Sobbing. Wailing. It grew louder and louder, until it all sounded, for a moment, like laughter. Wild, braying laughter. The ship's many veins and capillaries of hollowed steel warped the echoes of panic into every variable of emotion, disfiguring the torture of the lives onboard into senseless racket. Even the ship's architecture made it worse. The arched buttresses, ribbed vaults, and walls covered in worn reliefs allowed for echoes to carry into infinity.

The sound stopped so suddenly you didn't realise it at first.

It wasn't until you noticed just how quickly quiet had swallowed your surroundings, that you swung your gaze back ahead.

Then came the most gutting sight of all.

A ways down, where the winding corridor bent to a junction, you first saw them: saturated in glistening crimson, and tall enough for the strange, back-swept, wing-like protrusions of their helmets to almost scrape the wide passageway's roofing.

The foremost one with the tallest crest had a halberd ending in a grizzly, meat-wet chain-blade rested upon its pauldron.

The lumens flickered for a moment, then returned. It gave the abominable illusion of halos, as plume after plume of heavy condensation vented from their helm grills; accompanied by the chittering, khch-khch-khch of inter-vox-communications bouncing off the walls towards you.

Seeing them, even so far away, had laced you with such a complete and utter wave of mortification that taking a blind step backwards had felt more akin to falling off a canopy deck—as if the ship's artificial gravity had jolted to a sharp corner axis momentarily, before the stabilisation gimbal evened out.

The lumens flickered out again, and when they came back, the midnight-clad monsters were looking directly at you.

Again, the lights seized, leaving you in the dark longer than before. Power armour was by no means a silent thing. It was a sarcophagus of loud metal and hissing servos—which left little room for misinterpreting it growing closer—especially as the racket of sabatons scraping against the decking in a forward rush echoed near.

You ran back toward the command deck, pushing yourself past the burning in your lungs and managing to reach the far side of the gantry.

It was good that you had, because they had quickly approached the rigged section of corridor threshold. One stopped right beside the spot where a steel-wall plate hid the payload's receiver.

You saw now that it had hands nailed to its pauldrons. And Skulls. Skull helms—helms strung to its hips.

What fresh hell must it have crawled out of?

It stopped, and it stared.

Then, it looked right at where a fat swathe of thermoplastic explosives sat, albeit hidden behind clusters of wires and sheets of metal. Regardless, you took the opportunity handed to you with a hale and whole certainty. The destruction would boil the entire corridor, along with those abominable things. It'd send you flying no matter how far you got to the command deck.

But the detonator in your hand did not respond. No matter how many times you mashed at it with your thumb. The mechanism was dead.

And with it, the terms of your fellow crew's deaths were no longer self-made.

Failure was a bitter draught, but there was still one option. Even if it was no longer a complete denial. You only had the thought of escaping beyond the reach of the monsters.

A wave of nausea clawed at your gullet, and you swayed; stumbling but staying on your feet.

You drew your las-pistol from the holster at your hip.

The skull-faced abominations grew closer down the long bridge. They were eager, hunched like predators, and hastening their paces.

You raised the barrel to the soft flesh beneath your chin, and the one at the front with red-tinted mitts tilted its helm at you.

But in that eternal hesitation, the realisation that your crewmen would not know the plan had failed—not until the traitors were on the deck with them—wormed its way into the forefront of your thoughts.

It took little more than that to send you turning your aim from yourself, and to the things ahead instead.

One, two, three bursts of las, bathing the free fall into the ship's guts around you in hellish flashes of molten after-burn. The wretch at the front took the brunt of the marks, but the heavy armour around its torso practically ate the hits.

You aimed higher, going for the head, taking step after back-pedalling step, keeping your reticule straight.

Each successive strike boiled a strip of paint off the brute's helm.

It broke into a sprint, then.

You kept firing, still trying.

Round after round raced at the thing coming for you, striking it, but not slowing it. Your weapon glowed, raging with the rapid fire; but you tried again—again—again—until the power-cell shrieked.

Through your gloves, you could feel the boiling core raging into death. White-hot plasma foamed at the barrel's mouth, leaving you without any means to keep up the act.

You turned.

And ran.

The clang-clang-clang-clang of heavy, plated feet landing and pushing off the grated bridge behind you, triggering some latent memory of an auspecs lock-on warning. Especially with how it grew faster, and faster—closing in, almost on target. Almost on you.

But the thing had too much distance to cover.

You threw yourself into the tiny crack left open of the blast-door, and screamed for Marmeladov to let the great metal wall slam. Shut it—shut it—shut it—make the monsters claw at a meter of steel in their faces.

In a flurry, you ran to your Shipmaster's side, heaving in great gulps of air as panic filled your heart.

You had scarcely got a word out, but in the end, that didn't matter in the slightest.

The blast-door screeched as warning klaxons flashed across the overhead hololith displays, turning the once-disciplined chamber into a raucous hellhole.

Your head had whipped around so fast it stung for a second, and you watched as gauntlets ferreted into a gap in the middle.

For a moment, the sheer insanity of the situation made you wheeze in disbelief.

You glanced to the floor of the threshold, and wedged in the closing panels was a single ceramite boot.

One man rushed to the doorway, holding a las-gun, firing wildly at the opening; clever, and yet mad.

The revving tip of a monstrous glaive came down on him like a guillotine in an instant—sending a deluge of insides spraying outwards on the fall. Then it withdrew, clutched in the red-plated hand of the one you'd shot at. The beast really had been right on your ass as the doors had shut—or hadn't shut—evidently.

You stumbled back in horror, clutching your fried las-pistol as the man crumbled to his knees in a slough of blood.

The rest of the chain-glaive wielder's armoured forearm managed to fit in the steadily widening gap.

A smoke-bomb was tossed from behind it. Everything was swallowed by the haze absurdly fast. In a panic, you pelted your fried las-gun at whatever horrible shadow you thought was moving closer in the smog. The empty weapon pinged off ceramite with a ringing chime. Ceramite, inside the command deck, could only mean one thing. They had made it inside, and they had come for you all.

You forced yourself to swallow a scream.

But the others hadn't swallowed theirs.

That screaming was suddenly everywhere.

Marmeladov had risen from her throne beside you, but could not get far with the ports plugged into her temples. She was yelling for you to find cover, to run—frantically reminding you of the distance to the escape pods. She strained on her leash to the vessel, and you had to resist the urge to unfasten her from the interface. If she were wrested from the cables of the dying spirit, the ship would kill her on the disconnect out of one last show of possessive spite.

She shoved you to flee from the dais, and it pained you to take the step back from her.

But your Shipmaster's orders were law.

You ceded, even if it was agony to uphold her command.

In the carnage, you barely managed to catch yourself from falling off the steps.

You steadied and turned just in time to see one of the hulking, armoured monsters barrel straight toward Marmeladov's junior lieutenant, Dmitri. It seized him by the throat and lifted him effortlessly, his boots kicking above the floor. For a heartbeat, he was still alive—eyes wide, trying to speak—before the gauntlet'd grip tightened. Bone gave way with a crack so wet your guts twisted. His body was discarded, limp, across a far console that shorted out in a cascade of sparks.

The killers were too busy toying with the others to notice you run.

But that proved no easy feat when their bolters started to roar.

Each bullet was a contained detonation, tearing bodies apart from the inside. It hardly even looked like they were aiming; like they were just firing for the fun of it. A man heroically scaling the loft ladder with a rifle in hand was hit mid-rise over the cusp of the floor; his torso ruptured out behind him, ribs and armour fragments surely raining onto the terrified serfs and menials below. Another round floundered across the deck, ricocheted, and exploded at knee height, dropping three crewmen in a spray of bone and shredded uniforms.

The shooting made the lingering blooms of smoke churn, swathing the deck in heavy belted plumes around you. Your mind had stuck on the reek of it: the stink of phisolene, and hot gunpowder—acrid and vile, enmeshed with the smell of burnt flesh—thick on the tepid air like a disease.

It took everything in you to gather your bearings through the chaos and find the vague shape of an enclave, in the form of an auspecs console not far behind you, silhouetted by the haze.

The Second Officer, Rodion Razumikhin, was already there when you weaselled behind the cover.

He had a sidearm clutched to his chest, and he stunk of piss, which was not entirely unexpected. He was never a man of great brawn, nor a good marksman. His mind was his most valuable asset, that, and his ability to appropriately delegate actions among the lesser officers.

He looked at you through filthy, ash-covered hair with eyes bloodshot with tears.

You understood that too, truly.

The only thing that had kept you from that very same hysteria had been adrenaline and anger at it all.

Marmeladov had always cautioned you for your temper; and she was right, being the smarter, wiser woman she was.

You peeked over the cover you and Rodion had both ducked behind, only to see a giant beast standing before Marmeladov's throne.

Impulsively, you'd lunged for Rodion's las-gun, tore it from his fear-clammy grip and stood from behind the console, aiming for that high-crested monster's head.

It hit dead-on enough to make the thing's helm jolt from the blow.

Which made it stop and take a step back from the command dais.

You saw it had both taken out one of Marmeladov's eyes, and shattered her leg. A single, simple kick from one of its huge boots, just to cripple her in her throne even more, no doubt.

Seething at what the beast had done to her, you kept firing; and yet it did nothing, just like before.

It stood there and watched you, as the rest of its abominable comrades continued flensing your colleagues—your friends.

You loosed volleys until the weapon steamed, another las-gun almost dead at your hands once again. All you had needed was one to pierce. Just one. If any of them were to fall, just that one monster's death would have satisfied you for an eternity.

But it had turned to you now, attention hale and whole upon your form.

It lowered the halberd and pointed the huge weapon at Marmeladov.

You hesitated, then.

The beast tilted its head.

Behind the huge glaive tip obscuring her face, for a second, you glimpsed Marmeladov's gaze on you still; tears streaming out of her lone, surviving eye.

You choked back a sob, your aim on the monster faltering as your vision tunnelled and fixed on her.

In that momentary, fleeting lapse, you heard Rodion's death-scream far too late to realise the figure towering over you from behind. Huge gauntlets dug into the back of your heavy coat, and you shrieked at the sudden weightlessness that seized you—kicking, seething, cursing—caught like an animal by the scruff and held aloft.

The red-handed one approached, then, forgetting your Shipmaster for a blessed moment. Hoping to keep the attention off her, you increased your swearing and thrashing, clutched at lens-level with it.

Then a sickening trade occurred, wherein you passed between murderous hands, under more khch-khch-khch of their helm-voxes.

You could hear Marmeladov crying, pleading for mercy—but it was not for herself. She was pleading to the deaf ears of the butchers to at least make it quick for you. That act sent you clawing up at the Night Lord's gusset in a frenzied rage. The suit lining the inside of the ceramite had not looked much different from an imperial flight-suit—so you dug your nails in under the helm-seals and tugged.

A long, throaty hisssss came from both the power-armour and its' occupant.

Abruptly, it dropped you.

Air rushed out of your lungs in a heavy thud as you landed squarely on your back, wheezing hiccup after hiccup of torturous oxygen back in.

The red-gauntlet'd one you'd been clawing at looked down at you, twirling its halberd idly as you suffered—only to stop fast with the glaive in a backwards hold. The toothless end of the long handle pressed into your spasming chest, pinning you in place on the deck.

You snarled up at it, squirming wildly enough that your flailing arms knocked the grip of your fallen las-gun.

Palming blindly, you grasped it and brought it up—but not at the beast.

Instead, just as before, you cozied the hollowed barrel into the soft underside of your jaw.

The high-crested murderer apparently did not like that.

All notions of restraint were damned and gone as you pulled the trigger, a hateful sneer painted across your face.

At once, your head swam, whipped to black-speckled serenity for a moment. But not backwards in a warm, wet spray, like it should've when obliterated by a las-round at point-blank.

No, your head was strewn sidelong, looking out across the deck of the body-strewn deck. The entire left half of your skull blistered with acute agony, throbbing and flickering your vision.

You could hardly even feel the red gauntlet that reached down to grab you by the front of your uniform. You couldn't even hear the standard-issue, mass-produced attire buckle and tear almost immediately. The cold of the vessel did not seem to bite your flesh entirely, even as the monster adjusted to tug you airborne by your coat's lapel, instead.

You were up in the high-crested thing's grip, dangling like a little girl's doll. Bleeding, dazed—rendered inert. Distantly, you wondered if this was how servitors felt with their skulls emptied out—but your brain refused to render so much as a single, rockcrete thought beyond that as it throbbed, and throbbed, and throbbed. Grey began to blotch your sight, and it only grew harsher in severity. Those patchy wells of ash fluttered and flickered across your retinas, backgrounded by a quiet so absolute you could only distantly perceive that it cut in and out in long, swelling waves of far-off noise.

Your head rolled back, only vaguely catching shape of Marmeladov through the visual snow creeping in—before the monster's shadow blotted her from view and everything fell to serene, sunless nothing.

It was your hearing that returned first, although it granted only a constant ringing in your ears. Then came feeling, but the only immediate sensation you found yourself plagued by, surpisingly, was blotches of cold.

It was a strange way to discover there was no afterlife. Nor a bright glade, nor a shining palace filled with golden light.

But that was to be expected when death hadn't claimed you as it should've.

You remembered that you gave a pitiful attempt at inhaling, which led you to find that nothing seemed to fill your lungs for seconds. Seconds that felt like minutes—or hours—or years.

Finally, the air surged in with an aching strain, and a creaky, shallow exhale slipped free from you a moment thereafter.

You had tried for another, but began coughing. Blood clogged your nose, making you snort and splutter to clear it, but that decision was quickly regretted. Because, situationally, the stench you found was by far the most jarring one you had come to meet in all your years of Void-faring. Your nose was flooded with the smell of offal and disinfectant. It was beyond organic necrosis. It was more intrinsically terrifying. It was the rank odour of a Medicae chamber.

Against the very laws of nature, the chilled creak of your lungs surged against the pressure in your chest.

A lurch had seized your diaphragm, alongside a bitter rush of air, gasping in shock at the realisation you could breathe properly again.

You were alive.

Then, you were promptly unconscious once more.

When you dragged yourself out of that depthless nothing again, you were here—caged in a monster's quarters.

It has been some time since then.

So far, you had learned the red-handed beast's full name was Jago Sevatarion. But that was no chance uncovering. He had told it to you, in fact—just like he had told you he was the Legion's beloved First Captain; but all you really saw was some gestalt nightmare rendered incarnate.

For a time, that's all he was: a torturer, a gaoler, and a butcher. All pieces culminating to a big, mad, man-thing full of deranged loyalty toward a bigger, madder man-thing; one that Sevatarion couldn't help but boast about. The Night Haunter, the Primarch, Konrad Curze—father, father, father—the Night Haunter, the Primarch, Konrad Curze. A large portion of Sevatarion's traitorous, bootlicking rants orbited his name and his genius... or well, names, more accurately. You have discovered there seems to be many, many, many versions of the same turncoat son of the Emperor, and you were only privy to this due to Sevatarion, who never stopped painting a pict of an unending gamut of contradictions.

It is all, ultimately, a condensed reality you're told by force. Every story he spoke at you when you didn't flinch under his knife.

When it was not about his insane but allegedly genius gene-sire, he raved about a system well outside the Ultima Segmenta—a planet in a chain of numbers—about the killing he did on it—the cousins he butchered. The Primarch he watched die.

The Primarch your Shipmaster served.

The Primarch you had served through her.

You wondered if that was why they had chased your ship down. All that savagery just for meagre gratification, like a sick pervert fondling himself while peeping on someone's daily schedule.

Still, there was something truly horrible about the notion of these behemoths waging war on each other. Never mind the sick glee in Sevatarion's tone as he recounted a throat he had spent a minute sawing through with a stolen blade so dulled from endless killing it was practically a deck plate.

He complained, then, about how thin the skin was. How easy it was to slice open a helmet-less fool's trachea. But through those retellings of a carnage you can scarcely fathom, you took a mental note.

Astartes have vulnerable throats.

He prattled on even more after that, but you were no longer really listening.

Even his voice was horrible.

His accent was somehow nearly comedic with the level of menace it carried. Something about the lower register and the over-correction of sounds, especially his w's—which sounded closer to v's—to say nothing of the fact that he somehow made i's more like y's. Culminating in an accent alike the bow of a ship grating against the hull of another. You didn't get to cover your ears, though you wished you could; it was hard to manage that act of defiance belted down on a chopping block, after all.

Rather unfortunately for Sevatarion, when you're constantly stuck in the den of a rabid beast, the terror of him fondly reminiscing lost its lustre quickly. Especially when a majority of the physical torture doesn't stick, and he only has himself to curse for that miscalculation. All because of your brain damage. Having patches of complete neurological insensitivity across your body was exactly the blessing on a Night Lord's flagship one would think it was.

Still, Sevatarion got bored rather easily.

You're absolutely covered in bruises and long, thin cuts. They were scabbed now, but not all entirely painful when you'd earned them. Some had stung to ripe agony, some had not even registered beyond the press of a blade. He'd checked where your insensitivity extended to after you'd absentmindedly ripped a few fingernails out trying to claw his hand off your wrist.

Thanks to Sevatarion, you discovered your neuropathy was self-contained to extremities, largely.

Unfortunately, it hadn't stopped him from checking routinely these last few visits. He carved into you like a piece of steak to see if the blind spots were growing. As proof of a disgusting concept, he had cut deep horizontal lines at the threshold of each patch, giving himself markers as to where any effort of torment was rendered null and void.

Only then had he let you scamper off into the fresher to lick your numb wounds.

Well... the fresher, at first. But he'd ruined the door soon thereafter. Surely not because you'd impulsively believed it was Night Lord-proof and called him a very, very colourful rainbow of things. He'd bashed the panel in and dragged you out of the false hideaway by the scruff while you tried to bite off his nose. Then, he'd dislocated your fingers, leaving you to fumble around for a few hours; which led to the revelation that it's not easy to pick up a ration bowl with all your digits mangled.

He'd gloated that there were no more places to hide as he set them back. You'd barely managed to fight back the urge to tell him he was wrong. You could fit under his unused cot, or under the holo-projection table, or stow away in the armoury he kept locked, if you could get in.

Still, that didn't negate the fact that your world—which was once a great vessel in a greater woman's charge—was now reduced to the cubby hole of the very thing that stole you away.

You're in rags tied together by two pinwheels and some floss, and the smug bastard was in polished, high-laced boots. It made you miss your uniform dearly. The—for lack of a better word—uniformity of it. The heavy reinforced heel, the tight-fitting undershirt beneath your buttoned jacket and your nice, warm coat.

Honestly, the room was altogether not that bad. Certainly cold, yes, yet there was a surprising lack of human leather hanging around than expected. The only real vulgarity was the tray of knucklebones on the counter of the holo-projection table, which could, hypothetically, be a xeno-animal's.

You knew very well they weren't, though.

You had guessed as much from the first short glance you had at them twenty-three meals ago; and then four meals later, you'd spent a few hours sorting them into matching pairs.

You'd been keeping time, despite the monotony. Sevatarion returned maybe once or twice a standard Terran week, equaling out to seven meal cycles. Whenever he did, you endured those tortures that were quickly growing mundane... and, when he wasn't wielding a dagger and a hypothesis, he ran his mouth about anything and everything. You're not sure which was worse, anymore; truly, you can't really tell the physical agony from the mental. It was always an odd fusion of the two. The only good thing to come out of being forced to converse with him was that he made no call for honourifics, nor titles, like 'sir' or 'my lord' or 'master' although, even if he had made such a demand, you'd have never have stooped to such a level. All the better he hadn't then, ultimately. One less thing to be punished for, though he hardly needed a reason in the end.

He hit you when you didn't respond.

He hit you when you did but he didn't like the answer.

He hit you because he could.

And yet, as of right now, Sevatarion has been oddly quiet.

Currently, he is sitting cross-legged on his cot—the one you have never seen him sleep in even once during your captivity—attending to his disassembled bolter.

You glare while he works, shooting daggers at him in your imagination.

"Something on my face?" Sevatarion rumbles after a long time of saying nothing, yet it's strangely sans a typical baiting edge.

You stay silent at first, scowling.

He grumbles expectantly, and you know he wants a response.

"I'm hungry," leaves you at last.

"Hungry?" Sevatarion scoffs, his focus remaining steadfast on the barrel as he carefully slides a cloth-covered metal rod down it, "You're hungry?"

"Yes," you grunt.

"You've only just eaten," he hisses, pulling the rod out and discarding it mindlessly onto the floor behind him, before pointing toward the empty metal bowl sitting in a little tray-hatch mechanism by the entry blast-door.

"No," you bite out, "I haven't."

"I don't know what grand feasts your old station granted you," he raises a brow, and fixes the action back into place before eyeing down the iron sights, checking his work. "But you're going to keep eating that slop, and you're going to be thankful for it."

"It's not that it's gruel," you say bitterly, "It's that it's not enough."

"You want more?"

"I'm starving."

"...and you think that I ought to care?"

"You're clearly keeping me alive for something," you clench your fists by your sides impotently, "Or are you making this up as you go?"

"I'm only keeping you alive because I haven't decided what I want to make out of your skin, yet," there ought to be more malice to his tone, but it just sounds half-arsed and disinterested—like he's only saying what he thinks will scare you because he can't think of anything more creative.

It occurs to you that this is probably a game to him.

He is keeping a puzzle in his quarters, no different to the ones you once had in yours. Where they had been small, and metal, and made for the sole intention of fighting with, he has in you the same, only larger and made of flesh.

You are a toy to this monster.

"Need to piss," the aforementioned monster announces to thin air and, just like that, any continuity to your thoughts vanishes entirely.

He tosses his bolter heedlessly across the cot and is on his feet in less than the blink of an eye, making a beeline to the fresher. Thanks to the lack of functioning door, you hear—in horrible detail—the long, wet stream of him relieving himself into the vac-toilet.

You look at the fresher, and the shadow he casts under the dull lumen above him. Then, you look at the bolter. It's a sudden glimmer of hope on a string, and you take an ever-so cautious step toward the cot.

It's too easy.

It's too obvious a chance.

Unease hits you like a blow to the chest, acutely aware of how you feel your skin crawl innately.

Sevatarion is leaning against the arch of the fresher doorway when you whip your head around.

"Go on," he hums. "Fetch."

You take a step back, sneering as you say, "There's no rounds in it."

"There might be," he says with a huff, lying rather badly for once.

You frown and stand a little straighter.

He seems to realise you're not going to take the chance and strides back over to his cot, dropping his immense bulk down on it with a small grunt.

Sevatarion simply sits there for a while, doing nothing while he ignores you staring at him, until it apparently irks him enough to speak.

He sighs loudly, purposefully being dramatic, "Well, now I'm bored."

"Good."

"No, not good," he grumbles. "You were supposed to fall for that."

"And I didn't, so what now?"

"I suppose we are going to have a chat," he says, with a strangely bubbly lilt overriding his irritation.

It's a fight not to run across the room and claw madly at the blast-door like a trapped animal. You hate his 'chats' so, so much. It's an excuse for him to vomit up whatever inane stories he wants, and they're always abominable. They're hardly even stories. Every one of them is just some advanced form of psychological torment or violence-based circle-jerking. It's him gloating, and gloating, and gloating eternally; like a recaf-station pissing contest turned up to a quintillion.

Sevatarion says nothing for a while before he offers, "I'll make it interesting this time. Maybe even let you in on a little secret," his black eyes almost sparkle with the conspiracy he offers up, "You know, a bit of gossip—you officers love that stuff, don't you?"

You scowl at him and eye the shut door while thinking of how clawing blindly at the metal sounds like a perfectly good idea.

"Have you ever heard of Eight-Hundred-and-Nine Five, before?"

You're actively trying to stop listening.

"No?" He says for you, before you'd really have time to answer if you'd ever wanted to—which you didn't—even if he's right. "Lucky you, it's a shithole," he digresses quickly, gesticulating while he does so, "But that's besides the point... Naraka, the Captain of the thirteenth company, brought her to heel. Without a single drop of blood, which, for us, is very impressive. The lot of them wouldn't tell a soul how they did it," he tilts his head and raises a scarred brow, a sly, conspiratorial look mapping across his features as he offers, "Would you like to know how?"

"Do I have a choice?" You mutter to yourself, unsure of where exactly this tirade of his is going, but in no position to escape his yammering as per usual.

A slow, creeping smirk rises on Sevatarion's face, replacing the slyness with rabid glee as he leans forward. "Naraka fucked the Planetary-Governor insensible and plastered it live over every pict-feed you could imagine," he barks, grinning like a madman suddenly.

You blink, stunned almost immediately. The concept is impossible, the Legiones Astartes surely do not—

"Twelve Night Lords in one night," he adds dryly, still smiling, "Talk about a close proximity bombardment."

You're only distantly aware you're cringing at him, and then the reality that he's very likely talking out of his ass hits. He's probably spinning stories to discomfort you as a way of amusing himself as usual.

"You're vile—" you snarl, "—and a liar."

"For once," he shoots back, "I'm actually not lying."

"Firstly, that doesn't even make any sense," you hurriedly bite out, squinting at the giant black-eyed deceiver as he pouts crookedly at you. "How would that even work? You mean to tell me that the entire planet went: 'How lewd—everyone quickly—surrender,' and that was that?" You start flailing your hands around in an absurd pantomime to match your tone, then stop abruptly and cross them over your chest, "Secondly, since when do Astartes even—"

You remember exactly what the thing you're arguing with is just as the words leave your mouth, and promptly stop talking.

"Oh?" Sevatarion all but leers, "Do go on."

You glare at him, "No, no—I don't think I will."

"But you were posing such a clear, sensible argument," he tuts, clicking his tongue for effect. "Surely, you wouldn't want to lose."

You stand from where you'd been leaning, clenching your fists by your sides in impotent irritation once again. You move to walk aimlessly to the right—remembering a little late that there's only wall that way—and pivot on your heels leftward, toward the broken door of the fresher.

"I don't care," you call out from where you're standing, stubbornly facing the pulse-shower cubicle.

"Come on," he barks, letting the taunt drag out painfully. "Let's try breaking this discourse down to it's bare components. Simple principles. You remember those from bootcamp, don't you, little officer?"

Oh, he's an insipid bastard of a man-thing—he's got such a vile, condescending way with words. You hate that he calls you little. He knows you do, and he does it even more because of it. Everything he says is a sarcastic leer, a double-edged cheap-shot, a mouth-breathing snark. It makes you wish, on everything you've ever loved or owned or respected, that you had the great strength to beat him to death.

"I'm not dignifying this inane lie," you snap at the open doorway, knowing he's probably sitting there smirking like the smug, over-sized prick he is.

You hear him clicking his tongue again in that annoyingly chiding way he's all but perfected, "All I'm asking is if you really think we don't fuck?"

It's bait on an industrial lure, tied to an adamantium-reinforced rod resting in Sevatarion's greasy, bloodied mitts.

"That is to say... I have," he adds with a snort, and he pauses for a moment before he continues, "Plenty of times, actually."

He's completely delusional.

No one could handle an Astartes—you can't even imagine the proportions of their mass being factored in sexually. Maybe somewhere out there in the galaxy, at least one lunatic follower of the Lectitio Divinitatus might've barked up an Astartes' tree. You can rationalise someone going for the pretty, noble ones with long, flowing hair... but to bark up a Night Lord's?

Someone would dare risk a broom-closet jaunt with a mad son of a madder father?

No one would want to fuck one, except maybe a suicidal moron, let alone fuck him. If Sevatarion has fucked something—which you doubt—it was probably by rape. And they probably died afterwards. For their sake, you hope they were dead beforehand. Being in the same room with him is torment on its own, so the thought of being under him grants you a glimpse into an otherworldly agony. He'd be insufferable. He's even visually off-putting, just to top it all off. A good part of Sevatarion's face is a mess of scars. His mouth's crooked. He slouches like a hunchback. His hair looks like shit. There's enough bags around his big, mean-looking, beady eyes to fill an entire embarkation-deck. To say nothing of the fact he smells a bit like a woman's sanitary bin—sure, he's well-muscled enough to make a baseline dock-worker look like a lanky teenage girl in comparison, but that's where any objective attractiveness ends. Which, ultimately, means the only things remotely palatable about Sevatarion are his big arms and big arse.

And so, you swallow the proverbial hook and come storming out of the fresher, waggling your finger at him in a fury.

"Now, I know you're full of it—" you growl, taking hurried steps to get up in his face as your temper boils over against your better judgment, "—and I'm too hungry to go along with this groxshit."

"I'm not lying," he's still sitting, and yet he's at your standing eye-line. All pitch-black sclera and furrowed brows, an arm's reach from your own.

You roll your eyes and snap, "Yes, you are!"

"I know something that could resolve both those issues," he says, face flat and expressionless suddenly, "Give me your mouth."

"What?"

"You heard me," Sevatarion's face contorts from a statue's into a bared-teeth, cadaver grin, "I'll get you another ration if I get your tongue on my cock."

"You're joking," stunned, you blink repeatedly, hoping despite yourself, that it's another one of his daft games he's playing at, "This is one of your sick jokes."

"I don't joke around about proving others wrong," he says through his sharp jaws.

"So, so..." you start, flabbergasted, "...you want me to whore myself out to the butcher of my crew-mates? My Shipmaster?"

"It's not like their opinions matter," Sevatarion's smile finally falls away to a leering smirk, "They're dead."

Vitriol mangles your voice into a ragged hiss, "Yes, and you made sure of that, didn't you?"

"Not my fault your Cruiser didn't scamper away fast enough," he scoffs.

"You have no concept of integrity, do you?"

"Not even a scrap."

"There's something deeply wrong with you," comes your hissed reply.

"You can't even imagine," Sevatarion breathes out in a strangely tired manner.

You can imagine.

In fact, you'd love to tell him every little detail of how deplorable you think he is. How conniving, how utterly stupid and violent—how he's a slimy wretch that only exists to smirk at his own snide comments and skin babes in their cradles.

Irrationally, you fail to rein in the urge to spit at him, and it almost appears as if he wholly expects the saliva that flies in his direction.

He doesn't even flinch.

It lands well enough, right on the corner of his mouth; he grumbles, and—and licks the corner of his lips clean.

You recoil in disgusted disbelief, so unsettled enough by his behaviour that the words you wanted to yell in his face come out a decent bit quieter than you intended, "I'm... I'm not sucking you off."

"Then you'll be going hungry," he says, and pointedly spits on the floor.

It lands just shy of your foot and sizzles against the steel-plated floor, filling the room with the slightest reek of sulphur. A fresh wave of horror dawns upon you. His saliva isn't saliva. It's—it's acid—

"It's that simple," he states, at last.

It's a threat in and of itself, even as the liquid fizzles out impotently and leaves a pitted black stain on the metal.

You weigh your options: Claw at a chance to remain even slightly able to control your situation, but debase yourself wholly—or drag your heels the entire time and rely on his whims for nothing, but slowly start starving away. Both outcomes would bear fruit, both would be torment. There's no fork in the road that leads to a solid victory. It will be a fight the whole way, no matter which path you take.

At least with assenting to this, you keep some condition on your bones.

You sigh, and don't bother to keep the frown from your face as you drop to a kneel.

"Finally, you make a sensible choice," he rasps.

Up close, you realise belatedly that his pants are some sort of blackened leather. Human, perhaps, but for some reason you don't think so. It feels impossible to manage such a tedious stitching job with a person's skin. You think back on all the grazes and nicks you've had and how easy your flesh tears. How did they make anything with it, let alone pants? But you've never stitched anything beyond a patch in your life, let alone skin, so your assumptions fall to a moot point conclusion.

Loose leather draws tight around his huge thighs as he adjusts his seating, and interface ports—like the ones you'd seen on the Shipmaster's temples—distort the leather in solid, rounded mounds.

You completely disregard the distortion higher up his legs, leaning left and resting upward in a long, sweeping shine of distended black.

The pants are low and sit up on his middle-hip, which is largely out of place compared to Imperial standards. They are weirdly proportioned, too. They make his long legs look thicker than they actually are. It's nothing like standard officer uniform, which is high-waisted and cinched in. You suppose both would look absurd on a body so densely muscled.

You have no idea where to even start to undo the catches.

His terrible taste in attire actually explains a lot about the wretched tunic he's forced you to wear.

You're about to go on a mental tirade about the shortness of your tunic, before your attention snags on him undoing the latch of his pants.

They part disgustingly low, and disgustingly easy. It's sleazy—especially when your eyes trace down a coarse line of hair that's somehow darker than the leather.

A long, fat swell of erection flags out of the pants and up onto his navel along with it.

It is distressingly large.

Suddenly, every ounce of his behaviour makes complete and total sense. If you were his size, with a dick this big, you'd be a prick, too. But that realisation still doesn't even get close to remedying any of the deep-seated loathing you have for him, though.

He holds his cock by the base, tilts himself, and slaps the side of his fat shaft against your cheek.

"Open your mouth," he rasps.

Begrudgingly, you oblige—and he takes full use of the allowance, adjusting himself to rub the underside of his swollen glans across your tongue.

"Lick," he says next.

And you do.

It's vaguely salty, though that's not unusual. His isn't the first dick you've sucked, after all. Well, he's the first Astartes, at least... but he tastes pretty standard, if for the heavier smell of something distinctly earthy pervading your senses. It's almost reminiscent of a hot, chemical dampness, like an engine room when the sprinklers go off.

His hand comes to rest on the crown of your head abruptly, "Now, suck."

It's a unique sort of panic that suddenly chills your bones. You feel stuck, unable to breathe—like you're locked in the stuffy, muscled cage of his thighs rather than kneeling between them.

The stubborn part of your brain digs itself heel-deep in the dirt and refuses to budge.

You pull your tongue back and frown, "No, just tongue."

"You offered your mouth," Sevatarion notes flatly. "Stop being difficult and suck."

"You said tongue."

"You know what I meant," he snarls abruptly, jutting the tip of himself against your lips with a small buck.

Still frowning, you rear back and grit out, "I bite."

"You're going to bite the cock that feeds you?"

You scowl up at him, "You said—"

"You're not that stupid," he interrupts, glaring down at you with his eyes squinted into black slits, "You wanted more rations, I gave you a way to earn it, and you agreed to this."

"I bite," you say again, mulishly, trying to pull away even further, only to be reined back in by his fingers bunching up a handful of your hair.

"Just gives me an excuse to rip all your teeth out, I guess."

"Wouldn't undo what I'd do," you say with a heady defiance, frowning at him from your low spot with the fat heft of his member to your cheek.

"After your teeth go," he starts, talking as if you're not there and he's simply plotting aloud to a hidden audience. "I think I'll let the Atramentar use you as a chew-toy."

You're confused, "The... what?"

"My brothers," he clarifies, pausing his weird recounting of nonsense events as if he's cluing you in for your next lines of script. "You've met them already, little officer."

"Who?"

"You said you remembered the deck," he pouts, his tone almost like a sing-song for an absurd moment, "You said you remembered what happened to your friends."

For a moment, you're too bemused by his change of behaviour to even think straight. He only talks like this when there's a knife in his hand, and you're on his cutting board, and—oh, oh. He's being serious. He's not raving, he's genuinely plotting aloud like it's a torture session. An interrogation. Like he had the first time you were sliced bloody. He's fuming. Suppose it's expected of an entitled man-thing whose dick isn't being slobbered on after the promise of it happening.

You don't even bother replying at this point.

You know better, now.

"I imagine they'd love to see you again," he says with an airy huff, "Wonder what they would do to a stubborn little shithead like you—maybe they'll beat the twelve-in-a-night record..." The mask of impassive detachment drops on his face is a cold, cold statue, "Or maybe they'll just eat you alive."

You cringe.

"Don't like the sound of that, do you?" Sevatarion's mangled lip curls, breaking the straight-faced horror into a clear pict of irritation, "Play nice, and a sore jaw's the worst you'll be dealing with."

He jostles himself by the base, letting the thickness of his cock sit up straight in the webbing between his pointer and thumb.

"Now," Sevatarion spits, his voice a rough thing as he shifts his hips so that the tip of his length rests on your lips again. "Warm this up for me, would you?"

You begrudgingly open your mouth and close it around him, and Sevatarion is quick to take the ground offered. He starts rolling his hips, keeping you in place with a huge palm right across the back of your head.

There's too much of him to fit, and the grip you take around the lower half of his cock barely manages to keep him from sliding too deep. His cock's hot, too—it's unnatural, it's—it's as if his ambient temperature is five degrees higher than your own.

It's a struggle just to breathe steadily through your nose, to say nothing of the war you're waging against your own gag-reflex. It's almost impossible not to choke while he fucks your mouth. You try to steady yourself by placing a free hand on his leather-covered thigh, and garble out a curse when the spongy tip jars into your epiglottis.

You jerk, and your hand around his cock slips—covered by his—and then it's not. It's sliding up, and then a thumb slips into your mouth alongside his own cock; adjusting, hooking over your bottom teeth.

The manoeuvre locks you in place, with a mouth forced wide.

He's doing it to make a point, he's doing it for insurance, he's doing it to all but face-fuck you.

The entire situation is a mess.

He keeps pumping his hips, and you make awful, half-choked protests at each of his choppy thrusts forward.

His short-cut tunic hides a majority of his upper body away, but you catch glimpses of scar-mottled flesh with every rock of his hips forward.

Your jaw aches under the strain of Sevatarion's pace and his hold, and there's spit and pre-cum sloppily roping down your chin. It's not as if he cares, though. He's acting like no more than a rutting animal, taking every chance he can for himself.

You thrash backwards, and surprisingly, he lets you off him—the hand in your mouth withdraws, whereas the one on your head stays.

"A-At least... l-let me do it myself," you harrumph loudly, throat irritated by the numerous attempts to fuck into it.

"With no teeth?"

You nod sluggishly, beyond frustrated with the fact that you have to cede.

"Good," he says with a long, satisfied hum. "Let me back in."

You do, rather hatefully.

It takes every bit of composure you have to not go back on your promise and nip the fat, rounded end of his cock off out of spite. As if by some cruel irony, that thought arrives at the exact moment you accidentally allow too much to slide in.

Pointedly, you gag and try to drag your head back, despite the big mitt on your scalp. He, surprisingly, lets you cough up a stringing mess of bubbling saliva.

"I'm just too big for you," he tuts, with a heavy, faux sincerity, "Aren't I?"

You try to mentally talk yourself out of giving in to the urge of sticking him back in and chomping once again. Instead, you try to focus on getting him off. The sooner it's over, the better. You gather back enough willpower to lick over the tip of him, watching the pumping of your own hand around the middle. The salty flashes of pre-cum across your tongue aren't at all helping you disassociate, though, so you eye the rest of him.

He's lifted his tunic up to his stomach with his free hand, fully displaying the menagerie of brutal-looking old wounds he has. It's all solid, gene-forged muscle, but there are hints his underbelly is actually soft in places. You wonder where the skin's thinnest aside from his gullet, and where a blade could punch through best. You let your gaze drift, going from his belly button to the long, dark trail arrowing down from it to his groin.

"Your head's too small to fit me," he notes with a gravely chuff of amusement, "Too much space wasted on useless brain matter."

You try to sit up a little, letting his leaking cock lean against your cheek as you do.

The manoeuvre stings your ego almost immediately, because the wretched press of your own thighs as you adjust your angle feels horribly wet.

You can't be—you refuse—there's no way this is happening.

You wriggle again, just to be sure, and a dull, persistent throb makes itself known alongside a vile slickness. The realisation makes you freeze, and leaves you staring blankly at his navel as he keeps petting your hair.

"Oh, you're not talking back anymore?" Sevatarion ventures, purposefully nasty. "Am I not worth the words? Or are you just... too busy?"

"Busy... tryin' t-tuh—get t-this over with," you sloppily manage, irritated—refusing to let his awful voice register, just pressing forward, pulling back—letting rigid heat fill your mouth to the brim and slide out. Trying to ignore the smell of sex pervading your nose, with the same nonplussed discipline you'd maintained hearing other cadets fucking in the barracks. Let him tire himself out with his rambling, and hopefully finish faster. It feels like it's been hours. How long do these overgrown fools last? It can't be for a lack of trying. You're trying to make it good, so he's done quicker, and you're fed sooner. Fuck, you're hungry. At this point you'd swallow the monster's load if only to rob him of an extra meal. It's vile and it makes your stomach twist in disgust, but it is ultimately for survival. You'd do just about anything to spite him and live a little less starved, at this point.

"Zec te jaesha yahsshan," ["I like how you look when you lick,"] he groans suddenly, and it breaks you from your reverie—you glance up with his cock still in your mouth as he says, "Juthica te vey athasavi darnitha na." ["Keep staring at me with those angry eyes."]

You furrow your brows, unsure if you'd misheard him and were simply hallucinating a string of gibberish. Then it clicks. He's yapping the lunacy he thinks passes for language. The one he'd had before he was elevated to sapience with Gothic. Nostraman. It's harsh in his mouth despite the flowing, almost smooth sounds some of the words make. As if they're mangled by his overgrown lungs and his sandpaper gullet. It might've been a lovely thing on a human's tongue, but it garners nothing but a feeling of discomfort on his. He's probably saying something vile, laden with threats and insults. It's probably another one of his disgusting stories. Hell, it's probably very creative slurs. They don't count if you can't make sense of them. You learned that very early in your career. But that fact never meant you couldn't retaliate as if you did understand.

You let his cock slide out and scowl up at him, baring your teeth, "S-Stop speaking that drivel or I'll—"

He doesn't react like you thought he would, he just pets you more and interrupts you, "Or you'll what? You'll stop?" He ruffles the top of your head, urging you to take him back inside your mouth with a long, heavy stroke through your hair. "You'll give up your meal just because you don't like my mother-tongue?"

You try to shake him off, and for a blessed instant the hand's gone. Until it isn't, it's—it's holding you by the chin, and his thumb is prodding at your lips. Sevatarion forces it in behind them, but you keep your jaw clenched, leaving him to trace against the front of your gums.

He huffs out an exaggerated sigh, "Fine, but you should know... I was close," and immediately, his taunt works. You loathe yourself for it, but still let your maw open just a little.

With that, his frown quickly evaporates into a lopsided smirk, and he starts pumping his thumb into your mouth like he's done with his cock for the past hour.

"Jus' fuggin geh i' ovah wif," you garble out, your words mangled around his probing.

"That's the spirit," he rasps, straight-faced.

Sevatarion traces your back molars, then doubles back and depresses the top of your tongue.

"Varre vel ar'sun yoshun ivi?" ["Who's my wild little slave?"] He says, and you parse out what sounds like a questioning inflection in his tone as he slides his thumb in down to the webbing and groans, "Jasca, jasca, te ashilla." ["Yes, yes, you are."]

You gag, about to give in to instinct and let your jaws close down hard on the invading digit, but it retreats rather abruptly—replaced by the tip of him nudging your lips, trying for an entrance again.

You don't let him in.

Instead, you sneer and pump your fist up the length of him with long jerks.

Gritting your teeth in anger, you hide the seething scowl painted across your face against the base of his cock. You start to lick—but pull back prematurely when the coarse black hair around it irritates your cheek.

So instead, you lap at the underside, veined but far less annoyingly textured as the base. The only issue is that the angle makes his cock sit up against your forehead, and you try to ignore the obscene proportion of it quite literally weighing on you.

He tugs you back, then growls, "Te niateyia'shia, jaeshai ma jarcu vel." [You're disobedient, but I like the fight.]

You're about to protest to whatever nonsense he's grumbling, but it's clear your stalling has gone on long enough. You hatefully allow him to line his cock back up to your mouth, before sliding himself back in.

Sevatarion makes the next few thrusts messy on purpose, punishing you for ignoring him earlier.

Soon, you're gurgling curses around the meat of him with each breath you manage to steal, while he rams into your mouth in earnest. It's hard to even think with him carrying on like this, let alone breathe properly, but watching his chest rise and fall manages to let you wander off mentally enough to bear it.

Huge lungs surely reside behind those big muscles, you've heard there's more than one set in there—thanks to a Medicae novice's idle ranting a few years ago. You try to remember any other curious facts about Astartes, but the only thing that comes to mind is that they have two hearts. You can't feel two heartbeats on your tongue. Maybe only one of his hearts pumps blood to his cock, then.

You glance up higher, seeking his face next.

And almost start crying tears of joy when you find he's started chewing on the collar of his tunic. It shuts him up, and you're finally free of the incessant filth he lets leave his lips. He's shut his eyes, too, and with them, the rest of his face relaxes in a completely new way that makes a majority of the lines smooth out with it.

He's... much easier to deal with like this. Much easier to look at, too. It's almost bearable, even if he's still bucking into your mouth and screwing up your rhythm.

Taking the risk, you rock a little against yourself again.

You're definitely wet, now. No need to check twice. It's far gone enough that you can even feel your clit in the mess where it's sandwiched between the tight press of your thighs.

It's impossible to veer away from the urge to roll your hips, especially when Sevatarion's heavy breathing covers your own.

The motion of you bobbing your head forward synchronises with your grinding with agonising perfection. It's a spark in your vision that glimmers with every wet slide of his cock into your mouth. The fat length of him jerks a little, appreciatively, when you let your tongue swipe the underside on the back-draw. If only he'd been this quiet from the start. You'd have given him a good reason to work with you on this.

He pets you like he had earlier, letting you pull your mouth off him with a slimy gasp and lap at the side. There's a thick, raised vein webbing across it, and he hums contentedly behind the fabric in his mouth with still-shut eyes when you let the flat of your tongue drag a wide lick across the surface. He tugs your hair a tad to give you the message he wants back in, and you grumble, but acquiesce and take the length of him into your mouth again.

Sevatarion's not being a prick, currently—and to prove a point, you actually allow him to fuck into your maw this time. It frees up your neck and lets you focus on much more important matters. Namely, the rush of bliss your heel grazing your cunt gives you—you're hyperaware of the pressure, fleeting as it is—and you wonder, in some mad desperation, if he'd notice your hand leaving his thigh and travelling south. Maybe he'd turn your distraction into some even more twisted debasement as punishment, or if he'd just let you. You suspect the foul butcher would take it as an invitation to get his cock really wet.

Strung out on both air and sense, the prospect doesn't send you into a rage as it should. Funnily, it's just like Sevatarion said: he's too big. From the sheer swell of meat in your mouth, you have a hunch he really, truly, wouldn't be able to fit, no matter how hard he pressed in—so maybe there's a victory in that. You imagine his face all screwed up with that sulking, sour look of his as he were to try.

It's a satisfying pict of the imagination, thinking of him suffering; one only made worse by your continued rocking. You hope it's agony for him, you hope he whines—his gnarled maw all twisted up, rutting his fat cock against you vainly—he'll let you steal a hiss out of his lungs when you fuck yourself down to the hilt...

Hold on, wait.

What?

The sinew behind your eyes aches as your mind backpedals, but the hand on your head tightens in your hair.

Wait, no—you... you don't want to fuck him. He's abominable and soaked in the blood of your peers. He's a beast. You don't know where these thoughts are coming from.

You swear you don't want to—you don't want him—bouncing you on his lap, holding you up in those huge arms and dropping you on him again, and again, and again.

Where is this coming from? Why are you...

You're not even aware of the fact that he's opened his eyes until you hear him moan, and you look up.

You see him digging his teeth into his bottom lip. Something is trailing down his philtrum in a thick, dark line.

Is.. is that blood?

He rolls his pelvis, and you gag, trying to snatch another look—before your attempt is thwarted by the hand dragging you forward.

The shock from the sudden amount of dick in your mouth makes your sight glue head-on.

Sevatarion's cock twitches abruptly, then starts pulsing hard as molten heat fills the meagre space of your maw. With it, a long, haggard groan slides from his gullet. The thigh you were using as a sure, stable fulcrum starts shaking alongside the sharp, upward stutter of his hips.

He holds your head there for a moment while you gurgle. His cock's in deep enough that tears start to well up involuntarily in the corners of your eyes, and your vision jerks with the reflex to convulse. Your taste-buds are covered in bitter tasting spend. It's gross, it's thick—it's hot like tar. It's too much to keep a mere mouthful of, and you choke loudly, and fuck does your entire postnasal cavity burn.

When he finally lets go of your head, you pull back violently.

Your mouth's still full of semen, your nose feels like it's full of bile, and you're two seconds away from retching. Any plotting you'd had regarding eating the mess of cum bloating your cheeks immediately evaporates.

"Mmm... now be good and swallow that, little officer," he moans, looking absolutely debauched. The collar of his tunic is covered in slobber, his face is flushed all the way up from his neck in some weird, mauve-tinged blotching; and he's showing off a crooked grin that makes him look even more like an rabid beast than usual. There's... nothing on his top lip, no proof of the blood you thought you saw— "Go on... swallow what didn't go up your nose."

You let the thick, milky slurry of cum drain straight out of your mouth and onto the floor with a deliberate disregard.

He raises a brow and grumbles as his finish paints the ground between his legs.

"Swallowing wa–ah—" you start, but cough, "W-Wusn't... part of the deal," and it's not easy to find a level voice as you focus on spitting out the leftovers.

"Next time you're going to be," Sevatarion shoots back smoothly.

"I w-won't."

"Yes, you will."

"N-Nuh... it tastes bad."

"I don't care," he suddenly detonates, his scar pulling taut as he sneers. "You'll gargle my load to the tune of the Iter Imperiale, if I fucking tell you to."

"I'll spew it b-back up on your lap," you snap in return, stand, and consciously try not to make any tell-tale changes in your walk—despite the warm-wet glaze of excitement slathered between your thighs.

"I really should just kill you," he sighs, finally.

You fight not to acknowledge the blacked-out eyes burning holes into your back, as you head to the fresher to rinse your tongue. Sure, not having a sightline on him that makes your skin itch, but you can't bear the taste of him any longer.

You harrumph loudly, turning the handle before leaning down to start lapping at the rusty-tasting water jetting out of the tap in erratic bursts of varied water pressure. After spitting a few times, you roll your tongue around and find it blessedly cum-free. So, you lean over to the vac-toilet, grab a handful of paper, and wipe your mouth dry.

Then you pause, and reach down to wipe between your thighs with the same crumpled tissues before tossing, and then actioning the venting of the bowl. It's the best you'll get for a destruction of proof. You smile triumphantly, swallowing down the distant spice of metallic water lingering in your maw, before you call out, "I want that extra ration, now."

Silence reigns for a good while, and you stand a little straighter—unsettled by the fact he does not answer.

Carefully, ever so carefully, you pad backwards and peer out from behind the dented door of the fresher.

Across the room, Sevatarion is sprawled on his back, still half off the cot with his softened cock hanging out of his leathers—his eyes are shut, and despite the crease between his brows, the rest of his face is slack as it'd been when he was not too far off from blowing a load.

You realise this is what an Astartes looks like asleep.

It makes you frown, because even if it means he's finally out of your hair for a good while... it also means you're not getting that owed extra bowl any time soon.