Pairing: Meduras Chairon x FemOC
Warnings: mentions of injuries and death
Description: The daemon uses Chairon's own memories against him.
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The daemon shrieked as it felt one of its prey break free. The Sergeant's soul lunged toward a crack in the Warp pocket, its desperate defiance searing any tendrils that tried to reach for it. Then…
The howl resonated through the sea of chaos. The daemon sensed it ricochet off other entities. Small ones. Large ones. Fellow creatures of the Dark Prince… and servants of Their rivals.
Soon, they would swarm. And the daemon’s private feast would become a free for all. It hissed in displeasure, sending a wave of agony through its servant on the other side of the thinning veil.
The ritual must be performed. The gates must be opened. It would take longer now that a source of desire had slipped its bonds. An amorphous tangle of taloned hands flexed and clenched in frustration.
But two sources still remained.
And the second… oh, the second….! He would not be so easily distracted.
Tongues lolled as the capricious being felt a surge of pleasure once more.
“Try, try, and try again, little psyker. Your false hope is,” a hissing moan flooded unreality with a sickly purple tide, “deliciousssssss.”
Meduras Chairon drowned in nostalgia.
Those curtains fluttering in the warm breeze. He remembered sitting with his legs drawn up at the kitchen table, watching his father hang them over the window.
“A little to the left, my dear.”
“Anymore to the left and they won’t hang securely, my love.”
“... if the words “I told you so” come out of your mouth, my dear, I am never speaking to you again.”
The worn carpet in the main room. He remembered laying on his stomach there, playing with his sisters.
“In the name of the Emperor, I will slay the enemies of humanity!”
“RRRAH! Fear the might of the Ultramarines!”
“We’re playing House, stupid!”
“Mama! Meddy is being stupid again!”
The intricately carved rocking chair in the corner. He remembered clambering up onto his grandmother's lap.
“Oof, you’re getting too big for this, my strong boy.”
“Sorry, Grandma. I can get down.”
“Nonsense. You stay right here as long as you like, sweet boy.”
“For as long as Calth endures, child. For as long as Calth endures.”
Chairon’s breath caught. The images were so clear. So fresh. Things he had not thought about since awakening in an Imperium so very different from the one he remembered. No. Since before even then.
Since he joined the ranks of the Ultramarines.
“Forgotten what, my son?”
He looked down into the weathered face of his mother. For years he’d clung to a slowly fading outline. Every campaign, every bloody slog into the next warzone wearing away the image until he remembered the memory more than the actual person. Until the pain mutated into rage for a loss he could hardly recall.
But now, it all surged back.
“You,” he answered her, “everything. Forgive me.”
She smiled. It should have comforted. But… why did she look so… satisfied?
The laughing voice snapped his head up and around. Vesta beckoned him to the kitchen table, where she and his sisters sat. Chairon found himself moving to her side. He watched her tiny hand slip into his own. Felt the cool softness of her skin.
“Caballa was just telling me how you once tried to stow away on a transport bound for Macragge. Is that true?”
He blinked again, another long lost event of his childhood crystallizing in his mind.
His eldest sister reached across the table to poke his side. The sensation was painfully familiar. She always did that when she found him insufferable. Glancing over at her, he marvelled how she still looked so much like the adolescent she’d been when the….
When the… event… something….
“Father was furious. I remember him dragging you by the scruff of your neck. You sulked for a week!”
Vesta laughed again, and he found himself smiling. He loved her laughter. He loved the way she looked up at him with eyes full of joy so rarely found in the… the….
Where had he met her, again?
“I can’t wait to meet your father, Meduras. Will he be home soon?”
“Oh, yes. His shift ends soon. He’ll be home in time for dinner.”
Vesta leaned into his side. He inhaled the fragrance of her. Flowers. Sun-lit air.
Wait. No. She should smell of medicines and sterilizing agents. He’d teased her before about reeking like an Apoth… Apothec… something. Something else. Something different.
“You have such a wonderful home here, Meduras.”
Her soft, cool hand moved up his arm, then down again. Her fragrance filled his nostrils. He closed his eyes and wanted nothing more than to sink into the comfort of it. The peace. Sink down, down, down and never surface. Never go back.
The sounds of his sisters’ chattering faded. The birdsong and breeze and clucking poultry from the yard just beyond the door muted beneath the pounding of his own heartbeat.
A double heartbeat. Two hearts.
That was important. Wasn’t it?
“It doesn’t matter, my love.”
Vesta’s hand moved from his arm to his chest, her touch growing bold. More bold than she’d ever been before. He remembered her shyly cupping his cheek as he knelt before her in an isolated alcove. She’d bitten her plush little lips, eyes alight with mischief and wonder. He’d leaned down further to rest his forehead against-
No longer did he stand in the kitchen of his family home. This room….
Crude model voidships hung from the low ceiling. Various sporting equipment lay scattered about the floor. Imperial propaganda posters lined the walls. The Primarch. The Ultramarines. Heroes any young boy of Calth would idolize.
Picts in simple frames sat on the window sill. His parents. His grandparents. His sisters. All accompanied by a young boy with gangly limbs and a gap-toothed grin so wide it threatened to split his cheeks.
Dark eyes full of innocence.
Chairon stared. He knew that boy. He knew he’d died long, long ago. When the skies above Calth cracked wide open and fire fell.
He refused to turn toward the too-sweet voice.
“Oh, poor boy. Poor lonely child.”
Hands on his shoulders, kneading, embracing.
“You need no longer be alone.”
The voice changed. First, his mother. Then, his sisters. His grandmother. His father. Grandfather.
The last sent his teeth on edge. Something whispered at the edges of his consciousness. Something he had to do.
“You can have everything back.”
Back. He’d lost them. Lost them all.
His room burst into flame. Chairon staggered back as fire consumed every vestige of his childhood, picts curling and blackening in the heat, smiling faces obliterated. Smoke burned his eyes, dragged wracking coughs from his chest. He couldn’t see.
But he could hear the screams.
He lunged forward, only for the unseen floor beneath his feet to melt away.
Chairon crashed down into hell. All around him, the figures of everyone he’d ever loved writhed in agony. He saw his mother’s lined skin char and crack, his father’s pooling blood beginning to boil, his sisters convulsing on the floor as smoke stole the air from their lungs.
Only their eyes remained whole, staring at him. Begging..
Silence. Nothingness. He knelt in a void, tears streaming down his face. The hands settled on his shoulders again.
“It need not be that way.”
Vesta’s voice purred in his ear.
“You can have all your heart longs for. Family. A home to return to. I can fulfill your deepest desire.”
“Just give yourself to me.”
“I will make all the pain go away.”
“Say yes, Meduras Chairon.”
The sound of her laughter, so bright and unexpected in the dour chambers of the Apothecarion. The way her green eyes lit up when he came through the door on some flimsy pretense. The soft touch of her lips when he kissed her.
He may ache for a past turned to ash. But the present needed him.
Chairon snarled, low and deep. “How DARE you, daemon!”
He lurched to his feet and swung blindly. “How dare you pollute what I hold most sacred!”
Unholy laughter nearly knocked him back into the blind void, but he gritted his teeth and refused to retreat. He would fight. He would find a way out of this wretched illusion.
“I will not abandon her!”
“It’s too late, pathetic little soul. Far too late to play the dashing hero.”
“She’s dead. She died screaming. Begging for you to save her.”
“But you were too late. Again.”
He was that gangly limbed, gap-toothed boy again. Running. Running so fast. So hard. Until his lungs burned. His father’s last words echoing in his head.
Right before the light in his eyes died.
So he ran. As fire fell. As monsters roared and people screamed and explosions tore the very atmosphere to shreds. He ran and ran and ran.
“But you still failed. As you will always fail.”
Purple fire exploded all around him. It burned through his armor, through his toughened skin and carapace, through to his very soul. The agonized screams of his family mingled with the daemon’s maddening laughter in a swirling cacophony of gleeful suffering.
A new voice. Small. Weak. Straining like it took the effort of ages just to speak the word.
Chairon forced his eyes open and saw it. Through the flames. Through the agony. A tiny spark of light, flickering in the recesses of the mad void. Howling his fury at the creature who’d ripped his scars wide and let them bleed, he willed himself toward the light.
Toward the only home he had left.
For a moment, Atius sank into blackness. Blissful, restful oblivion.
A sting at his neck sent molten energy surging through his veins, dragging him back to consciousness. The Apothecary knelt next to him with his narthecium poised and ready to deliver another injection.
Atius struggled upright. “Enough, brother.”
Callistus stared at him with grim eyes. “Your secondary heart stopped, psyker. What is happening?”
The Librarian spat a globule of fast-congealing blood and managed a smile. “Another of Squad Damocles has fought free of the daemon’s lies.”
Callistus gave a sharp nod. Behind him, Captain Acheran’s orders sent another pair of battle brothers marching from the cramped room. Searching, Atius knew. For any sign of the missing Ultramarines, the women, or the abomination.
So little time had passed, all things considered.
And yet it is too much! I must… continue….
Ignoring the Apothecary’s displeased grunt, Atius let his eyes unfocus and stretched his mind out once again.
Demetrian Titus’s soul burned bright in his mind’s eye. Stalwart. Incorruptible. All he had to do was-
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