Summary: Around a campfire, Jerhamiel muses over humans’ strange rituals of “camping” and watches his bonded human wear the simple metal band he forged. When feral Chaos Sorcerers ambush, their warp-magic collides with the band—searing his crest permanently into her wrist as a brand. The mark flares painfully whenever Chaos draws near, acting as both a warning and a ward. Jerhamiel defends the baselines with righteous fury, baffled at how such fragile things—a fire, a scar—can hold so much strength.
Warnings: Branding / Body Marking (non-consensual, painful, permanent), Body Horror Elements (warp-magic searing flesh, burning sigils), Violence & Gore (combat with Chaos Marines, bolter fire, blade work), Themes of Ownership / Bonding (protective but could echo control dynamics), Religious / Cult Overtones. LMK if I need to add any more.
The fire snapped and hissed, sparks drifting up into the dark. Jerhamiel remained apart, helm at his side, watching the baselines laugh over half-burned rations. He could not fathom it. Proper shelters stood a stone’s throw away, reinforced, defended. And yet, they gathered around open flame as though some ancient rite compelled it.
His gaze lingered on her—his bonded. She sat close to the fire, fingers tracing absent circles over her wrist. The brand there, still raw from the night of its making, pulsed faintly in time with her heartbeat. His crest burned into her skin by accident, born of the chaos-warp’s collision with the token he had given her. It should have angered him—branding was the mark of slavers, of cults. And yet… every time she touched it, she seemed steadier. Rooted.
That baffled him most of all. Humans clung to such fragile symbols: a flame in the dark, a scar on the wrist. And yet, perhaps these things carried more strength than fortresses.
The night shifted. The ground trembled. The brand flared suddenly, painfully, her gasp slicing through the laughter. Jerhamiel’s head snapped up even before the trees vomited forth their filth.
Feral Chaos Marines. Sorcerers cloaked in madness, warp-lashings reaching greedily for mortal flesh. Some sought to bind the baselines to chain them like thralls. Others came with blades and hunger, intent on blood and worse.
She clutched her wrist, doubled in pain, the brand blazing like a coal. Jerhamiel moved without thought, helm sealing with a hiss as red lenses lit. He put himself before the fire, before her, before the humans.
“Stay by the flame,” he ordered, voice a growl of iron. “Do not falter. It will not touch you.”
The ferals struck—and he struck harder. Bolter fire cracked like thunder, blade singing as it carved through corrupted steel and foul sorcery alike. Each time the sorcerers’ tendrils angled toward her, she cried out in pain, the brand searing as though warning him. He answered each flare of her agony with slaughter, carving a path through those who dared reach for what was his.
By the time the last sorcerer fell, warp-fire guttering into silence, the campfire still burned. Fragile. Defiant.
She held her wrist to her chest, the crest glowing faintly in the aftermath, not just a scar but a ward. The humans looked on in awe, whispering. Jerhamiel removed his helm, meeting her gaze.
“It pains you,” he said, not a question.
“It protects me,” she answered, steady despite the strain. “It protects us.”
He had no answer. Only the confusion of a knight who had sworn to carry his cross into eternity, yet now found his cross carved into her flesh.
And though he did not understand, he knew this: the fire would burn, and the brand would flare, and by his oath, neither would ever fall while he still drew breath.
What business I had writing this at this hour, idk. I took this long nap after work and had very intense dreams and it was super discombobulating...anyway. I know nothing about... anything in here so shhhh you don't see any inaccuracies.
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Raven has never been in the tattoo parlor after dark. All of the lights, beneath their wide metallic brims, are off now, except for one. It leaves an unfocused triangular sheen, soft-yellow and slick, against the deep red of the walls. The sleek leather chairs and tables hunch as deep shadows, the lines of artwork on the display wall now all frame, dulled gray rectangles and squares. The lava lamp on the corner table still glows, hypnotic red jelly shapes floating, luminous.
Plaintive guitar is playing over an unseen speaker.
The shop's closed up, the neon OPEN sign no longer crackling red in the window, but the door's still unlocked. Raven closes it softly behind her, listens to the jarring shiver of the glass and rustle of the closed Venetian blinds as it shoves back into place. Her shoes squeak on the clean black-and-white tiled floor.
For a while, she stands in the middle of the room, past the front desk, staring at the sharp, bent angles of the metal stool left sitting by one of the chairs, and the high reach of the bright lamp next to it, now just a gray circle set into a gray frame, and at the lava lamp again, and thinking.
The first time she came to the shop, she stared at that lamp a long time, letting it hypnotize her. Letting herself dissociate from her own body, and it wasn't about the pain, but about the aura of the place and its intimacy, and about something of the enormity of the moment, too. She'd decided to get a tattoo that intersected with her scar. Something to really mark it, to own it—this ugly raised line of bleached scar tissue on her leg, this way she is marred now and always will be. Because it was fine for Finn to tell her that's not how it is. It wasn't his leg and it wasn't his skin. And it was fine to tell herself that at least she was walking again, with the brace. And it was fine, it was fine, it was fine, except for the weighty feeling of powerlessness she carried around with her all the time, the vertiginous loss of control that—and no one ever warned her it would be this way—was not just the short flashing moments of the accident, but uncountable random and terrifying moments ever since.
So she told herself she'd own it and she'd get the tattoo. A pattern of stars, not over the scar but around it, integrated with it: she's still as vast as the universe, still a part of the heavens.
The scar stretches up high along her leg. The process of sitting for the tattoo, then, of twisting just so, the long expanse of her leg and thigh exposed, was so much more intimate than she'd expected. The walls of the long, low rectangular room were so exquisitely red. The ceiling fans, between the lights, bumped to the rhythm of their own breeze, and there was music that day too, but quieter and tinny. Sometimes barely audible beneath the whir of the machine.
The occasional, clinical touch of gloved hands against her bare skin.
Like therapists, Raven thought, perhaps tattoo artists must deal with transference: how she put all her anxieties and hopes into that touch, and into the steady way Octavia Blake watched her as she sketched out her vision of the constellations, and into the sweeping promise of her own tattoos, slashed black lines along her arm that read like anger painstakingly controlled.
Octavia is in the backroom now, fiddling with the papers on her disorganized desk. Raven can hear the sounds beneath the sweeping, melancholy guitar slide, can picture her back there in the cramped and the dark, looking for her keys.
When the door opens, she's holding them tight in her fist, pushing her hair out of her face with her free hand. She catches sight of Raven, stops for a moment, mid-gesture, and narrows her eyes. "We're closed," she says. But she doesn't keep walking.
"I wanted to talk."
Octavia doesn't answer and she still doesn't move. All the way at the front of the shop, a single car passes by on the lonely night-street, bleeding headlight glow through the blinds.
"To apologize."
Octavia sticks her keys into the pocket of her jeans and crosses her arms. Raven saw a picture of her once at fifteen, a petulant teenager with a cut above her eye and a bruise on her arm, and she sees in the grown woman in front of her now something of the ghost of that girl.
"I'm closing up," she says finally, grudgingly. Because of course she doesn't want to have this conversation in the shadowy shop, burned out neon and leather and silver and ink, and mournful blues notes on the sound system she still hasn't shut off. Raven doesn't want to have it here, either. She's standing just at the edge of the still-lit lamp, there at the outer rim of a spotlight. And she's thinking about Octavia's hands on her, the way she slings her arm around Raven's waist and the way she kisses, like burning, and the way she asked, unaccountably, for permission to touch her own work and the clean, pale ridge of scar beneath. And about how Raven herself is so fucking good at pushing people away. Dissociating away from vulnerability and need.
"Please," Raven says and it's ragged. It's ripped from her.
Octavia takes a deep breath, lets it out, and concedes: "Okay." Then she turns off the last of the lights and the music, so only the deepest lines of shadow are still left, and ushers Raven out the door first.
Summary: During a suffocating August storm on Ancient Terra, a sleepless human glimpses the silhouette of an Astartes watching them through the lightning. From the shadows, Jerahmiel, a Space Marine once betrayed and slain, observes the fragile mortal with cold disdain, his wrath burning as he plots vengeance against the one who wronged him.
Warning: oppressive heat, implied character death, betrayal and vengeance themes, predatory perspective (human viewed as lesser) LMK if I need to add any more.
You’d been lying awake, sweat sticking to your sheets despite the halfhearted hum of the AC. Then the first thundercrack split the night, rattling your window frame like a warning knock. The air was thick with ozone, the smell sharp and metallic, and you pushed yourself upright just as the second bolt tore across the sky.
For a heartbeat the world was drowned in white. And in that flash you saw it.
Something vast—outlined in lightning, black against the burning sky. It was too big, too tall, its proportions stretched into wrongness, like a shadow from a body that couldn’t exist.
The thunder rolled, long and low, but you weren’t listening. You were waiting for the next flash. Waiting for proof you hadn’t imagined it.
When the sky lit again, it was still there.
Still watching.
And this time, you swore its head tilted.
You knew, somehow, that it saw you. Not just your window, not just the little apartment box stacked among thousands on the streets of Terra’s endless hive. You. A glance sharp as a blade, pinning you where you sat.
The lightning’s afterglow clung to your vision, tracing the outlines of the figure’s armor—pauldrons broad as doorways, a helm that gleamed like a skull, a presence too immense for any human silhouette.
An Astartes.
The word landed in your chest with the weight of inevitability. The storm’s roar seemed to fade, and for a breath you imagined you could hear its thoughts, or maybe simply feel them pressing into you. Ancient, cold, as though you were no more to it than an insect caught in the light.
Your hands trembled in your lap, sweat chilling on your skin as the air turned heavier still. The thunder boomed again, and when the next flash came, the sky was empty.
But you knew it hadn’t left.
You knew it would remember you.
~~~
The storm masked his presence well.
Jerahmiel’s helm lenses tracked the flicker of light from the window—a Terran human, fragile, mortal, blinking out into the storm as if they had any comprehension of what they looked upon.
How small they were. How soft. How easily broken.
Wrath simmered beneath his breastplate, wounds that no apothecary’s work could cauterize. He remembered betrayal—the false brother’s voice, the Chaplain’s approval, the execution that had stolen his honor. Cedric. That name still tasted like ash.
Yet here he was, on Ancient Terra. Impossible. Ridiculous. And yet real. Every sense, every twitch of pain told him he was alive. Returned.
The human’s eyes found him through the lightning. For a moment, Jerahmiel wondered if they saw truly—or if the storm’s tricks had only made them believe they had. He tilted his head, testing them, amused despite himself at the way their body stilled, the way their fear bled through the glass.
There was always fear. They always feared what they couldn’t comprehend.
Jerahmiel’s gauntlet flexed at his side, and he felt the familiar pull toward action. To smash, to silence, to punish. They are nothing. Less than nothing. Soft clay, meant to be shaped or broken as needed.
But instead he let the next thunderclap swallow him, his silhouette folding back into the storm.
He would not forget the look in their eyes. He knows that Cedric walks this era- but while he's been surly... He didn't know for sure when in the timeline Cedric is from. He'd learned quickly to be hostile to certain older brothers for their discipline tactics.
