Summery: Rushal overthinks things while wandering the Nightfall.
Pairing: Sevatar/Rushal (just a little bit)
A/N: More a character study than anything else. I have a lot of thoughts about Rushal and how he could have come to be a traitor, and just kinda wrote them out in prose instead of just headcanons. xD
The dark, deserted places of the Nightfall were good for thinking. Unlike what many of the Night Lords thought, the Raven was not some broken, thoughtless pet leashed to Sevatar's side. He still had his mind, even if he'd lost any way to speak it in more than gestures and battle signs.
He haunted the depths of the Nightfall, the lightless places, where the only sound was his own breathing and the whisper of his clothes as he moved. It was nice, in a way. No reason for him to try pretending he was anything. That, itself, felt so very strange. He been pretending for a long time.
He had been Terran, once. He'd had a mother and father. He'd lived a portion of a life with them. Not long, of course. He was still young when he was chosen to be part of the Emperor's angels. He had still considered himself Terran when he joined the Legion. And yet, his skin color faded to a pallid, colorless white, his hair and his eyes darkened to the color of ink, his memories of a life before the endless war among the stars faded, and it became harder and harder to think of himself as Terran.
He was a Raven Guard, and nothing more.
And then their Primarch came, and he brought with him those who came from Deliverance, with their ways and their values. They remembered who they were, and their Primarch brought their ways into the Legion, prioritized them more and more, while it was clear he did not trust those from Terra the same as those from his own home. Slowly, the culture of the Raven Guard began to change. And Rushal found it harder to think of himself as whatever it was they had become.
He could no longer identify with his Terran past, nor with the Raven Guard around him. He was a pretender among them.
He drifted through the pitch-black halls. They were nothing to the eyes of an Astartes. He could see clearly enough. Barren walls. Pipes. Mesh decking. Things that skittered in the dark. Even he wasn't certain if they were animals from some planet or another, or something that had slipped aboard in the warp. He paid it no mind.
It hadn't been all that difficult for Sevatar to leverage the feelings of isolation and frustration. Maybe he should have been angry at the manipulation, but he wasn't. He was, in some ways, what he was used to. The Astartes were all manipulated in various ways. From the idolization of them by human populations that led young boys into dreaming of being one, to the conditioning they were put through, they had all been manipulated. Sevatar had not manipulated him since, at least, and had offered him more than a life of fighting for an Emperor who had used them all, in a Legion that did not want him, while he slowly lost anything that had made him *him*.
It baffled him now how his former brothers couldn't see that they were serving a man who was the exact opposite of what they claimed to stand for. He'd been vaguely aware of the hypocrisy of it even before Isstvan. Those from Deliverance claimed to fight for the freedom of human populations, to abhor tyrants like those that had lorded over them once.
And yet, they fought for the Emperor.
There wasn't a larger tyrant in the entire galaxy than the Emperor of Mankind. Anyone with eyes could see it. And yet, they chose not to acknowledge it. They refused to see it. Even he was guilty of it. He'd realized the truth long before he had joined the Night Lords, but he'd convinced himself that they were still doing the right thing. A tyrant, maybe, but the better of the evils out there in the galaxy. A tyrant was what humanity needed to defend it from the threats that lay in the stars.
Yet, that wasn't the truth, was it? The galaxy was no safer now than it had once been, especially with his sons fracturing.
Rushal paused, reaching one hand out to brush against the wall. Someone had drawn on the metal in streaks of grease and oil. A symbol that shouldn't exist, one that hurt the eyes to look at. He flattened his palm against the wall and wiped it away.
He had no love for the gods of Chaos. He had no love for the Emperor. His loyalties were his own. His goals weren't to unite or corrupt the galaxy.
"I didn't realize I'd taken on a janitor."
Rushal glanced over at the familiar, rasping voice, his eyes lingering for a moment on the form of Sevatar as the man leaned against a wall opposite and just behind him. He wondered how long the man had been following him while he'd been thinking. The smirk on Sevatar's lips told him that he likely wouldn't enjoy the answer. He turned, wiping his grease-stained palm on his pants absentmindedly.
"Come, the Kyroptera are meeting and I want you nearby," Sevatar said, beckoning him closer.
Rushal moved to his side without hesitation, and Sevatar's smile spread wider, flashing more gentle for just a moment. He leaned in, pressing his lips to Rushal's with a fierce possessiveness, teeth raking his bottom lip for just a moment before he drew back, flashed him a smirk, and moved to lead the way back out of the deepest parts of the Nightfall, and back up to where others were.
His goals were now very simple, Rushal mused as he followed the broad back of the other man: Survive, and ensure Sevatar survived.
The rest of the world could burn for all he cared.
Although the wine and ballads festival was really cute and heartwarming, sometimes I wish that Kaeya's character didn't revolve so much around Diluc's. I miss things like what happened in the Windblume Festival, when Kaeya manipulated Venti. It felt like he was doing his own thing, and since then hyv is visiting the same plot point over and over again. Like, it adds to the angst sure, but his character is so complex and I wish we could see more sides of him.
