Nacht shows up after idk how long just to say ominous shit and he has a state down with Sanguinius that is across the room and then goes missing again. Who is gonna tell the bird boy that yeah he sometimes does that it's fine
I honestly really want to know how Sanguinius came to have a crush on Cary
Okay so,
the short answer is he saw one person trying to do genuine good in the Warhammer 30k and was like "damn............. I See That"
the long answer is that he saw this, noticed this and also kept an eye on things. looked at reports, sat in meetings with them, noticed their fear and how they tried to treat him with as much respect as possible. Also when they get drunk they treat him like a Normal Dude, and when they stand near the viewing windows of voidships the stars reflect in their eyes and he has to go write poetry.
the even longer answer is that he doesn't know cary as well as he thinks he does. there will be surprises for him.
Especially would go insane to get to see what went through Corax's head when Cary starts bleeding from the eyes and (presumably?) Collapsed. Putting these primarchs in Tupperware and violently shaking them.
Hehe Hoho
He had kept his face blank all throughout the blessings and the journey back to Dark Sister. His countenance could not possibly betray the turmoil inside him.
The Captain had gone to the Night Lords, gone to the ship to find their dead and had returned as if nothing was amiss. They had lied, repeatedly, to his face. He stepped off of the Shadowhawk and saw that they had opened a vox with him.
“Do you need me for anything or can I go lie face down somewhere?” Their tone was light, if tired.
“I’d like to debrief you on the Echo first,” he said, unable to keep the ice from his voice. “Would you mind disarming yourself and then taking yourself very calmly to my office?”
Corvus didn’t even look at them when he spoke. The Captain didn’t reply, walked past him in a stilted march.
He in turn also went to his arming chambers, and had his own armour removed. The process gave Corvus a little more time to think. Personal hurt shouldn’t have any bearing on what actions he should take. The facts were thus: Cary Kulikov had been contacted by members of their own (traitorous) Legion, they had not reported this and had in fact allowed themselves to be teleported to the Night Lords’ vessel. They had also abandoned a mission in order to do this. By all counts it was desertion, if not outright betrayal.
But they had not gone with the Night Lords, a small portion of him argued, they didn’t leave you. The thought pulled something sharp inside his chest. The mission. They didn’t leave the mission. They came back because they knew it was their duty. They had left because they wanted to see their sons.
When he entered his office they were already there, in a seat in front of the desk he was supposed to be using to sign reports and orders. The Captain was looking out of the window, at the void, at Hagiogra. He couldn’t read their reflection’s expression, and they seemed not to notice he had entered until he sat at his desk.
When Cary did look at him they did so with a drawn, exhausted face. It was the face of someone who had been running for a long time.
“Are you going to kill me?” They asked.
“No,” he replied.
He didn’t know how he felt about that assumption. It was perhaps logical of them to assume that their desertion would lead to an execution, as the Primarch he would have been expected to deliver it. It was logical. It wasn’t personal. It was not about how Cary viewed him.
They looked out of the window again, black eyes reflecting pinprick lights of distant stars.
“How did you follow me?” They asked.
“I intended to make my presence known to you at the chapel by the aqueduct and followed you. As Primarchs, we have certain privileges when it comes to unnoticeable vox channels.”
“You were listening in,” Cary said.
“Yes,” he said.
It was hard to tell if the notion unsettled them or not. But soon they started talking.
“I wanted to see them. I wanted to know who was dead, who I had to mourn. Do you wonder? What happened to those you left when you went into the warp? Have you tried to find out yet? Guilliman has, I’ve seen some of his books, some of the records. He has sons he has no idea what happened to, and no way of knowing. Sorry. I don’t mean to be unkind,” they paused and swallowed, though their voice continued at the same strength. “You never went to Nostramo. You were too young. You never saw it. Never lived it. Don’t get me wrong, prison moon sounds bad. Sounds like a real shitter of a situation and you have my sympathy. But people loved you, Corax. People fed you. Clothed you. Taught you. Curze ate rats and dogs in the street, ate his kills because he was programmed too strongly to even think of stealing food.”
They turned to face him, expression hardened.
“When we got to Terra I did a lot of research on feral children. Most kids- human kids, baseline kids, that grow up without anyone to care for them, without socialisation- they usually never learn to speak or have any interest in humanity. They have to be taken care of for their whole lives. Primarchs are different, hardier, stronger, apparently . Curze learned the lessons Nostramo taught him armed with what little knowledge your father shoved in his head. He understood justice, he understood the concepts of things that were right and wrong, but he ended up in the wrong place.
“By the time I got to him the damage was done. Fate’s die was cast. I don’t even think he knew how to use a spoon the first time I fed him. Is it any wonder that he resented the sons foisted upon him? He was barely a man and he needed help. Instead we were sent to do the bloody work no one else could do. The bloody work we were admonished for, but I bet I could say his hands were drenched in less blood than yours.”
The statement drew his ire, if only briefly. It was not the number of bodies produced that should have mattered, it was the way they were produced.
“And you don’t even know the worst part. No one knows, aside from me- Damn his eyes! You don’t even know that when he left Nostramo, when the greedy, silver-sucking bastards realised they had nothing to fear anymore- they poured their criminals, their murderers, their rapists into our ranks. That was the last thing I did as a Night Lord, true and proper. As a Captain of the Kyroptera I went to Nostramo and I saw what they were doing to us. I knew we needed help. I knew anything done internally would end up as butchery. I was going to ask for help. I was going to ask you for help.”
He opened his mouth to speak, but Cary continued. Their expression had turned from solemn acceptance to sharp anger, deep anger.
“They fed a sick dog bad meat and were surprised when it turned rabid, when it turned upon their clutching hands. Sin upon sin, body upon body. Skraivok’s personal army inside the Legion- a cancer upon all of us. I know what happened to him, Corax. I know that he turned to Fulgrim in fear, seeking some kind of comfort from that which haunted him, and that compassionate Rogal Dorn confronted him. As if it was his fault, what he saw. As if he had any level of control over his visions. You called him a monster, but you- his brothers, you’re the ones who left him in the dark. Who left us to die.”
The resentment was clear, it punctuated every word. Corvus would have liked to have responded calmly, evenly. But Cary’s statements felt more like an attack than an admission of guilt.
“You think his actions are excusable because he was infirm?” Corvus asked, voice strained.
“None of our actions are excusable,” Cary retorted. “The Imperium stands on a trillion graves, and for what? For this? For vile zealotry? For the same prejudices we’ve been carrying for ten thousand years?”
They were correct, Throne damn them for it but they were right. The Imperium was just as sick as when he had left it, Roboute was trying, he was trying- even Cary was trying! Yet none of their efforts were enough. Nothing was enough.
“I am beginning to question your loyalty, Kulikov.”
“I was loyal, truly loyal, in the beginning. Loyal to your father’s dream, which lies decaying all around us. I am loyal to what your brother sees, his vision of what the Imperium could become. I am loyal to those who call on me as a brother. I am not loyal to terror. I am not loyal to bloody violence. I have no loyalty for chaos, which has warped so many of those whom I love and have loved. I have only disgust for those of my Legion who are currently squabbling over the possessions of a man long dead. I want you to tell me something honestly, Corvus,” they leaned forward as they spoke, desperately searching his face for something.
The use of his first name took him off guard, it took him a fraction of a second to recover and he nodded.
“If your sons had been declared Excommunicate Traitoris, could you truly turn your back on them? All of them? If they had called for you, like scared children in the dark?”
His anger rose steadily as he absorbed their words, even if in the back of his mind- Cary didn’t know. His eyes dropped to the desk in front of him and his hands shook. Cary was ignorant of the Raptors.They did not know what they were saying, what it meant to him.
But he remembered his sons in pain. He remembered them as they lay twisted and broken and mutated and howling. Screaming.
He looked up at them. Cary was almost bent double, bowed head and clasped hands like a dedicant.
“I always knew you’d see through me, eventually,” Cary said. “That you’d see what I really was. I am a Night Lord. I will always be a Night Lord. My sins are indelible. Hála az ezüstnek… it’s you, in the end.”
And then, to his horror, they started to pray.
“Hála az… égnek és az… ezüst ereknek,” they whispered between short, gasping breaths.
He stood abruptly, cold shame crawling up his spine. He had lost control, the warp-thing that he truly was rising to the surface once more.
Corvus came around the desk, intending to pull the Captain upright but he caught something- the sound of blood drops hitting the floor, and the iron smell of it. The Captain had pulled their hands away from their face, the fingertips of their gloves coming away dark red.
He retrieved the medi-kit from the wall, opening it to find the saline solution and pushed Cary’s forehead upwards. Blood seeped from their eyes like tears and pores like sweat. Corvus tipped the bottle over their eyes and face, wiping away the worst of it with his thumbs.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to- I didn’t want to…”
Cary reached up and patted his forearm with the weariness of someone who had heard it before.
“It’s okay,” they said. “You can’t help it, I know.”
He clenched his jaw, but turned his face away from them so they wouldn’t see. Corvus could help it. He was a Primarch in charge of his own faculties and he should have been able to control his emotions.
Corvus looked down, their robe was soaked with saline and blood. He swiftly removed his own.
“You robe is- you can have mine,” he said, awkwardly shoving the garment at them.
Cary vanished in the fabric and struggled with their own robe, he almost reached out to help them. Almost. But that would mean touching them, and Corvus knew he could not do that.
They retrieved something from the pocket of their sodden robe, a pouch. Ah, yes. The other matter.
“I’d like to see the datachip,” he said, as carefully as possible.
They hesitated briefly, expression untrusting. He supposed he deserved that. But they tipped two small items from the pouch into their palm and handed over the datachip. Corvus looked at the other item, a jagged blackened thing, as large as the tip of a baseline finger.
“Is that a tooth?” He asked, only able to identify it through the shape of the root.
“Yes,” Cary said.
He paused.
“Who’s tooth is that?”
Cary looked at him as if he was being purposefully dense.
“I think you know.”
He was unable to keep his expression neutral and Cary clicked their tongue at him.
“In your father’s name, I can’t believe I’m being judged for this. Konrad walked around with a whole damn mortuary stapled to his armour and I’m getting mean-mugged by Corvus Corax for stealing a tooth,” Cary lamented, exaggerating their dismay.
Their voice caught on the name, he had noticed that. They avoided using that name, the name their father had given the Night Haunter. A discomfort that made him curious.
Cary dragged on his robes, which swallowed them. He ignored the small, almost smug feeling that curled in his chest that seeing Cary in his robes. Now was not the time for personal matters. There would likely never be a time for personal matters.
He took the datachip to his desk, finding a dataslate in one of the drawers. Corvus sat in his desk chair and plugged in the chip, watching as strings of Nostraman runes filled the screen. He could have sat there and waited until his mind simply comprehended the language, as it had done to so many spoken languages before. Instead, Corvus spoke.
“I’ve come across an issue,” he said, looking at Cary.
The Captain frowned at him, confused.
“I never learned to read Nostraman,” he admitted.
“Are you shitting me,” Cary replied, fixing him with a flat, disappointed look Corvus suspected they reserved for unruly neophytes.
“It will take me a few minutes to properly work out and translate,” he admitted, Cary clicked their tongue again derisively. “However I happen to be sitting in front of a literal Nostraman.”
He turned the dataslate towards them, and Cary pulled their chair forward, eyes already scanning the screen.
“And now you ask me to sell out my own?” They asked, hollowly.
The question itself was painful, as was the guilt. They believed he was asking them to tell him so that he could use it against the ones who had found them at great personal risk- Cary’s sons. Their tone was that of one ordered to betray their own.
“I’m asking you to trust me that I won’t,” Corax said, swallowing his duty. “I’m trusting you to tell me what it says.”
Cary glanced up at him, the action only noticeable for the movement of the muscles around their eyes. Their shoulders lost some of the tension they had been holding.
“They’re personal vox codes, comms codes for a couple of ships. The Echo’s are on there, along with a couple others. It’s all communication related, basically. I think that there might be the Atramentar’s teleportation frequency. That’s an emergency beacon signal,” they said, pointing to the various long strings of Nostraman runes.
“They want you to be in touch with them,” he thought, aloud.
“I don’t think they’re expecting me to spy for them, if that’s what you’re thinking,” they said.
He hadn’t, another pang of guilt. Cary expected him to have lost all faith in them.
“I think they just… Want me to call them if I need them,” Cary said, voice tinged with sad affection.
“They don’t trust the company you’re in now?” He asked, in mock offence.
Cary laughed a little. It was dry and tired, but genuine at least.
“I won’t keep you much longer, there’s only one more thing I wanted to ask about,” he continued.
Cary looked at him, eyebrows raised and expression open. The lone Atramentar, the one Cary had named.
“Grisha,” he said.
Cary crumpled forward and for a split second he panicked, a jolt of adrenaline almost making him rise. They leaned on the desk heavily, carded a hand through their short hair.
“My brother,” they said. “My little brother. I- I didn’t know he had been taken. I thought he died, he was always so sick. I have to believe they didn’t know- Curze and Sevatar. Didn’t know he was taken.”
Cary’s sorrows went far beyond their Primarch and their Night Lords- they had human ties. There was a whole life he wasn’t privy to, no matter that he had listened to their account. Once again he was confronted with the fact that he didn’t really know Cary as well as he thought he did.
“Cary, I am so sorry,” he said, gently.
He meant to stand, to offer them comfort. But they looked up and looked decades older.
“Can I go?” They asked, quietly. “Today has been a trial.”
He nodded.
“Yes, Theodanius mentioned something about the sorcerer,” he started, but Cary shook their head, already starting to stand.
“I’m haunted by enough ghosts as it is, and I’d rather not wake them,” the upward tilt at the corners of their mouth suggested that this was supposed to be a dry observation, but their tone made it more of a solemn statement.
He wondered what he could say, what comfort could he possibly offer them? Corvus had no idea. He had also lost sons, he had also lost brothers, but Cary looked exhausted. Drained. Their eyes had dropped to the floor again, unable to meet his.
“Go rest,” he said.
Cary nodded and left without another word or look. Once they had left, he rubbed his face with both hands. Cary’s sons had died, and they had not been permitted to mourn them. That was why they had gone, to find out which child lived and which child had died and which child had become something monstrous.
They had assumed he would kill them, and he admonished himself for even thinking they would suspect otherwise. Of course Cary thought he would kill them. He was a Primarch and they were an Astartes who had abandoned a mission to treat with traitors. Marines had been executed for less. They had accepted their death so calmly, so easily. It was a far cry from the Captain who had fought so hard their whole damn life to survive.
Thank the silver it’s you, in the end. A Nostraman oath. In their delirium they had returned to comforting beliefs, that was how far their acceptance stretched. They believed they were going to die in that room, and had prayed for themselves.
He looked down at the dataslate again, the Nostraman already becoming clear to him. Cary had spoken the truth, communication codes, squad tags. He had not yet alerted his men to the Echo of Damnation, though he knew where it was hiding.
Corvus remembered them kneeling, the oversized skull in their hands and how they had wept. Cary’s sons had died, and so had their Primarch. They had not been able to mourn either of them.
i know the fic hasn't been updated in a bit but did you ever have any plans for Kaz meeting her brothers on the echo?
love the caryverse and have reread it twice now XD hope you don't mind me blaming you for me making a night lord oc
I dooooo I do I do have plans !
The echo and the lads upon it will be making a return towards the end of this arc, and due to Circumstances, Kaz will be the one mostly handling things with them.
Which will be fun for her, baffling for the Night Lords and a new source of constant stress for Corax
Wait. Wait actually also tell me what Vulkan was thinking when he permanently disarmed Cary too.
It went very quickly from the vindication that comes from the seemingly justified act of harming someone close to the person who harmed you, to the "oh god what have I done" stage.
More Under Here:
Like at first during that arc he thought it was just Night Haunter, he didn't really perceive that it was Cary carrying Night Haunter's soul. Then slowly as his primarch physiology started recovering he was able to understand that it was Cary, but didn't care because Rage. When he took off Cary's arm he had a realisation of what he was doing, also aided by Cary being like "You're literally no better than him now" (debatable but Cary was clutching at straws here).
Like yes, you got what you wanted! You have permanently harmed someone who is close to the person who harmed you! Congratulations, do you feel better now? Do you feel victorious, Vulkan? Have the debts been repaid? Did you get the vengeance? Are you satisfied? Has balance been restored?
No. You hurt them because you wanted to hurt them.
Im sure you’ll cover this later in the story, but how heartbroken do you think Sanguinius is going to be when he finds out that his death created the Black Rage to manifest in his sons? I can see him getting a major guilt moment which only gets worse when he realized how much his sons have suffered in the last 10k years. (Obligatory Lamenter mention)
(I need you to know. I am slow at reading the Kulikov fic but I'm getting there.
....I cheered when Khepri resurfaced. I love this failboy so much, I was giggling and kicking my feet while Cary was goign through the stages of grief trying to find a way out. XD I'm so glad he keeps popping up with the same amount of panache every time. I am hoping he does it again, so I can lose my shit laughing once more.
Things just keep getting better! ;) your characters are very compelling, once more! Also no pressure to answer this ask, just wanted to throw my love of the clumsy peacock boy at you. ;) )
HEHEHEHHEHEHEE
Khepri's really fun to write because he wants to act like a cartoon evil villain wizard king but he's like. Castlevania Hot yknow? He's so pretty and the second he moves out of the Nest he'll start crashing on Cary's sofa.
