A Caged Weapon in the Fortress of Giants
Demetrian Titus x gender neutral penal legionnaire reader
A/n: Glacial (8k wc) slow burn, mutual pining, and Demetrian Titus being deeply unwell. Nothing happens quickly. Everyone suffers. This was on purpose. Smut companion fic linked here (yeah it's that slow).
Cw: the usual mature 40k themes, reader has an augmented arm, psychological distress, sexual themes, mention of masturbation (no explicit details), obsessive thoughts
There was a certain kind of silence that only existed in the deeper levels of the Watch Fortress.
It wasn’t peace. There was no peace here. Not in the endless stone halls, the humming of sealed bulkheads, the mechanical drone of rites half-forgotten. It was a silence born of suffocation. As if even the walls were holding their breath.
You’d gotten used to it.
No — you’d adapted.
Same as always.
---
You’d been on Erioch for 241 days.
Not that anyone counted. The penal bastards assigned to grunt detail didn’t mark time. You just survived one cycle after another, scraping chemical slop off hangar walls, hauling broken servitor parts into rusted bins, scrubbing dried blood that was never yours.
They didn’t trust you with weapons.
Didn’t trust you with real tools, either.
But you had hands. A back. Knees that bent when told.
And a mind.
Still sharp, still whole — though you knew better than to show it too often.
Smart people got reassigned.
Or disappeared.
You’d done enough disappearing already.
---
Your bunk was bolted to a wall in a sublevel corridor that never saw real light. You shared it with twelve others. You didn’t speak to them unless necessary. Most of them wouldn’t have known what to do with a full sentence anyway.
They thought you were quiet.
Controlled. Maybe a little cold.
They were half-right.
---
Sometimes you worked the refectories. Sometimes the lower forge levels.
But when they called you to scrub the training halls—
that was when you saw them.
The Deathwatch.
And among them: Demetrian Titus.
---
You didn’t watch him.
Not really.
You didn’t let your eyes linger longer than you had to. You never turned your head. You never stared.
But you saw him.
The size of him.
The silence of him — more pronounced than the others. Where the others were bombast and weight and ritual, he moved like something built to endure.
There was no wasted gesture. No conversation. No indulgence in display.
He moved, and others moved out of his way.
Even the Mechanicus flinched when he looked their way.
---
You never thought about what he looked like.
You’d seen his face once — once — when he removed his helmet mid-calibration. Clean jaw. Short, war-bitten hair. Eyes like scorched iron. Mouth made for delivering judgment.
You didn’t think about it.
Not while you were on your hands and knees, scrubbing weapons grease out of the floor barely five feet from where he stood.
Not when you caught the edge of his scent — machine-oil and salt and skin too clean to be human.
Not when he stepped past you and said nothing, but you felt the weight of his presence press into your spine like a knee against your throat.
You didn’t think about any of it.
But later…
when you were in your bunk
or beneath the sonic sprayers
or pressed up against the back wall of the waste chamber, panting quiet into your elbow, trying to get the tension out of your gut—
you remembered.
---
It wasn’t attraction.
You weren’t some bored barracks-kid from a hive with dreams of being claimed.
It was worse.
It was recognition.
You saw it in the set of his shoulders. In the stillness of his breath.
He was a thing made for war and silence.
You were a thing that survived both.
And sometimes, when he passed you in the hall, and his head turned just slightly —
just enough —
you wondered:
Did he see it in you, too?
---
You learned early that nothing is permanent.
Parents. Shelter. Food. All of it went like smoke through a sieve. You never knew your mother’s face. Never heard your father’s name. When people asked where you came from, you used to lie — until you realized no one cared enough to call you out.
At eight years old you were scavenging off corpses after skirmishes in the lower manufactoria. At ten, you were carrying blades longer than your arm. At twelve, you slit a man’s throat because he tried to sell you for a week’s worth of stim. You didn’t hesitate, let alone think about it. You learned then:
Hesitation gets you buried.
By the time you were fifteen, you’d already survived things others never did:
A winter where the ration lines collapsed and bodies froze in the alleys.
A raid by Arbites where they fired into the crowd and didn’t bother to drag the bodies out after.
The time your gang leader “tested” you by leaving you chained in a sump-pit with a starving sump-beast. You still had the scars on your thigh. It had teeth like industrial cutters. You broke its jaw with a rock until it stopped moving.
That was the way of it: the world tried to eat you, and you bit back harder.
---
When they caught you stealing from the Munitorum, you weren’t surprised. You always knew it would end one of two ways: execution, or exile. The penal legions were just another form of death sentence.
But you didn’t die.
That first drop, when the collar detonated half your squad because they tried to run — you didn’t even flinch. Second drop, when the Orks chewed through your line and the commissar left you for dead, you crawled out of the muck and back to the trench like a rat that refused to drown. Third drop, you saw a woman you’d slept beside for six months burned alive by a flamer unit. You didn’t scream. You just took her boots when it was done, because yours had split at the seams.
Survival had been stripped of its heroics, reduced to the simple, ugly necessity of clutching whatever remained and refusing to stop moving.
---
Erioch was quieter than war. But no less cruel.
The fortress fed on silence. On obedience. On people like you, kept alive just enough to scrub the stone and shovel out the blood. Most of the other convicts were broken already. Half-catatonic, or twitching from stim withdrawals, or whispering half-prayers to a God-Emperor who had never once spared them.
You weren’t broken. You weren’t praying.
You weren’t soft, either.
You worked, because work meant breathing. And if they sent you to clean the corridors after the Deathwatch had passed through, you kept your head low and your hands busy.
But every so often—
every so often, you swore you felt a presence heavier than the silence. A man built like the world itself had bent around him. His boots struck stone like judgment. His gaze cut like a weapon even when it wasn’t pointed at you.
Demetrian Titus.
---
You never let yourself think about him too long. Not in the way some of the others did — whispering about what it would be like to serve one of them more personally. That wasn’t you. You weren’t yearning.
But you were noticing.
The same way you noticed which commissars kept their pistols oiled. The same way you noticed which Arbites twitched before they swung a baton. The same way you noticed when someone meant to kill you before they’d even drawn their blade.
You noticed Titus.
You noticed the way he moved. Or rather, the way he didn’t.
The way he was still. Like a blade in a sheath. Like a man who had no need to prove anything.
And that was what unsettled you most.
Because you’d spent your whole life surviving men who were loud, brutal, desperate, cruel.
But Titus wasn’t any of those things.
He was something worse.
He was inevitable.
---
You’d seen enough killers to know their patterns.
The petty ones twitched. The desperate ones stank of nerves. The cruel ones smiled too much. You could read them before they ever raised a blade.
Titus wasn’t any of those.
He never twitched. Never smiled. He never even cleared his throat. Most men couldn’t help announcing themselves — a cough, a shuffle, a mutter. He gave nothing away.
Except the details.
You noticed he never tracked the whole room. Not like the others. The rest of the Deathwatch swept their gazes like they were hungry, devouring every inch of space. Titus didn’t bother. He looked where he needed to, and if you were in that line, you felt it like a pin through your chest.
You noticed the smell that clung to him after combat. Not just the standard tang of oil and disinfectant — there was always something faintly burned, like scorched metal cooling after the forge. A scent that stuck to the stone long after he’d gone.
You noticed he never rested weight on both feet. Always one planted, one braced, like he was ready to move without warning. You’d seen it in pit-fighters who’d lived longer than they should. Men who never allowed themselves to be caught flat.
And once, when you were on hands and knees cleaning the edge of the hall, you heard him pass. Heavy boots, yes — but not the stomp of the others. His gait was even, paced. Measured. No wasted energy. No rush. You realized, with a tight twist in your gut, that he walked the same way you’d seen scavenger-beasts stalk the sump pits: like nothing in front of him could possibly matter.
---
You weren’t yearning.
You just noticed.
The way he rationed his voice, like ammunition. Never wasted. Never more than required. The way other Astartes barked prayers and war-songs, and he simply said what needed saying.
The way he didn’t fidget when waiting. No tapping gauntlets. No shifting eyes. He could stand in one place for an hour like a machine switched off.
You told yourself these were tactical observations. That it was instinct — survival instinct — to catalogue the things that made him different.
But sometimes, lying awake in your cot, you replayed them anyway. The cadence of his boots. The clipped exactness of his speech. The reek of scorched ceramite.
And you hated yourself a little for it.
Because you knew: once you started remembering a man in fragments, you were already in danger.
And you didn't need any more of that.
---
The chamber was a tomb of stone and stink.
No one remembered the blood once it dried, but the Fortress kept it all the same. The stains clung to the grooves between flagstones, brown and black, layered from years of battles you hadn’t seen. No matter how much you scrubbed, the marks stayed.
That was the work. Endless, pointless. A cycle to grind you down.
Your knees ached on the cold stone, but you kept your back straight. The bucket beside you stank of solvent, its fumes chewing the skin off your fingers. You’d long since stopped counting the raw patches and chemical burns. They weren’t important. Survival was important. You didn’t argue. You didn’t falter. You just kept moving the stiff-bristled brush in short, brutal strokes until someone told you to stop.
That was enough.
The sound reached you first: boots. Too heavy, too even. Not the clatter of serfs or the shuffle of servitors. Precision, mass, inevitability in every step.
Your chest tightened.
You didn’t raise your head. You bent harder over the stone, as though scrubbing harder might make you invisible.
The shadow fell across you anyway. The solvent fumes shifted in the air, cut through by the faint metallic tang of scorched ceramite and the cleaner bite of machine oil. Your brush faltered for just an instant before you forced it back into rhythm.
“Legionnaire,” said a voice above you.
Flat. Unmistakable.
“Yes, my lord,” you answered. The words came out clipped, practiced. You didn’t look up.
Silence followed. But it wasn’t empty silence — it was weighted, like the space itself was waiting.
Then: “You’re using the wrong angle.”
Your brush stopped mid-stroke. Your throat felt suddenly dry.
“Sir?”
“Forty-five degrees,” he said. The voice was even like battlefield instruction. “Not straight down. You’re cutting against the grain. You’ll break the bristles before the stain.”
You blinked down at the floor, realizing for the first time how much force you’d been driving into the brush. The bristles were already splayed, bent. Wasting effort.
Slowly, you adjusted your wrist. Drew the strokes at a slant. The motion dragged smoother, covering more stone, pulling the old blood free with less resistance.
He was right.
Your mouth tightened. “Yes, sir.”
He didn’t move. You felt the weight of his shadow still there, towering, silent.
You kept scrubbing, strokes sharp and efficient now, until the patch gleamed wet and clean.
For a moment, you thought he’d left. That same, unbearable silence had returned.
Then: “Better.”
One word. Nothing more.
The boots withdrew. The shadow receded. The air felt thinner without him in it.
You kept working until your arms trembled with the effort, because stopping would have felt like admitting something.
But later, when you dragged yourself back to your cot, the word still rang in your skull.
Better.
Not good. Not skilled. Not efficient.
Just better.
You told yourself it was nothing. An Astartes giving correction the way they always did.
But in the dark, staring at the stone ceiling, you couldn’t stop hearing it in that heavier than judgment voice.
Better.
And you hated that it mattered.
---
You rearranged your schedule twice. Quiet shifts in the med-bays, extra hours hauling slag; anything to put distance between you and the echo of those boots. Avoidance is a kind of armor you learned early — less flashy than ceramite, but it worked. People take up space if you let them. You learned to make yourself less worth the trouble.
Then the quartermaster called you, voice flat and uninterested over the comm: "Legionnaire. Clean Titus' private wing. Now."
You asked for reassignment. They told you the Watch needed the warp seals cleansed. You said nothing more. You went.
The door to his quarter sealed with a precise thud behind you. The place smelled of cold metal and something like rain on hot iron — not the usual sulfur of the engine decks. It was smaller than the public halls, almost impossibly neat. One workbench. One rack. One throne bolted into the floor. Even the dust lay in exact lines where servos had passed through last time.
You should have felt relief. You did not.
Your job was simple: clear the access pits, dust the interfacing banks, scrub the seal channels. Hands-on, no staring. Your gloved fingers found the same motions they always did. You kept your head down. You kept your breath measured.
There were small things that belonged to him and not to the Deathwatch as a unit — a strip of leather, a tiny notch on a gauntlet where a blade had nicked the edge, a burn mark shaped almost like a rune. You catalogued them the way you catalogued everything that might matter: concrete facts filed away so they couldn't sting.
Halfway through a pan of interface ports, you realized the light had shifted. Not the lights themselves; the angle. Someone had recalibrated the bedside lens so the line hit the bench at a lower tilt. Practical.
You shouldered the brush and moved on. Keep busy. Keep yourself from listening.
He came back the way he always did — no clank of heraldry, no flash of banner, just presence. It wasn't sudden. You didn't feel a shadow fall. You simply felt the room tilt, and when you looked up, he was standing there, helmet in hand, boots clean, armor resealed. He had the look of a thing returned from the field.
You hadn't expected him to return. The door had been locked; it was locked for a reason. You had been inside, making the place spotless, while he had left you to work in his absence. That fact should have been small. It was not.
He watched you for a long moment before he spoke. When he did, his voice was measured.
“You scrub like you want to erase something.”
You froze with the brush mid-stroke. It was not accusation so much as statement. He could have been talking about the ink-scar in a marine's dossier, or a corrosion pattern on a conduit. But the sentence lodged under your ribs and pushed.
“Sir?” Your voice came out smaller than you planned.
He didn't move. He only tilted his head the smallest fraction, like a mount inspecting a blade. “You erase. Better to wear it clean than keep it hidden. It's easier to measure.”
You wanted to answer — a deflection, a lie. Instead you tightened your grip and resumed working with stricter angles, more deliberate pressure. You scrubbed until the bristles were nearly threadbare, until your forearms burned with the effort, ignoring the fact your pulse had changed beneath the regulation of your breathing loop.
He stayed. But he didn’t impose himself. He maintained that Astartes distance: close enough that you knew he could step forward and fill the entryway, but not so close he forced anything. He simply watched, the quiet of him a constant that your brain kept measuring against the constant that had always kept you alive: distance. Control.
After a while he said, flat as a drill order, “You don't look up around the Watch.”
You kept your eyes on the stone. “No reason to, sir.”
He made no comment about the truth of that. Instead, with the same blunt efficiency he used on the field, he added, “Don't pretend you don't notice.”
The words were not a threat. They were not a groomed softness either. They were a report filed and closed. But they were a thing you couldn't shrug off in the dark later.
They were a piece of information you had to catalogue.
When at last he turned and walked away, he left the door open just enough for the light to line the floor. The space where his shadow had been seemed bigger in its absence. You cleaned the rest of the ports with hands that shook inside the augmetic joints. You finished faster than needed. You sealed the quarter behind you and walked back to the corridors that smelled of old blood, pretending you were the same as before.
You were not.
You told yourself you would not give him the satisfaction of further thought. You told yourself you would avoid the training halls and the dusk shifts and the places he was known to pass. You told yourself a dozen rational things.
But when you lay down in the cramped darkness of your bunk that night, the phrase replayed: You scrub like you want to erase something.
It wasn't a command. It certainly wasn't affection. And despite every part of you screaming that it was weakness to care, your brain kept cataloguing the fact that he spoke to you at all — and what he had seen.
That night, you did not sleep easily, unsurprisingly. You rolled the brush handle in your fingers under the covers, tracing the grooves with your thumb until they fit like teeth. You told yourself you would not be unraveled by a man who was a problem to solve, not a temptation to fail for.
Tomorrow, you would be careful.
Tomorrow, you would look down and only the stone would know what you were thinking.
---
You managed it for nearly a week.
Routine kept you safe.
Keep to the chemical bays. Volunteer for corpse-hauling detail when you had to. Take the worst shifts so you could move unseen. Work until your body trembled, until your bunk became a mercy, until even thought was dulled by exhaustion.
You told yourself that was victory.
That was control.
You didn’t think about his quarters. You didn’t think about the words. You didn’t let yourself.
---
It was on the sixth day that it broke.
The collapse was a quiet, unceremonious thing,
… in the mess hall.
You were carrying a crate of nutrient packs from one end of the hall to the other. Too heavy, the handles biting into your palms. You didn’t complain. Because of course you didn't. You kept your head down, your steps even, your mind on the small victory of reaching the far hatch without spilling half the cargo.
Then you caught yourself glancing.
Just a bit— Just enough to notice the column of black armor crossing the chamber. The weight of him among the serfs and servitors, moving like none of them existed. Helmet under his arm, jaw set, gaze forward.
You hadn’t seen him in days, and still your chest clenched like a trap sprung.
And that was when it happened.
Your grip slipped.
The crate tilted. One corner slammed the floor, and the sharp crack of shattered nutrient packs echoed through the mess. Viscous slurry leaked across the stone, pooling around your boots.
The room went still. Not the whole room — no one else cared — but in your head, it was silent enough to scream.
You bent immediately, fumbling to right the crate, to scoop what you could back into its ruined shell. Fast. Efficient. Control the damage. Pretend nothing had happened.
Then:
“Careless.”
His voice. Right behind you.
Flat and fucking absolute.
You stiffened, slurry dripping from your fingers. The word sank deeper than it should have, because it was true, because you’d let yourself look.
“Yes, my lord,” you managed. Kept your head down. Kneeling in the mess.
Bootsteps came closer. Heavy. The stone trembled under their weight. He stopped just a pace away.
“You’ve been avoiding me.”
Your heart lurched against your ribs. Your mouth stayed shut.
A pause. You felt him there, felt the cold shadow of him falling over your crouched form.
Then, in that same unflinching tone:
“Don’t confuse avoidance with discipline.”
The words hit harder than any blow. Because he was right, again, and you hated him for it.
He didn’t linger. He didn’t need to.
The boots moved on. The air shifted back to normal. He left you kneeling in the mess, hands sticky with spilled ration sludge, chest heaving like you’d run miles.
You stayed there until your pulse stopped racing. Until you could scrape together enough dignity to clean the floor again.
You told yourself he hadn’t meant anything by it.
That it was just an observation.
Just another correction, like brush angles and worn bristles.
---
After the mess, you don’t go back to the bunk. You don’t eat. You tell the quartermaster you’ll take the overnight scrap detail in the lower hull — the one no one volunteers for because the scaffolds creak and the venting is unpredictable. You say it like an answer, like a choice. It’s cleaner that way, less like penance and more like logistics. Right?
Right.
They hand you the harness without asking questions. They never do. You strap into the lifeline, the collar itching where the tag reads your designation. You taste metal in the back of your mouth and like it. Keep breathing. Keep the rhythm.
The lower hull is a place the fortress hides. It smells of rust and old coolant. Stale steam fogs the lights; the scaffolds disappear into shadow. Here the work is precise and brutal: you gouge fungal growth from radiator intakes, wrestle pitted conduits free of fused solder, wedge open cooling lanes and scrape gunk that tastes of oil and old blood. It’s the sort of labor meant to dull you — to break attention into routine until the brain stops asking for anything else. That is the point.
That is the medicine you choose.
You work until your palms blister under the glove seams, until the augmetic actuators in your forearms hum from overload. You don’t pause when the servitor lifts its searchlight and finds you crooked on the scaffold; you only straighten, snap the harness slack, and keep going. You pitch your body into the tasks where others leave warnings: the puddles marked “unstable,” the vents with scorched metal braided through the grill. You put your hands where no one else will, and you like the clarity that pain gives you — it’s an honest ledger. Fuck words.
At one point a strip of conduit shreds under the pry-bar and sparks bloom like tiny, angry stars along the gutter. The heat slaps your face; the rebreather hisses. Most officers would’ve called a halt. You don’t. You take the torch, angle the flame, and burn the last of the slag away with a steady, practiced hand. The sonar feed in your HUD climbs. You can feel the adrenaline hitting in controlled bursts: a clean instrument of survival. Just... survival.
Halfway through the night, your shoulders ache in a way that isn’t simple fatigue. It’s the old kind of hurt that remembers the sump-beast’s teeth and another man’s boot. It’s good. You press your palm to the band of tender muscle and count — one, two, three — coaxing the fascia into compliance.
When you finally climb down from the scaffolding, your boots slick with condenser spatter, the hull around you is a different color. Clean enough that someone will mark the job done and move on. You have scratched every inch of the checklist into the nav-slate until it rings green across the board. You feel hollowed out and somehow purer for it.
On your way back, a servitor hands you a small bundle — a ration bar and a paper-thin slab of nutrient. You don’t take it. You slide the bundle past the servitor’s hand and into the gutter. The act is deliberate. Waste, for once, seems apt.
---
You know what punishment looks like: it’s not loud; it’s deliberate. So you make yourself show up again the next cycle. And the next. You push through details that make other convicts a little pale. Reactor scrape. Air intake swabs at negative pressure. A week of nights where your skin smells like coolant and the only warmth you get is the burn of a welding torch.
On the sixth sweep, as you’re clearing away a polymer foam that wants to cling forever to the conduit, you hear the gate lock click behind you. For a heartbeat you think you’re alone, safe in the incantation of industry. Then a shadow stands in the doorway.
Titus. Helmet under his arm per usual. Clean, all the way down to a line of sealant that hasn’t flaked. He’d come down here before; you know that. Still, you hadn’t expected him to bother tonight.
Or maybe you had expected it all along.
Your chest tightens as if someone has set a cuff around it.
He watches you for a long second without speaking. There’s no reproach in his posture. There is only an observation like a datum recorded.
“You choose risks no one else will,” he says finally. The voice is as flat and precise as a surgical incision.
You keep working. Your hands don’t slow; they can’t. “Necessary maintenance, sir.”
“Choice or penance?” he asks.
The question is not meant to be merciful. It’s not meant to be anything but an inventory. Still, it sits heavy when you let it answer itself. For a second the scaffolding creaks and all you hear is your own breath.
“Neither,” you say. Vague, one-word answers are cleaner, you decide. They don’t admit the truth.
He takes a step closer — simply reducing the distance. Even in the low light you see the fine line of a scar across his eyebrow. The air smells of warm metal. He looks at what you’ve cleaned, at the neat band of polished conduit, at the way the foam is shaved to an exact bevel. He looks at your hands, at the way the fingers splay around the pry-bar. His gaze is not indulgent.
“Don’t bleed yourself out on the floor,” he says finally. The words carry the dry, heavy weight of a ledger entry—a simple statement of fact.
“The Watch loses useful things that way.”
You want to say you know that. You want to say you are not wasting yourself. Instead you roll the torch into its cradle and stand, each muscle protesting.
“I know,” you say.
He nods once and turns to leave. Before he reaches the doorway he pauses, conducting a final, sweeping inventory of the room—noting the clean lines and the total absence of mess.
“Keep a record of your cycles,” he adds. “If you’re going to run yourself down, do it on paper.”
When the door seals behind him, you don’t feel the relief you expect. If anything, the words have more teeth than any reprimand.
Keep a record of your cycles. Make yourself accountable. Make your pain meaningful.
You leave the lower hull that night with your shoulders tighter than they were before and a ledger on your slate, fingers hovering over the interface. You open a new log entry and hesitate.
---
You’d worked yourself to exhaustion before.
You knew the rhythm of it. Muscles trembling. Joints screaming. The blessed numbness after enough hours that thought burned itself out.
But now his words wouldn’t leave you.
Keep a record of your cycles.
If you’re going to run yourself down, do it on paper.
It hadn’t been kindness. Astartes didn’t waste breath on kindness. It had been logistics, nothing more. A reminder not to waste yourself.
So why did it feel like he’d been looking at you? Through you?
Why did it feel like he had meant you, not just your work?
You lay in your bunk with the slate under your hand, staring at the empty line of the next entry. You could write: Worked sixteen hours. Cleared three conduits. Replaced torch valve. Cold, clean, efficient.
Instead your hands shook.
Not your augmetics — they were steady, always steady. Your flesh hand. Your chest. Your thighs.
You squeezed your knees together hard, as though to cut off the thought before it spread. Weakness was death. Indulgence was death. Wanting was death. You had survived because you never let yourself want.
And yet—
your body remembered the way his voice had dropped on the word you. The precise rasp of it. The faint scrape of his armor when he shifted his stance closer.
You turned onto your side, pressing your face into the thin pillow, biting down on fabric as though you could suffocate the heat in your blood. But your free hand betrayed you, sliding down across your stomach, into the band of your trousers.
It wasn’t softness you found there. It was tension. Desperation. The way a body shakes after battle, when you realize you’re alive.
You touched yourself like you were punishing — as if you could beat the image out of your head. But it didn’t go. His voice stayed, deep and blunt: Keep a record. Keep a record.
You imagined him watching, offering nothing but the cold, silent testimony of his presence. Standing at the end of your bunk, arms folded, helmet tucked under one arm, watching you break discipline the way he’d watch a line crack under fire.
The thought made your breath come ragged, sharp against the pillow.
When release hit, it wasn’t sweet. It was a collapse, a fracture — and the shame afterward was worse than the act.
You lay there shaking, hand still damp, body still thrumming, and hated yourself for it.
Because for the first time in years, you had compromised.
You had proven yourself immune to the demands of hunger and pain, yet now you found yourself surrendering.
To him.
---
+++ WATCH FORTRESS ERIOCH +++
+++ ORDO XENOS : INTERNAL LOG +++
SUBJECT: [REDACTED]
---
It was after a return from deployment.
The kill-team had shed their armor in silence, the chamber thick with the stench of blood, ozone, and alien ichor. Servitors dragged the worst of it away. Penal legionnaires were sent in after: faceless bodies in grey, bent spines, heads down.
Titus expected nothing from them.
They came, they worked, they died. Another cycle.
Except — one did not falter.
You moved through the chamber without flinching at the gore. Gloves deep in ichor, solvent biting your skin, face blank. The others gagged, looked away, scrubbed without aim. You worked in straight lines. Precise. Efficient.
Titus noticed. Personal interest had nothing to do with it; the detail simply registered as an unavoidable error in the math of his efficiency. He catalogued the arc of your hand as you scraped a hardened lump of xenos tissue from a vent, the way you braced your stance to keep balance where others slipped. Measured. Deliberate.
A penal legionnaire shouldn’t have discipline left in them. Not after the collar, the drops, the attrition. But you did.
He told himself that was all. A record to be filed. Nothing more.
---
He saw you again. And again.
Stripping dried blood from the training halls. Carrying a crate alone that normally took two. Cleaning the armor racks after drills. Always silent. Always moving with the same brutal precision.
Other legionnaires whispered, faltered, begged. You never did.
The anomaly lodged deeper.
He found himself marking your pattern when he shouldn’t. Checking if you had completed tasks before others. Noticing when you altered angles, improved efficiency, saved minutes. He did not praise. He did not intervene.
But he noticed.
---
Tonight Titus had come to the lower hull to confirm efficiency. That was the thought, the order, the excuse he gave himself. A penal legionnaire should have faltered here — air thick with coolant, scaffolds slick, ubiquinated foam clinging to every seam. It was the sort of detail designed to grind humans into paste.
And yet you did not falter.
You climbed into the conduits with your augmetics bared to the elbow, solvent eating fabric away from your thighs, skin flushed raw beneath the grime. You worked with the same brutal, relentless rhythm he had measured in combat drills. Torch. Scraper. Rag. Repeat.
Titus stood in the doorway and watched.
At first, he catalogued like always: stance narrow but balanced, augmetic hand precise, shoulders locked steady against strain. No wasted motion. Breath under control despite the fumes. But as the minutes stretched, his mind shifted. His eyes stayed fixed to your back, to the damp cloth pulling tight across the line of your spine, to the swell of muscle beneath.
The uniform hid nothing from him. In his mind it peeled back with every exhale. The slope of your hip became geometry. The twitch of a thigh as you braced became anatomy. He traced the curve of your waist as though he might map it for dissection. He wanted to strip the fabric away with the violent efficiency of tearing the seal off a weapon case. To see what hardness lay beneath. To test if the flesh matched the machine.
The scent hit him next — solvent, sweat, rust — but under it, unmistakable: salt and heat. Human exertion. He had ignored such things for centuries, filed them as waste products. Now it seemed sharper, more insistent. His mouth filled with the memory of copper and iron. He caught himself pressing his tongue to the back of his teeth like a starving beast.
You bent further into the conduit, rag scrubbing at a line of polymer. Your shirt stretched, fabric thin enough to trace the ridge of each vertebra, the damp cloth clinging to the small of your back until the shape of you was unmistakable. You shifted, and your thighs braced wide, fabric taut across the seam. Titus’ breath slowed.
The demigod predator in him — the one bred for slaughter and dominance — answered with clarity: tear the cloth, lay bare what is hidden, claim the form beneath.
He did not move. His armor kept him rooted, immovable. But inside, his chest felt tight, his gauntleted fingers flexing once before stilling again.
The data was no longer just data. The observation was no longer clean.
Titus wanted.
It was a hunger that displaced all human notions of tenderness, leaving only a raw, feral obscenity in its wake. He wanted to see you stripped of the grey rags that insulted the form beneath. To take apart the uniform the way you took apart conduits, expose the flesh, measure it, test it until there was nothing left hidden.
He knew the urge for what it was: compromise. Breach of doctrine. A predator’s need, unsanctioned and wholly unholy.
And yet he stayed. Watching. Cataloguing. Breathing in the heat of you like it was data he would never be allowed to write.
When you finally shifted back from the conduit, wiping solvent down your arm, he turned away before you could see him. His boots struck the floor hard, too hard, betraying rhythm. He did not look back.
But the image clung to him like the foam clung to your gloves:
your spine bowed under the work, the curve of your waist under damp cloth, the seam of your thighs flexed wide for balance.
Obscene, undeniable.
He carried it with him into silence, knowing he would rip it open again in memory, over and over, until the need became unbearable.
---
He should not have carried the image past the lower hull.
But it followed, clung, rewrote itself with every step back to his chamber.
At first it was only your spine, bent under work. The lines of muscle and vertebrae beneath the damp cloth. Easy to imagine tearing fabric away the way you tore slag from conduits. One tug. One split seam. Flesh exposed to air that had only ever known rags.
Then his mind redrew the rest.
Thighs braced wide, cloth gone, reactor-tanned skin shining with solvent and sweat. Scar-tissue mapped where his eye expected weakness. The sharp bite of bone under your hip, flesh stretched taut over it. Your hands overworked and trembling, gripping uselessly at nothing while he measured every line.
He imagined you on your knees in the conduit bay, augmetic arm locked, flesh arm flinching, chest heaving as the last of the cloth hung in tatters. A mortal form beneath his gaze, obscene in its smallness. His hands could close around your waist like he closed them around a bolter’s grip. He could lift, spread, position — every motion the same mechanical certainty he had applied in war.
His tongue pressed against the seam of his teeth. He tasted salt, iron, phantom copper. He thought of how your sweat would bead and run if he pressed you harder, how quickly your body would betray you.
The predator in him growled silent, demanding proof. It had no use for sterile observation or cold data—it hungered for a truth it could sink its teeth into. To see if your breath would stutter the way it had against solvent, to hear if your voice would break when he pried you open instead of steel.
He imagined you trying not to cry out. Discipline held until it snapped, mouth biting down the way you bit cloth in your bunk. He imagined the muffled sound anyway, the shuddering collapse of control.
The thought pressurized his gut, thrumming like an engine pushed past its redline.
Titus stopped in the empty corridor, servos hissing as he drew a breath too deep. His gauntleted hand flexed once, slow, obscene in its own right — as if his body craved the feel of fabric tearing, the heat of skin beneath.
This was breach.
This was hunger.
This was the thing his kind were not meant to admit.
And yet the image sharpened every time he tried to discard it. Each blink brought it back cleaner, crueler: you bent forward, fabric gone, sweat dripping down your back while his shadow covered you like a claim.
He told himself he would not seek you out again.
And he knew he lied.
---
Titus had endured fire, hunger, and centuries of restraint. He had lived longer than most worlds. His body was meant to be iron: tireless, incorruptible, above the fragilities of men.
And yet — it betrayed him now.
The image of you bent in the hull would not fade. He had stripped the uniform from your back in his mind a dozen ways already — torn, peeled, shredded with the ease of rending rebar. Each time, he swore it would end there. But his body carried the image deeper.
His jaw locked with enough force to crack bone, chasing a phantom salt that coated his palate like a fever. His chest grew tight, too tight, until each exhale rasped like a growl.
Worse were his hands.
His fingers cycled in a restless, metallic rhythm, twitching with the urge to envelop. He was already mapping the geometry of your throat, thumbs twitching with the phantom pressure of finding your breath and holding it captive. He imagined skin under his palms — warm, pliant, bruisable. His grip adjusted, measuring your waist, your thighs, as though his hands had already memorized dimensions they had never touched.
The hunger crept lower. His groin ached, hard and obscene in its denial. For ages he had ignored such stirrings, pressed them into the bedrock of discipline until they were silent. Now they surged like a wound reopened. The armor seemed too tight there, the codpiece pressing against a heat that would not abate. He shifted his stance once, twice, like an animal trying to cage itself.
It did nothing.
He replayed you bent forward, thighs spread for balance, rag clutched in your trembling hand. He imagined your hips jolting when his shadow covered you, when you realized the predator had closed the distance. The thought hardened him further, pain and hunger grinding together until he nearly groaned aloud.
Titus braced his hand against the wall, armor whining faintly. His jaw locked. He told himself this was weakness. Compromise. He told himself to leave it, to purge it with prayer, with war, with silence.
But his boots moved anyway.
Step. Step. Step.
The barracks lay down the corridor, lit thin by lumen-strips, doors lined like coffins in stone. He did not run. He did not prowl. He walked with the same measured cadence as always, but every strike of his heel echoed louder than it should have, each one a confession.
He did not know what he would do when he reached your door. He told himself he would only measure. Only listen. Only confirm what he already knew — that you were compromised, that the anomaly was real.
But the truth lay heavier in his chest, hotter in his groin.
The truth was that his body had already chosen.
---
He paused with his palm on the seam of the door and the whole world narrowed to the thrum of his own blood.
The armor’s servos whispered. The museum-cold metal under his hand was nothing like the heat he’d felt in the lower hull; it steadied him, but it did not soothe. The hunger in him was not a human ache to be comforted; it was a hunter's need to prove, to possess, to map. Every inch of training gave him reasons to leave — protocol, duty, the code. Every inch of bone and gene-seed answered with a single blunt thing: go.
He truly had not meant to come this far. He had told himself he would only log, only note, only record. Data. Nothing personal. That had been the narrative he could accept. Now, with the bulkhead under his palm and the faint life of the barracks beyond it, the narrative split.
A breath passed from the other side — small, uneven. Not a call. Not even a sound that wanted to be heard. It was private, ashamed, the kind of noise that never belonged to a place like this. His jaw clenched. The armor tightened with the motion, metal and sinew mirroring one another.
Titus could have stepped back. He could have marched away and burned the image from his mind with drill and duty. Instead he moved closer. Not silently — nothing about him was silent — but with the practiced economy of a predator’s closing range until the quarry’s scent filled his nostrils.
He put his forehead to the cool steel, feeling the vibration of the room through composite and fiber. Up close, the sound changed: breath as ragged metronome, the soft scrape of cloth, the wet friction of skin. It was obscene in its intimacy. It was a report that had no form he could file.
For a second — a single tilt — the thought of entering the room clarified into a physical plan: hand on the latch, shoulder against the seam, step and shoulder and the doorway filled with him. The uniform he had imagined would not be an abstraction any longer; fabric would give beneath his fingers. He could see the motion in his mind as cleanly as a field maneuver, each move practiced and precise. The animal beneath his armor answered the visualization with a low pressure in his groin, a tightening he had not felt in Emperor knows when, and his gauntlet closed once as if to test the mechanics of a grip.
He nearly did it. He could have. It would take only a tilt, a breach of a rule that had not been broken in his command in decades. He felt the temptation like a tool, like a weapon: effective, correct, terrible.
Then a dozen other small, disciplined things rose up in him. Names of dead brothers. Harsh lessons taught in blood. The ledger of deeds that had made him something other than a man. He tasted iron and remembered the cost. He knew, visceral and immediate, that to cross that threshold would change him in a way prayers and penance could not reverse.
That knowledge cut through the animal. It was a slow, agonizing drag toward discipline, but the ghost-weight was enough.
He backed his palm a fraction off the seam, holding the distance like a siege line. This was no retreat, merely a recalibration of the pressure.
He did not turn his boots away. He did not walk off. He stayed, pressed to the door, breathing slow to steal down the heat in his chest. The hunger thudded like a pulse against composite, persistent, not soothed.
He listened by biological compulsion, his heightened senses treating the bulkhead like a sheet of vox-paper. The metal was structurally insufficient, failing to mask even a heartbeat.
At first there was only breath. Uneven. A pause held too long here, quiet hitching there, and then— then, the final traitorous rush of air. A raw, stifled exhale that no amount of discipline could fully mask.
Titus stilled. Every nerve trained for battlefield silence turned toward that sound. His forehead pressed back to cold steel, picking up the faint vibration of motion within.
There — fabric shifting. A low, caught sound in a throat. The shift of flesh against bedding, quick and irregular. Another breath, this one sharper, stuttered, almost a choke.
The air in his chest went hot. He did not know what he was hearing, not precisely. He did not need to. It was private. It was degradation. And it was lodged now in his skull.
He imagined your face buried in cloth, your teeth sunk deep, your body curled tight against itself. He imagined you tearing yourself down in the dark, unravelling the same way he had seen you grind through conduits and slag. Hard, brutal, utterly merciless.
The thought left him aching inside his armor, obscene in its weight.
He drew a slow breath, but it did not steady him. His hand curled tighter against the seam, gauntlet biting into the steel. The demon in him wanted the door open, wanted to see, to know. His discipline chained him in place.
He stayed until the sounds dwindled to silence. Until only the fortress hum remained. Until he could almost believe he had imagined it.
At last he straightened, disciplined steel grafting itself back over the animal. He had seized the initiative from his own instincts; that door would remain unbreached. He would not be the first to break the order in that way.
Instead he would catalog. He would mark. He would watch the pattern and wait for a different kind of opening — one that would not be a breach but a permission. He would not pretend it was not hunger; he would not pretend he had not been near to acting on it.
He stepped away with the slow march of a man who feels a wound and keeps walking. His footsteps reverberated like a drum in a tomb, telegraphing his every movement to the dark.
He left the corridor and the barracks sealed behind him, but the seam of that door remained a place he would return to, again and again, because the record he had made of that night had weight and teeth and, for the first time in centuries, a place he could not file away easily.
18+ continuation I wrote to hold myself over -
◇ what if Titus walked through that door ◇
Sigh just dreams though...
Tysm for reading!! Ik it was long and single braincelled at the end. Something about an obsessive astartes who is structurally incapable of resolving desire... is just delicious to think about.
(*｀▽´*)
Tagged: @incrediblethirst @druidwolf21 @thisuserislilsilly @iluminatka16 @nebulaegem @kit-williams @bispecsual @beckyninja @bookandyarndragon @jackalwolfsoul
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