FSF - Deathwatch - "Come with me if you want to live."/"This is how the world ends."
“There are worse ways to die,” she said.
“Would you say so?” he asked.
There was the passing of a moment wherein the space between them was filled with no more than the sound of the wind, the crackle of the glaciers as they shifted.
“Well,” she said with a bit of a snort. “In fairness I must confess that I’ve experienced precious few of them myself. But secondhand? You may take my word upon it.”
“Perhaps I shall do so,” he answered after the silence of another moment. The sun had vanished beneath the blowing snowstorm as the planet’s elliptical orbit carried it away from the star that had momentarily warmed its surface. As it refroze, the turbulence created in its thin jacket of air covered the fresh remnants of battle, scars not unlike those that lurked beneath older layers of the ice.
“Generous of you, mon-keigh,” her voice rasped in his ears.
He shrugged his remaining shoulder, a scrape of the cooling, silver-painted pauldron against the ice. “It seems it would be churlish to contest such things, now of all times.”
The pair lay quietly together, perhaps a meter apart. One was a motionless, skull-masked figure armored in darkest blue-black sprawled upon its back, laid out beside an emptied weapon nearly as long as she was tall, whilst the other was a twisted snarl of ceramite plate and machinery that hardly resembled anything human - neither of them a threat to the other any longer. As the snow settled upon them, obscuring craftworld insignia upon the one, Ordo sigils and oath-markings upon the other, he managed to make the tiniest motion of one hand. “Was it destined to so end, do you think?”
“Once the portals closed, yes,” she answered.
“I don’t mean this battle. Have you ever wondered if the moment a primitive human creature took up a sharpened rock from Terran soil long ago, was all the rest set in motion? Was the meeting of our kinds a mere formality?”
Frost crackled as she lifted one hand a mere few centimeters and then let it down once more. “Who can say. Perhaps there was a point things could have gone differently. Why do you ask?”
“If there are such moments in the past, perhaps they yet lie in the future, as well. Not for us, of course,” he added, unnecessarily.
“Not for us,” she agreed. They lay in silence once more until a quiet beep echoed thrice. “What was that?” asked the one that bore the mask of Maugan Ra.
“The support system for my organic components is at critical power,” replied the tangle of machinery that had once been a space marine. By this point, the snow from the condensing atmosphere lay so thickly upon them that each of them had been reduced to shades of dull white.
The dark reaper did not reply to this admission for some moments. “For what little it is worth, there are better ways to die, as well,” she ground out.
“Mm. I had always hoped for it to be at the height of battle, my brothers and sisters at my side, striking one last blow in the name of mankind,” he said dryly.
Her chortle was a short rasp of rusted metal against barbed wire. “I cannot grant that wish, human,” she said as the sound faded. “The most I can offer is quietly, in the company of an enemy.”
He was quiet, sparing a moment to listen to the wind as his auto-senses faded. “Well,” he said eventually. “I suppose I can live with that.”
There was silence, and then she crowed with laughter, joined by the vox-distorted voice of the space marine. In time it faded, the last sound made by living beings upon the cold planet as the long night closed in.
