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May 15

Underhive on Praelucente Alpha 🦪✨️

Fic I wrote about @primarchpenissucker Iridiate Primus Lysander and my oc apothecary biomancer Nipharia going on a mission into the underhive where Lysander grew up. Sfw action adventure, but its got some cool fighting in it!

Wasn't gonna post but its for Gisa's 40k fic weekend

CONTAINS: Violence, Angst, Fluff, Eldritch Monsters, talking about the sexual happenings within the Iridiates, possible brainwashing being discussed

Apothecary Nipharia bit into the charred hiverat for the first time with the gusto of a spoiled brat trying a yet unsampled sweet.

When the things brains popped greasily on his tongue, he paused, every bit of the wonder and delight within him twisting as it took every conscious thought he had to keep himself from puking.

The Primus, leaned against the same sturdy railing on the walkway they had paused upon, stared him down with something akin to righteous glee. He took a bite of his own blackened - and still furry, Nipharia noted with a shiver of hysterical horror - meat and chewed loudly, the bones cracking between his teeth.

“Better not waste it. This is a delicacy down here.” Lysander said, the words mushed and messy as he spoke with his mouth full.

With some effort, Nipharia swallowed, ignoring every protestation of his body. With his warpsight, he could watch the aggression within the Primus spike and then decline, amusement sending thrills of violet and red curling around the phantom outline of his head. Everyone the blind biomancer “saw” was through the context of the warp. A clear body, featureless, except for where the humors concentrated, making every being a swirling cosmos of their own life forces. Like the bioluminescent lights of a deep sea organism, they flared and spun and shifted. Deep within the Primus's chest, past the glassy crystals of his now significantly smaller breasts, a hint of gold, whirling and blooming in shining petals before being swallowed by the constant agony of blackened pain.

For the tiniest hint of a moment, there had been respect.

Nipharia smiled, tilting his head.

“It's…well…I'm glad this was a treat for you, little angel.”

Lysander scoffed, the sound nearly lost in the din of the factorums below them. The walkway they stood upon was close enough to feel the heat of industry. To Lysanders eyes, the whole of the metropolis before them would be bathed in the hellish light, stark oranges and smog so thick they could not see farther than a few kilometers before even the tall jagged spires became foggy and formless in the great darkness above them. But Nipharia was looking at the Primus, watching the warmth and affection brought on by the pet name spread from Lysander's chest to his face. Quickly, he recovered.

“Oh, fuckin’ shit. I'm kidding. It was all bad. Be grateful you didn't know the rat.”

They had become closer since the Primus's emergency visit to Nipharia's medbay. There were teeth in the younger Astartes’ words, but very few of them were for Nipharia directly. He was unhappy to be back here, in the manufactorums of his youth. It was as obvious to Nipharia as the pulsing signature far below. The creature they had come to exterminate.

Nipharia signed, turning the dripping greasy meat delicately in his gauntleted hands as if looking for a better angle to approach for his next bite. It wasn't sugary. Or sweet. Or sticky. He felt like pouting, slightly, but pushed through that trait of his.

“I was unaware that you kept the organs in. What an interesting practice.”

Lysander gestured with his food at the decapitated rat held in the Apothecaries hands.

“The organs have all the protein. You fucked up by eating the head first. That's the best part. Only downhill from there.”

Nipharia frowned.

“I shall finish the thing. And we shall proceed down.”

“You sound like you're trying to convince yourself.”

“Hm.”

Through the crowds they strode, two glorious iridescent statues given life. In full power armor, they looked very much like their cousins. Regal, intimidating. Internally, Nipharia was cramped. The armor was always such a burden. It was rigid where the apothecary craved softness; cramped where breathability was desired. Nipharia would much prefer to walk barefoot into the burning air of the underhive, picking up each of these neglected little babes and loving them like his soul so craved, but he knew what lay deeper in the facility, and facing it required his utmost protection. For now, anyway.

Lysander had warned they would not be welcome, and yet there was no warning in existence that could prepare Nipharia for the hatred that poured from every single worker's soul as they forced their way through. The mob of manufactorum workers burned like hateful stars in Nipharia's warpsight, and only moved at the last possible moment before being crushed beneath boots each the breadth of their emaciated shoulders. Nipharia's display within his helm was calibrated with sound cues instead of visual indicators, and he had to lower the internal volume as alerts indicating “anti-Imperium threats” and “impending violence” began to ping incessantly.

+My love?+

Nipharia intoned, psychically reaching out to Lysander, grappling to his presence in a moment of rising panic like a drowning man to a lifeboat, tossed in a sea of vivid swirling red and black. The Primus, leading the way, did not respond. His shields were firmly up, and Nipharia huffed, activating their vox-link with a flick of intent. Forcing through Lysander's mental protections now was at the very least a breach of trust.

“My Primus?”

“What?”

Lysander’s vox twisted his already violent words into an animalistic snarl. Nipharia scanned the crowd, spotting over the fearful and angry heads of the many a line of soulless bodies, dragged out of the belly of the manufactorum proper. As the apothecary tore his view away from these pitiful corpses and the many wounded that accompanied them, the floor beneath them thundered, driving great curtains of dust and debris from the vaulted ceiling in rains of blackened ash. That, more than the eldritch creature currently thrashing its way up the grand ferrocrete mining shaft that yawned not a hundred meters ahead, finally drove the crowds of workers into a panic. Many tripped and fell before Lysander's feet and most escaped unharmed due to the effort the Primus still put into monitoring his passage, but when one missing a gaping section of his ribcage stumbled and fell and did not scramble out of the way quickly enough, Nipharia acted.

In one motion he accelerated in his power armor, slamming Lysander with the blunt face of his shoulder pauldron, throwing the Astartes off course by merely a fraction of a degree. It was barely enough. The Primus' hand was on his golden chainsword and he was spinning to unsheath it before Nipharia could right himself from the movement with the unsteadiness of the ground. As the wounded man scrambled away, Lysander brought the snarling blade to point resolutely at the gorget on Nipharia's neck.

“Enough!!” No longer using the private vox channel, the Primus' voice roared as powerful as any of the machinery here, every bit of the bloodlust within him manifesting in red hot lines that broke his form into burning rays of phosphorescent agony. “You have no right.”

Nipharia waved a hand in display, voice rising to a frantic pitch. “Please! The creature comes. These people…they…I do not think they will escape unharmed unless I assist. I have to assist them.”

The underlying message was clear. I will not break the chain of command. Permit me.

Lysander revved his sword and turned as the first slender transparent tendrils of the leviathan stretched to grapple upon the crumbling metal of the vaulted ceiling, bending beams as wide and strong as their bodies as if they were made of melting candy instead of the Imperiums finest ore. The glassy eyes of the MK II opalite helm burned as it turned back to face Nipharia.

“Do what you want. It doesn't matter. They won't accept assistance from you.”

He spun, cape emblazoned with the Legions finest Heraldry trailing like glass in Nipharia's warpsight, and smashed a fallen piece of debris blocking him from his eldritch prey with his unoccupied gauntlet, clearing his path.

Nipharia watched the first of the creatures' eyes reach their level, and was forced to look away. He was too vulnerable now, too utterly exposed. His shields had dropped sympathetically with the suffering around him, craving to reach out and pull the innocent and wounded into his warm psychic embrace, and if he stared into this creature's eyes and saw the colors that are not colors…he would not be able to put his Flame out when it rose like a furnace fire in his mind.

So Nipharia turned and removed his helmet, disengaging the seals with a series of hisses as he began to field the survivors back towards the entrance to the manufactorum. They scrambled away, screaming, and Nipharia felt his hearts break in his chest at the fear and suffering and hatred he was awash in. Little purple and black and yellow bolts of energy and emotion dagger out of bodies small enough to crush in one accursed hand. They weren't moving fast enough. They were too uncoordinated. Nipharia knew what he must do, even if he despised having to do it. In one moment, he inhaled deeply, cycling the energies around and within him into positions of power. He centered himself, becoming the apex of the vortex of energies that had begun to vortex about his soul like a whirlpool.

Nipharia lowered his shields, and allowed the tide within him to flow outwards, pouring down his soul and out, outwards, covering and consuming every screaming frightened being. At once, the screaming silenced, as if stolen from their very lungs. A cacophony of panic, quieted so absolutely that an eerie echo could be heard before being drowned by the din of combat and structural collapse. Several hundred souls were hollowed out, and in the space created, Nipharia left transcendent peace. Love. Obedience.

+Good. My good little ones. So sweet.+

The apothecary whispered, his forehead burning where his pearlescent eye mutation lay. He wanted, suddenly, to sob as he watched the colors within each transparent astral body snuff out like candlelight, replaced with the same soft warm lilac purple, filling every inch of their minds and bodies.

Nipharia strained reflexively to soften the blow, to make the sensation of stripping away the natural will as painless and undamaging as possible. He whispered soft assurances, infused his will into the lapping tide of his power. At the same time, he navigated the thrashing floor, torn apart in a hideous screech of metal as the creature behind him fought the Primus.

+This way. You want to go this way. You want to make me proud, don't you? Yes. Of course you do.+

Nipharia sent over and over the image of the open air outside, the wide doorway shining brightly, and the crowds moved, even the wounded standing upon broken limbs to drag themselves to freedom. So immune to pain were they in Nipharia's psychic embrace that they did not even feel it when their injuries worsened under the strain of walking on them and blood began to trail behind their procession...

Nipharia felt his power armor catch him as he weakened; his body mirroring the fatigue using such a power left upon his soul. He caught his breath in the choked air, dragged his shields back up, and ran to assist his Primus near the tunnel at the far end of the great manufactorum chamber.

Luckily, Lysander was perhaps the greatest fighter in the whole of the Iridiates, and he needed little help.

The creature was a vast net of glittering stars in Nipharia's vision, like a serpentine flame that branched endlessly at its numerous heads and tails, creating the impression of a dark pool laden with diamonds. Every movement caught a hundred of its eyes in the light of the cosmos, and they glittered and flashed in a way that made the apothecary's biology croon in need. The bright comet of red and black that was Lysander danced around it, dashing behind terrain and debris, the tension in his body coiling beautifully before each strike.

The leviathan screamed at every tearing contact with the Primus's chainsword, the sound-that-was-not-sound it made vibrating the very air around them. This was what their bodies were made for, all and all. The frequency alone turned the poor fallen workers who could not stand to paste instantly, their insides congealing and squeezing out of every orifice as the air itself ripped them inside out. Nipharia watched as Lysander's still ample reservoirs channeled the blast and burned off, making each step lighter and quicker. They all had timers like this against the monstrosities of the warp. The extra mass they kept, once it ran low, meant they would begin suffering the same maddening fates as any of their cousins.

Nipharia pulled his bolter and without hesitation began to lay down fire as he approached the combat. Each round, as they struck true, warped the colors of the undulating thing's body and it thrashed, oozing through a nearby wall in an attempt to escape, its tendrils and claws scraping desperate acidic furrows into the melting ferrocrete flooring. Lysander went low as one of its desperate tendrils whipped the air he had just occupied with force enough to decapitate him and he rolled, his heartsbeat pounding in a frantic hungry rhythm.

Nipharia spun to avoid another tendril and backed to cover in a chunk of fallen ceiling as the Primus lunged, like a ghoulshark smelling blood. He had seen his opening, and now slid on the layer of ooze the things many wounds had already laid down, carving a line along the beast's bared flank as he went. With a final flourish, the thing was done, its head split roughly in half, and it fell dead to the floor.

The prism of beauty that had once been its soul, far more elaborate and gorgeous than any humans would ever be, was snuffed out in an instant. Now the beautiful thing was merely a bloated corpse, ugly and heavy and gray.

The manufactorum was, at long last, truly silent.

Nipharia came close, near the body. They both stood for a while, not speaking. The apothecary clasped his hands, withdrawing into his own mind for a while. Some things were too painful to share. What to say, over just one of the thousands that had forced its way through the hiveworlds shields, and fallen to the same fate?

“It was beautiful.” Nipharia said eventually, and Lysander made a noise of agreement, before flicking the ooze off of his chainsword onto the rubble and turning to face his brother.

“Are they alright? I felt you.”

Nipharia shook his head somberly. He was grateful that he did not need to explain.

“Physically? The vast majority. Mentally? Spiritually? Not enough of them. And…I cannot say how many will recover fully from what I did. It is…it is my last resort, always, and it is almost never the right choice. The sooner I go to them, the sooner I can begin restructuring their will to live. If I act quickly-”

Lysander cut him off, his voice a low hiss.

“Why pretend to care?”

Nipharia shook his head, stunned.

“‘Pretend'?”

“Yes. Pretend. You have no concept of life down here. This is more of a holiday to you than a mission, even, isn't it?”

Nipharia put his bolter back in its holster and pulled his helmet free, his hair askew in loose, sweat slick curls that covered none of the scarring about his eyes. He ensured it, so he could stare Lysander down, even if he could not do so literally.

“You speak from pain, brother. Not from truth.”

Lysander swore, a phrase Nipharia had never heard before, and removed his own helmet.

“And you think you know my pain? Because you…you fucking, I don't know, did your little tricks on me and fucked your way into my mind? Saw me naked, touched me?”

Nipharia stood tall and went to speak but Lysander wasn't through. The Primus removed his own helm, mag-locking it to his belt, and gestured broadly with his palms, voice clear and pained.

“Don't act like you know me. You can invite me to navigate you down here, you can aid as many workers as you'd like, Throne, you can even try a hiverat because it makes you feel good to feel like you're part of this. But you'll never understand what it was like to grow up here.”

Lysander laughed, sharp and incredulous.

“None of you lot even remember anything about anything before fucking each other day-in and day-out came along!”

He shook his head, baring his teeth, and cursed again. Nipharia had psychically reached to lap gently against the walls of his soul, trying to comfort him even as he lashed out, pleading to be allowed to soothe even just a little of that ache.

“Stop, stop it. You may not feel like Lucien, but I know…I know you want the same things he does.”

The air rang with Lysander's final words, the broad walls throwing his voice far and wide. Nipharia felt within his soul a great pity, winding tighter and tighter with his dawning pride in the young Astartes. He approached his next words with caution, and spoke slowly, monitoring the emotions within his Primus.

“I share many of the philosophies of our Father, Lysander. His love of life. His desire for peace. His understanding of the beauty of the natural world. However…”

Minutely, the rage lessened. Just the barest hint of confusion, swirling yellow streamers that curled about Lysander's head…so Nipharia continued.

“That does not mean I follow the Primarch mindlessly.”

Nipharia knelt by the body of the creature, reaching out to touch the rapidly dissolving fatty mass, stroking the fingertips of his gauntlets tenderly against the sagging flesh.

“I was the child of a pleasure slave. Her name and life is lost to me, but she was of this hive.” Nipharia said, simply. “She did not survive my birth. I was adopted by childless nobles, who, for all their glory and power and money, could not bear young. I was told all my life that I had escaped hell, that the only thing I would have amounted to was a full belly for another down here.”

He did not speak for a moment, and with some effort, began again, voice thick with restraint. He stroked the creature's body, over and over, as if any comfort could be given to the dead.

“I only began to remember these things about myself when I first began to serve outside of the Radiata System. Away from Lucien.”

Lysander inhaled sharply, and Nipharia knew he was intuiting meaning from the words. Would he find them traitorous?

“That is all I have been able to remember. Centuries of service, and only recently do I find the courage to question why things are the way they are. When the opportunity arose, to journey down here…I thought it would spark something. Perhaps give me more insight.”

“And has it?”

Nipharia smiled softly, standing back to his feet. He realized he has also shed a few kilos now, the psychic death throes of the creature having taken its toll on his body.

“No. Only confirmed what I already knew.”

He reached out, once more, brushing tender hands against Lysander's mind and soul. To his relief, he was permitted. His touch was light as he communicated his truth, his pure intent.

“All I was made for…All I am…is love, sweet one. All I wish is to ease the burdens of others. I would tend to them, even if the desire to do so comes from some…nefarious source, in the end.”

Lysander seemed to melt slightly, under his touch. Warmth bloomed within him, a desire, not for raw carnality, but for care. Within him, sharp as ice and white as snow, was suspicion, always guarding his heart. Nipharia hummed sympathetically, opening his arms, and spoke once more.

“I know. I know how cruel it must be, to be made this way. I would never take your rage, or your suspicion. I would merely take the pain. I would teach you love, your own love.”

A moment passed and Lysander came, all 1200+ kilos of him, clad in power armor of finest make, and embraced his brother. It was a private thing, and Nipharia cleaned his gauntlet on a cloth before he softly placed it against Lysander's hair, nestling the Primus as well as he could against his own power armor. As he pressed a kiss to the younger Astartes, atop his head, he knew he must speak once more, and did so in a whisper.

“The Imperium will not last, like this, will it, pretty darling? Not with this cruelty. The Legion…if it is to survive what I fear is coming…it will need your rage. Do not let anyone take it from you, no matter what you are put through.”

They stayed like that in the dust and rubble filled manufactorum for a minute or so. Nipharia was pleased. He sensed no outrage from his patient, his Primus. Good.

Good.

Nipharia laughed gently, amused.

“Now. I must try and save as many as I can before we return to receive our accolades. And then I am going to put you on a nutrient regiment to regain this lost weight. If that is too difficult for you to maintain…”

The apothecary tapped his breastplate knowingly.

“Please, come visit me for an additional supplement anytime. Or, if you just wish to chat. I promise, I can multitask.”

#WH40KOCfic #warhammer 40k #warhammer 30k #warhammer oc #legio ii iridiates #others oc: lysander #nipharia #my fic #im not a nsft writer tbh #im more of a hurt/comfort with action #mommy? sorry. mommy? sorry. mommy?

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