I TOLD YALL I WAS UP TO NO GOOD!!! AND THIS IS ONLY 1 OF 2 PARTS (well, the other is done... but un-beta'd) PS: super special thank you to @megsdoodletag and @yestheantichrist for helping clean up this long ass monster of a fic!!! IT'S TAG TIME LALALALA!!!! @syrospit @nightlordbrainrot @moqylodge @technoarcheologist @runiceye @godofhonse @sinistermojo @tanknode @grimdark-raccoon @kit-williams @undeaddream @thevoidscreams @beckyninja @bispecsual @ma1dmer @primarisly-marooned @justfreakynothingelse @lemon-russ @pluvio-tea @the-raven-lady @historitor-bookshelf @thunderhawk727 @ultramarenis @noxassula @bookandyarndragonwritesdark @solspina if i forgot anyone or you want on or off tags let me know, enjoyyyyy!!!
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It was a rather violent fall from your hard-earned station, to say the least.
You weren't demoted, or court-martialed, nor found grossly negligent. Not a single choice you made factored into the whole situation happening at all.
No, that blame lay squarely on the bastard whims of fate and chance.
Or, more accurately, the blame lay on the auspec-sweep personnel failing to adequately address both a Gloriana-class Battleship using a nearby sun's gravitational field to slingshot herself near; and a Strike-Cruiser hurtling towards your own in a prime flanking position.
You were First Officer to the Shipmaster, the lady Marmeladov. She was an aged woman, yes, but not dulled, or made any less a sight to behold by her many, many years. In her infinite wisdom, she commanded an egress from the oncoming assault via the command dais; a raised platform of polished metal and stone. An impossible, unachievable egress—or at very least, enough of one to bank starboard, attempting to round on the vessel and give a clear fire pathway.
She was not quick enough to cripple the enemy Cruiser, even if the hits had landed.
The punishment followed immediately thereafter, streaks of artillery racing across the void, lighting up the holo-display's threat recognition.
The Sword-class Frigate escorting your ship tried to intercept the barrage, valiantly taking the Gloriana's attack—you watched through the huge, armoured viewport windows as her void-shields burned back in waves like gossamer, and saw the flash of her reactor collapsing—the air within the vessel causing a rare combustion within the void. It birthed a new star in the endless dark for a fathom of a second, as fire tore through her in her death throes.
Marmeladov seized the opportunity given by a thousand, thousand lives thrown to the nothing and sent a lance at the approaching enemy Cruiser. Only for your ship to be jolted by a hulking laser-battery stampeding across the port side, as the Gloriana took another pot-shot over the ghastly distance it was quickly reducing.
High on the command deck, elevated above the crew on a vaulted loft, you had the perfect view of the slurry of internal dialogue recounting how the void shield seethed at the blow, still standing.
Servitors twitched at their stations on the platform below, some freezing mid-task, others repeating the same motion over and over as if caught in a loop—then, you watched them drop dead under the strain of the machine spirit's protests.
A return volley of lance-fire jetted from your ship, but the angle was wrong; your crews could not account for the enemy Cruiser's steep approaching angle.
Still, the hit caught an accidental mark against the looming Gloriana, even if it only glanced off her immense shielding.
Nigh in tandem, a ghastly lurch rattled your vessel again, sending the void shields to breaking. But the blow upon your ship was not from the assailing Cruiser. It was, instead, the Gloriana's immense artillery that decisively crippled your protective cocoon, slowing you down while the massive vessel charged closer. Marmeladov nearly fried the ship's thruster vectors desperately trying to outmanoeuvre the incoming Gloriana's hulking ram—causing the carcass of your escorting Frigate to be devoured in place of you.
Then, everything got even worse.
Scrawled in plating the size of hive-spires across the Gloriana's bow, the wretched signage of the VIIIth Legion came into view. Just as the traitor Cruiser jammed its snout into the side of the launch bay, bearing with it turned-heretic, skin-wearing abominations.
In response, your vessel's machine spirit screeched. The cogitator interfaces, wired directly into the ship’s systems, sparked up with her anger.
Some fool in the gantry barked a prayer to the Emperor of Mankind. It redoubled among other staff, murmured here and there—not officially, never officially—but often enough that it became a background hum beneath the battle. Wasting time on faith in a situation like this never even occurred to you. There was only action, only following through on your Shipmaster's rapid contingency response. Only her commands to seal as many bulkheads between the bay and everything else as quickly as possible.
There was no decisive reason to board, not when a meagre display of broadside firepower—let alone a few laser-batteries—from the Gloriana could've killed everyone on the ship anyway.
You realised what Marmeladov already knew. Nothing could stop what worse death was coming. No amount of coordination or codifying logistics could stand against the tide hellbent on crashing.
Even then, Shipmaster Marmeladov tried to do something—detonate the artillery stores, have the soldiery collapse as many bridging walkways as possible—but the Night Lords buried their claws in, regardless.
It was simply sport for them.
Howls began to rattle up from the deck plates. Horror running rabid and rife in the innards, still far away enough to maintain proper process, but near enough that the itch of terror had begun to creep up everyone's backs.
The intership vox cut in, then cut out, and finally vaulted across a channel in a flurry of crackles, from one station to another. One section of the ship reported boarders. Another reported nothing at all; then stopped responding entirely. Internal pict-feeds were brought up on the secondary hololithic displays, but instead of clarity, they showed disjointed, flickering scenes: a corridor empty one second, then filled with something tall and jagged the next.
Attempts to hail the Astropathic choirmaster fell dead as the hundred separate vox-links quickly became an overlapping cacophony of gunfire, las-discharge, wet tearing, and screaming. It all blended together as the other officers coordinated sabotage efforts; as much as they could when their proxies were faced with trans-human man-flensers. The orchestra of communications grew louder and louder until each line cut to static, one by one.
They all went out the same way: wet crunching, the scrape of armour against the plated floors, until finally, came the fizzing of dying vox.
Then, at last, silence reigned supreme.
Your Shipmaster insisted upon a last stand, as she was wont to.
First, a remote tripping of the actions. She tried—and tried—and tried, again and again, to override the Ship-spirit's prerogative, but the old girl would not abide the risk of taking her master down with her. Too many years spent with a single person at her helm had made the great vessel fussy over how she died. Ever a stubborn thing. Too spiteful to perish as anyone commanded, itching for a confrontation rather than a gutting, but the great ship would get no say in a matter already decided by the armoured parasites crawling about in her guts.
And so, another contingency was enacted.
In a command deck full of fear-frozen fellow officers and elite staff, it was you who volunteered to manually engage the detonations of the bridge.
No one protested, even knowing it was suicide for you. Namely, because it was suicide for everyone on the deck. The entire structure would crumple in on itself—and yet the task had to be done. Deny the traitors their spoils. Deny them access to the records. Deny them their man-flesh pelts. Take them all down with you.
Your peers opened the blast-doors enough for you to slide through the middle parting, detonator in hand.
The very instant you were out, you were doused in amber warning lights flashing in swirling arcs, warning of a reactor meltdown. Shadows festered in the hallway at the end of the long, open gantry as the lumens flickered in and out of life, painting the cavernous passageway, broad enough to march a whole human regiment through, in strobing confusion.
The ship groaning was no anomaly. It would do that constantly, regardless of whether she was hurt or not: ever a deep, metallic chorus of creaking machinery, thundering engines, and the distant roar of her reactors.
Truthfully, that noise never stopped.
Now, though, it was overpowered—by agony.
There was no sense to the way screams travelled up from the depths below as you crossed the overpass. It had only worsened as you stepped over the threshold into the familiar halls and stopped in your tracks. Somehow, the clamour chased up the pipes, down the vents, and back from the command deck. Sobbing. Wailing. It grew louder and louder, until it all sounded, for a moment, like laughter. Wild, braying laughter. The ship's many veins and capillaries of hollowed steel warped the echoes of panic into every variable of emotion, disfiguring the torture of the lives onboard into senseless racket. Even the ship's architecture made it worse. The arched buttresses, ribbed vaults, and walls covered in worn reliefs allowed for echoes to carry into infinity.
The sound stopped so suddenly you didn't realise it at first.
It wasn't until you noticed just how quickly quiet had swallowed your surroundings, that you swung your gaze back ahead.
Then came the most gutting sight of all.
A ways down, where the winding corridor bent to a junction, you first saw them: saturated in glistening crimson, and tall enough for the strange, back-swept, wing-like protrusions of their helmets to almost scrape the wide passageway's roofing.
The foremost one with the tallest crest had a halberd ending in a grizzly, meat-wet chain-blade rested upon its pauldron.
The lumens flickered for a moment, then returned. It gave the abominable illusion of halos, as plume after plume of heavy condensation vented from their helm grills; accompanied by the chittering, khch-khch-khch of inter-vox-communications bouncing off the walls towards you.
Seeing them, even so far away, had laced you with such a complete and utter wave of mortification that taking a blind step backwards had felt more akin to falling off a canopy deck—as if the ship's artificial gravity had jolted to a sharp corner axis momentarily, before the stabilisation gimbal evened out.
The lumens flickered out again, and when they came back, the midnight-clad monsters were looking directly at you.
Again, the lights seized, leaving you in the dark longer than before. Power armour was by no means a silent thing. It was a sarcophagus of loud metal and hissing servos—which left little room for misinterpreting it growing closer—especially as the racket of sabatons scraping against the decking in a forward rush echoed near.
You ran back toward the command deck, pushing yourself past the burning in your lungs and managing to reach the far side of the gantry.
It was good that you had, because they had quickly approached the rigged section of corridor threshold. One stopped right beside the spot where a steel-wall plate hid the payload's receiver.
You saw now that it had hands nailed to its pauldrons. And Skulls. Skull helms—helms strung to its hips.
What fresh hell must it have crawled out of?
It stopped, and it stared.
Then, it looked right at where a fat swathe of thermoplastic explosives sat, albeit hidden behind clusters of wires and sheets of metal. Regardless, you took the opportunity handed to you with a hale and whole certainty. The destruction would boil the entire corridor, along with those abominable things. It'd send you flying no matter how far you got to the command deck.
But the detonator in your hand did not respond. No matter how many times you mashed at it with your thumb. The mechanism was dead.
And with it, the terms of your fellow crew's deaths were no longer self-made.
Failure was a bitter draught, but there was still one option. Even if it was no longer a complete denial. You only had the thought of escaping beyond the reach of the monsters.
A wave of nausea clawed at your gullet, and you swayed; stumbling but staying on your feet.
You drew your las-pistol from the holster at your hip.
The skull-faced abominations grew closer down the long bridge. They were eager, hunched like predators, and hastening their paces.
You raised the barrel to the soft flesh beneath your chin, and the one at the front with red-tinted mitts tilted its helm at you.
But in that eternal hesitation, the realisation that your crewmen would not know the plan had failed—not until the traitors were on the deck with them—wormed its way into the forefront of your thoughts.
It took little more than that to send you turning your aim from yourself, and to the things ahead instead.
One, two, three bursts of las, bathing the free fall into the ship's guts around you in hellish flashes of molten after-burn. The wretch at the front took the brunt of the marks, but the heavy armour around its torso practically ate the hits.
You aimed higher, going for the head, taking step after back-pedalling step, keeping your reticule straight.
Each successive strike boiled a strip of paint off the brute's helm.
It broke into a sprint, then.
You kept firing, still trying.
Round after round raced at the thing coming for you, striking it, but not slowing it. Your weapon glowed, raging with the rapid fire; but you tried again—again—again—until the power-cell shrieked.
Through your gloves, you could feel the boiling core raging into death. White-hot plasma foamed at the barrel's mouth, leaving you without any means to keep up the act.
You turned.
And ran.
The clang-clang-clang-clang of heavy, plated feet landing and pushing off the grated bridge behind you, triggering some latent memory of an auspecs lock-on warning. Especially with how it grew faster, and faster—closing in, almost on target. Almost on you.
But the thing had too much distance to cover.
You threw yourself into the tiny crack left open of the blast-door, and screamed for Marmeladov to let the great metal wall slam. Shut it—shut it—shut it—make the monsters claw at a meter of steel in their faces.
In a flurry, you ran to your Shipmaster's side, heaving in great gulps of air as panic filled your heart.
You had scarcely got a word out, but in the end, that didn't matter in the slightest.
The blast-door screeched as warning klaxons flashed across the overhead hololith displays, turning the once-disciplined chamber into a raucous hellhole.
Your head had whipped around so fast it stung for a second, and you watched as gauntlets ferreted into a gap in the middle.
For a moment, the sheer insanity of the situation made you wheeze in disbelief.
You glanced to the floor of the threshold, and wedged in the closing panels was a single ceramite boot.
One man rushed to the doorway, holding a las-gun, firing wildly at the opening; clever, and yet mad.
The revving tip of a monstrous glaive came down on him like a guillotine in an instant—sending a deluge of insides spraying outwards on the fall. Then it withdrew, clutched in the red-plated hand of the one you'd shot at. The beast really had been right on your ass as the doors had shut—or hadn't shut—evidently.
You stumbled back in horror, clutching your fried las-pistol as the man crumbled to his knees in a slough of blood.
The rest of the chain-glaive wielder's armoured forearm managed to fit in the steadily widening gap.
A smoke-bomb was tossed from behind it. Everything was swallowed by the haze absurdly fast. In a panic, you pelted your fried las-gun at whatever horrible shadow you thought was moving closer in the smog. The empty weapon pinged off ceramite with a ringing chime. Ceramite, inside the command deck, could only mean one thing. They had made it inside, and they had come for you all.
You forced yourself to swallow a scream.
But the others hadn't swallowed theirs.
That screaming was suddenly everywhere.
Marmeladov had risen from her throne beside you, but could not get far with the ports plugged into her temples. She was yelling for you to find cover, to run—frantically reminding you of the distance to the escape pods. She strained on her leash to the vessel, and you had to resist the urge to unfasten her from the interface. If she were wrested from the cables of the dying spirit, the ship would kill her on the disconnect out of one last show of possessive spite.
She shoved you to flee from the dais, and it pained you to take the step back from her.
But your Shipmaster's orders were law.
You ceded, even if it was agony to uphold her command.
In the carnage, you barely managed to catch yourself from falling off the steps.
You steadied and turned just in time to see one of the hulking, armoured monsters barrel straight toward Marmeladov's junior lieutenant, Dmitri. It seized him by the throat and lifted him effortlessly, his boots kicking above the floor. For a heartbeat, he was still alive—eyes wide, trying to speak—before the gauntlet'd grip tightened. Bone gave way with a crack so wet your guts twisted. His body was discarded, limp, across a far console that shorted out in a cascade of sparks.
The killers were too busy toying with the others to notice you run.
But that proved no easy feat when their bolters started to roar.
Each bullet was a contained detonation, tearing bodies apart from the inside. It hardly even looked like they were aiming; like they were just firing for the fun of it. A man heroically scaling the loft ladder with a rifle in hand was hit mid-rise over the cusp of the floor; his torso ruptured out behind him, ribs and armour fragments surely raining onto the terrified serfs and menials below. Another round floundered across the deck, ricocheted, and exploded at knee height, dropping three crewmen in a spray of bone and shredded uniforms.
The shooting made the lingering blooms of smoke churn, swathing the deck in heavy belted plumes around you. Your mind had stuck on the reek of it: the stink of phisolene, and hot gunpowder—acrid and vile, enmeshed with the smell of burnt flesh—thick on the tepid air like a disease.
It took everything in you to gather your bearings through the chaos and find the vague shape of an enclave, in the form of an auspecs console not far behind you, silhouetted by the haze.
The Second Officer, Rodion Razumikhin, was already there when you weaselled behind the cover.
He had a sidearm clutched to his chest, and he stunk of piss, which was not entirely unexpected. He was never a man of great brawn, nor a good marksman. His mind was his most valuable asset, that, and his ability to appropriately delegate actions among the lesser officers.
He looked at you through filthy, ash-covered hair with eyes bloodshot with tears.
You understood that too, truly.
The only thing that had kept you from that very same hysteria had been adrenaline and anger at it all.
Marmeladov had always cautioned you for your temper; and she was right, being the smarter, wiser woman she was.
You peeked over the cover you and Rodion had both ducked behind, only to see a giant beast standing before Marmeladov's throne.
Impulsively, you'd lunged for Rodion's las-gun, tore it from his fear-clammy grip and stood from behind the console, aiming for that high-crested monster's head.
It hit dead-on enough to make the thing's helm jolt from the blow.
Which made it stop and take a step back from the command dais.
You saw it had both taken out one of Marmeladov's eyes, and shattered her leg. A single, simple kick from one of its huge boots, just to cripple her in her throne even more, no doubt.
Seething at what the beast had done to her, you kept firing; and yet it did nothing, just like before.
It stood there and watched you, as the rest of its abominable comrades continued flensing your colleagues—your friends.
You loosed volleys until the weapon steamed, another las-gun almost dead at your hands once again. All you had needed was one to pierce. Just one. If any of them were to fall, just that one monster's death would have satisfied you for an eternity.
But it had turned to you now, attention hale and whole upon your form.
It lowered the halberd and pointed the huge weapon at Marmeladov.
You hesitated, then.
The beast tilted its head.
Behind the huge glaive tip obscuring her face, for a second, you glimpsed Marmeladov's gaze on you still; tears streaming out of her lone, surviving eye.
You choked back a sob, your aim on the monster faltering as your vision tunnelled and fixed on her.
In that momentary, fleeting lapse, you heard Rodion's death-scream far too late to realise the figure towering over you from behind. Huge gauntlets dug into the back of your heavy coat, and you shrieked at the sudden weightlessness that seized you—kicking, seething, cursing—caught like an animal by the scruff and held aloft.
The red-handed one approached, then, forgetting your Shipmaster for a blessed moment. Hoping to keep the attention off her, you increased your swearing and thrashing, clutched at lens-level with it.
Then a sickening trade occurred, wherein you passed between murderous hands, under more khch-khch-khch of their helm-voxes.
You could hear Marmeladov crying, pleading for mercy—but it was not for herself. She was pleading to the deaf ears of the butchers to at least make it quick for you. That act sent you clawing up at the Night Lord's gusset in a frenzied rage. The suit lining the inside of the ceramite had not looked much different from an imperial flight-suit—so you dug your nails in under the helm-seals and tugged.
A long, throaty hisssss came from both the power-armour and its' occupant.
Abruptly, it dropped you.
Air rushed out of your lungs in a heavy thud as you landed squarely on your back, wheezing hiccup after hiccup of torturous oxygen back in.
The red-gauntlet'd one you'd been clawing at looked down at you, twirling its halberd idly as you suffered—only to stop fast with the glaive in a backwards hold. The toothless end of the long handle pressed into your spasming chest, pinning you in place on the deck.
You snarled up at it, squirming wildly enough that your flailing arms knocked the grip of your fallen las-gun.
Palming blindly, you grasped it and brought it up—but not at the beast.
Instead, just as before, you cozied the hollowed barrel into the soft underside of your jaw.
The high-crested murderer apparently did not like that.
All notions of restraint were damned and gone as you pulled the trigger, a hateful sneer painted across your face.
At once, your head swam, whipped to black-speckled serenity for a moment. But not backwards in a warm, wet spray, like it should've when obliterated by a las-round at point-blank.
No, your head was strewn sidelong, looking out across the deck of the body-strewn deck. The entire left half of your skull blistered with acute agony, throbbing and flickering your vision.
You could hardly even feel the red gauntlet that reached down to grab you by the front of your uniform. You couldn't even hear the standard-issue, mass-produced attire buckle and tear almost immediately. The cold of the vessel did not seem to bite your flesh entirely, even as the monster adjusted to tug you airborne by your coat's lapel, instead.
You were up in the high-crested thing's grip, dangling like a little girl's doll. Bleeding, dazed—rendered inert. Distantly, you wondered if this was how servitors felt with their skulls emptied out—but your brain refused to render so much as a single, rockcrete thought beyond that as it throbbed, and throbbed, and throbbed. Grey began to blotch your sight, and it only grew harsher in severity. Those patchy wells of ash fluttered and flickered across your retinas, backgrounded by a quiet so absolute you could only distantly perceive that it cut in and out in long, swelling waves of far-off noise.
Your head rolled back, only vaguely catching shape of Marmeladov through the visual snow creeping in—before the monster's shadow blotted her from view and everything fell to serene, sunless nothing.
It was your hearing that returned first, although it granted only a constant ringing in your ears. Then came feeling, but the only immediate sensation you found yourself plagued by, surpisingly, was blotches of cold.
It was a strange way to discover there was no afterlife. Nor a bright glade, nor a shining palace filled with golden light.
But that was to be expected when death hadn't claimed you as it should've.
You remembered that you gave a pitiful attempt at inhaling, which led you to find that nothing seemed to fill your lungs for seconds. Seconds that felt like minutes—or hours—or years.
Finally, the air surged in with an aching strain, and a creaky, shallow exhale slipped free from you a moment thereafter.
You had tried for another, but began coughing. Blood clogged your nose, making you snort and splutter to clear it, but that decision was quickly regretted. Because, situationally, the stench you found was by far the most jarring one you had come to meet in all your years of Void-faring. Your nose was flooded with the smell of offal and disinfectant. It was beyond organic necrosis. It was more intrinsically terrifying. It was the rank odour of a Medicae chamber.
Against the very laws of nature, the chilled creak of your lungs surged against the pressure in your chest.
A lurch had seized your diaphragm, alongside a bitter rush of air, gasping in shock at the realisation you could breathe properly again.
You were alive.
Then, you were promptly unconscious once more.
When you dragged yourself out of that depthless nothing again, you were here—caged in a monster's quarters.
It has been some time since then.
So far, you had learned the red-handed beast's full name was Jago Sevatarion. But that was no chance uncovering. He had told it to you, in fact—just like he had told you he was the Legion's beloved First Captain; but all you really saw was some gestalt nightmare rendered incarnate.
For a time, that's all he was: a torturer, a gaoler, and a butcher. All pieces culminating to a big, mad, man-thing full of deranged loyalty toward a bigger, madder man-thing; one that Sevatarion couldn't help but boast about. The Night Haunter, the Primarch, Konrad Curze—father, father, father—the Night Haunter, the Primarch, Konrad Curze. A large portion of Sevatarion's traitorous, bootlicking rants orbited his name and his genius... or well, names, more accurately. You have discovered there seems to be many, many, many versions of the same turncoat son of the Emperor, and you were only privy to this due to Sevatarion, who never stopped painting a pict of an unending gamut of contradictions.
It is all, ultimately, a condensed reality you're told by force. Every story he spoke at you when you didn't flinch under his knife.
When it was not about his insane but allegedly genius gene-sire, he raved about a system well outside the Ultima Segmenta—a planet in a chain of numbers—about the killing he did on it—the cousins he butchered. The Primarch he watched die.
The Primarch your Shipmaster served.
The Primarch you had served through her.
You wondered if that was why they had chased your ship down. All that savagery just for meagre gratification, like a sick pervert fondling himself while peeping on someone's daily schedule.
Still, there was something truly horrible about the notion of these behemoths waging war on each other. Never mind the sick glee in Sevatarion's tone as he recounted a throat he had spent a minute sawing through with a stolen blade so dulled from endless killing it was practically a deck plate.
He complained, then, about how thin the skin was. How easy it was to slice open a helmet-less fool's trachea. But through those retellings of a carnage you can scarcely fathom, you took a mental note.
Astartes have vulnerable throats.
He prattled on even more after that, but you were no longer really listening.
Even his voice was horrible.
His accent was somehow nearly comedic with the level of menace it carried. Something about the lower register and the over-correction of sounds, especially his w's—which sounded closer to v's—to say nothing of the fact that he somehow made i's more like y's. Culminating in an accent alike the bow of a ship grating against the hull of another. You didn't get to cover your ears, though you wished you could; it was hard to manage that act of defiance belted down on a chopping block, after all.
Rather unfortunately for Sevatarion, when you're constantly stuck in the den of a rabid beast, the terror of him fondly reminiscing lost its lustre quickly. Especially when a majority of the physical torture doesn't stick, and he only has himself to curse for that miscalculation. All because of your brain damage. Having patches of complete neurological insensitivity across your body was exactly the blessing on a Night Lord's flagship one would think it was.
Still, Sevatarion got bored rather easily.
You're absolutely covered in bruises and long, thin cuts. They were scabbed now, but not all entirely painful when you'd earned them. Some had stung to ripe agony, some had not even registered beyond the press of a blade. He'd checked where your insensitivity extended to after you'd absentmindedly ripped a few fingernails out trying to claw his hand off your wrist.
Thanks to Sevatarion, you discovered your neuropathy was self-contained to extremities, largely.
Unfortunately, it hadn't stopped him from checking routinely these last few visits. He carved into you like a piece of steak to see if the blind spots were growing. As proof of a disgusting concept, he had cut deep horizontal lines at the threshold of each patch, giving himself markers as to where any effort of torment was rendered null and void.
Only then had he let you scamper off into the fresher to lick your numb wounds.
Well... the fresher, at first. But he'd ruined the door soon thereafter. Surely not because you'd impulsively believed it was Night Lord-proof and called him a very, very colourful rainbow of things. He'd bashed the panel in and dragged you out of the false hideaway by the scruff while you tried to bite off his nose. Then, he'd dislocated your fingers, leaving you to fumble around for a few hours; which led to the revelation that it's not easy to pick up a ration bowl with all your digits mangled.
He'd gloated that there were no more places to hide as he set them back. You'd barely managed to fight back the urge to tell him he was wrong. You could fit under his unused cot, or under the holo-projection table, or stow away in the armoury he kept locked, if you could get in.
Still, that didn't negate the fact that your world—which was once a great vessel in a greater woman's charge—was now reduced to the cubby hole of the very thing that stole you away.
You're in rags tied together by two pinwheels and some floss, and the smug bastard was in polished, high-laced boots. It made you miss your uniform dearly. The—for lack of a better word—uniformity of it. The heavy reinforced heel, the tight-fitting undershirt beneath your buttoned jacket and your nice, warm coat.
Honestly, the room was altogether not that bad. Certainly cold, yes, yet there was a surprising lack of human leather hanging around than expected. The only real vulgarity was the tray of knucklebones on the counter of the holo-projection table, which could, hypothetically, be a xeno-animal's.
You knew very well they weren't, though.
You had guessed as much from the first short glance you had at them twenty-three meals ago; and then four meals later, you'd spent a few hours sorting them into matching pairs.
You'd been keeping time, despite the monotony. Sevatarion returned maybe once or twice a standard Terran week, equaling out to seven meal cycles. Whenever he did, you endured those tortures that were quickly growing mundane... and, when he wasn't wielding a dagger and a hypothesis, he ran his mouth about anything and everything. You're not sure which was worse, anymore; truly, you can't really tell the physical agony from the mental. It was always an odd fusion of the two. The only good thing to come out of being forced to converse with him was that he made no call for honourifics, nor titles, like 'sir' or 'my lord' or 'master' although, even if he had made such a demand, you'd have never have stooped to such a level. All the better he hadn't then, ultimately. One less thing to be punished for, though he hardly needed a reason in the end.
He hit you when you didn't respond.
He hit you when you did but he didn't like the answer.
He hit you because he could.
And yet, as of right now, Sevatarion has been oddly quiet.
Currently, he is sitting cross-legged on his cot—the one you have never seen him sleep in even once during your captivity—attending to his disassembled bolter.
You glare while he works, shooting daggers at him in your imagination.
"Something on my face?" Sevatarion rumbles after a long time of saying nothing, yet it's strangely sans a typical baiting edge.
You stay silent at first, scowling.
He grumbles expectantly, and you know he wants a response.
"I'm hungry," leaves you at last.
"Hungry?" Sevatarion scoffs, his focus remaining steadfast on the barrel as he carefully slides a cloth-covered metal rod down it, "You're hungry?"
"Yes," you grunt.
"You've only just eaten," he hisses, pulling the rod out and discarding it mindlessly onto the floor behind him, before pointing toward the empty metal bowl sitting in a little tray-hatch mechanism by the entry blast-door.
"No," you bite out, "I haven't."
"I don't know what grand feasts your old station granted you," he raises a brow, and fixes the action back into place before eyeing down the iron sights, checking his work. "But you're going to keep eating that slop, and you're going to be thankful for it."
"It's not that it's gruel," you say bitterly, "It's that it's not enough."
"You want more?"
"I'm starving."
"...and you think that I ought to care?"
"You're clearly keeping me alive for something," you clench your fists by your sides impotently, "Or are you making this up as you go?"
"I'm only keeping you alive because I haven't decided what I want to make out of your skin, yet," there ought to be more malice to his tone, but it just sounds half-arsed and disinterested—like he's only saying what he thinks will scare you because he can't think of anything more creative.
It occurs to you that this is probably a game to him.
He is keeping a puzzle in his quarters, no different to the ones you once had in yours. Where they had been small, and metal, and made for the sole intention of fighting with, he has in you the same, only larger and made of flesh.
You are a toy to this monster.
"Need to piss," the aforementioned monster announces to thin air and, just like that, any continuity to your thoughts vanishes entirely.
He tosses his bolter heedlessly across the cot and is on his feet in less than the blink of an eye, making a beeline to the fresher. Thanks to the lack of functioning door, you hear—in horrible detail—the long, wet stream of him relieving himself into the vac-toilet.
You look at the fresher, and the shadow he casts under the dull lumen above him. Then, you look at the bolter. It's a sudden glimmer of hope on a string, and you take an ever-so cautious step toward the cot.
It's too easy.
It's too obvious a chance.
Unease hits you like a blow to the chest, acutely aware of how you feel your skin crawl innately.
Sevatarion is leaning against the arch of the fresher doorway when you whip your head around.
"Go on," he hums. "Fetch."
You take a step back, sneering as you say, "There's no rounds in it."
"There might be," he says with a huff, lying rather badly for once.
You frown and stand a little straighter.
He seems to realise you're not going to take the chance and strides back over to his cot, dropping his immense bulk down on it with a small grunt.
Sevatarion simply sits there for a while, doing nothing while he ignores you staring at him, until it apparently irks him enough to speak.
He sighs loudly, purposefully being dramatic, "Well, now I'm bored."
"Good."
"No, not good," he grumbles. "You were supposed to fall for that."
"And I didn't, so what now?"
"I suppose we are going to have a chat," he says, with a strangely bubbly lilt overriding his irritation.
It's a fight not to run across the room and claw madly at the blast-door like a trapped animal. You hate his 'chats' so, so much. It's an excuse for him to vomit up whatever inane stories he wants, and they're always abominable. They're hardly even stories. Every one of them is just some advanced form of psychological torment or violence-based circle-jerking. It's him gloating, and gloating, and gloating eternally; like a recaf-station pissing contest turned up to a quintillion.
Sevatarion says nothing for a while before he offers, "I'll make it interesting this time. Maybe even let you in on a little secret," his black eyes almost sparkle with the conspiracy he offers up, "You know, a bit of gossip—you officers love that stuff, don't you?"
You scowl at him and eye the shut door while thinking of how clawing blindly at the metal sounds like a perfectly good idea.
"Have you ever heard of Eight-Hundred-and-Nine Five, before?"
You're actively trying to stop listening.
"No?" He says for you, before you'd really have time to answer if you'd ever wanted to—which you didn't—even if he's right. "Lucky you, it's a shithole," he digresses quickly, gesticulating while he does so, "But that's besides the point... Naraka, the Captain of the thirteenth company, brought her to heel. Without a single drop of blood, which, for us, is very impressive. The lot of them wouldn't tell a soul how they did it," he tilts his head and raises a scarred brow, a sly, conspiratorial look mapping across his features as he offers, "Would you like to know how?"
"Do I have a choice?" You mutter to yourself, unsure of where exactly this tirade of his is going, but in no position to escape his yammering as per usual.
A slow, creeping smirk rises on Sevatarion's face, replacing the slyness with rabid glee as he leans forward. "Naraka fucked the Planetary-Governor insensible and plastered it live over every pict-feed you could imagine," he barks, grinning like a madman suddenly.
You blink, stunned almost immediately. The concept is impossible, the Legiones Astartes surely do not—
"Twelve Night Lords in one night," he adds dryly, still smiling, "Talk about a close proximity bombardment."
You're only distantly aware you're cringing at him, and then the reality that he's very likely talking out of his ass hits. He's probably spinning stories to discomfort you as a way of amusing himself as usual.
"You're vile—" you snarl, "—and a liar."
"For once," he shoots back, "I'm actually not lying."
"Firstly, that doesn't even make any sense," you hurriedly bite out, squinting at the giant black-eyed deceiver as he pouts crookedly at you. "How would that even work? You mean to tell me that the entire planet went: 'How lewd—everyone quickly—surrender,' and that was that?" You start flailing your hands around in an absurd pantomime to match your tone, then stop abruptly and cross them over your chest, "Secondly, since when do Astartes even—"
You remember exactly what the thing you're arguing with is just as the words leave your mouth, and promptly stop talking.
"Oh?" Sevatarion all but leers, "Do go on."
You glare at him, "No, no—I don't think I will."
"But you were posing such a clear, sensible argument," he tuts, clicking his tongue for effect. "Surely, you wouldn't want to lose."
You stand from where you'd been leaning, clenching your fists by your sides in impotent irritation once again. You move to walk aimlessly to the right—remembering a little late that there's only wall that way—and pivot on your heels leftward, toward the broken door of the fresher.
"I don't care," you call out from where you're standing, stubbornly facing the pulse-shower cubicle.
"Come on," he barks, letting the taunt drag out painfully. "Let's try breaking this discourse down to it's bare components. Simple principles. You remember those from bootcamp, don't you, little officer?"
Oh, he's an insipid bastard of a man-thing—he's got such a vile, condescending way with words. You hate that he calls you little. He knows you do, and he does it even more because of it. Everything he says is a sarcastic leer, a double-edged cheap-shot, a mouth-breathing snark. It makes you wish, on everything you've ever loved or owned or respected, that you had the great strength to beat him to death.
"I'm not dignifying this inane lie," you snap at the open doorway, knowing he's probably sitting there smirking like the smug, over-sized prick he is.
You hear him clicking his tongue again in that annoyingly chiding way he's all but perfected, "All I'm asking is if you really think we don't fuck?"
It's bait on an industrial lure, tied to an adamantium-reinforced rod resting in Sevatarion's greasy, bloodied mitts.
"That is to say... I have," he adds with a snort, and he pauses for a moment before he continues, "Plenty of times, actually."
He's completely delusional.
No one could handle an Astartes—you can't even imagine the proportions of their mass being factored in sexually. Maybe somewhere out there in the galaxy, at least one lunatic follower of the Lectitio Divinitatus might've barked up an Astartes' tree. You can rationalise someone going for the pretty, noble ones with long, flowing hair... but to bark up a Night Lord's?
Someone would dare risk a broom-closet jaunt with a mad son of a madder father?
No one would want to fuck one, except maybe a suicidal moron, let alone fuck him. If Sevatarion has fucked something—which you doubt—it was probably by rape. And they probably died afterwards. For their sake, you hope they were dead beforehand. Being in the same room with him is torment on its own, so the thought of being under him grants you a glimpse into an otherworldly agony. He'd be insufferable. He's even visually off-putting, just to top it all off. A good part of Sevatarion's face is a mess of scars. His mouth's crooked. He slouches like a hunchback. His hair looks like shit. There's enough bags around his big, mean-looking, beady eyes to fill an entire embarkation-deck. To say nothing of the fact he smells a bit like a woman's sanitary bin—sure, he's well-muscled enough to make a baseline dock-worker look like a lanky teenage girl in comparison, but that's where any objective attractiveness ends. Which, ultimately, means the only things remotely palatable about Sevatarion are his big arms and big arse.
And so, you swallow the proverbial hook and come storming out of the fresher, waggling your finger at him in a fury.
"Now, I know you're full of it—" you growl, taking hurried steps to get up in his face as your temper boils over against your better judgment, "—and I'm too hungry to go along with this groxshit."
"I'm not lying," he's still sitting, and yet he's at your standing eye-line. All pitch-black sclera and furrowed brows, an arm's reach from your own.
You roll your eyes and snap, "Yes, you are!"
"I know something that could resolve both those issues," he says, face flat and expressionless suddenly, "Give me your mouth."
"What?"
"You heard me," Sevatarion's face contorts from a statue's into a bared-teeth, cadaver grin, "I'll get you another ration if I get your tongue on my cock."
"You're joking," stunned, you blink repeatedly, hoping despite yourself, that it's another one of his daft games he's playing at, "This is one of your sick jokes."
"I don't joke around about proving others wrong," he says through his sharp jaws.
"So, so..." you start, flabbergasted, "...you want me to whore myself out to the butcher of my crew-mates? My Shipmaster?"
"It's not like their opinions matter," Sevatarion's smile finally falls away to a leering smirk, "They're dead."
Vitriol mangles your voice into a ragged hiss, "Yes, and you made sure of that, didn't you?"
"Not my fault your Cruiser didn't scamper away fast enough," he scoffs.
"You have no concept of integrity, do you?"
"Not even a scrap."
"There's something deeply wrong with you," comes your hissed reply.
"You can't even imagine," Sevatarion breathes out in a strangely tired manner.
You can imagine.
In fact, you'd love to tell him every little detail of how deplorable you think he is. How conniving, how utterly stupid and violent—how he's a slimy wretch that only exists to smirk at his own snide comments and skin babes in their cradles.
Irrationally, you fail to rein in the urge to spit at him, and it almost appears as if he wholly expects the saliva that flies in his direction.
He doesn't even flinch.
It lands well enough, right on the corner of his mouth; he grumbles, and—and licks the corner of his lips clean.
You recoil in disgusted disbelief, so unsettled enough by his behaviour that the words you wanted to yell in his face come out a decent bit quieter than you intended, "I'm... I'm not sucking you off."
"Then you'll be going hungry," he says, and pointedly spits on the floor.
It lands just shy of your foot and sizzles against the steel-plated floor, filling the room with the slightest reek of sulphur. A fresh wave of horror dawns upon you. His saliva isn't saliva. It's—it's acid—
"It's that simple," he states, at last.
It's a threat in and of itself, even as the liquid fizzles out impotently and leaves a pitted black stain on the metal.
You weigh your options: Claw at a chance to remain even slightly able to control your situation, but debase yourself wholly—or drag your heels the entire time and rely on his whims for nothing, but slowly start starving away. Both outcomes would bear fruit, both would be torment. There's no fork in the road that leads to a solid victory. It will be a fight the whole way, no matter which path you take.
At least with assenting to this, you keep some condition on your bones.
You sigh, and don't bother to keep the frown from your face as you drop to a kneel.
"Finally, you make a sensible choice," he rasps.
Up close, you realise belatedly that his pants are some sort of blackened leather. Human, perhaps, but for some reason you don't think so. It feels impossible to manage such a tedious stitching job with a person's skin. You think back on all the grazes and nicks you've had and how easy your flesh tears. How did they make anything with it, let alone pants? But you've never stitched anything beyond a patch in your life, let alone skin, so your assumptions fall to a moot point conclusion.
Loose leather draws tight around his huge thighs as he adjusts his seating, and interface ports—like the ones you'd seen on the Shipmaster's temples—distort the leather in solid, rounded mounds.
You completely disregard the distortion higher up his legs, leaning left and resting upward in a long, sweeping shine of distended black.
The pants are low and sit up on his middle-hip, which is largely out of place compared to Imperial standards. They are weirdly proportioned, too. They make his long legs look thicker than they actually are. It's nothing like standard officer uniform, which is high-waisted and cinched in. You suppose both would look absurd on a body so densely muscled.
You have no idea where to even start to undo the catches.
His terrible taste in attire actually explains a lot about the wretched tunic he's forced you to wear.
You're about to go on a mental tirade about the shortness of your tunic, before your attention snags on him undoing the latch of his pants.
They part disgustingly low, and disgustingly easy. It's sleazy—especially when your eyes trace down a coarse line of hair that's somehow darker than the leather.
A long, fat swell of erection flags out of the pants and up onto his navel along with it.
It is distressingly large.
Suddenly, every ounce of his behaviour makes complete and total sense. If you were his size, with a dick this big, you'd be a prick, too. But that realisation still doesn't even get close to remedying any of the deep-seated loathing you have for him, though.
He holds his cock by the base, tilts himself, and slaps the side of his fat shaft against your cheek.
"Open your mouth," he rasps.
Begrudgingly, you oblige—and he takes full use of the allowance, adjusting himself to rub the underside of his swollen glans across your tongue.
"Lick," he says next.
And you do.
It's vaguely salty, though that's not unusual. His isn't the first dick you've sucked, after all. Well, he's the first Astartes, at least... but he tastes pretty standard, if for the heavier smell of something distinctly earthy pervading your senses. It's almost reminiscent of a hot, chemical dampness, like an engine room when the sprinklers go off.
His hand comes to rest on the crown of your head abruptly, "Now, suck."
It's a unique sort of panic that suddenly chills your bones. You feel stuck, unable to breathe—like you're locked in the stuffy, muscled cage of his thighs rather than kneeling between them.
The stubborn part of your brain digs itself heel-deep in the dirt and refuses to budge.
You pull your tongue back and frown, "No, just tongue."
"You offered your mouth," Sevatarion notes flatly. "Stop being difficult and suck."
"You said tongue."
"You know what I meant," he snarls abruptly, jutting the tip of himself against your lips with a small buck.
Still frowning, you rear back and grit out, "I bite."
"You're going to bite the cock that feeds you?"
You scowl up at him, "You said—"
"You're not that stupid," he interrupts, glaring down at you with his eyes squinted into black slits, "You wanted more rations, I gave you a way to earn it, and you agreed to this."
"I bite," you say again, mulishly, trying to pull away even further, only to be reined back in by his fingers bunching up a handful of your hair.
"Just gives me an excuse to rip all your teeth out, I guess."
"Wouldn't undo what I'd do," you say with a heady defiance, frowning at him from your low spot with the fat heft of his member to your cheek.
"After your teeth go," he starts, talking as if you're not there and he's simply plotting aloud to a hidden audience. "I think I'll let the Atramentar use you as a chew-toy."
You're confused, "The... what?"
"My brothers," he clarifies, pausing his weird recounting of nonsense events as if he's cluing you in for your next lines of script. "You've met them already, little officer."
"Who?"
"You said you remembered the deck," he pouts, his tone almost like a sing-song for an absurd moment, "You said you remembered what happened to your friends."
For a moment, you're too bemused by his change of behaviour to even think straight. He only talks like this when there's a knife in his hand, and you're on his cutting board, and—oh, oh. He's being serious. He's not raving, he's genuinely plotting aloud like it's a torture session. An interrogation. Like he had the first time you were sliced bloody. He's fuming. Suppose it's expected of an entitled man-thing whose dick isn't being slobbered on after the promise of it happening.
You don't even bother replying at this point.
You know better, now.
"I imagine they'd love to see you again," he says with an airy huff, "Wonder what they would do to a stubborn little shithead like you—maybe they'll beat the twelve-in-a-night record..." The mask of impassive detachment drops on his face is a cold, cold statue, "Or maybe they'll just eat you alive."
You cringe.
"Don't like the sound of that, do you?" Sevatarion's mangled lip curls, breaking the straight-faced horror into a clear pict of irritation, "Play nice, and a sore jaw's the worst you'll be dealing with."
He jostles himself by the base, letting the thickness of his cock sit up straight in the webbing between his pointer and thumb.
"Now," Sevatarion spits, his voice a rough thing as he shifts his hips so that the tip of his length rests on your lips again. "Warm this up for me, would you?"
You begrudgingly open your mouth and close it around him, and Sevatarion is quick to take the ground offered. He starts rolling his hips, keeping you in place with a huge palm right across the back of your head.
There's too much of him to fit, and the grip you take around the lower half of his cock barely manages to keep him from sliding too deep. His cock's hot, too—it's unnatural, it's—it's as if his ambient temperature is five degrees higher than your own.
It's a struggle just to breathe steadily through your nose, to say nothing of the war you're waging against your own gag-reflex. It's almost impossible not to choke while he fucks your mouth. You try to steady yourself by placing a free hand on his leather-covered thigh, and garble out a curse when the spongy tip jars into your epiglottis.
You jerk, and your hand around his cock slips—covered by his—and then it's not. It's sliding up, and then a thumb slips into your mouth alongside his own cock; adjusting, hooking over your bottom teeth.
The manoeuvre locks you in place, with a mouth forced wide.
He's doing it to make a point, he's doing it for insurance, he's doing it to all but face-fuck you.
The entire situation is a mess.
He keeps pumping his hips, and you make awful, half-choked protests at each of his choppy thrusts forward.
His short-cut tunic hides a majority of his upper body away, but you catch glimpses of scar-mottled flesh with every rock of his hips forward.
Your jaw aches under the strain of Sevatarion's pace and his hold, and there's spit and pre-cum sloppily roping down your chin. It's not as if he cares, though. He's acting like no more than a rutting animal, taking every chance he can for himself.
You thrash backwards, and surprisingly, he lets you off him—the hand in your mouth withdraws, whereas the one on your head stays.
"A-At least... l-let me do it myself," you harrumph loudly, throat irritated by the numerous attempts to fuck into it.
"With no teeth?"
You nod sluggishly, beyond frustrated with the fact that you have to cede.
"Good," he says with a long, satisfied hum. "Let me back in."
You do, rather hatefully.
It takes every bit of composure you have to not go back on your promise and nip the fat, rounded end of his cock off out of spite. As if by some cruel irony, that thought arrives at the exact moment you accidentally allow too much to slide in.
Pointedly, you gag and try to drag your head back, despite the big mitt on your scalp. He, surprisingly, lets you cough up a stringing mess of bubbling saliva.
"I'm just too big for you," he tuts, with a heavy, faux sincerity, "Aren't I?"
You try to mentally talk yourself out of giving in to the urge of sticking him back in and chomping once again. Instead, you try to focus on getting him off. The sooner it's over, the better. You gather back enough willpower to lick over the tip of him, watching the pumping of your own hand around the middle. The salty flashes of pre-cum across your tongue aren't at all helping you disassociate, though, so you eye the rest of him.
He's lifted his tunic up to his stomach with his free hand, fully displaying the menagerie of brutal-looking old wounds he has. It's all solid, gene-forged muscle, but there are hints his underbelly is actually soft in places. You wonder where the skin's thinnest aside from his gullet, and where a blade could punch through best. You let your gaze drift, going from his belly button to the long, dark trail arrowing down from it to his groin.
"Your head's too small to fit me," he notes with a gravely chuff of amusement, "Too much space wasted on useless brain matter."
You try to sit up a little, letting his leaking cock lean against your cheek as you do.
The manoeuvre stings your ego almost immediately, because the wretched press of your own thighs as you adjust your angle feels horribly wet.
You can't be—you refuse—there's no way this is happening.
You wriggle again, just to be sure, and a dull, persistent throb makes itself known alongside a vile slickness. The realisation makes you freeze, and leaves you staring blankly at his navel as he keeps petting your hair.
"Oh, you're not talking back anymore?" Sevatarion ventures, purposefully nasty. "Am I not worth the words? Or are you just... too busy?"
"Busy... tryin' t-tuh—get t-this over with," you sloppily manage, irritated—refusing to let his awful voice register, just pressing forward, pulling back—letting rigid heat fill your mouth to the brim and slide out. Trying to ignore the smell of sex pervading your nose, with the same nonplussed discipline you'd maintained hearing other cadets fucking in the barracks. Let him tire himself out with his rambling, and hopefully finish faster. It feels like it's been hours. How long do these overgrown fools last? It can't be for a lack of trying. You're trying to make it good, so he's done quicker, and you're fed sooner. Fuck, you're hungry. At this point you'd swallow the monster's load if only to rob him of an extra meal. It's vile and it makes your stomach twist in disgust, but it is ultimately for survival. You'd do just about anything to spite him and live a little less starved, at this point.
"Zec te jaesha yahsshan," ["I like how you look when you lick,"] he groans suddenly, and it breaks you from your reverie—you glance up with his cock still in your mouth as he says, "Juthica te vey athasavi darnitha na." ["Keep staring at me with those angry eyes."]
You furrow your brows, unsure if you'd misheard him and were simply hallucinating a string of gibberish. Then it clicks. He's yapping the lunacy he thinks passes for language. The one he'd had before he was elevated to sapience with Gothic. Nostraman. It's harsh in his mouth despite the flowing, almost smooth sounds some of the words make. As if they're mangled by his overgrown lungs and his sandpaper gullet. It might've been a lovely thing on a human's tongue, but it garners nothing but a feeling of discomfort on his. He's probably saying something vile, laden with threats and insults. It's probably another one of his disgusting stories. Hell, it's probably very creative slurs. They don't count if you can't make sense of them. You learned that very early in your career. But that fact never meant you couldn't retaliate as if you did understand.
You let his cock slide out and scowl up at him, baring your teeth, "S-Stop speaking that drivel or I'll—"
He doesn't react like you thought he would, he just pets you more and interrupts you, "Or you'll what? You'll stop?" He ruffles the top of your head, urging you to take him back inside your mouth with a long, heavy stroke through your hair. "You'll give up your meal just because you don't like my mother-tongue?"
You try to shake him off, and for a blessed instant the hand's gone. Until it isn't, it's—it's holding you by the chin, and his thumb is prodding at your lips. Sevatarion forces it in behind them, but you keep your jaw clenched, leaving him to trace against the front of your gums.
He huffs out an exaggerated sigh, "Fine, but you should know... I was close," and immediately, his taunt works. You loathe yourself for it, but still let your maw open just a little.
With that, his frown quickly evaporates into a lopsided smirk, and he starts pumping his thumb into your mouth like he's done with his cock for the past hour.
"Jus' fuggin geh i' ovah wif," you garble out, your words mangled around his probing.
"That's the spirit," he rasps, straight-faced.
Sevatarion traces your back molars, then doubles back and depresses the top of your tongue.
"Varre vel ar'sun yoshun ivi?" ["Who's my wild little slave?"] He says, and you parse out what sounds like a questioning inflection in his tone as he slides his thumb in down to the webbing and groans, "Jasca, jasca, te ashilla." ["Yes, yes, you are."]
You gag, about to give in to instinct and let your jaws close down hard on the invading digit, but it retreats rather abruptly—replaced by the tip of him nudging your lips, trying for an entrance again.
You don't let him in.
Instead, you sneer and pump your fist up the length of him with long jerks.
Gritting your teeth in anger, you hide the seething scowl painted across your face against the base of his cock. You start to lick—but pull back prematurely when the coarse black hair around it irritates your cheek.
So instead, you lap at the underside, veined but far less annoyingly textured as the base. The only issue is that the angle makes his cock sit up against your forehead, and you try to ignore the obscene proportion of it quite literally weighing on you.
He tugs you back, then growls, "Te niateyia'shia, jaeshai ma jarcu vel." [You're disobedient, but I like the fight.]
You're about to protest to whatever nonsense he's grumbling, but it's clear your stalling has gone on long enough. You hatefully allow him to line his cock back up to your mouth, before sliding himself back in.
Sevatarion makes the next few thrusts messy on purpose, punishing you for ignoring him earlier.
Soon, you're gurgling curses around the meat of him with each breath you manage to steal, while he rams into your mouth in earnest. It's hard to even think with him carrying on like this, let alone breathe properly, but watching his chest rise and fall manages to let you wander off mentally enough to bear it.
Huge lungs surely reside behind those big muscles, you've heard there's more than one set in there—thanks to a Medicae novice's idle ranting a few years ago. You try to remember any other curious facts about Astartes, but the only thing that comes to mind is that they have two hearts. You can't feel two heartbeats on your tongue. Maybe only one of his hearts pumps blood to his cock, then.
You glance up higher, seeking his face next.
And almost start crying tears of joy when you find he's started chewing on the collar of his tunic. It shuts him up, and you're finally free of the incessant filth he lets leave his lips. He's shut his eyes, too, and with them, the rest of his face relaxes in a completely new way that makes a majority of the lines smooth out with it.
He's... much easier to deal with like this. Much easier to look at, too. It's almost bearable, even if he's still bucking into your mouth and screwing up your rhythm.
Taking the risk, you rock a little against yourself again.
You're definitely wet, now. No need to check twice. It's far gone enough that you can even feel your clit in the mess where it's sandwiched between the tight press of your thighs.
It's impossible to veer away from the urge to roll your hips, especially when Sevatarion's heavy breathing covers your own.
The motion of you bobbing your head forward synchronises with your grinding with agonising perfection. It's a spark in your vision that glimmers with every wet slide of his cock into your mouth. The fat length of him jerks a little, appreciatively, when you let your tongue swipe the underside on the back-draw. If only he'd been this quiet from the start. You'd have given him a good reason to work with you on this.
He pets you like he had earlier, letting you pull your mouth off him with a slimy gasp and lap at the side. There's a thick, raised vein webbing across it, and he hums contentedly behind the fabric in his mouth with still-shut eyes when you let the flat of your tongue drag a wide lick across the surface. He tugs your hair a tad to give you the message he wants back in, and you grumble, but acquiesce and take the length of him into your mouth again.
Sevatarion's not being a prick, currently—and to prove a point, you actually allow him to fuck into your maw this time. It frees up your neck and lets you focus on much more important matters. Namely, the rush of bliss your heel grazing your cunt gives you—you're hyperaware of the pressure, fleeting as it is—and you wonder, in some mad desperation, if he'd notice your hand leaving his thigh and travelling south. Maybe he'd turn your distraction into some even more twisted debasement as punishment, or if he'd just let you. You suspect the foul butcher would take it as an invitation to get his cock really wet.
Strung out on both air and sense, the prospect doesn't send you into a rage as it should. Funnily, it's just like Sevatarion said: he's too big. From the sheer swell of meat in your mouth, you have a hunch he really, truly, wouldn't be able to fit, no matter how hard he pressed in—so maybe there's a victory in that. You imagine his face all screwed up with that sulking, sour look of his as he were to try.
It's a satisfying pict of the imagination, thinking of him suffering; one only made worse by your continued rocking. You hope it's agony for him, you hope he whines—his gnarled maw all twisted up, rutting his fat cock against you vainly—he'll let you steal a hiss out of his lungs when you fuck yourself down to the hilt...
Hold on, wait.
What?
The sinew behind your eyes aches as your mind backpedals, but the hand on your head tightens in your hair.
Wait, no—you... you don't want to fuck him. He's abominable and soaked in the blood of your peers. He's a beast. You don't know where these thoughts are coming from.
You swear you don't want to—you don't want him—bouncing you on his lap, holding you up in those huge arms and dropping you on him again, and again, and again.
Where is this coming from? Why are you...
You're not even aware of the fact that he's opened his eyes until you hear him moan, and you look up.
You see him digging his teeth into his bottom lip. Something is trailing down his philtrum in a thick, dark line.
Is.. is that blood?
He rolls his pelvis, and you gag, trying to snatch another look—before your attempt is thwarted by the hand dragging you forward.
The shock from the sudden amount of dick in your mouth makes your sight glue head-on.
Sevatarion's cock twitches abruptly, then starts pulsing hard as molten heat fills the meagre space of your maw. With it, a long, haggard groan slides from his gullet. The thigh you were using as a sure, stable fulcrum starts shaking alongside the sharp, upward stutter of his hips.
He holds your head there for a moment while you gurgle. His cock's in deep enough that tears start to well up involuntarily in the corners of your eyes, and your vision jerks with the reflex to convulse. Your taste-buds are covered in bitter tasting spend. It's gross, it's thick—it's hot like tar. It's too much to keep a mere mouthful of, and you choke loudly, and fuck does your entire postnasal cavity burn.
When he finally lets go of your head, you pull back violently.
Your mouth's still full of semen, your nose feels like it's full of bile, and you're two seconds away from retching. Any plotting you'd had regarding eating the mess of cum bloating your cheeks immediately evaporates.
"Mmm... now be good and swallow that, little officer," he moans, looking absolutely debauched. The collar of his tunic is covered in slobber, his face is flushed all the way up from his neck in some weird, mauve-tinged blotching; and he's showing off a crooked grin that makes him look even more like an rabid beast than usual. There's... nothing on his top lip, no proof of the blood you thought you saw— "Go on... swallow what didn't go up your nose."
You let the thick, milky slurry of cum drain straight out of your mouth and onto the floor with a deliberate disregard.
He raises a brow and grumbles as his finish paints the ground between his legs.
"Swallowing wa–ah—" you start, but cough, "W-Wusn't... part of the deal," and it's not easy to find a level voice as you focus on spitting out the leftovers.
"Next time you're going to be," Sevatarion shoots back smoothly.
"I w-won't."
"Yes, you will."
"N-Nuh... it tastes bad."
"I don't care," he suddenly detonates, his scar pulling taut as he sneers. "You'll gargle my load to the tune of the Iter Imperiale, if I fucking tell you to."
"I'll spew it b-back up on your lap," you snap in return, stand, and consciously try not to make any tell-tale changes in your walk—despite the warm-wet glaze of excitement slathered between your thighs.
"I really should just kill you," he sighs, finally.
You fight not to acknowledge the blacked-out eyes burning holes into your back, as you head to the fresher to rinse your tongue. Sure, not having a sightline on him that makes your skin itch, but you can't bear the taste of him any longer.
You harrumph loudly, turning the handle before leaning down to start lapping at the rusty-tasting water jetting out of the tap in erratic bursts of varied water pressure. After spitting a few times, you roll your tongue around and find it blessedly cum-free. So, you lean over to the vac-toilet, grab a handful of paper, and wipe your mouth dry.
Then you pause, and reach down to wipe between your thighs with the same crumpled tissues before tossing, and then actioning the venting of the bowl. It's the best you'll get for a destruction of proof. You smile triumphantly, swallowing down the distant spice of metallic water lingering in your maw, before you call out, "I want that extra ration, now."
Silence reigns for a good while, and you stand a little straighter—unsettled by the fact he does not answer.
Carefully, ever so carefully, you pad backwards and peer out from behind the dented door of the fresher.
Across the room, Sevatarion is sprawled on his back, still half off the cot with his softened cock hanging out of his leathers—his eyes are shut, and despite the crease between his brows, the rest of his face is slack as it'd been when he was not too far off from blowing a load.
You realise this is what an Astartes looks like asleep.
It makes you frown, because even if it means he's finally out of your hair for a good while... it also means you're not getting that owed extra bowl any time soon.
do u intend to continue the Cato Sicarius x Ambassador series…? I literally think about it all the time. It’s genuinely the best fanfic I’ve EVER read 😭👀
AHAHAHAHAH STOPPPPPPP IM GONNA CRY TYSM I DO INTEND ON FINISHING IT I JUST KEEP GETTING SIDETRACKED BY THINGS LIKE THE SOON TO BE POSTED SEVATAR FIC!!
I PINKY PROMISE THE NEXT CATO ONE IS ALMOSTTTTT DONE
I just binge read your fics and your Cato one has me in a chokehold, holy hell. That one is SPICY and TENSE. I love the banter and the drama of them sneaking around. Your writing is sublime, that is all, have a wonderful day
HAGSHAGHDGAHA OMG THANK U SO MUCH POOKIE THATS SO SWEET OF U IM GLAD U ENJOYEEEDDDDD
Hi! Came here through "Second Company and the Serf". Pls, you take fic requests?
omg hi !!!!! i dont really take requests but i for sure take ideas and prompts, and then if my brain likes em enough i pursue them :3 what have u got in mind vro?
Do you have like a Kofi or anything?? I feel like I should buy you a drink for the amount of quality reading you've provided.
no i dont, nor will i ever!!! i do this bc i love sharing my work with you all, so its for you darling people to eat up free of charge!!! (also,,, save ur money pookie!!!)
but, if you do want to and have the means, please donate to a charity like Doctors Without Borders and help innocents in crisis!!!
oh?? you thought it was gonna be the sev fic?? SIKE,,, anyways, this is a birthday present for the evil nord that i love to hate @yourlocalnautilus based off her (art) with gadriel lost in the sauce rawdogging an anon on a countertop, it's also set after both (Damocles/f!serf) and the sequel (Titus/f!serf) respectively. im still so bitter about Chairon dying off screen btw im gonna write Metaurus getting some as revenge for pookie. fuck you james workshop why is there only one black guy per company allowed. also come get ur tags!!! @sinistermojo @tanknode @grimdark-raccoon @kit-williams @undeaddream @thevoidscreams @beckyninja @bispecsual @ma1dmer @yestheantichrist @primarisly-marooned @justfreakynothingelse @lemon-russ @pluvio-tea @the-raven-lady @historitor-bookshelf @thunderhawk727 @ultramarenis if i forgot anyone or you want on or off tags let me know oouughhghgh adios enjoyyyyy!!!
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The battle barge is a leviathan of a vessel—but certainly far, far less busy than the Flagship.
It has fewer mumbling serfs, drooling servitors, and binary-raving Mechanicus Adepts roaming the halls.
You have grown to miss that lack of crowding, given the fact you're back in the hulking innards of a Gloriana-class ship. Truth be told, you liked the small rooms of the battle-barge, and the tiny cots, and how you had to cosy up close to your Lord in them. Because now, everything is too spacious.
Titus' new cot is so big, you can lay down and not even touch him on the same mattress. You can stand in his armoury. Yes, he has an armoury, now—it's huge. It's so tall that even he can't touch the ceiling. He even gets a bathing chamber. You hadn't seen one of those in a very long time. You remember what the Chapter-master's rooms were like, how grand the interlinked apartments were—and somehow Titus' quarters feel about the same.
They're very beautiful.
But... a bit too big.
That sentiment goes for the rest of the vessel, too.
There's too much compared to the little world in and of itself you'd had on the Second Company's barge. You had forgotten just how packed in everyone was here. The Macragge's Honour is a hive city in all but name, listing and rising on the waves of vast, empty space. You could walk a whole cycle and never see anything but humans. You could do the same a kilometre up in the hallowed halls and see nothing but Astartes. Below their echelons, in the mid-depths, there are some nooks and crannies that are less peopled—but it is usually for a reason.
Most of the time, it's simply a matter of differing shift allocation.
Sometimes, at least.
Other, quieter moments are unexplainable.
Just like they are now.
The nigh endless corridor feels hollow as you stare down it. There's not even a peep of natural sound, aside from the great vessel around you seemingly breathing. The ship knows you're here, the ship knows where everyone is. She is very old. She probably knows you were born within her halls. But that fact doesn't change the disquieting way her dark veins echo around you. Even if you know, on a primitive level, you're not really alone—there are always people on the Flagship. There's always someone. So, really—there's no reason to worry. The creaking of the decking a ways behind you is probably just another serf or two doing their labours nearby. It's nothing. Everything is just fine.
The sheer size of the bundle of sheets in your arms slows you a little, and adding to that is Titus' heavy linen rest clothes, which weigh a pretty decent amount.
It's improper that you're doing this laundry rather than a lesser menial—or servitor, even.
But it feels right to do it after all your habit on the Battle-barge, and your Lord has voiced no complaints thus far.
You had felt the eyes of others on your back as you descended each echelon, and eventually the gazes thinned out to nothing.
And so you walk in the half-light, through long, dark passages below the high halls of the God-Emperor's Angels.
Fear prickles up your spine with the feeling of being watched, worsened yet by a source beyond view.
It's pointless stress to carry on in such a way in a ship full of Astartes, and even more so Primaris, and... the Primarch, he is here too. The Avenging Son, how you would die to even glimpse his face once in your lifetime like your parents have... no, no—enough of that ditziness—point of fact, the chances of danger are low, but it is little harm in being cautious.
There's something to be said about the mind crafting horrors that pale reality in comparison, and whether or not the animal unease plaguing your subconscious is mere baseless anxiety.
The truth remains that it's still there.
It still sets your hair on end; it still quickens your pace.
And yet, you arrive at your destination unharmed and unmolested by whatever monster your brain swore was going to gobble you up.
The washing-room is one of thousands.
It is a tall-ceilinged hall littered with candles and idling red lamps, tiered into a lower chamber and a loft that sits at rim level to the huge, open vats of sloshing water, churning in slow, whirling efficiency. There are dozens upon dozens of them, their transparent panels revealing churning currents of fabric suspended in luminous fluid. Soft blue light pulses up at you from within them, signalling cycles of decontamination, stain dissolution, and readiness. The system wastes nothing, converting residue into energy or base compounds for other ship functions. Every part of the routine is utterly tireless, each attended to by... oh. No, they are... not being attended to. Where are the servitors? Where are the junior Mechanicus agents? Who is monitoring readouts on floating displays?
Ah, probably the shift change you were hypothesising earlier coming into effect. A correct guess, that—for a moment—makes you chuffed at your good intuition.
Then, the notion pointedly curdles in your mind.
You are alone in this dim, unpeopled place.
The air is somehow both cold and humid, with the faint metallic scent of recycled water and sterilising agents.
You look up and shiver nervously.
Overhead, articulated rails that ought to be operated by faceless Adeptus Mechanicus labourers are empty. There should be at least one of them, but where each cart is tagged and tracked and eventually taken to vast dryers—ensuring that an Astartes' robe and an officer's dress uniform are never confused—there is no one.
You wander to the far end of the chamber and find an entirely empty vat. There's nothing to be afraid of. If there's no one here, isn't that a good thing? Better that than just one other person. It's safer to be by yourself than lack the safety of a crowd against an individual.
It calms you just that little bit more as you remind yourself of your duty. which is as easy as a quick drag of your palm across a scanner propped up at the edge of the platform, and a green light flash to commence loading. There's complex machinery surrounding it; along with a broad, flat surface littered with lit-up cogitators. How the system within that huge countertop logs and informs the workers whose clothing is whose is certainly beyond you. All that matters is that the unclean fabric comes back clean.
Which it does, eventually.
You carefully lower Titus' tunic over the ledge into the water, and then one of your own, and you carry on your task until you start to tire and begin to lose all pretence of grace. You toss a towel, fling a fresher-cloth, and punt a pair of pants.
You send one of your dirty linens flying and huff at the splash it makes.
Then comes the bedding, which starts out easy enough.
Pillow cases go soaring into the swirling tide, and a bundled fitted sheet briefly unfurls in the air before it's quickly sucked into the vortex.
It's rather fun.
You usually don't get the opportunity to indulge in a bit of ruckus like this, obedient as you are. Not that Titus really minds. He's very forgiving, and you don't ever act out to begin with—but still, out of propriety, you try to keep most of your more... impulsive actions rather subdued.
But with no one around, and the luck of having the Captain of the Second Company as your master likely deterring any menial from raising a complaint, you decide this tiny amount of hooning around is an acceptable minor lapse of judgment.
Clumsily, your heel catches behind a large top-sheet as you try to spin and throw it far with your momentum, effectively snatching your own footing out from under you; falling forwards towards the twister of chemical-laden water.
You don't even get the chance to properly react.
It's suddenly apparent that you're no longer about to enter the slurry.
You're no longer even on the ground, either.
You look over your shoulder, and are met by a familiar face. Grey-blonde-haired and surprisingly close—you find Sergeant Gadriel, in all his bright-eyed glory.
It's hard to get out the next words in your shock, but you try, even if you stutter when you say, "I-I, uh... t-thank you, my Lord."
He's holding you aloft with two big hands around your midsection, and there's an awkward pause between him stepping back with you in his grasp and him putting you down, before he nods stiffly.
Gadriel sets you facing away from him and you turn, and an—agonisingly—real awkwardness deepens as he simply stays rooted to the spot staring at you.
Did he... see you acting a fool?
Is he going to mention it?
Are you in trouble?
"Was..." you start, shifting your weight between your feet. "Was there something I could be of assistance to you with, my Lord?"
The blink he gives you is clearly forced, like he's trying hard to centre himself from some faraway thought.
He swallows and all but blurts out, "No—no, not yet, serf."
What does he mean by that, you wonder—still, it is not your place to question—even if he sounds a little terse. So, you simply nod dumbly and stand there. He doesn't seem to have brought any linens to wash, nor does he seem to be looking for something. He's glued to the spot, almost like he's already found what he'd been after. There's a focused attention in his gaze, which is certainly intimidating. Is he scrutinising you? Is he going to discipline you for your lapse in behaviour? You have trouble tearing your eyes away from his then, because he's kept them stuck to yours the whole time; and you've only just realised the impropriety of the act... what he's seen and what you've done.
Impropriety, when there's far worse on your list of deeds. Far worse with him and his squad-mates. Throne of Terra—you're still a little green about the matter. It hasn't been helped by Titus' elevation in status. You imagine the Sergeant is surprised to see you here. Titus doesn't really have need of you to do such tasks when he's suddenly drowning in menial assistants, but he has been more than glad in humouring your continued existence. Much like all the Great Angels, actually. They are all surprisingly kindly in such matters, seeing as they largely ignore you—which is good.
You are seen, but not heard by the others, as you are wont to be. Or perhaps more accurately, another Astartes—other than Titus—sees you, and you only see his boots as you bow.
Well, that is... except for the Sergeant, currently. He's looking right at you, and you're looking right at him. Throne, you haven't even glanced him since your return to the flagship.
Until now, that is.
"How have you been faring, serf?"
It's completely out of the blue, and you react in accord, nervously wringing your hands.
"Well," you reply reflexively, "I've been well, Lord."
"You seem it," he breathes, and takes a step closer to you.
You try to maintain decorum and take a step back, but he follows—and swallows up the step with one large stride that probably accounts for three of your own. You're toe to toe briefly, before you scud on your heels and your back collides with the scanner's countertop.
"Don't be afraid," he rasps. "You know I mean you no harm, serf."
Ah, so he is aware you're terrified, despite the fact you know him. That is, to make the claim that having had someone inside you is a form of knowing them.
"O-Of course," you rush to say, "And... and what of you, Lord? How have you been?"
He moves in closer while you stammer.
Gadriel is now looming over you as the low, residual glow of the machinery and vats casts his face in a truly frightening light for a second. He's very much a Great Angel suddenly, very much a being made for war on a thousand worlds; and very much glaring at you like you're one of the many, many enemies he's no doubt cleaved through with ease.
Then Gadriel blinks again, ever so slowly, and you're reminded of the fact he's not really seeing you as a threat. He's probably not intentionally scaring you either; he's just... a bit strange, like they all are.
"I have been distracted as of late," he says softly.
You frown sincerely as you answer, "I am sorry to hear that, my Lord."
"You ought to be," he grumbles.
You're not sure what to do or say to that.
You haven't done anything to him, or at least, you don't think you have. Still, should you grovel just in case? Somehow you get the impression he's not actually angry... maybe he is making a joke? Astartes jokes are very strange, but they're not as rare as you'd once thought they were.
You look up at him and blink back, just as slow as he did.
It seems to be the correct response, because Gadriel takes a long breath in and appears to be satisfied. It's hard to tell, namely due to the fact that his mouth remains straight. But there's a crease on either side of his bright blue eyes that looks like he is trying not to smile openly.
You're glad it worked, you're glad he is appeased momentarily, you're—
You're not glad when he crouches down and lifts you up under the arms like a child's toy.
A yelp leaves you in surprise, and you flail wildly before you are suddenly back on something solid. He's seated you up on the countertop, and it's just as high up as you thought it'd be. The top of your head is level with his neck, and it's a little too familiar an angle of him. You try not to remember being held up with spread legs by Chairon and seeing the same thing.
He moves in near enough that you jump at the realisation his pelvis is almost at the same height as your hips, if not for your dangling legs being in the way.
You're well aware of the fact you're cornered—and that you're being fondled—for lack of a better word, as he leans in close enough that his head looms beside yours.
Big, calloused palms start to knead at your hips; taking an entire, single-handed grope of your outer thigh through your pant fabric and squeezing. It's going to bruise, it's going to be so tender later—and Titus is going to ask what happened—you won't even know how to begin to tell him. Something along the lines of 'Oh, Gadriel found me' and then he–he... he's reaching up under your tunic.
The hall's air is bitingly cold, but the big palm sliding up your flesh is so warm you can't help but sigh as they start to knead your breasts.
Afore you, the Sergeant's breathing is growing laboured.
He's huffing and puffing next to your ear, and you're stunned by the sheer volume of air that he can take in and expel. You'd been practically insensible the last time he'd been this close, so the realisation is a new, wry thing.
Something wet and scalding drags across the side of your gullet, and you abruptly figure out that he's—he's just licked you.
"You are still sweet," Gadriel heaves, and lathes his tongue on you again—but this time, up under your jaw. "Yes, this will suffice as an apology for distracting me."
You go rigid, unsure of how to answer once again and also quite frankly unseated by his sudden fixation. Perhaps him currently lapping at your skin like a starved animal should be a greater cause for concern. A wild, unbidden surge of fear seizes your mind. Do... the God Emperor's Angels eat people? No. No. They probably could, but surely they do not. You've never seen them eat anything other than their nutritional rations—sure, when you were young, you had seen the Chapter Master indulge beyond that. Sometimes in a glass or two—or ten—of amasec poured out by your father's hands, but the most far-fetched thing you've seen an Astartes put their mouth to in any sort of hunger is, well... you.
You shudder.
He brings his face close to yours, sharing the hot air of his breath.
Then, he moves even closer to you, smothering your cheek with his—before he decides to start tilting his head so your chin drags across his parted lips. You're extremely confused when Gadriel pulls away, only to repeat the gesture, except this time it's closer to him banging his forehead on you. His big nose jars against yours, and it stirs the distant urge to sneeze, although you manage to keep it together.
You're a little sore in the two places where his huge snout and reinforced skull made contact, and he reels back, seemingly as lost as you are.
"Is that not correct?" He asks, brows furrowing.
You blink a few times, "I-I'm not sure I understand?"
"Is that not a kiss?"
It's hard to believe the Sergeant even asked that, but it doesn't undo the fact that he just did.
"It's not... exactly," you flounder, "...m-my Lord."
You've noticed they've all got quirks. For example, when Titus is deep in thought or annoyed, he scrunches his nose and flares his nostrils; with Chairon, it's an absentminded biting at the inside of his cheeks—and now, you find that Gadriel chews his bottom lip. It's one of a panoply of little behaviours that make them seem less like angelic war-machines, and more like coltish men simply blown out to hulking proportion. It's so endearing it makes you a little giddy to linger on.
"Show me, then," he demands rather sharply, pouting at you.
You swallow and look away for a second before placing a hesitant hand on his shoulder.
Leaning up, you shut your eyes and press your lips against his. They're soft, and warm, and gentle despite the advances he makes forward.
It's a bit like kissing a slowly falling statue, at first. One that's breathing hard through its nose and trying to nuzzle into each peck. Your hand moves from his shoulder to the back of his neck, and you deliberately remember to card your fingers up, up, up through his hair to the crown.
Reliably, it gets the reaction you knew it would.
He moans as he leans in further, and your back slides down to meet the counter beneath you—then, his tongue peeks out. It's a surprisingly steady, natural escalation from Gadriel, all things considered. Namely because you're baffled he hasn't accidentally smothered you in his haste, yet. Still, you open your mouth and let him in, swallowing down the content rumble that leaves his throat.
As if by the whims of some cosmic, ironic pacing, he doubles down abruptly.
He's lapping at your tongue like a man dying of thirst, and you try to tug on his hair to get him to steady up.
It achieves the exact opposite, as you should've known.
Gadriel's rumbling becomes a long, cluttered mess of him alternating between panting into your open mouth and licking into it.
In his frenzy, you manage to turn your head away—but all it does it drive him to groan and tuck his face against your throat; lapping there, instead, and covering you in greedy bruises and saliva.
You keen loudly and wriggle, inundated with the full attention of the Sergeant trying to do as much as he can all at once.
That is, before he ducks down to your chest.
Your tunic is suddenly rucked up and bunched to your nose, blocking your sight. It's deeply unsettling having him fussing around where you can't fully see him.
Still, there's some comfort in the fact you can assume, largely, what Gadriel's doing by the groping of his huge hands and the drag of his tongue.
He's face-down against your chest, pressing your breasts together either side of his cheeks.
"How I've missed this," he moans, and the sound is scandalous.
He's been distracted by... lust? You thought Astartes disciplined nigh to death, not capable of pining. Titus certainly practises restraint when it comes to... these urges, but looking back—you're not too shocked the Sergeant is more gun-ho.
In your own distraction, you realise a little late you're half-off the counter. He's got your hips lifted in one huge hand.
"My Lord, p-please be careful—" you yelp loudly, and curl, not exactly fighting. It wouldn't do you much good. Gadriel is nothing if not persistent.
He's spreading and then releasing the underside flesh of your rear repeatedly. Only for him to decide thumbing one of your labia aside—and sighing to himself like he's misty-eyed with the delight of the view—is a good idea.
Unsettling, or more so jarring, really.
There's a very, very visceral memory of Lieutenant Titus' head between your thighs—and Gadriel's himself.
Bracing your elbows on the hard steel counter, you arch up slightly.
Truthfully, you can do little but watch as he then raises your hips even higher to pull your pants to your ankles.
He folds you up to your middle, and you lose sight of him briefly behind the pants stuck around your legs; the bunched-up fabric of your hooded robe around your chest only makes the whole endeavour even harder to see. You're being restrained and half-blinded by your own garb, and that's apparently working exactly in Gadriel's favour.
You hear him sigh contentedly again, and you just barely catch a glimpse of his big, trans-human tongue peeking out between your clothes as he licks his bottom lip.
The view is gone quickly, though, and hot air puffs against the tender skin between your legs.
"You are already wet," he rumbles slowly, focused.
You're genuinely stunned by the enormity of panic suddenly rattling about in your chest. So, you struggle to wolf down the saliva in your mouth around the lump in your throat and say, "I'm... uhm... sorry, L-Lord."
You don't know what else to offer him.
"Why?" Gadriel cuts in sharply as he promptly pulls your ass higher up, in a deep curve.
You don't know the correct answer to that, either.
With your cunt bared, the discomfort of open air on fresh, cooling saliva mixing with slick sits at the forefront of your focus. But Gadriel only makes a soft tutting sound as his big palm smooths down your sides; warm breath dancing across your inner thighs.
"W-Well, it's just that I... I..." you stammer, and immediately forget whatever excuse you had; replaced instead by the feeling of the flat of his tongue lathing a fat stripe over your entrance in one smooth motion, only to pull away, seemingly briefly appeased.
"You shouldn't be sorry," Gadriel offers at last, "I like tasting how much you enjoy this."
His words dumbfound you, but you don't get much time to think about that, considering you're not only being lifted higher; but also stunned by a boiling mouth latched squarely to your cunt.
He licks over your clit again, and again, and again, holding you fast by a single hand on your hip. God-Emperor have mercy, it is—it is utter torment. Each slow roll of that oversized, wet tongue against the bead of your clit makes your legs jolt. There's no possibility of canting yourself away, no repose, no chance of stemming the hot, thudding flush of sensations cloistering up—or is it down in this position—from your belly to your head. All you can do is let him gorge himself on your struggling as you moan frantically through the robes half-obscuring your face now; all thanks to the sharper incline of him bending your body.
Just barely, out of the corner of your eye, you can see how hard he's leaning against the counter-edge; craning down while his hand holds you up. And—oh, he's—he's got himself in his free hand. The Sergeant is touching himself to this. Throne, you can see the motion of him ruthlessly fucking into his own fist under the folds of his linens.
You moan, and he does too. It's always jarring how low an Astartes register is. You can feel the vibrations travel through your flesh like rolling thunder.
It's more than enough to make you squeal and buck against his mouth; more sucking you rather than licking, now, giving your poor clit not even a moment's reprieve.
He pulls away suddenly.
He's breathing hard as he lowers you down from his mouth, and pins your legs back against your front again. He's got you around the ankles, squeezing hard enough to bruise. Hard enough that not even the distraction of your dripping cunt can dampen the ache.
A fat, blunt tip prods at your entrance, and you freeze. The angle makes seeing it past your own shucked-up, baggy pants impossible. You can see him, you can see the lust blowing his blue eyes almost black, you can see the furrow on his brow, but you can't see when he's going to fill you. Your hands flail across the smooth surface around you, desperately trying to find a hold. He's going to jam himself in just like he had the first time, and start rutting into you like a very, very excited beast—and it's going to hurt—you're trying in vain to brace for the pain of a battering ram striking point blank. He's still palming himself, too worked up to stop. You can feel the head of him testing your warmth, circling your cunt, pressing in a little, edging closer—
You can't help the keening whine of both want and horror that rises up and finds freedom from your mouth.
For a second, you think it's an echo that a similar sound comes from in front of you. Some trick of resonance off the steel-plated walls and high ceilings, but that can't be right—your voice isn't that low, isn't that rough and rumbling—abruptly, something paints across your sex. It's hot and coming in thick, pent-up ropes.
Gadriel slumps forward, the hold on your ankles swapped for being pinned back by his chest. He catches himself on the hand he was holding them with, and you see just how beaded with sweat Gadriel's face is pink—a bright, rosy pink—as he opens his eyes and meets yours almost shyly.
That is to say, if a Great Angel could ever look shy.
"I did not mean to..." he starts to bumble out, but swallows midway through, apparently cotton-mouthed as he looks down at you. "Waste myself i-in such a manner."
You realise then that he's finished all over you.
There's no time to ruminate on that, though—because you're suddenly back to having something riling you up.
It's fingers—he's—oh, Throne. He's pressing into you with his fingers. A thumb rolls against your clit, and you buck, and then you're full of something—there's too much happening all at once. One hand's holding you steady, the other's got digits jamming into you like a machine.
"Do it," he grumbles as he somehow increases the speed of his fingers.
What? Do—Do what? What does he want now? You don't know what he's talking about. He's pressing his own spend into you, and it's—it's slimey, and slippery, and so, so satisfying knowing he's that desperate to fill you—and you're trying not to start crying at the rising crest that's hot on your heels.
"Mnnh–m-my Lord," you strain and try valiantly to get your words out over the distractingly sloppy sound of fingers fucking his cum into your cunt, "I don't understa—ah—and?"
"That wet gush you made when I had you for the first time," Gadriel rushes to say in a whiny, impatient tone rather unbecoming of his kind, but then again... nothing is really becoming of one of his kind in this situation, "Do it again, I want to see it properly."
"I d-don't—" you blubber, suffering through a heady throb of bliss that somehow almost hurts with how sharply it scorches your nerves. "I don't k-know how I... I d-did it, I don't—"
You're trying to give him what he wants, you really are; but you don't know how, and he's not going to stop unless you do. The pace of his scissoring at your walls is a brutal, stinging rush of pleasure. Your abdomen aches, instinctively trying to clench on the huge fingers playing you like some daft, mewling instrument.
It's too much. He's always too much too fast, and you can't help but whine and try to buck your hips away from the incessant bliss coiling in your core.
He stops, suddenly and you hear a heavy thud before you. You try to arch up, but any hope of getting to your haunches evaporates when a mouth latches at your clit.
You're so stunned you can't even manage a moan as he starts moving his fingers again.
The pressure builds and builds, hot and bloating in your loins and you feel like you're about to burst, drawn closer and closer to a damning end.
"Yes, that's it—" he groans, "That—that's exactly it, almost there," and quickly presses his face back in.
One long, luxuriant lick across your nub while he's knuckle deep undoes any restraint you have in a fraction of a second.
You squeal, scrambling at the counter anew—thighs shaking and trying to figure out how to do anything but squirt on his hand and chin.
It's no use, in the end.
You're a trembling, dripping wreck, and far too wrung-out to protest about the feeling of a big tongue lapping at your soaked inner thighs.
"So sweet," Gadriel mutters to himself, and stands.
You finally can see the entirety of him, though your vision is swimming. He's sucking at his own fingers, smiling that weird Astartes-smile all the while; and, for his part, he does look extremely happy about the matter.
You're boneless to the point he has to lift you clear off the counter for a moment to turn you over.
The steel is nice and cool on your overheated flesh, and you melt into it, panting.
"You did well, serf," he chuffs, as his large hands slide up the plane of your body, tug your tunic off you; and then trace back down the curves of either side. "Very, very well."
"Th-thank you, m'lord," you moan, only distantly aware of his palms coming to rest on the pant-covered meat just above your hip.
Then, his thumbs press into the dimples of your middle back, into some tender nerve centre deep under the muscle, immediately bringing a lulling ache to the light of day.
You take in a sharp breath and grit your teeth; wriggling as you bleat, "My Lord—?"
"I'm not trying to hurt you," he says, and the hands shift lower, pressing down on yet another unseen tension-point just above your pelvis.
He's being unbelievably gentle, for an Astartes; but what's even more unsettling is that the tenderness is also unbelievably uncharacteristic for Gadriel.
"I-I did not think you were, b-but it is—" you begin with a meek glance over your shoulder, "Titu—I mean... uh, the Captain doesn't really allow me to do much h-hard labour, so... there's no—ngh..." yet just as you did, the sudden drag of his fingers up the muscles astride the seam of your spine had you stifle a groan loudly. "No point t-t-to you debasing yourself doing this... truly."
The scalding pressure shifts into a dull warmth, roiling through your nerves sweetly; convincing you to arch your back. Your legs flex, and you feel your shucked-down pants falling all the way off one foot.
"You think my effort is pointless?" He supplies, a slight offence lacing his tone.
"N-No, Lord... I j-just..." you backpedal, and let out a short groan, lifting your hips a little. There goes the other pant leg, you suppose, as the fabric slides away. "Don't uh—understand."
"It feels pleasant, doesn't it?" He mumbles, one of his palms splaying out between your shoulders.
"Y-Yes," you whine.
"Then it is not without purpose," Gadriel began in a flat tone, looming close to your ear and letting his exhale taper off into a long, curious hum. "I am simply... rewarding you, for your work."
"You are, y-you certainly are," his fingers rolled over a pressure point and dug in, causing you to jerk, a shallow moan ripped out of you when your rear arches higher and bumps up against his groin.
You hear the Sergeant inhale sharply, his huge hands steadily sliding down, kneading your ass. He's surprisingly mindful to maintain a safe pressure as he digs into the tissue of your glutes.
He stops suddenly, and you're a bit upset about that because it actually felt really nice—but you're quickly reminded there's much lewder things he's more than happy to do.
A set of hips bumps against your rear, and you look over your shoulder to see him holding his tunic up. His cock's just as pretty as you remember it, and topped with the same colour grey-blonde hair as his head. It's flushed and leaking as he drags it back and forth against you.
"Why were you delivering used linens, serf?" Gadriel asks completely from left of the field, his erection sliding between the rounded cheeks of your rear, "There are other lesser menials that ought to do such tasks."
"Uh," you harrumph, a little taken a back by the sudden change of pace. Why is he asking this, now? Why is it suddenly important? Which all surmise into the thought of: why are Astartes like this?
"He shouldn't leave you to wander," he continues roughly while you dither, "You are too sweet, it is an invitation."
Try as you might to refute it in your head, the Sergeant's right about the notion it's probably a bad idea letting you freeroam. You hadn't even considered that you're probably a dangling treat to the Great Angels onboard. If Gadriel's like this, maybe—maybe the others are, too. If Titus, and Chairon, and Gadriel are all liable to desire, then how many others, too? Is it possible there's other serfs just like you, being... companionable? You can't even begin to imagine which ones would be, though. You wouldn't be able to tell. Maybe you've bumped shoulders with another in your exact situation, and had been none the wiser. Perhaps one of the young servant men and women, or one of the older serfs? There are pretty people on board everywhere you look, if you really think about it. Who knows who is closer to an Angel than they rightly ought to be? You pass by so many people day-to-day, it could be anyone. They could be a lord and a lady, one of the officers—even an ambassador. You should try watching closer. Maybe there's a tell? Surely, it can't be hidden entirely. You would like to see them, even if they probably won't really see you. You're invisible in your status. They wouldn't know if you stayed inside Titus' chambers or not.
Still, being cooped up and a layabout feels wrong. There is so much to do besides cuddle up, you should be helping Titus with more things—not just enjoying yourself, constantly; and you try, albeit rather poorly, to tell the Sergeant just that, "The C-Captain has many duties, now, and I still want to be useful, so—"
"If usefulness is your wish, you should always be like this," Gadriel hums, his free hand squeezing your ass while he rolls his hips again.
"Like w-what?"
"Wanting," he breathes.
"My Lord, t-that would not be... proper," you breathe, baffled at yourself that you're talking back to an Astartes.
"Why not? You like the attention well enough," Gadriel says tersely, and you turn away, trying not to tremble too obviously.
"I-I—" you stammer.
"We should breed you," he announces suddenly, and stops rolling his hips in favour of squeezing your ass with both hands, "How do I breed you?"
"I'm n-not sure that's a good i-idea—" you attempt to contend softly, surely shaking again, now.
"I want to try," he grumbles.
And it's readily apparent he's going to.
He's manhandling you onto your back, next; and your legs kick out in surprise.
You watch him fight his tunic over his head with a hurried grace, and pause momentarily to ogle the broad plane of muscle and scars bared to you.
He is still strikingly beautiful, battle-wounds and all. His ports catch the light like silver jewellery, almost. He's looking at you, too—pupils blown wide and pouting slightly. Throne, he's so pretty, you almost want to stare at him for hours.
You don't get much longer to simply bask in the view, though; because he leans back in and tries to bend you up under him like he had when his mouth'd been between your legs—you're worried if he folds you underneath himself too harshly, he'll snap you in two. And just as you think that, a muscle in your lower back smarts in pain seemingly proving your point.
A soft yelp leaves you, and it makes him hesitate.
Gadriel eyes you, clearly expecting you to speak.
"Mm... m'lord, please... wait—" you blubber, uneasy at the looming problem and your own attempt to address it under his gaze. "It'll be difficult like t-this."
He blinks slowly, "How can I make it better?"
"I-I," your mouth feels dry, "I really shouldn't be telling y-you to do things, my Lord—"
"Would you, if I order you to?"
You guess when he puts it like that, you don't really have an option.
"Maybe, p-perhaps... the former position would be less... daunting?"
"On your front?" He asks, sounding a tad disbelieving. "You'd prefer that?"
"Maybe on one of the sheets, t-too?"
"I can't see why not," he hums, and promptly leans back down to lift you clear off the counter.
You're lowered to the ground on shaking legs, but miraculously keep your footing when his support falls away and he reaches for what's left of your pile of unwashed bedding.
He pulls a large blanket out, sniffs, and makes a face with his top lip curled up.
"Lord?" You ask, unsettled by his reaction.
He doesn't answer immediately, and sniffs at it again, only to roll his tongue around his mouth and shallow snort.
"Smells like Titus," he notes flatly, "...and you."
There's probably more than a few stains of lascivious fluid on it. You're not exactly sure how many. Could be one, could be ten. Most of them are probably yours. Titus really does have a fixation on finishing you off as many times as he can, and definitely goes a fair number of rounds with you in tow—not that you're really complaining.
"Ah," you breathe, trying not to start stammering again under the Sergeant's scrutiny. "I-I suppose it would, my Lord..."
"He takes you this way as well?" Gadriel raises a grey-blonde brow and snorts again, turning to lay the fabric out across the counter with a quick flourish. Then, he lifts you back on to the sheet-covered counter with not even a hint of issue.
"S-Sometimes—He... knows I-I enjoy the heat," you force out, and settle against the familiar feeling of the blanket with a practised ease. Talking like this is much easier when you can't see him. Your nerves get too high when you're plainly aware he's looking. "You all run very hot, it's... nice, being close to."
"Is it not the size disparity that makes being mounted your favourite?" He asks sternly, but it's not really a question. It's the cutting remark of observation that only an Astartes could make so plainly. It's filth that sounds more like he's making a simple, casual comment about the time; and all it does is send your brain into spirals.
It is, it is, it is—you like it, you really, really like it because of that. You can't admit it, but you also can't even deny it for a fraction of a second. Throne, just the thought of feeling huge legs and cold ports against your ass and thighs makes you whine high in your throat. It makes you force your spine to arch hard despite the dangle; clenching your abdomen to try to lift yourself just that little bit to aptly present. Trying to give him a clear invitation to fill you.
Let him use you however long he wants, let him drain himself of all the hot spend he's got.
Titus always makes you wait, like this. Likes to lick, or stuff his fingers in. He makes a game of being sure you're so wound up you finish just as he slides in. You're hoping you can get a nice, streamlined version out of that out of the Sergeant.
Retrospectively, you note Titus' made a monster out of you, truly. A greedy monster. You're only a little serf, compared to all of them; and your tastes have been adjusted to the obscene. Now, you're all too keen to let anything twice your size in blue ceramite spill in your womb if only to please. You're not going to lie and say you're shameless, because by the God-Emperor, that you enjoy being used is mortifying—and you're no more confident around them because of it—yet it still doesn't change the fact.
Gadriel's response to your attempts to harry him is a choked, appreciative thing, followed by a laboured swallow.
He nudges your entrance without any preamble, and just that touch is so warm you shiver at the heat—but then it gets so, so much better.
He wraps a hand around your hip to keep you still, and presses forward.
It's depraved how easily he slides in, because you know it's solely due to how wet you are.
It doesn't negate how big he is, though. You're still much smaller. There's just no way to truly consolidate the Baseline-to-Astartes dimorphism, let alone with a Primaris like Gadriel.
You squeal when he jars himself against your cervix, and whine sourly when there's no familiar, divine press of hips flush to your ass.
Gadriel groans out a long, trying sigh, "I needed this so badly."
Any thought you have to respond to that disappears as he starts fucking into you with purpose.
It's so good you can't help but squirm, trying to fight for purchase on the surface. Your toes don't even skim the floor, even stretched as you are. To your brain, it feels like a great height, like dangling off a balcony, or a cliff with a sheer drop. And all the while, he's driving himself as deep as he can into you. Throne, the sounds you're only distantly aware you're making must be debauched.
"Keep making those noises, serf," Gadriel rasps, his voice heavy.
A big mitt smoothers down your back and the touch is so sudden you jerk, only for him to drive into you again, and again; and then that same huge, overwhelming hand is at your scruff, holding you down to the surface like a scared animal.
Panic immediately seizes you, even though you arch a little higher to let him rut deeper.
It would take a flex of those fingers to snap your neck—honestly, it'd take less than a mere twitch, at that.
A cry is all the response you can articulate, and you try, mindlessly, to lift yourself on two palms and fuck yourself back against him.
It's apparently not the reaction the Sergeant was after.
Seeing as, a moment later, his unoccupied hand is wrangling your arms behind yourself—holding them in place with a vice-like bracket about your wrist like some living pair of cuffs. The sheer strength in every aspect is dizzying, but you suppose it's an admirable consideration seeing as he's not yet accidentally broken anything of you.
Everything surely aches, but that is far exceeded by the blessed thud of sensation plaguing every nerve and synapse you have. You're melting, and he's so, so far in you. You're certain he's bullied your insides into allowing another inch to fit with his oversized cock. There's no other logical explanation as to the fact you can suddenly feel strong hips plastered flush to your rear; and a pair of balls snug against your clit.
Or the fact that your cervix feels like it's in your throat, of all places.
You'd never properly fitted him to the base, even with the extra stretching from Titus and Chairon before him.
He's seemingly well aware of the fact he has stuffed in all he can. Because the groan that echoes from above you all of a sudden when he rolls himself into you again is obscene. It's a wet, open-mouthed sounding thing, luxuriant and lazy.
"There, just... just like this is perfect," he pants.
His hips grind forward in slow, steady motions, rocking upward. The once rabid, almost hydraulic-press pace of his hips hammering into yours has completely dilapidated into sloppy humping, for lack of a better word.
Rather unsurprisingly, it's exactly enough of a change of pace to send you finishing on his cock.
"You're just so tight and warm... a-and..." he starts to say but your hearing rings out, and you lose the rest of his words to it. You can't help how your insides thud, and a surge of bliss chokes a garbled cry from your gullet. It's so quick but intense you grind your teeth, clenching hard but stilling fast.
And through it all, Gadriel rocks into you. More than happily letting you know he's enjoying your end with a long, self-satisfied groan. You can feel him filling you, too; a nice, hot load inside—it's gratifying knowing you feel this good, that he's enjoying it, even if you're so sensitive you're shaking.
But it's only a prelude—a short glimpse at a steeper, harder crest that'll come, which makes everything far worse; because there's pleasure still building just from having his cum heating your insides, let alone being ploughed into. The bliss doesn't blow away like dust; it stacks and stacks, and you know the next one will not be as easy to ride off.
You can hear him above you, panting, and a whine rises in your chest as he rasps, "You'll take another, won't y-you?"
Your hamstrings burn with the effort of your orgasm, core cinching and head pounding in unison with each rabid squeeze you make around him.
You're sobbing openly, vision half-blurred by tears you try blink away, "Y-uh-yes, m... m'lord."
Every part of you is so sensitive, it's almost dazzling feeling him shudder in delight atop you.
The hand scruffing the back of your neck moves to brace his own bulk, now flat and palm-down beside your head.
At that reprieve, your face turns until your cheek's nicely cooled by the steel. The sheet's been moved and jostled enough that it's slowly slipping back. The cold is pleasant, even if your insides still feel like superheated slag.
The shift allows you a skewed, tear-blurred glance upward, and you're graced by the sight of a drooling Sergeant.
Gadriel's face is banded across with a flush just like before, except he's keening, brows knitted almost as if in agony—salivating like a beast.
But your short time to watch him is quickly ripped away. Because, abruptly, Gadriel's entire weight presses against your back. For a brief instant, you feel every ounce of air drive out of you, but it's somehow remedied by him tugging you up against him.
Swooning, you let out a little mewl; over-full and over-hot with the sudden embracing. The Sergeant's like a furnace to the touch, you can't even wriggle enough to gain a millisecond of reprieve from being stuck in the iron-hard clutches of his huge arms. Stuck between him and the surface, he's more or less mounting you now, just like you asked, and you're stunned he hasn't shattered your spine. You can still feel your toes, and legs, and rear—but God Emperor help you, does your ass hurt. And so does your cunt, for that matter—even if every sloppy roll of his hips against you is absolutely sublime.
He's back to pounding the living daylights out of you, with not even a hint of thought towards the fact that he's only recently cum in you.
You gasp, half-stunned by the heady return of fresh pleasure to your senses.
But then his hold changes, and you're suddenly in a headlock.
It stifles you nigh instantly, and any loud, depraved noise he'd been fucking out of you tapers off to a hoarse keening.
Gadriel tips his chin down and rubs his cheek against the top of your head, nuzzling up while he's apparently completely oblivious to the fact he is starting to choke you.
He also doesn't seem to notice you scrambling at the forearm braced under your throat. And when he starts moving again, your head swims at the warm slide of him.
An agonising, weightless burst of lightning tramples through your nervous system and you cry out a noise closer to a hissed wheeze—desperately trying to figure out how to make the rush stop, or how to make it never stop—something, anything.
But you can't disengage him; he's too much.
"Why aren't you moaning?" Gadriel rasps between heaving breaths, still rutting forward, "Is... is this not good? I'm t-trying to be good."
Something in you twists into a knot and unwinds with a snap, mere seconds later. You can't help but whinny in confusion, shaking beneath him. Your orgasm feels like a death throw. It may as well be, as speckles of black and static edge your vision. Phantom lights of colour burr across your sight, and—
The vice under your gullet abruptly lifts away and you cough harshly, barely managing to wolf down air despite the mercy.
Your feather-light nerves feel a pulse-pulse-pulse between your thighs; the shudder of huge hips and an all too-familiar heat being spilt in your twitching cunt.
You look up through your tears and see Gadriel's face pinched up, he's gritting his teeth hard—and a sound like a broken piston leaves him. It's a shrill, keened whine up from his huge chest that vents out through his nose, tapering off to wild panting; he's straining through his own end while filling you up. It's so over-much that you can feel the warm-wet spill of what can't manage to stay in you dripping down your sex and thighs, in fat, milky ropes.
You can feel his thighs twitching against your own, and the errant, impulsive half-thrusts that he can't help.
Gadriel's... satisfied enough to calm for the moment, it seems.
You don't know how long you're simply gasping for air under him. The heat of him against your back is so nice you almost doze off, to say nothing of the bliss of having him still hard inside you. You're warm and content, and aching—and most of all, filled. It's sloppy and leaking where he's still buried inside you. He's done a thorough job of keeping it in, despite that. You're tempted to lazily rub yourself, even raw as your clit probably is, and let him bask in one more orgasm. Throne, you'd even let him have another round, if he wanted—you can think of how to explain taking so long to Titus, later.
But when you do regain higher thought, you realise you're drooling against the steel beneath you, and only really rouse when he says, "...serf?" in a very, very small voice for an Angel.
It's hard to talk when your body prefers hyperventilating, but you push through the urge to slump.
So, you groan instead.
"Are you alright?" He asks quietly.
You groan again, a little higher in pitch this time.
"Well... that's a good sign," he answers quickly.
A whine is all you can offer, as he rears up to his palm and looms over you.
"Gadriel," comes a gruff, familiar voice out of nowhere.
Belatedly, you flinch and try to rise—only to keen at the feeling of a cock still hilted in you.
"Titus?" Gadriel mumbles, confused, and you swear there's the smallest tremor to his voice as he adds, "I... I did not expect you here."
"Her access logs in the ship's system," Titus rumbles sternly, "As does yours."
Gadriel's pulling out of you, suddenly, and you whine—it's uncomfortable, losing the warmth and the fullness so quickly. But Titus' here, and that's good. You can't turn to see him, stuck on your belly as you are, but you're glad to see him. He's always so much softer. It'd be a nice change of pace. Maybe it'll be like the battle-barge, and you'll get spoiled with more.
You almost start drooling again.
You try to rise again, wanting to greet Titus as you ought, but your limbs are like wet rations. You can't even muster up the strength to even start to lift yourself off your front, especially not with your legs dangling.
Gadriel rolls you onto your back and carefully strokes your side. It's nice, and you blink up at Titus standing next to him. He's in his tunic, with his soft blue robe pulled over the top. You're very happy to see him, even if there's a harshness to the lines on his forehead that entails a very poor mood.
Somehow, you drag yourself up to a sitting position, and the room spins for a moment with a queasy tilt.
"Careful, careful," Titus' hand comes to rest against your bicep, steadying you while you regain your bearings. "Not so fast."
When you're finally settled, you peek up at him and huff softly, which earns his palm coming up to your cheek—or more accurately—against the side of your head.
You reach up to place your hand over the top of his, content and deeply, deeply exhausted but still wanting to at least try to cheer him up. He's probably just been concerned. But you're alright, and you know exactly how to prove it.
"M'okay," you slur, and paw at Titus' large forearm with your other hand until you find the port on the interior. You circle it softly, and he sighs again.
He likes it when you do this, so it's no harm to try to at least show you still have some sense.
Titus' face creases as he looks down at you, "You've made a mess."
You frown sadly, and turn your face into his hand more as the disapproval stings, "Mm... m'sorry, Titus."
"You don't have to apologise," he tuts, and his thumb starts making slow circles against your temple, "I am talking to him."
You look from your Lord to the Sergeant as he says it, and Gadriel winces.
"She enjoyed it," he offers in his defence, and his hand joins Titus' efforts, though not on your face. Instead, he's stroking your back; rubbing a little like he'd done earlier, "Didn't you, serf?"
You moan softly, basking in the warmth of hands on you.
"She's not to be trusted with metrics of enjoyment," Titus cuts in as he raises a dark brow and sets his mouth into a thin line, "She'd gladly let you break something. Look at her, she's covered in bruises, Gadriel."
"I-I'm a-alright," you affirm again, despite the mumbled hoarseness in your voice while looking up at them both. You're so tired that any reservation against the act doesn't even occur to you, because what's that supposed to mean?
Titus regards you with long, trying exhale before he abruptly says, "Yes, you're very tough—but I think you've had enough for a cycle," and pets you again; then he turns to Gadriel and flares his nostrils, "Not to mention, there are staff outside who are rather displeased about having their entry-clearance rescinded."
Gadriel pointedly looks at the floor, pulls his hand away from your back and clears his throat, "We were finished, anyway."
"Good," Titus harrumphs, "Then you won't mind if I clean up, will you?"
Gadriel doesn't have anything to say about the fact that it's his tunic that Titus then uses to wipe the cum dripping and smeared between your thighs.
crop of something thats soon up on twt, a Valdor based on my dearest most innocent jolliest friend vyzz´s heroforge model (where he wears a sexy bunny suit)
crop of something thats soon up on twt, a Valdor based on my dearest most innocent jolliest friend vyzz´s heroforge model (where he wears a sexy bunny suit)
I'm the one who asked about Corvus, but I have yet another question. How about Jago Sevatarion, Talos, or any of First Claw? (BONUS POINTS FOR JAGO SPECIFICALLY). Sending many inspirational vibes.
hhbnbghhghhhghh jago,,,,
i am a big enjoyer of him hes sooooo pouty and such a yapper,,, legitimately itching to write something with him but i have no fucken idea where to start.
at one point i was gonna do a sorta stockholm syndrome type beat of him and a reader while hes in big bad sevatarion jail (dark angels ship) because hes such a patootie with altani,, shes such a sweet lil baby i need them to be a happy family :(((((
BUT I CANNOT FATHOM HOW TO EVEN START IT????
OR—maybe i just go the fan favourite route of him just straight nabbing a chick in the """""good""""" days pre-heresy. idfk??? see what i mean i have too many cakes and not enough spoons,,, OUGHHGH
Would you ever do a reader insert with Corvus Corax or the Lion? Your writing in general is just so good. I think I've read the Cato Sicarius fic like fifteen times from top to bottom.
hmmmmm,,,
id do one of corvus if i had the right inspiration kicking me up the ass. because i do think hes cute.
,,,but i actually dont know all too much about him aside from general timeline lore and the odd cool fact. so id probably have to deep dive his novels to characterise him right.
•extreme violence/gore (graphic descriptions of body horror)
•seizures/derealisation
•alcohol abuse
•obsessive behaviour
•dubcon edging on noncon
•oral [M&F receiving]
•intercourse [M/F]
•sorta femdom
•blood play
•power play
•sadomasochism
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now for the lewdity yum yum eat up @noxassula..... also... COME GET YOUR TAGS PEOPLE!!!!! @yourlocalnautilus @sinistermojo @kit-williams @grimdark-raccoon @primarisly-marooned @ma1dmer @yestheantichrist @yesthe-artblog @pluvio-tea @bispecsual @historitor-bookshelf @gallifreyianrosearkytiorsusan @lemon-russ @blackstarangel @the-raven-lady @thevoidscreams @mothiir @undeaddream @tanknode @beckyninja @justfreakynothingelse if anyone wants on or off the taglist lmk you know the routine!! sorry if i forgot anyone btw <3
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When he returns next, it has been another long week.
Pointedly, he finds himself standing under a broken gutter for five minutes to at least attempt to cleanse himself of some of the gore coating him. The water is filthy too, but he has little other options left so last-minute.
His dark hair is plastered to his face, and he is only freshly freed of stinging metal nuisances beneath his skin. It had taken hours to claw each one of the shotgun slug's pellets out of his thigh meat, to say nothing of the broken glass.
He had sustained the wound attending a corrupt political banquet—attending without the knowledge of the patrons—in which he tailed and butchered his way through four different two-faced criminal prosecutors and one scheming attorney general.
To say nothing of the dozens upon dozens of hired thugs they brought with them.
But it is done now.
And he has thoughts he seeks to refine through you.
But when he returns to your boudoir, somewhat clean from his rinse under the stale rainwater, he finds it a ransacked rat-nest.
He abandons his usual entryway, and goes through the front instead. The whole scene stinks of a gang related dereliction. There's signs of it in the sprayed symbols across the faux-velvet walls and the stage. The place has been ransacked with rushed purpose, not frenzy. Tables have been overturned and stripped bare. The bar is gutted, taps torn out, shelves smashed, and every single bottle on the bar's shelving has been drunk, then obliterated across the floor. Someone took everything worth carrying and broke the rest out of spite. There are indications of a fight everywhere: a dropped magazine near the service desk, bullet holes sprayed across the far wall—fresh footprints, all different tread patterns and different weights, overlapping and smeared through dust and spilled drink; pointing in conflicting directions, none of them yet faded. The private booths look worse. Privacy screens have been smashed in and their frames bent outward as if someone was dragged or thrown through them. One booth wall is blown all the way through, leaving a jagged hole that exposes wiring beyond.
He stalks down the long passage lined with dancer's rooms and enters yours. The door is wide open, and there's signs of a struggle here, too. The mirror vanity you usually sit at is cracked but not shattered, fractures radiating from a single, violent impact. The bulbs around the frame are smashed unevenly, leaving a few still glowing beside dark sockets. Powder and pigment are smeared across the countertop in frantic handprints. Your clothes are everywhere, moreso than usual.
The room feels too-hot, suddenly.
His brain swells in it's cavity for a moment. A pinched, shrill ringing resounding in his ears as his mind takes him.
He sees dark, depthless eyes peering into yours and ice cold hands against your skin. He sees your gaudy robe plunged into scarlet, and smells your perfume mixing with bile and blood. A gunshot echoes in the blackness, and a thud. A gurgling scream, the hiss of a death rattle.
The Night Haunter sucks his bottom lip into his mouth, worrying at it with his teeth.
He wants to be there to see you die, at the very least.
Around him, everything stinks of dust and fear... but also decay. He finds you have managed once again to take at least one moronic pursuer down. A pair of scissors to the throat seem to've been your weapon of choice this time. His so-called gang mates have left his corpse behind to rot in your ensuite.
So, the Night Haunter drags him out into the corridor and frisks the cadaver.
Wherein he discovers two things at once. The man's affiliation, and an invitation to an event in the outer hive.
It is all he needs to know.
On the outer fringes of the southwest district, he finds where they are trading in flesh and beasts. He has not been out this way, yet. There is too much filth to purge from the main heart of the sprawling hive to manage a venture to it's edges.
He eyes a massive series of derelict buildings, all covered in gang signs and spray-painted vulgarity. The defacement upon both housing and gutted warehouses extends even down to the cracked roads.
And in the background, he sees a yawning stadium.
The structure itself is immense, even by Nostraman standards; and is likely the centrepiece of the greater entertainment quarter. A passtime now long lost to the populous. Yet it still stands, bullet holes and viscera stained and etched into the walls and floor.
The stands of the amphitheater that are exposed to the corrosive rains could likely seat a minor city—or two. He can imagine it. Tens of thousands packed into the tiered gantries welded onto old support beams. It almost looks like a ribcage, cracked open and splayed.
Each echelon encircled by ruined arcades and broken balustrades framed on the exterior by engaged columns.
It is then that he hears voices.
Yelling and howling to one another, he smells human waste and booze and smoke; and so he stalks deeper into the subterranean layers of the arena, to hunt in the structure's entrails. Dead strip lights flickering and boot prints among the debris show him the way. The walls are pock-marked—layered with peeling industrial insulation, old warning decals half-buried beneath grime, and streaks of rust that look like dried blood.
Even from the confines of one of the many winding hallways, he can hear echoes reverberate loudly off the corridors. He cannot rightly distinguish screams from laughter. They are both too syncopated by the rattling of old pipes. Filthy, polluted water drips down on his head from them, running down the thick line of his nose; and he has to fight against the urge not to shake his head like a hound at the unwanted dousing.
There must be a busy street or an ordinance factory just above the tunnels, rattling the earth and sending percussive vibrations through the ground. Be they the clamour of the trapped or the merriment of trappers, or the awful rumble and shaking creak; the sounds all in unison nearly dizzy him.
He wants to snarl at the overload of noise to his keen ears, he wants to back himself into a corner and hiss.
But it will not do, and he stalks on.
In one large room, doors line the walls. Each filled with sobbing baselines. And when he looks down, he finds a man's body laying at his feet, in the early stages of rigor mortis, missing an arm.
He has seen him before.
He is one of the hired muscle that attended to the girls who worked alongside you, one of the guards outside that night at the entrance when he first slipped into the boudoir.
He has been visibly tortured.
The Night Haunter steps over him, and follows the long, red drag marks that lead from the body. The blood-path leads further down a causeway to a rust-scabbed blast door that marks the threshold.
The gang has welded layers of scrap plating over the original structure, leaving only a narrow, jagged opening just wide enough for a single person to pass through. A flickering red lumen glows above it, casting a red halo onto the grime-caked floor.
The screams and laughter are coming from there.
He, understandably, struggles for moment to fit his tall frame through the gap.
He is not particularly stocky for all his great height, but he is agile—and yet still the fact remains it is not sized to allow something like him through. His persistence rewards him in the end, even if it shreds the last scraps of his tunic off him.
The Night Haunter stifles the grumble that wants to bubble up his throat at the door's theft.
Instead, he scopes the room.
A half-functional loading crawler sits in one corner of the room. In the other, a welded-together forklift—painted in the gang's colors—resting with its' tines buried in a pallet of stolen munitions. And in the centre, you are being tormented. One brute has your arms pinned behind you and a woman is settled between your thighs with a knife in hand, leaning over you. There's flesh blood on the air, and all over your robe, and they are laughing.
Two men are smoking a few paces away, observing the whole ordeal with only distant interest.
He claws their throats open from behind and yet, he still isn't noticed; the others are too distracted.
It makes it awfully easy to close the distance.
All at once, he begins.
It takes a fraction of a fraction of a second for him to be upon them, and even less than that for him to land a blow. Skin sloughs back around his fist in red, frayed petals from the woman's caved-in chest. He has driven straight through. The force of the blow renders the surrounding meat to paste, with minimal effort on the Night Haunter himself's part.
The sound of communications interference sparking to life only makes him angrier.
The man shrieks: "C-Cargo bay four!" into the receiver.
He yanks his bloody hand out of the woman, and her body falls limp; then he lunges forward to reel the man—who'd been restraining you, but is now scrambling away, ham-fisting a radio—back in by the ankle like a speared fish.
"The Night Haunter i-is here! He's—" the words drown to screams in the man's throat as he's dragged right over the top of you, and all but riven into two halves.
Sometimes the sheer disparity of strength he wields disgusts him. It feels all too simple to take life. All too quick. The lessons in order and law that he wants to teach take time—time and effort, moreover—but baselines are fragile, and their thin forms break so very easily before his reckoning is complete.
You scramble out from under the two corpses, shaking and stinking of adrenaline. You are also covered in gore, which, considering the circumstances is rather fair enough.
But the maddest part of the whole situation occurs: you spring towards him—clambering to him—touching him, jarringly. The Night Haunter has never had hands that weren't clawing to get away against him. Your palm skates across his oblique, finding purchase on his filthy bicep and tugging.
"G-Get me the fuck out of here!" You sob, wracked by tremors like a wind blown bag, and all but latched on him.
He stands, and your hold on him coincidentally aids you to your feet.
When you detach, you sway, woozy, and he notices under the bloody crusting across your face that something is missing.
Your other eye, to be exact.
He has no time to dwell on it, and immediately sets about leaving. He wants to exit the way he came in, but a loud, thunderous crash echoes. The entire subterranean system shakes. Controlled, sequential detonations ravage through the hallways he'd stalked through not two minutes earlier. They have planned for him to come for them eventually, then. He knows the earth will start falling well before it actually does—and snatches you by the back of your tattered robe.
He doesn't know why he does. Only that it happens, and that you do not fight it.
A maintenance tunnel behind the loader remains unscathed by the rigged explosions, and he's halfway down it by the time the former room's ceiling collapses.
You are curled up on yourself in the air like a battered pup held by the scruff, and for a moment he is unsure what exactly to do to remove himself from the situation he put himself into.
He lowers you slowly, and stares.
You manage to stay standing as his grip leaves you, and look up at him. Your dressing robe is blotched brown with blood. He sees now the full extent of your wound. It spoils careful hours of applying make-up, far more than the tear-smudging of your mascara and the grime of the arena's innards.
Even in the dark, your blood is a shocking burst of colour to his enhanced eyes. It's smeared across half your face, dripping from your nose, and the same vivid cochineal as your painted lips. The Night Haunter tries—rather vainly—not to look too closely at the gouged site, lest some ghastly vision of him sticking his tongue in it steals him into fits. Some vision of warm, wet flesh, stringing membranes against his gums, rich and the colour of dried ochre.
Oh, what it would be to gleam the life you have had in that burst of taste.
It almost happens.
He leans down slightly, bidden by an urge twitching in him on a molecular level. He can smell the particles of blood in the damp air. It taunts him. His mind flickers at the edges with the after-image of the possibility. He sees you, then—in a different reality, in a new future. He sees that in the hazy alternative place you are in a dark robe—arranging yourself into a pile of skins and dark, plumate throws on a raised block of hewn rock.
The perspective shifts, and he cranes his neck; only to see you are suddenly below him, not quite awake. The facial wound you wear now, in the present, is a scar that's healed over into a deep cicatrix.
Your hand reaches out and touches the top of his.
The him that-is-not-him rolls his wrist to hold your hand softly, but the illusion of gentleness quickly shatters.
He's on you then, three times your size and inconsolable with the want for violence. He hears an echo of a shriek. Then his sharp nails find purchase enough to breach, drawing blood—and the screaming turns to mad laughter.
The Night Haunter takes a step back from you in the now, and bites down on his tongue so hard with his molars he can taste his own ichor.
It is enough to de-rail himself the trance.
It would do no good to fall to convulsions.
So he turns, keeps his head straight, and allows his vision to tunnel down the long, filthy hallway.
He starts to walk, and you follow.
You stride a pace behind him, cycloptic and half-feral from the adrenaline coursing through your veins. Your pain has taken precedent over your fear, and makes you obedient. But if you knew what horrors beckoned in his mind like viral electricity, would you be so willing to trail behind?
Nonetheless, you do.
You follow him into the warren of collapsed transit shafts and forgotten service corridors sealed off centuries ago. He suspects there is a culvert ahead somewhere, and seeks it out. That is, if the sound of water is any indication of an exit.
Naturally, nothing is ever easily said and done for the Night Haunter.
He notices you are both not the only ones in the tunnels. He can hear two foreign heartbeats well before they can even begin to conceive they, too, are not alone. He hunts the sound of their bodies through the dark passages.
Coming to a halt at the threshold of a small, breaker-filled enclave.
In less than a heartbeat, he has taken note of the man, clad in waterlogged gang-colours and trying to shoulder open the safety barricade on a fire-escape for a woman in a short, filthy dress.
He prepares to lunge, but your footfall behind him scrapes a few pebbles of debris across the ground.
The sound gives him away, and the pair spin about-face.
A scream tears from the woman's throat, and a sharp, thin-lipped grimace of horror spreads across the man's face; a look of panic glazing his eyes.
Displeased, the Night Haunter shoots a scathing glance at your mistake.
You stare up at him dumbly, only half-aware of yourself, but fearfully shrink back into the dark regardless.
The instant the Night Haunter looks back at the pair, the man has his weapon drawn and is aiming it at him. It always irks the Night Haunter that the filth of man think yelling curses and waving guns at him will fend him back. As if the bullets are not just temporary inconveniences. As if he's not going to just pick them out of himself later, as usual. As if there's a chance he's going to throw his hands up and yield to them. If he's completely honest, sometimes, the sheer audacity is almost amusing. But not in situations like the current one, when the only viable exit is within sight—and he's just about had enough mortal stupidity for one night.
"Back the fuck up!" The man screams, shaking so heavily with terror he looks almost spasmodic. "Back up, asshole! Darla, stay beside me, doll—"
Despite the man's efforts, the Night Haunter takes a heedless step forward.
In answer, the thug tightens his hold on the weeping young woman, who cries out. He tilts his head to the side, his gaze never leaving her. He thinks... he thinks he recognises her as one of the entertainers in the windows. Yes. Yes, that's it... her boudoir room is two doors down from yours. She is the one of short, lithe figure—all big hair, red lips and batted lashes. Her Nostraman is sharp slang, a series of words that betrays her age—she is—she is begging the man to run with her.
It is then that the Night Haunter notices she is not battered.
She is not in your state, she is not abused and covered with the marks of a struggle.
She is not ravaged, like her coworkers.
Moreover, why is she gallivanting about with a gang marked fool? Is she a willing captive? A turncoat? A trap?
It does not matter.
He does not really care.
"No—no, no! No! Stay back!" The thug screams when the Night Haunter takes another step forward, focus shifting back to him.
The woman, Darla, tugs the man's arm, trying to get him to flee again. But he is too busy flailing his firearm around at the Night Haunter to even consider anything remotely close to a good idea.
Abruptly, the partially compromised ceiling above creaks, displacing a few shards of rubble—spooked, the man flinches sidelong, looking up atop the woman; his stray fingers pressing down on the trigger.
A shot rings out.
Blackened crimson splatters against the wall to his side.
Then, a body falls away beside him, and slackens to the floor with a thunk.
The thug's gun clatters to the concrete beside the girl not a second later—and, as he wavered on his feet in a daze, he lets out a wheezing, dry sob as his knees drop out from under him.
The Night Haunter watches the man realise what he's done.
Naturally, the reality of his actions dawns upon him far slower than it does the Night Haunter. Still, it gives him the rare opportunity of seeing it crystallise in the man's eyes, alight with clear mortification despite that planet-typical voided out sclera.
It's then that he lunges at last, when the gravity sets in, already fully across the room in fractional seconds and lifting the man by the collar of his filthy fatigues.
Panting through his nose wildly, the man's hands scrape uselessly at a grip three times his own. Almost insensible with panic, he clouts the Night Haunter across the chin; all to no effect. And, even more foolishly, his legs kick out regardless of the inescapable hold, snarling and crying; but struggle just irritates the Night Haunter more.
The thug screams bloody-murder when he collides with the back wall—the sound less a thunk like his woman, and more a crack—likely having had his shoulders shattered on impact.
Then, the Night Haunter's huge hand grabs for his chin, violently seizing it and coincidentally wrenching his jaw open past the point of dislocation with the ease of a door torn off it's hinges. All that, just to lay a punch into the cavity of the forced open maw with such force his fist caves his skull in instantly. But, the Night Haunter doesn't stop there—no, an example must be made—he continues delivering blows in quick, excessive succession until nothing but a smear of viscera remains above the thug's neck in a matter of seconds. Brain matter, sundered flesh and bone shards coating all the way up his sallow forearm in clotting chunks, red and pink and white froth mixing thickly into a mucilaginous slurry.
Dropping the man's brutalised corpse to the floor, he watches as it spasms once then stills.
It is almost blissful that he hadn't even needed to think about doling out that judgment.
Abruptly, he hears a gagging behind him in the now-quiet room, and he hones his gaze silently on the lifeless woman across the room.
For a brief moment, he thinks it's hers.
He thinks, impossibly, that the collateral is not so.
But she is long gone.
In a few slow footfalls, you have moved out of the corridor to stand over her; and remain lingering upon the cusp of the puddle of dark blood pooling slowly around her head and neck.
Your breathing has picked up, and then comes that sickly gagging sound again. Thud-thud, thud-thud, thud-thud—goes the deafening, prey-quick beat of your heart as ever.
You settle into a squat, hesitantly reaching for the woman's body. Your hand pulls away once, twice, thrice; before at last you tentatively rest a palm upon her, patting the girl's hair mournfully.
"She is dead," the Night Haunter says.
You stop hyperventilating and stand, wherein a short interim of quiet resounds before your voice rises, thin in your throat; "I-I know."
"I did not kill her," he says too quickly, almost prematurely.
"I know," you sigh, gathering together the scraps of your mind; but he knows all too well the sound of distress by now to recognise it behind your ploy.
Silence stays thick on the stagnant air for a long while.
Until, at last, he offers; "I had foreseen a courtesan dying tonight."
A sharp inhale, and then you ask shakily, "Y-You see things?"
"You will die in the dark," he notes flatly, "I wrongly assumed it would be today," only to digress; "It seems instead... a later time, then."
"I-Is that supposed to be good or bad news?" You cringe at him, still stammering with shock despite your heartbeat slowing. He stares at you through the curtain of his dark hair—in some black humoured way—he finds the expression almost comically lob-sided.
"Neither," he rasps, and easily opens the door the now-dead man had been struggling to.
You, thankfully, do not continue speaking after that.
The exit leads to a small rampart up to street level, and upon forcing open that door, too; it is raining again. The precipitation falls in heavy sheets, warm and oily, streaked with chemical tang that douses the gore off his his skin and hisses where it hits exposed, dead lampposts along the street. Rather unsurpisingly, the rain turns the walk back to your ransacked club into a long, soggy, miserable corridor. It leaks from places it should not, it seeps through cracked buildings, and runs in thin black streams along the ground. He notices that for once there are no passersby, no sense of life—there is only the steady hiss of water and the distant groan of machinery buried deep in the hive's spine—the explosions have likely spooked the populace of this rung into cowardice, for the time being.
The path he has chosen is simply for the fact the lights are worse. It hides him better. He does not like moving at street level if he can help it, typically. He does not like the fact there is a chance of being seen to begin with, but he cannot take you the ways he normally traverses. You cannot make the jumps, nor manage the climbs.
Streetpost-lumens flicker or stay dark entirely overhead, leaving long stretches of shadow where the rain disappears before it meets the ground. When a light does work, it is jaundiced and weak; revealing peeling paint, rust blooms, and old warning sigils half-scraped away.
Your footsteps echo dully behind him, swallowed almost as soon you make them.
When he finally reaches the ransacked club with you in tow, he is not surprised to enter and see a vagrant already taking up the space under one of the tables.
The human is slumped, wrapped in a stained coat, face hidden, breathing slow enough to make the Night Haunter linger. But the reek of freshly smoked lho-sticks makes him turn his nose up in disgust. Lung-blight has the mortal in it's clutches much like a vast majority of Nostramo. He can hear alveoli strain, clotted by tar and chemical taint; and knows death is on it's way. It is because of this the Night Haunter is acutely aware he does not need to intervene. The human is already on the proverbial way out.
You walk ahead abruptly, not even noticing the vagrant with your blunt baseline senses. For a moment, it is not the fact you are blind to the company that confuses him, but the fact you decide it is your place to lead.
In the end, he is not entirely too dedicated to caring about it.
So he tails you, following behind. The rain has soaked your dressing robe nearly translucent. Blood blotches in thick bands atop the outline of flesh stuck to the fabric. It clings so close he can see the dimples of flesh above the back of your hips.
He watches and says nothing in warning as you nearly trip over the cold corpse you made of one attacker he'd dragged into the dark corridor earlier.
A gurgle of disgust leaves you as you kick it a little, and then step over it.
Your boudoir is still a mess, and you disappear into the bathroom.
Without prompting, the Night Haunter easily moves your tall wardrobe across the room to block the doorway.
He does not entirely trust the barricade, but he does not entirely care. If something, or someone tries to break through it; he is irritable enough to savage them without a second thought. He also doesn't trust you, but you are small and weak and wounded, and he knows you won't try to make an enemy of him anytime soon.
You leave the bathroom stinking of alcohol, with a half-empty bottle in your hand. It seems to be a recurring solution for you to cope with the innate fear he inspires.
Rather absurdly, you are smiling to yourself as you stare at the swill; only to hold out the container to him. It seems you are trying, impossibly and despite better judgment, to fashion an ally from him with generosity.
It will not work.
"I do not want your poison," he hisses, and drops to a crouch—only to organise himself to sit cross legged. He is unusually tired this night. It has been a long, long week. Full of trivialities that have all but sucked him dry. He has not even dared a moment's rest in a ten-day, and he is beginning to feel the burn of it behind his eyes.
"So..." you start meekly, manoeuvring to mirror; sitting yourself in-front of him with the bottle between your thighs. "Why did you save me? ...again?"
"I did not do it for you," he answers flatly. "Your life has no bearing on the fact law had to be dealt."
"It seemed pretty intentional," you huff, looking down at the lip of the bottle longingly.
Hypothetically, if it was an intentional, grand rescue: in the moment, he surely would have spared even half a thought for the other fools still in their cages when the ceiling collapsed. Which he hadn't in the slightest. He would also tell you that your own coworker likely sold you out for the sake of credits and an easy get-away with her paramour. He would tell you about all of that, but his mind cannot fashion a way to use the fact as leverage for why he hadn't saved you on purpose. Because it both contradicts his argument and benefits it in equal parts, aggrivatingly. As far as you are aware, he may very well have just been in the area hunting the thugs already. Not that he searched a corpse, tracked after your attackers; killed them and the one who betrayed you, and led you home.
So, he settles on merely staring down at you and hissing, "It was not."
You abruptly look up at him.
"Then... what? All this is fate?" You breathe, still letting words leave you despite the very clear irritation he's trying to telegraph. At last, you end your yapping by snarking; "Or some weird divine, angelic intervention?"
The sentiment disgusts him on an atomic level. He is no angel, he is not here at the behest of some god's pithy will. And if he is an angel, then he is surely the blackest, most dreadful one anything living or dead could surely bring into being.
"It was predetermined," he rumbles, "Your end has already happened, as far as the future is concerned."
"So why bother?" The question is almost a sigh as you lift the bottle up to your lips to take another heavy gulp, finishing it, "Why bother with anything?"
He does not know how to respond to that, at first. He frowns, thinking. Another thing he has not been spurred to ponder upon yet, brought to his attention by your mouth.
"Because you must," he rumbles, with no great sum of words to offer in inspiration.
Just like him, you have to carry on, carry on until you die.
You scoff, "That's not true."
The touch that follows catches him by surprise; but there is a familiar urgency to it. You are not scrambling for a hold like before this time, and he does not entirely know how to shake it off. It is trembling, and small against his knee. The rest of you is shaking, too. The adrenaline has clearly not worn off, and neither has the horror of his continued presence on your baser mind. It's the act of a kicked animal seeking comfort, and he is not capable of comprehending—nor fulfilling—such a task.
Or perhaps it is an attempt at securing another inevitable rescue.
He is not interested either way.
"You cannot even conceive what is to come," he says, instead. "I have seen it."
"I want to know," you offer, and he can tell you still don't fully comprehend.
He grumbles, "No."
"You're full of shit," you scoff, "You're lying to me."
"Lying?" He snarls, lurching forward into your space with a snarl suddenly rising on his maw. "You are only so bold to imply that because you think our repeated conversations grants you immunity from prosecution, but don't think it will for long."
You spook at his words, aware you have over-stepped as you pull your hand back. The traces of mirth vanish from your bloodied face and your eye widens a fraction. The hammering of your heart redoubles. His acute perception catches a flinch—the shadow of an impulse to get up and run, but there is nowhere to go that he wont find you.
A strange disappointment that pricks at his thoughts makes him scowl, and he rears back far enough to lie down.
It is quiet for a time, and he can hear your heart dying down to a more reasonable pace. Fast, but steady. And, foolishly, you decide to scud closer on your haunches to his side, then you ask:
"Do you kill me?"
The Night Haunter groans, bringing a huge clawed hand up to his face and smearing it across his cheek in dismay. He did not want you to pursue this line of questioning. He is already sick to death of your obsession with the topic.
"It is not clear," he snaps.
You make a thoughtful hum in the back of your throat, "Is... is there lots of blood?"
"About the same as there is now," he grumbles.
A similar grumble also leaves you at that, and your hand comes up to touch your face—dainty fingertips skirting around the haggard wound that had been one of your eyes.
"I don't even want to know how bad it is," you whisper, clearly biting back tears.
The injury is not exceptionally deep, and yet still it has taken the eye. Your eyebrow is intact, but the upper eyelid is cut wide and clotted.
"You will not have to endure any more performances," he offers.
You look at him, lopsided, and start laughing wildly.
He is completely bemused.
Your madness dies off eventually, leaving you panting shallowly, "I'm disfigured beyond belief, then?"
"It will heal," he notes flatly.
You harrumph, "See that in one of your visions, did you?"
He hesitates, then answers anyway; "Yes."
That seems to earn your curiosity.
You make a strange sound, and ask softly; "...am I still beautiful, at least?"
It is so beyond banal a notion to be questioned, he feels the urge to slap a palm to his face again in dissapointment, but does not.
Instead, he glares at you and answers, "I do not know."
You give him an odd frown, "What?"
"I said, I do not know," he rumbles.
"I heard that," you cut in with a drunken scoff—fussing, "What I mean is why?"
"I do not feel what humans feel," he digresses, mindlessly gesticulating with a clawed hand from his prone spot on the floor beside you. "I do not... lust, like them. I do not see a beautiful face and fall to fits of hunger."
The last part is perhaps an omission of the truth by some standards. He has seen beautiful faces and hungered. He has hungered to tear them off the people wearing them. He remembers doing just that to a senator's trophy-wife trading in false bonds. And the woman he killed before she could do the job herself. To say nothing of the young men and women he has dragged into the dark to flay for their gang affiliations.
"I would've wagered it to be a thing for blood," you breathe out with a sly side glance.
He is absolutely beyond disgusted at your line of thinking. All his hard work, all his hours upon hours trying to heel and curb the masses—and you think he is a pervert seeking violence? "You think I bring law to this abhorrent place for the sake of... sexual gratification?"
"I've seen and heard of some strange fetishes," you offer, cringing.
He does not doubt that.
Abruptly, his irritation abates—thinking it over, with your experience, it is not a so far fetched conclusion.
"Have you ever..." you mumble softly, clearly hesitating, "...tried?"
He blanches, abhorred at the idea.
"No."
"Why?"
"I have told you why, I do not—" then he realises himself, realises who he is, and who you are, and abandons the whole topic in favour of seething. "Your poison has made you stupid and reckless," he snarls, resting up on his elbows and scowling at you. "I will be the one to kill you this night if you insist on this depraved chatter."
"There's no crime in having a drink," you bite, much to his surprise. The swill has made you bold, indeed.
"Public intoxication," he sneers.
"Well..." you drawl, batting the lashes of your only good eye. "When you find the public in my boudoir, do let them know I've had a few, will you?"
You are taunting him, trying him—testing the line, to see how far you can overstep. You must surely be mad. Mad or daft—or simply drunken, and in pain, and trying to distract yourself from such.
He bares his teeth as he warns, "Solicitation is a crime, too."
"I don't think I could manage to solicit you if I tried," you rush to say, and you look at him in that odd way again. Your cycloptic gaze tears from his and glazes down his front, openly ogling. It drags from his throat to his chest to his biceps and then down, lower.
You make a sound alike a purr, and pull back; only to start to shrug off your robe. He holds himself completely still when one heavy breast falls free, followed by the other.
Then the sopping wet, bloodstained robe all but sloughs to the shag carpet behind you.
"You are insane," he hisses high in his gullet, "You cannot possibly think—"
"Think less me propositioning you," you cut him off with a rasp, using the honeyed tone certainly saved for clientele as you lean forward far enough that the heft of your cleavage cushions against his abdomen, "And more... me thanking you."
He is deeply, deeply unnerved as you reach for the ragged drawstrings of his pants and use your nail to tease the knot open. He does not stop you. He wants to, partially—but he is curious.
Mortified, but curious.
Then, with barely veiled urgency you shuck down the hem all the way down to the middle of his large thighs.
Over your own shoulder, he sees your eye widen, then half-lid.
Your head ducks down, and your mouth glazes over the rounded top of his soft length; the organ unsurprisingly disinterested.
It's a distant warmth, but easily disregarded.
Small hands brace against his wide adonis belt, and another slow lick sends an uneasy chill up his spine. Still, he lies there, doing nothing to impede you draping yourself further against his front. You lean on his abdomen on your side, the back of your thighs pressed together forming a neat, uniform line. With the exception of the fork in the road your plump cunt makes further up.
He tries not to look at it, but the entirety of your rear is bared to him. He can see the divot between both holes, and the glossy sheen of slimy degeneracy smeared across the skin.
It's nothing like what his visions supplied.
His visions of your form were far more complex.
This, in comparison, seems rather trite.
You're not covered in bleeding claw marks, nor livid bruises—your flesh is smooth and unmarred and flushed.
You deign another slow drag of your tongue, and your spine curves with the movement, mouth tipping to allow the tip of him in.
It's a new, uncomfortable, tingling kind of heat. It's making him blindly impatient, almost itchy under his skin—like there's a dryness to his hide that needs wetting—and he's well aware the closeness in feeling it shares with having one's hands covered in parched, flaking blood and wishing for a rinse.
The Night Haunter immediately decides he won't stand for the feeling.
You're quickly pulled from where you're mouthing his still-soft endowment, and up to the wide span of his upper torso. In the process, your legs move to try to steady yourself, first with a knee on his ribs; then sprawled utterly across him.
One of his huge clawed hands holds you still about the hip, while the other remains limp at his side. Warm thighs press either side of his sharp cheeks. Musing his long dark hair enough to spill over the tops in dark, filthy ropes. It is the longest he has been this close to a living body, let alone one not howling and screeching in terror. It is also, similarly, one of the strangest positions the Night Haunter has ever found himself in. That is, despite his many, many strange situations. Doling out due process on the criminals of this wretched planet has it's absurd moments, in almost obscene contrast to the morose nature of the circumstances in which the doling happens.
In his earlier time, he had corpses he'd strung up fall on him. He's been stunned to scrambling back when an obscura addict lept at him on all fours like a rabid dog. Once, a woman he'd gutted managed—with her insides very much out, mind you—to stumble close enough to bite his hand midway through him ridiculing her life choices.
But in the end, nothing like the situation he is in now has happened to him before.
At least not in his waking reality.
In his momentary absences of mind, this scene would be part in parcel with the average, debauched blight of his visions.
This is real, however.
That much is certain.
You are prone, belly down on his front, now—nigh glued to him with the damp heat between.
A pithy little groan escapes you where your face is angled against his navel, "I can't reach you like this, y-you know?"
But he can reach you.
He has your sex merely a hand from his face, and nothing else in the way. At the back of his throat, the smell of sweat, old perfume and soaps linger on your skin despite the night's torments. He picks through them with conscious mental effort until just estrogen and progesterone cloud against his vomeronasal passage.
It's not entirely unpleasant, just mortal.
He has never had an appetite for such things.
Truthfully, he had never thought to test himself for the urges he has seen mortal men succumb to. The very urges that you capitalise upon for survival as a courtesan. This is but another dilemma brought to his attention by your actions.
Still, the instinct that this is far, far beneath him lingers in his mind; but the curiosity remains. There is weight to your part in this endeavour. Namely in this long, long play yet to truly begin. His fits of delusion spare no detail when it suits them. Vivid, torturous detail of every aspect. In your presence the glimmering pieces of your fate multiply. Albeit fish-eyed and seemingly impossible. Every time, they show he—will—can't—might—be in this position one day, and that he—mustn't—does—should—allow it to happen.
Theory and practice, theory and practice; always dancing in tandem. His visions appear absolute, at times; and in others they are fragments of many futures strung into one with no real purpose. They blur together like drunken nights he will never have. And, much like you, with your destroyed boudoir and your pithy little stage, and it's red-as-blood spotlighting; his theatrics are a set schedule, woven by destiny.
Beset by his trance, you take the opportunity to try to squirm down him again; and chance a quick lick against his cock.
At the exact moment you do, he breaks from it and slides you back up himself; dragging you higher, closer to his face.
"Stop moving me," you groan.
He is not sure why he does it, only that he does. He gives a single, long lick across delicate skin, warm under his tongue, and over a tiny blood-swollen nub; making you squeal like a stuck pig. The sound is not quite pain. It's shock, yes, but not the agonies he's familiar with drawing from others.
Another lick, and you freeze stiff, heaving—he feels nails pointlessly digging into his impenetrable hide, and the pillow of breasts against his lower sternum as you tense. He can smell fear, but he—he can taste... excitement. Liquid glee, smothering over his tastebuds and sending his brain into a flurry of mad spirals.
It's intoxicating, like the memory borne sparks wrought by a fresh spray of spinal fluid, or cerebral tissue—except this boon is not carved out of criminal carcasses. It's not a violent vindication, no act of justice, merely... passive. He does not need to think to do this, does not need to weigh his punishment, it's simple, blind—motion and reward. Killing may come to him with much the same primary ease, but this is a foreign act. A service in and of itself, and perhaps that is half the delight. Letting a hangman's rope slip free enough to slack. Grant enough mercy to give, rather than take. Or maybe, much like the side effects of gorging himself on the memories of the guilty, it's an after-effect of your own thoughts seeping through your fluids.
He wonders if a taste of your blood, or your sinew, or your bone, would bestow the same blissfully emptiness in his head.
Open mouthed against your cunt, he groans, and stuffs his tongue in next.
The small thighs either side of his large head jolt, then squeeze; juddering with exertion as he rocks his head closer—forcing as much in as your frame allows.
Your heartbeat is prey-fast against his flesh, and he can feel it echoing on his tongue through the ridged membranes inside you. They're soft, and delicate and warm. They shiver when he drags across the sidewall of your insides, and he fights the urge to dig his claws into your skin when you squirm.
Your entire body jumps a little, and he drags his mouth away for a moment. He doesn't expect your hips to tip up the very instant his maw is off you, but he's not going to let a better angle pass him by.
Leering back in, he slides his mouth back against your sex with little preamble. It's a closer fit, he can stuff a few centimetres extra in and you are squeezing around his tongue more. You squirm again, yet it's far closer to wild bucking than any struggle. Your cunt twitches, too, but at least it's predictable, now. In time with every slow curl he laps inside, every feedback loop within his own hindbrain he fulfils, every hoarse sob he all but torments out of you.
Time loses its bearing, and he's only cognisant to the changes in the pattern of your sensitivity by way of your jerking increasing.
It happens a few times, he notes.
You try to cant your pelvis away, crying, and are quickly corrected by the warning scrape of his talons across your flesh.
A viscous, wet smear spreads anew across his lips every time his tongue arcs against your insides. Mixing with drool, and the heady claustrophobic breath filling the space where his head remains wedged between your legs. Dragging his slick, sloppy lips and teeth across the skin at the inner apex of your inner thighs. He yearns to bite, he yearns to scratch and score you. The temptation is real, and true. He has seen it thus before—it will happen, it may happen now, or later in his rapport. Whether or not the caution of sharp, sharp canines show for a moment, or they swiftly close down on the meat, you will be marked.
With filed teeth at your hot inner thigh, he lets the points dig in enough to hint at wounds, enough to bruise; enough to stain you with a promise of a scar shaped like a yawning smile.
But for a blinding, blessedly horrible moment there is nothing but the now; the soft give of warm flesh, and him sucking a vivid blotch of broken capillaries to the surface.
He's daft, and weak, and willingly letting himself be led by urges far more than reason. No past to illuminate a future, no harrowing end; just touch, and taste, and time. So very much time to idle in bliss. The concept should be anathema to him. As satisfying as the feedback is—as satisfying as squeals born of want rather than fear could ever be to a debased vessel like him—he can only shoulder the firmament so high.
Honestly, he isn't entirely sure how long he keeps the cycle going.
Long enough that there's far too much of both his saliva inside you, and your slick painted across the entire lower half of his face.
Long enough that you don't even peep a word when he's finally had what he assumes is his fill.
Yes, while there's no words—you still make a sound. A groan that borders on a sob, and your hand blindly scuds down his hip. The hollow in his head is an unbearable stuffiness all of a sudden, thudding through his synapses. It courses through his veins like lightning, keen and sharp and matching the pace of his thundering twin hearts.
The source of that strange intensity, rather unbelievably, is a mouth straining to taste him—more precisely, a little tongue lapping against his glans. It hadn't felt like this earlier. His senses weren't so boxed into him before. The Night Haunter licks his chops and rumbles out a sigh, letting his head fall back—letting you free from his hold, and subsequently letting you suck.
But despite himself, he raises his head again at the feeling of hot suction, and is utterly aghast at the sight he finds. He's engorged. He's never seen himself do that before. He was not aware his biology allowed such a thing. It's obscene. It's a thick, angry purple-red gradient'd slab, with a fat vein sprawled on the side. He's disgusted and rapt all at once watching the tip of himself weep clear, sticky fluid against your cheek.
Like the prey animal you are, it seems you're suddenly innately aware you're being watched; and you glance back at him with your one good eye.
The reaction apparently amuses you enough to dare a snort, and then worse yet, a remark: "Finished eating, h-have you?"
He bares his teeth, threatening—but before he can speak, you lick.
Your tongue drags from base to flared head, and he cringes at the jagged rush that arcs up his spine because of it.
"Never seen a cock so pretty," you all but drool out, tone so sugared it's nearly abhorrent. Only to wrap your hand around the thick base of him and slap the rounded end of him against your lips, grinning as you rasp; "Maybe you are an angel, afterall."
A long, wet line of slime thins out like a web from the contact, and you lap it down.
He cringes again, unsure of what exactly to say to the information and the sight beyond baring his teeth once more.
You huff, "Oh, don't be a baby."
The provocation makes anger rise in his hearts, and he opens his mouth to cut you down—only for yours to take his cock back in.
Promptly, he abandons the pursuit in favour of rumbling out a groan.
It's too pleasant, hauntingly so.
And then, as fate is wont to damn him for any ease he experiences; you spite him and decide to move.
You sit up, manoeuvring on shaking arms to carefully slide down his front, and then re-orient to face him; hands flat on his lower sternum. Your hair is a mess, and spit strings off your chin; there's also a layer of sweat on you that—in the low, sleazy light—gives you a damp sheen. He would say you looked like a half-drowned, half-maimed rat, if not for the almost lust-drunken smirk smeared across your face alongside the dried blood.
"What do you want now?" He growls, apprehensive but not entirely dissuaded enough to commit to throwing you off him yet.
"Pretty as your cock is, I doubt you'll fit—so..." Your smirk degenerates into a grin, faintly reminiscent of a mad cadaver's cheshire scars; "I have to find a work around."
Canting your hips up, you reach behind yourself; he feels a small hand on his cock again, angling it to slant prone against his navel—then, the hand is gone, and in tandem you abruptly decide to seat yourself atop.
Heat settles over the underside of him, velvet-soft and sloppy with slick.
Grinding forward, your motion sends another electric rush chasing through his nervous system, making him bare his teeth in unison with the content shiver that wracks your body.
"Feels good, huh?" You whine, only to drag yourself backward, and as you do, his blood-rigid cock tries to flex up. The Night Haunter watches—nigh mortified—when it twitches expectantly at the loss of contact. You notice, too, and the sound that leaves you at the realisation is nothing short of a purr, "Can't lust... m-my bloody arse."
Abruptly, your cunt is against him again, pressing his length down as it had before; rocking against the shaft until the sound of wet friction is deafening. He almost chokes on his own saliva when you're suddenly fixated on jerkily grinding your clit against his glans.
A stuffy, high pitched whine creaks out of your gullet—and the unbidden urge to leer up and bite it douses his mind like acid.
His cock twitches again, dribbling clear fluid across his abdomen.
"I t-think you're... enjoying this," you say, tongue lolling out for a second before you grin.
"This is depraved," he snarls, because he can't bare to watch the scene any longer—and finally lets his head drop back against the floor.
He hears you laugh breathlessly before rasping, "Is t-that why..." your words abate for a moment as you inhale shakily, "You're behaving so well?"
Irate, he tips his chin to glare down his snout at you.
And instead of managing that, he is held rapt again at the vista of you straining like a hound on a choke chain, panting viciously to offset your wounded nose. Your exertion has reopened the damage you had sustained earlier in the night, and the shredded capillaries high up your nose drip blood onto his sternum.
It paints his sallow skin vermillion, in dappled dots.
It is a disgusting display.
To say nothing of the metallic stink of your own bleeding mixing with your hormones in the damp room. You brace a palm flat in the patch of red, smearing it in a small outline of your splayed hand. Not enough to stain him, only enough to be skin deep—just enough to huff it on the air, enough to taste it in his head—but if he opened his mouth to get a proper breath through anything but his vomeronasal passage, he would be fighting to avoid drooling openly at the debauchery. He is able to show restraint. Despite how asinine the notion felt when you, the battered courtesan atop him, simply stares down at him. One now-cycloptian pupil sunk in a sea of blacked out sclera locked on another whole matching pair. Perhaps there is some solidarity to be found in the situation being from one Nostraman to the other, despite the glaringly real physiological differences. If there were any other similarities beyond mere home-world adaptation, they matter very little.
The consequences of this would bear a heavy toll regardless of likeness; and would worsen with each rung of the downward spiral.
Similarly mattering little was that train of thought, which vanished almost immediately into vapours when you suddenly ground yourself faster on his length.
That, at least, manages to draw another grating, keening sound from the Night Haunter; the corded muscles in his neck straining as he clenches his jaw.
You roll your hips hard, again.
Wet, vile heat drags across his cock—and you moan through a maw set stiff, apparently trying to focus while continuing the motions.
His hands tirelessly begin clenching and unclenching, only to dig his nails in so harshly into his palms they puncture the meat. It is of no real concern that the wound he gives himself smears streaks across the filthy carpet as he fidgets irritably, they close up as quickly as he eases his grip.
He risks a deep inhale, and his brain reels at the degenerate boon.
You are enjoying this, thoroughly.
He tastes it in the thin, wafting particles of blood.
In the faint, atomised afterimage he gleans not your fate but your own thoughts overlaid with his; a hazy retinal burn of his shape from above scarring ever-so-slightly over his from below. But most of all he is aware of the delirious, rising tide—a feeling layered over his like a two-fold stitching. The thudding pain of a hollow where an eye should be. The high of achievement after an achingly long waiting period, a litany of 'finally, finally, finally,' and the hot, brilliant drag of his cock against your cunt; all divined from the blood in the air sticking to his nasal passage.
He manages to hold fast on his rational mind, and instead opts to bite hard on his scarred bottom lip, gnawing impatiently.
He refuses another sniff, and the blood fades from his hindbrain—and he's free of the tethering for a moment, free of the addiction that is a baseline's desperate impulses.
"You are pathetic," he hisses wetly, saliva thick in his mouth; narrowing his eyes at you before flickering his gaze down to where you're sat and back again. "This? This is what you wanted of me?"
You—surprisingly—make no immediate effort to respond with a cutting remark.
Instead, you moan and shimmy yourself languidly, adjusting your straddling before choosing to reply; "Can't... ngh, expect me not to want it," before settling back into your rhythm of roughly grinding against him, with little care for decorum. "I've—I've always... liked the tall, dark a-ah-nd handsome ones."
He cannot believe what he's hearing. You must truly be insane. He's the Night Haunter and you are compartmentalising him into a box to be lusted over. He is a force of law, he is death upon this hive, upon this world, even; and you are swooning over his looks that are, more often than not, covered in blood. And he is about to openly call you psychotic, if not for the rush that races through his nerves when your renewed motions nudge the rounded tip of him inside for a second.
It's all strangling, twitching heat—too small for such a warm, inviting space begging to be filled—but flesh is known to stretch, if nothing else. He may not know much of this way of manipulating sinew, but the broader topic of skin is one he knows very well. Flesh can be rendered and shaped and moulded, strung and twisted and reworked to accommodate.
"Keep being g-good," you breathe, voice wracked by lust. "And... I-I'll let you finish inside."
The Night haunter growls, insulted, filed-sharp teeth bared, "You debase me—"
"You w-were doing so well," you scowl, practically hoarse as you outstretch a hand to his face.
It is the one soaked in your half-dried blood that falls on his mouth.
Your blood smears, partially coagulating on his lips—unbidden and thoughtlessly, he opens his jaws wide. Small fingers tangle against his tongue, and the taste of copper dissolves in his saliva. It would be so easy to maim you further, make a half-blind lunatic one handed—steal more of that rich red from your veins—but for now, the tasting platter playing in his dagger-filled mouth is satisfactory enough.
A vision of you, in the same way, in the same scenario; in midnight robes with scarlet stitching. Drenched in gore, and grinning down at him in the innards of some hulking transport—he can hear a wet, slap-slap-slap, and—
The scene dispels almost as quickly as it comes on.
Despite himself, and despite the blaring implications the sight his cursed mind has offered, he cannot hold back a moan while he drags his tongue between your pointer and thumb; lapping at the webbing like a starved dog.
"Just hungry, h-hm?" You heave, thighs racketing. "Needed something... ngh, to suck on?"
Molten bliss assails his thoughts from your own, as another jolt surges through your form. The pleasure is sublime, and he is slave to the sensation as it is in your body. He sees himself as you see him, pitch gaze glassy, maw almost a rictus around the fingers stuffed in it; his hard brows furrowed, entranced. His hair is a long, messy black puddle; and his sallow, almost grey skin is flushed a fey mauve by the discoloured nature of his flesh.
This is perverse, this is feral—he is acting like a circus animal. He is relishing the whims of a mortal, and he is not fighting back. His dual hearts thud in his ears. He is disgusted, he is delighted, he is—he is—he is suddenly blissfully unable to weigh the consequences.
The Night Haunter's practically foaming at the mouth around your fingers when he feels himself tease in again, your pelvis angling him to dip inside.
Your cunt lets him stretch it, lets him sample the clutching heat—it is taunting him, and he cannot imagine allowing it to lift away without letting him in.
He is helpless to the upward jackknife of his own hips.
It's the only real thrust he has offered during the whole ordeal, and it renders you completely limp; hand yanked back from his mouth as you practically deflate against him.
Before he can realise himself, the sensation greets him. Soft, ribbed muscles shiver around him, then squeeze hard enough to practically wring him out. He comprehends abruptly he's halfway inside your cunt—and there's a waterfall of sobs being garbled into the valley between his pectorals.
Several things occur simultaneously.
Firstly, there's a white-hot shiver down his spine, then he's rigid for an instant, brain emptied out and vision tunnelled—a wave crests, then another, and another; each more intense than the last. The fit is too tight. It's suffocating, he's straining—he's only very, very distantly aware he's thrown his head back and is grinding his teeth hard enough to crack a molar, snarling insensibly.
When he's done seizing, he's all but dazed.
Sense returns to him in quick succession—though it's a lazy, smeared awareness of himself; as choppy and stuttering as the heat still pulsing around his cock.
Still, he manages to wrangle his mind into glaring down his nose at your trembling form.
He cannot see just how far in he is—but he is still stunned, truly stunned to have managed the fit to begin with. He wonders how much you have been made to stretch, and if the fat tip of himself has rammed into your diaphragm. No, he's still in your cunt, he knows that much—he can still feel the twitch, twitch, twitch of your warm insides greedily delighting in him reshaping them.
On shaky arms, you regain your head at last and rake trembling hands to a flat stop on his chest.
"O-Oh, f-f-fuck..." you wheeze, "You're..."
He ogles the glaze of drunken pain plastered over your visage, as you clearly try to un-do what his thrust has earned him.
"You're in... you're—" it seems your wider vocabulary is long gone for the moment, "You're h-huge."
With your uprighting, he discovers you are more than halfway down him; and he can see the remaining few inches of his length swollen and angry at not being fully swallowed inside you.
He looks up at your face again, and sees tears tracking from both your good eye and the ruined one; a harsh wince painted across your wounded features.
Pulling out is too difficult for you, it seems.
A keening sound of hurt leaves you again, and you backpedal, moving back down on him as you try to return to the false comfort of where he'd initially reached. The reversal strangles his cock even more. He wants to stay in, but also wants out—the throttling fit is agony. The throttling fit is delicious. It's an irritating duality of feeling, wholly overpowering. His vision is tilting on a mad axis, and he cares not that he's growling again.
It's all too much for you, too, it seems; and you start to tremble again, hyperventilating.
After a moment, you begin rocking slightly.
Seemingly mindless, until some excessive spill of fluid trails all the way down to his balls. It's wet and over-hot, and he realises abruptly that it's everywhere—and thick like coagulating blood.
He inhales sharply, honestly expecting more gore-stink to fill his nose. Already displeased to think he's torn flesh he hoped rather to stretch, he hisses thinly. But the room has a new reek to it, over your lust and pain, there is the smell of ejaculate; but not just yours.
The thick fluid is his.
He did not know he could do such a thing, nor why he can. Yet neither line of question negates the fact you're full to overflowing with it. He looks down your body, and sees it dribble between you both; dense strings of semi-translucent white thinning down from where he's still stuffed deep in you to the broad plane of his pelvis. He is aware of the way mortals reproduce. He is aware he has, technically, fulfilled the task.
Dumbfounded, he stares.
Fresh blood streams from your nose, and drips onto his flesh once more—alongside tears.
"W-Wuh—Why... why're y-you still..." you blubber, "H-Hard...?"
"I'm not a man," he grits out.
Your brow furrows harshly.
Then, a mad burst of laughter leaves you; it's closer to a death rattle until it's suddenly anything but—booming and too-loud in the claustrophobic boudoir.
"A-Again, then—" you abruptly squeal, slurring hard. "Ngh... f-fuh—fucking fill me, a–ah–again."
The Night Haunter balks, but makes no move to stop you as your hips shift down, and your cunt swallows another inch. A fat bead of cum bubbles at your entrance, forced out by the deepening slide of him and you whine, delirious.
He's strung too thin, panting, blindly reaching for your thighs—as if by some miracle—they're going to help him cope in the slightest. His nails dig in when another sliver of him disappears inside. So lost in the cloistering pleasure, he doesn't even realise he's raking bloody stripes in the shape of his broad hand-spans across your skin.
It's good, it's all so abhorrently good. He can smell your agony on the air, carried in your blood, but over the top of it is primitive glee. You're roiling in it—in the pain, in the bliss, in the fact he's beneath you and that you can manage such a thing. The same tide from earlier is rising again, too-soon and too-much. He's about to yelp at the sudden intensity, but wrangles back the urge by biting down on his tongue.
Iron fills his mouth and you warble out a sob.
Then, it all reaches a wall.
He gasps, and realises that finally—impossibly—he's all in.
You have him hilted.
Your small pelvis and his far, far larger one press flush at last. It's warm, so very warm around his cock. Every bit he has is sweetly embraced in slick, fluttering meat; and he swears he ought to see the hard line of himself through your fragile flesh.
Your face is slack with shock, and pleasure, and agony.
He snorts a harsh breath through his nose like an animal held back by it's bit, thighs shaking. His skin is on fire, alight with the urgency barely held back. It is a blessed damnation that you chose then to start to move, smothering him in shaky, rounding rolls of your hips; your hands leaving his chest to grab over his on your legs.
"T-That's—that's it," you sob, drooling. "Fill m-me, fill me, f-f-fill me—"
He's unable to even reason otherwise.
A punched-out shriek leaves you when he uses the fulcrum of his hold on your thighs to buck up.
You bite hard on your lower lip, and your unharmed eye rolls back.
His vision whites out for a moment, and he feels his head slam back into the ground. This end is far more all consuming. It makes a sputtered hiss shear out of his throat as his hips jerk—bouncing you on his lap—draining himself as satisfaction thud-thud-thud's up from his belly and through his synapses.
He's wrung dry by the time he's able to even think again, let alone open his eyes.
You're shaking like a leaf, slumped back against knees he hadn't realised he'd tented and breathing hard. And looking lower, he finds a vile slurry of seminal fluids and translucent slick where you meet.
Your head wobbles for a moment as you mentally crawl back to yourself—like a drunkard trying to find their bearings in the dark—until you at last manage to meet his gaze.
He manhandles you about the middle, slowly lifting you off of each inch you'd managed to wolf down. He's still... hard, which is surely strange, but he has had well enough after all that mental defenestration.
You don't even react beyond groaning, wrung-out as you are. The evidence of his lapse of judgment shows in the bleeding gouges on your thighs, and leaks out of your puffy—and surely sore—entrance in thick, milky rivulets.
The Night Haunter seats you on his wide abdomen, and despite the fey urge to retain a hold, he completely disengages. Even if he still feels your residual twitching against his flesh, complete exhaustion is well on the menu for you now.
"Th...thanks f-fuh–for savin' m-me, b'fore," You slur out, cough and then slump forward. Barely managing to catch yourself on two hands on the floor either side of his head.
Almost nose to nose, you look right at him—albeit through a half-lidded, almost animal-stupid, single eye.
Then your mouth crashes over his, and he doesn't know what to do with the drool soaked lips on his own—but it doesn't matter, in the end—because all the residual strength you had that kept you holding yourself up dissolves and you slide off him, unconscious.
He is not surprised by the outcome of your fainting in the slightest.
•extreme violence/gore (graphic descriptions of body horror)
•way too many big words
•way too much environment description
•obsessive behaviour
•seizures/derealisation
•sexwork
•alcohol abuse
•discussions/implications of SA
•curze's canonical mental gymnastics
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haha... i can explain... ummmmmmmmm for starters, this is a secret sanguinalia gift for darling @noxassula :3 im soooo glad i got u bc ive been dying for an excuse to ACTUALLY write this edgelord and your prompts were so gooooooood. hope 15,000 words of slop is to your fancy pookie i tried my best to get as much of your gift pointers into it as i could!!!! @yourlocalnautilus @sinistermojo @kit-williams @grimdark-raccoon @primarisly-marooned @ma1dmer @yestheantichrist @yesthe-artblog @pluvio-tea @bispecsual @historitor-bookshelf @gallifreyianrosearkytiorsusan @lemon-russ @blackstarangel @the-raven-lady @thevoidscreams @mothiir @undeaddream @tanknode @beckyninja @justfreakynothingelse if anyone wants on or off the taglist lmk you know the routine!! sorry if i forgot anyone btw <3
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It is cold in the middle hive.
The Night Haunter concedes he is not dressed for it. He is clad in merely the suggestion of a tunic—and long pants that were once probably a deep blue, now a mottled blood-crusted brown.
The exposed altitude surely does him no favours, either, but he prefers to watch from above.
Or more specifically, twelve stories up on a block of shanty apartments, and half hanging over the edge of the railing.
Buildings throughout the planet's five dense hives aren't constructed so much as they are fused—although the current one he stalks through, Quintus, is probably the most alike a beast of living steel. It is constructed of layers of scrap plating, collapsed walkways, and forgotten hab-stacks welded together until they form crooked canyons of twisted metal. Narrow bridges sag between structures like spiderwebs, swaying under the heft of foot traffic and the ever-present tremor of distant industrial bores gnawing through the lower strata to get to the planet's only actual value: adamantium.
Still, there is work to be done and that fact will not change anytime soon.
He returns to watching the crowded street several floors below his perch.
Within the hive's walls, life never truly stops. Billions upon billions of souls moving in ceaseless currents through poorly-lit corridors and factories. Sirens howl with numbing regularity, signaling anything from mechanical failures to gang skirmishes, yet no one flinches. The air tastes of smog, oil, and waste. Here, in this towering labyrinth and the others like it scattered across the planet's equatorial belt, humanity clings to survival one abominable level at a time, each tier a world unto itself.
And all are at his mercy, ultimately.
But he has not finished his work here, in the mid-levels; where the bulbs flicker more than they shine, casting long, twitching shadows across rust-scabbed bulkheads and water-stained rockcrete.
It is then that he sees a woman in a fur-lined coat leave a small hole-in-the-wall store. The colour of it is the first thing to catch his eye: white and creme and unlike most of the workers around in their tattered greys.
You have your hood up and your head down, despite the audacious clothing, clearly trying not to breathe the chemical-tainted air too deeply.
The aberration of you takes his focus for only a second, and then he cares not.
Truly, it is of little consequence.
...that is, until you are a short ways down the promenade, and two men shoulder into the crowd behind you.
They keep to the edges of the walkway, slipping behind a conduit cluster when you glance back. They are not subtle, just confident that no one will intervene.
The Night Haunter stands, and cranes his head to continue watching.
But it is difficult with the angle, so much so that he has to duck into a long unused maintenance scaffold to consolidate.
Your stride quickens, their slow orbit closing in.
The buildings are tightly pressed enough to allow him to leap the distance with ease. His tall bulk coming to a skidding stop on the other surface—but above you now, at least. Up high is his favourite place to be, and it is the most advantageous. Because despite the paranoid nature of the masses, no one ever thinks to look up.
These men certainly do not.
They keep their eyes on you as their footsteps grow louder. You turn into a narrow alley pass, sound echoing up to where he is crouched alongside humming coolant pipes.
He shifts his weight, making sure the fire-escape doesn't creak as he scales down it.
The thugs pass directly beneath him.
He scans the path ahead of you. The corridor narrows further, then splits: left toward a locked maintenance junction, and right to an old cargo lift that obviously hasn't worked in years. Dead ends. All of it. You have seemingly realised that, too—and your stride slows, barely perceptible, but he has been watching.
It's enough of a lapse that the men catch up.
You turn to face them, wide-eyed and breathing hard.
The glint of a blade slides out of one of their breast pockets, while the other runs ahead to try to grab you.
You fight, thrashing against the hands vying to bar your arms; only for a knife to press to your throat. You freeze. There's no cry for help, no screaming pleas for mercy, no bartering or begging. Every Nostraman knows it's pointless—no one ever comes—but he doesn't need an invitation.
But it's no rescue.
He could care less about the collateral, because what he actually cares about is curbing the act; the victim is irrelevant. He seeks to stifle the disorder, one perpetrator at a time.
And so, he leaps down: turning one of the knife-wielding fools into a bloody smear on the cement with his falling weight.
A scream leaves you at last, and so does one from the other thug.
You shake the man off in the panic, but lose your footing in unison with him. He collapses sidelong, dazed and blabbering the words 'Night Haunter, Night Haunter, Night Haunter' to himself like a mind-broken schizophrenic. With no shortness of luck, you manage to swipe the fallen shiv from him as he panics—just to drive it into the man's throat—the hard, sharp edge crunching through the cartilage lining of his oesophagus.
Blood bubbles from the fatal wound, and a soundless, yawning rictus paints the thug's face.
You are heaving.
The Night Haunter stares at you.
It takes a moment for you to realise the struggle is truly over.
"Oh, f-fuck—y-you're still... you're still here—" you blubber, finally looking up, heart jackhammering as you scramble away from your saviour, rigid with fear.
He stands to the zenith of his great height, takes a long step to the left, and waits. He knows the routine of the saved, whether he intends for there to be someone saved or not.
"You're—y-you're not going to..." you stammer, clearly beside yourself with horror. "You're not going to k-kill me?"
He sniffs derisively, still waiting for you to make a run for it.
"I-I can't believe this," you breathe, hysterical; and tears have begun to prick at your pitch eyes. A breathless, terrified sort of laugh leaves you. It is clearly born from the adrenaline, or perhaps the shock.
"T-Thank you," you wheeze and then scamper past him, terrified.
Nobody has ever done that.
Nobody has ever... thanked him.
He stays standing there for a long while. Long enough that the blood-puddles from the thugs have cooled and thickened where they soak his feet. There is a strange feeling of suspicion that eats away at his mind as he rethinks over your shape fading down the alley.
That suspicion is all the incitement he needs to decide to make note of your existence.
But he does not happen upon you again that night, try as he does to hound after you. He keeps high, fully utilising the fact at such altitude his shape is never fully clear to the foundry workers and poverty stricken below; to them, he is merely a suggestion of pitch-hair, height and angles when he passes beneath jittering spotlights or the glow of factory windows. Metal bridges between the shanties creak under his weight as he crosses them, slow and deliberate, claws—or something like them at the ends of each long finger—scrape softly against rusted steel. He pauses often, head tilting, listening to the city's haggard breathing. Hoping to hear dissent over the hiss of vents, or a sob amidst the hurried footsteps of people who know better than to run too loudly. He can wait. The chaos of this planet is everywhere, and it is only a matter of time before it dares peek out of its' hovel. And when it does, he is always there. Always. But in this rare instance, he has given you too long a chance to flee, and he hates himself for the fact.
As fate would have it, it comes to pass that in much the same way he first saw you—he sees you again—if but a week later.
The Night Haunter is stalking across a hab-block's eastern parapet, when he catches the familiar creme of your coat disappear through a double door at street level. Two muscled figures guard the entry. Lights flash inside. There are people everywhere. He cannot pursue straightways in these conditions.
So, he scales the building across from the gaudy, arching windows and takes in their offering of a wide view of the inside.
The main entertaining chamber is circular, low-ceilinged, and oppressive. Strips of red lumens crawl along the walls, cycling through lurid colors that reflect off dribbling patrons and sweat-sheened skin alike. He watches for exactly three debauched performances, as dancers move on raised plasteel stages, their silhouettes sharp against the glow. Hoping to see your shape amongst the shadows. Hoping the tracking of his nose is still as good as it ever proves to be, and he can catch your smell on the fog if you've snuck out a back entrance.
A woman's top is flung into the audience, and the Night Haunter decides he has had enough of the show.
He is not here to glean the base desires of man.
He is here to be thorough.
He rounds the spire by vaulting the gap between the neighbouring block and scrambling over an awning. He manages to use his momentum to boulder across three decrepit balconets, and checks the windows of each. The first is empty and dark, the other: occupied by a lithe, big haired woman and three others, and the last... the last is another seemingly empty boudoir. However, there is light. A flickering lumen-strip that runs along the ceiling, its' glare softened by strips of coloured tape stuck over it. The walls are a patchwork of peeling paint, devotional scraps, old show posters, and handwritten notes—names, dates.
And then he sees you.
You are sitting at the mirror vanity, applying lipstick in the same large faux-fur lined dressing robe you were wearing before.
You sway as you reach to place something down on your left.
It is a bottle.
Another baseline weakness found in a warren of vices, he supposes.
He is masterful enough at his purpose to slide his bulk through the window without so much as a creak. The shag carpet absorbs his footfalls excellently, and the room's uneven lighting lets him weaponise the shade.
You do not notice him take up residence in the dark far corner of the boudoir.
You do, however, notice when he growls.
You freeze.
He hears the thud-thud, thud-thud, thud-thud of your heart suddenly lurching up your gullet. The fear is part in parcel with his appearances. He has come to expect it's arrival alongside his own. But what he doesn't expect is the reaction you give him.
"So... y-you are going to kill me," you spit out in a tone that he can't interpret any other way than vacantly sarcastic—which is really just a baseline self-preservation mechanism. Mock-condescension with enough plausible deniability to skirt consequences.
He can smell the dank reek of panic and intoxication clotting the room like a fog haze hanging low. You have been drinking. Whether you walked in already sloshed or it is a new development doesn't really matter. He may very well have been watching the performances from the outside for hours. But then again, his attachment to time was never too well cemented. You likely have been regularly drinking yourself numb for days since the encounter.
Inebriated, your gaze glazes across the room and slowly—ever so slowly—rakes to the dark corner he's claimed as sanctuary from the too-bright lights of your vanity's mirror.
Then you turn away, partially.
But you are still looking at him.
He can see you trying to keep him in your periphery. Desperately trying to anticipate the seismic activity of his muscles, or a shift in the way the stray refractions gleam off his raptorial eyes.
You have not spared the knife on your bedside counter a single glance and the Night Haunter is acutely aware of this.
It is good, at least, that you know it would be of little help.
You do, however, glance at the shut hallway door beside him.
"There's no more theatrics for tonight, I-I'm afraid," you slur, and look away from it—seemingly finally giving up the resolve to try premeditate an escape.
He hums, similarly letting go any expectation of having to hunt you down again.
"And I don't usually allow visitors," your voice is a smooth note on the tepid air all of a sudden. It is almost buttery, and he knows this is another ploy. He knows it is especially that when it suddenly turns to sugar, and you say, "But I'll make an exception... just for you."
It stirs a rare word out of him, "Why?"
"Because... I don't think the muscle in this place could drag you out," you laugh too-loudly, and the sound is bitter to his ears as you reach for the forlorn bottle on the floor aside your vanity seat.
Your hand shakes as you pick up a glass off the floor along with it, eye the inside, sigh, and then set it down to pour a full serving of amber liquid.
The Night Haunter can detect the sharp tang of high proof alcohol across the room and winces, sensitive nose irked by the biting aroma. He hates the smell of alcohol, it is a poison and yet mankind insists it is a worthy draught.
"And," you start with a slow drawl, "I-I don't really know what the rules say about things that aren't really human being behind stage."
That piques his interest further, and rather gratingly to his own wishes, all he can think to ask again is, "Why?"
"My, you have a way with words," you harrumph immediately, almost insufferably noticing his failing despite your drunkeness.
"Answer," he grumbles, low and menacing in his throat.
It earns a quickening of your pulse, again. Understandably.
"W-Well," your voice croaks, and you lift your drink to your mouth to wash down the fear he inspires. "Men aren't allowed back here, seeing as they are rarely full of good intentions in a place like this."
"I assume they are here to watch," he supplies, bemused by the notion.
"Oh, oh, yes... and watch they do—" you keen, and eye him fully this time; turning around in your stool and tipping the glass at him, "But, they wouldn't keep it only watching if they could help it."
"I know the nature of man, and what happens if that comes to pass," the Night Haunter notes flatly.
"Then, you understand the point of the rules and the point of the exceptions," you cut in swiftly, "There is the risk of men constantly when using your appearance for a living."
"That is not all there is," he contends sharply.
"Perhaps in a brighter place, or a better time," you say, and have misunderstood him. He is not being optimistic, he is not proposing greener pastures—he is threatening you—he is trying to say that men are the least of your worries now that he knows of you; but he is not going to correct himself for your rose-tinted idiocy. Nonetheless, your voice tapers off as you tilt the dirty glass of spirits in a slow circle, "But here, on this rotten rock, even gelded men think with their cocks—" you raise a brow, and take a short sip before staring at your drink, "And if they are chemically or mentally castrated, they are still weak to other vices."
"Poison," he answers.
"Exactly," you smile sadly at your glass, and take another quick drink—tapping the side with a long nail.
"You have employed this tactic," he accuses as if only musing offhandedly, in a tone that’s clearly terrifying you only because it’s so calm. You're keenly aware of the whipcord strength about him. You have seen him kill. He knows that you know he could snap your neck in a heartbeat, and yet—
"Not just yet," you tut, inhaling slowly, "Nobody has drunk themself to death on this place's booze on my watch, as far as I'm aware."
"But you have killed," he rumbles and leans out of the shadows, enough that he can see the form of himself in your mirror.
He is distracted by it momentarily. He sees the long, pitch-hued spill of his own shaggy long hair, and the sharp, menacing angles of his face in the light. He looks, even to himself, like a ghoul masquerading as a human, espousing the form of man; so blown out of proportion in size and mass in comparison to anything on two legs on... what had you called it? Ah, yes. This rotten rock.
He doesn't completely understand why you don't flinch back at the sight of him, but he assumes it's born of that same logical fallacy of forced acceptance you provided that he cannot be removed. That, and your repeated supping at swill.
"I had to," you breathe, and there's a sudden pinch in your polished, perfect features that looks unspeakably ugly. "I had to, you saw that. Surely, y-you did."
He cannot rightly argue with it, either. It was justified. It was, truly. An infallible defensive decision, even to his own heavy handed judgment.
The stressor plaguing you is gone as soon as he grunts in agreement and tucks himself back into the dark.
Then the act is back on, and the game begins again.
"It... it wasn't the first time, but I'm not certain I finished the job in the end on that one."
An unprompted spilling of information, and he doubts you fully understand you've proverbially dawdled down another avenue that may very well lead to your demise at his hands.
Still, he tilts his head, ever curious; and even in the dark, the gesture of his silhouette is telling enough to his interest that you guess he wants an explanation.
"Hair-pin somewhere to the poor fool's face, didn't stick around to find out," you cross your long, smooth legs and lean back a little; even when drunk you feign for the eyes of the—currently nonexistent—audience of slavering patrons, "I'm smart enough not to stick around failed robberies long enough to be re-robbed."
He grunts, straightening his head.
No crimes to your name, as of now, but you are doomed to slip—he knows you will—he has seen it in the fates of others much like you. All those haughty and overconfident and conniving things, bound to trip over their own feet.
Promptly, you stand and pat out a wrinkle in your robe; but the motion ends up straining the fabric down over one of your breasts. It almost spills out, but he pays it no mind. Though he is somewhat confused how, in a hive rife with malnutrition, you have managed to grow them so large. It is of no real importance, but aggravatingly remains in his mind nonetheless.
"I'd start to charge you for this chat," you sigh, "...if I thought you had money."
A part of him feels as though there is a jab to that remark, but he cannot place it and instead grunts, "Power is it's own currency."
"If that's the case," a soft hum leaves you, "Why not start a merry little gang while you're at it?"
"This world has terrible stock," he grumbles, sneering to himself. "Liars and thieves and cutthroats, none who would properly fix the issues at hand."
"Ah," you tut, "So... you think you're the best candidate to bring in rule of law."
"I am the best candidate."
You harrumph, and nod drunkenly before drawling, "You are aware you're covered in blood, in a whore's parlour at the earliest hour, right?"
That statement gives him pause, because... yes, yes... he is, isn't he? Trying to scry philosophy out of a courtesan feels rather ironic. He applies the title of courtesan to you because the title of whore you apply to yourself doesn't seem to fully catalogue the other roles you fill. Spreading your legs probably only makes up a small portion of your profession. He doesn't know what is asked of you by your clients, be they the rich or the poor. Your life is one of an entertainer, a dancer—and a self-employed bartender, currently. But you mostly seem to have talent as a conversationalist. He supposes compared to the men you've had to engage in discussion with under pay, he is but one of many, many gore soaked souls. Perhaps that is why you have remained so sane in his presence.
Or maybe, it is simply the drink giving you a backbone.
Truthfully, the noise you are making is merely a viable strategic springboard. He does not entirely care what you have to say, even if this is the longest he has managed to converse with a human without them running away screaming or bleeding out.
"I would establish a system in which only the highly skilled control—" he posits, but is interupted.
"I think... that's a meritocracy?" You cut in, and purse your lips for a moment in thought before adding; "...and a gang, technically. Educated, but a gang."
He goes quiet, then offers: "Dual, alternating political parties run by elected representatives."
For some reason, you laugh out loud at that.
He has never had anyone not mad with fear laugh at him before. The Night Haunter is not entirely sure what to do about it. He feels as though anger would be a reasonable response to such a thing, and yet it does not stir.
So, he simply stares—and, despite the still-thundering pace of your heart, you elaborate the reason for your amusement; "Two gangs, seems you're getting colder now."
In the dark corner, the Night Haunter finds himself pouting.
How is he to bring order, if there is no means to an end? How is he to found a system that inherently aims to keep one in their place, without employing a judiciary who's plagued by a pervading sense of entitlement over the ones they manage as a whole? Insofar, he has come to know that given the nature of man, the same vicious cycle would surely be repeated. Baselines are greedy, and are easily corrupted. Their morals change and fade like mist. They cannot be trusted to maintain order. Not without a tight leash. So how does he exactly enact egalitarian segregation without it being a gang? How does he avoid fanning the flame of new thuggery from the one he seeks to stamp out?
"You think there is no way to get the wheel to stop," he grumbles, then considers. "So to you, there is no... ameliorating a miscarriage of justice without moral compromise."
You nod, "Unless you kill everyone and crown yourself king, but that seems counterproductive."
He can very well butcher his way through the streets. But he will not pursue such. True, the ends justify the means, and perhaps order can be achieved through a cleansing of the slate... but what point is the slaughter if there are none left to benefit? He has never actually considered killing everyone, but the concept is raw, and uncomfortable—it feels excessive. There must be an alternative. Especially when he can... he can get the populous to cleanse themselves. Force them to purge their own chaotic natures.
But how?
He cannot even bare the thought of trying to reason with the scum, nor will he stand to compromise the weight of law.
He can make them fear it, though.
He can make them fear him.
Fear cows all, fear can bring a beast to heel, and yield it receptive to submission. He can make them pliant and wanting for a guiding hand.
Tyranny, then.
...he can do that.
With his thoughts resolved, the Night Haunter grunts, stands—and promptly leaves the very way he came in without another word.
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