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Nov 8, 2025

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Help!! My Subordinate is my secret online Beau!! - Rogal Dorn x Reader

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Okies!! It's time to torture a Primarch!! Modern AU setting!! [~4.1k words ( ≖‿ ≖ )] Taglist: @beckyninja, @solareias, @owltxt, @incrediblethirst, @mehiwilldoitlater, @passionofthesith, @cunninglinguist-69, @gh0st-nebulae, @adamsr1cyk, @tani-rani, @wonderfullytenaciousbeast, @theonceunknown, @w-40k-2, @funk-elysium, @vspin, @jackalwolfsoul, @egrets-not-regrets, @thatnightlamp <- The queen who's idea started it all!

(I've added folks who may have expressed interest in this work. But if it bothers you, DM me and I'll remove you from the taglist! And if anyone wants in on it, let me know as well!)

DORN TORTURE TIME... GO!!

CHAPTER 2

The blinds cut sunlight into obedient columns across Rogal Dorn’s office, each stripe a crisp geometry of order. His desk is a shrine to symmetry: parallel stacks of blueprints, weighted corners aligned with the edge of the world, fountain pen resting exactly perpendicular to the leather blotter. Even the air seems ironed. Despite all the various edicts to order, Rogal Dorn feels like he is amid the most chaotic storm.

You are still in the room.

And that… is the unstable variable.

He has just said the words “Good work,” as if they were measured in grams and not in existential dread. You smile in response; a bright, guileless, devastatingly pleased smile, and for a heartbeat it looks like the morning might hold.

Then, before anything can wobble, you clutch your folder, nod politely, and escape.

The door closes behind you with a whisper of brushed steel.

Out in the hallway, you finally breathe. The air smells of toner and mild victory. You glance down at your phone, thumbs still trembling from adrenaline, and type a message to your saviour, furiously.

You grin at the message once you’re done typing and click send. With your cheeks warm, and your heart singing, you hurry back toward your desk.

Inside Dorn’s office, his stunned silence is broken asunder when his phone vibrates.

Once: a discreet, refined tremor. Twice: a warning. The phone vibrates a third time, as if the device itself has decided to announce whatever chaos it contained could not wait any longer.

Dorn’s eyelid does not twitch. He does not move. He is stone. (Internally, he is a fissure: hairline, hidden. The kind that brings down cathedrals overnight.)

Silence returns, the kind his engineers claim to hear in the seconds before a bridge reveals its flaw.

And then, the phone hums again.

Dorn picks it up the way one picks up a live wire: with immaculate discipline and the faint expectation of death.

The lockscreen blooms. A notification banner. The name that shines is the one he now has a face to place against it.

Troublemaker2301

He should put the phone down. He should not expose himself to evidence; evidence implies knowledge, knowledge implies responsibility, responsibility implies action…or worse, feelings. He should set the device face-down and look at the screen in front of him and be a responsible fortress.

He swipes.

Troublemaker2301 — 9:02 AM: Submission was flawless!! Dorn didn’t find a single fault this time (T__T) You’re a lifesaver, Stoneheart. Thank you for staying up with me last night.

The first emotion is relief.

Immediate, bright, unthinking, so pure it feels like standing in sun. She did it. Good. There is a physical unspooling in his belly like a ratchet finally loosening that he hadn’t known it was tightened that hard until it lets go.

The second emotion arrives on a ten-ton freight train.

She is thanking me for rescuing her from me. A detonation you can’t hear but which rearranges all the furniture inside his skull.

He stares at the words Dorn didn’t find a single fault and has the peculiar sensation of existing in two times at once: the man who scolded you yesterday to the marrow and the man who sat in the dark at 01:47 aligning your load tables and muttering, “No, tie that reinforcement, there…good,” into the glow of a screen. The man in the pressed white shirt and the man in the black t-shirt with the sleeves shoved to the armpit, jaw shadowed, whispering we’ve got this into a keyboard.

He has never particularly believed in irony. Irony, he has always thought, is the narrative spice people sprinkle onto failures to feel better about their math. But this… this is the universe rewriting his blueprints with a smug little flourish and a pink emoji.

He exhales. The sound is quiet, controlled. If breath could salute, his would.

He puts the phone down. The phone vibrates against the wood, a gentle rattle of treachery. A second message unfurls before he can stop himself from looking.

Troublemaker2301 — 9:04 AM: You’re going to laugh but bossman looked… tired today? Maybe karma exists! (>U<) Anyway. I owe you coffee! Or a small nation-state! Your pick.

He does not laugh, oh no! Rogal Dorn does not laugh in the office. He experiences a small, private malfunction behind his sternum that might someday be medically classified as ‘humour adjacent’.

His thumb hovers over the screen. He knows the answer that would preserve the world: nothing. No reply. Radio silence. Throw the phone in the building’s deepest foundation trench, pour concrete, mark the slab ABANDON HOPE YE WHO TEXT HERE.

And so, like any sane person, he types:

Glad it went well.

And then, he sends it.

As soon as the message is sent, he wants to fetch the words back by the collar like they’re errant apprentices and lock them in the stationery cabinet forever.

And since even HE can’t do that, he does the next best thing. He picks up the fountain pen. Sets it down. Straightens the already-straight blotter. Realigns the corner of the report. The blinds. The world. The tilt of the globe on the credenza (it wasn’t tilted; he tilts it anyway, because he must change something, must make a mark, must insist that his will still moves objects the way he wants to).

On the other side of the glass, the drafting floor hums; plotter feeding paper, measured voices, the meditation of a hundred brains doing math at once. He should stand, open the door, become the Wall again. He should itemize a day into tasks and punish the tasks into obedience. He really must…

The phone pings.

Troublemaker2301 — 9:10 AM: You’re too modest. You fixed the calculations AND the formatting; don’t pretend you don’t wear a cape!! I promise I’ll return the favour next raid!! Healer hat ON!!

He stares at the last words until they blur. Healer hat. The language of the other life, bleeding into this one. A little ribbon of warmth winds up under his ribs, treacherously soft.

He tries a thought experiment: Say, if he were not him…if he were, say, his closest cousin brother, Polux (Emperor spare him), or anyone with an operational sense of whimsy… would this be amusing? The boss and the boyfriend, mirrored. The ‘you’ who says sir and the ‘you’ who says Stoneheart and laughs at his dry jokes that aren’t really jokes. The one who is steel, and the one who is all bubbly mirth.

He can feel it now, the edge of that emotion he keeps at bay with rules and rituals; the one with a different gravity. It is not new; it has been crystallizing over months on late-night ledges of conversation. The first time you called him “Stoneheart” like it was not an accusation but a fondness, like you saw the hard thing and decided it could be a handle.

Oh Throne, help him! He has the horrifying suspicion that he likes being handled by you.

He shuts the suspicion in a sub-basement of his mind and bars the door.

Then, he types:

Understood. We’ll… coordinate.

He deletes the ‘we’ll’. Too intimate. He then deletes the ‘coordinate’. Too him. He goes with:

All right.

He clicks “Send”.

His reflection in the glass stares back, a sober ghost framed by stripes of light. He observes himself the way he observes a beam under load: clinically, cataloguing hairline fractures. Left temple: a new line since yesterday. Under-eye: shadow, forty-five-degree angle. Mouth: compressed. Shoulders: no visible slump (praise be).

He stands from his desk.

The chair slides back a measured inch. He tucks it in with the exact force needed to have the chair meet the desk at a ninety-degree promise. He smooths the front of his shirt. There is, for the first time in years, a traitorous impulse to loosen his tie. He does not. He is not an unspooled man…Not yet!

He reaches for the door and then stops.

A shard of memory – inconvenient, honey-coloured – cuts across his vision: you at your station last week, brow furrowed, chewing the inside of your cheek as you annotated a cross-section, a tiny frown of concentration like the world would open if you just asked it correctly. It had irritated him at the time. It is irritating now, for a different reason: Throne damn it! Tenderness is a poor structural material.

He presses his thumb into the doorframe, tests the wood as if it might yield him an answer. It does not. Wood never does.

“Containment,” he says under his breath, the word falling into the office like a bolt into a slot. “We proceed with containment.”

He then opens the door. The office holds its breath for a moment as his door opens and then, like a living creature, the place resumes normal respiration; and the sea of posture returns to its working tides. He crosses to your aisle without meaning to. His feet perform the commute his mind says it will not do.

You are there, of course. Head bowed over the report’s digital twin, cursor blinking in anticipation, a sticky note rebellion flowering along the monitor’s edge: tiny flags that read ANCHOR THIS and CHECK AGAIN and, in one corner, a scribble that says don’t panic with a tiny smiley face wearing a construction helmet. The helmet wrecks him.

You don’t see him for a moment, you’re in your own little bubble wearing the most admirable work-face: competent, quiet, a line between your brows that wasn’t there when you were laughing through a headset.

He clears his throat.

You jump. “Sir!”

“Status,” he says. The syllables click like a tool returning to its rack.

“Final pass on the annotations. I’ll archive the corrected file to the shared drive within the hour.”

He should say good. He should say proceed. He should keep each word in its assigned slot like screws in a labelled drawer. Instead: “If you require additional time.” He stops, hears himself, corrects course. “To ensure the standard holds.”

Your eyes flicker, surprised. He has never offered the luxury of time like that. It lands on your desk with the delicate shock of a bloody rose in a toolbox. “I…thank you, sir. I think I’ll be okay.”

He nods, one crisp, abbreviated bow. He wants to say You did well. He has, technically, already said it. He wants to say it again, but in a different voice, the one that knows your laugh. Instead, he says nothing.

You pause. “Are you… all right? You look a little–” You abort the sentence like a pilot pulling up from a canyon. “…It’s been a long week.”

“Yes,” he says, grateful to the god of plausible deniability. “It has been.”

He takes one step forward… away from you.

“Sir?” you say.

He stills. He does not turn fully; he tilts enough that the line of his shoulder invites the voice onward.

“Thank you. For the… for the flexibility. It helped.”

He doesn’t deserve the warmth you put in the word helped. He accepts it anyway, places it carefully on a shelf labelled do not touch until later. “Maintain the standard,” he says, because if he says you’re welcome the floor might open. And the Church would declare the end of the World upon the People!

You smile, small and real. “Yes, sir.”

He walks back to his office through a corridor of spreadsheets and unknowing. At his door, he glances at the glass – his reflection… and you, bent like a parent over a child, coaxing data to behave.

He enters the silence of his office space again, shuts the door, and for one irrevocable second, leans his forehead to the cool pane of glass like a penitent to a reliquary.

He allows himself exactly two breaths.

On the first: This is untenable. On the second: I do not want it to end.

He lifts his head. The phone on his desk waits, a sleek, treacherous cat. He could put it in the bottom drawer. He could lock the drawer. He could throw the key into the mouth of the plotter and dare it to chew.

He picks up the pen instead. The nib settles on paper. The familiar drag, the ink-black order, the way letters appear like soldiers on parade. He writes a list. Not pros and cons (not yet). A schedule. Meetings, reviews, a site visit, lunch (forgotten daily; included anyway, like hope). He plans his day into such perfect right angles that feelings would need a permit to enter.

The phone vibrates again.

He looks down despite himself.

Troublemaker2301 — 9:30 AM: Also… totally unrelated but… if anyone asks, I did NOT cry in the subway last night. That was, um. Condensation. From the air conditioning in the train.

A breath that is almost laughter escapes him. He clamps it at the throat, but it leaves a warmth behind. He types before he can stop the kindness in his hands:

Understood. Perfectly normal condensation.

Three dots appear. Disappear. Appear again.

Troublemaker2301 — 9:32 AM: You’re the best, Stoneheart. Okay! I’m going to focus and make this perfect. Wish me luck.

He deletes the first reply (You don’t need luck; you need rest). Deletes the second (Proud of you). He finally settles on:

Proceed.

He puts the phone down like it might combust if he holds it any longer and then stands straighter. He smooths the air with his palm as if the texture of the day could be corrected by tactile coersion.

On the other side of the glass, you push your hair behind your ear and lean into the glow of your screen, sovereign of a tiny kingdom of lines and numbers. He watches for one heartbeat longer than professional, then turns away.

He is Rogal Dorn. He builds walls. He is Rogal Dorn. Today, he must not hide behind one.

And so, he steps out again, your report in hand, deposits it to the Records, signs off on a beam inspection with a hand that does not shake, answers a call with a voice that could steady scaffolding in a gale. He is precise. He is polite. He says “thank you” once, because it is true. The floor, sensing a change in barometric pressure that could be weather or mercy, hums a little easier.

At 10:11 AM, he reaches for his coffee and finds it cold. He drinks it anyway.

At 10:16, he passes your desk and does not look. (He looks in the reflection on the window.)

At 10:23, he remembers the line you sent – I owe you a small nation-state – and, against his will, imagines what state motto you would choose.

At 10:24, he shoves that thought into the drawer with the phone.

At 10:25, he realizes that he must get through another six and a half hours of this!

No, he will enforce containment. At any cost!

--------------------------------------------------------

Containment fails before noon.

For a man who runs his life like a schematic, Rogal Dorn’s morning begins to come apart in increments so microscopic they could pass as precision. He feels it first in the little things: a pen misplaced half an inch to the left, a folder not flush with the others, a monitor brightness two points higher than his usual setting. He corrects each deviation as it appears, but they breed faster than he can compensate. Somewhere between his third and fourth correction, he realizes the impossible has occurred: he is distracted. And so, he decides the best course of action is to leave the fortress of his office for yet another round of the drafting floor beyond. The fact that you are there is entirely coincidental.

The entire drafting floor hums like a machine under tension. Rows of engineers hunch over blueprints glowing faintly under the soft white of the industrial lights. The air smells faintly of graphite and burnt coffee; the kind of smell that tells of long hours and people running on caffeine and pride. Above it all, Dorn’s footsteps strike the polished tiles like a metronome: deliberate, unhurried, dictating the rhythm of the entire department.

Normally, when he passes, the murmur of conversation folds into silence. Today, however, the silence comes a beat late. He senses it. The Wall never misses a beat.

He pauses by the central table where a cluster of junior architects are bent over a load-bearing simulation. Someone fumbles a pen; it rolls, clattering in echoing percussion. Dorn’s eyes track the pen’s journey with the patience of a saint and the dread of a storm. When it stops, he simply says, “Retrieve it.”

The young man leaps up, nodding so violently that he might drop his brains with the pen below.

Dorn moves on, expression unchanging, though his thoughts are anything but composed. His mind is a battlefield of two worlds colliding: the one where he is the stern, unsmiling department head, and the other where, less than twelve hours ago, he’d been coaxed into revising structural stress charts by someone who’d called him sweetheart between messages about raid loot.

He passes your desk. You’re bent over a printout, red pen in hand, hair pulled into an efficient bun that’s starting to fray around the edges. You hum softly under your breath; not enough to disturb the peace, but enough for him to hear. It’s a small, unassuming melody, some tune from an advertisement or perhaps a game soundtrack. He recognizes it instantly. Shadowspire Raid: Level 4 Entrance Theme.

The sound hits him like a thrown wrench. He continues walking, though his gait acquires a specific stiffness that wasn’t there before, and his shoulders feel heavy under the weight of recognition. You, you marvellous thing, have not a clue, of course! To you, he’s still just your impossibly stern superior: the man who finds grammatical errors in structural reports and makes sure everyone is aware of how he feels about them.

By mid-morning, the tremors of distraction begin to spread.

At precisely 11:30 a.m., during a team design review, he gestures toward a projected cross-section of a retaining wall. “We’ll need to raid the main support from the east–”

The room falls eerily silent.

Twenty-three heads turn simultaneously toward him, blinking like metronomes gone off tempo. The intern sitting nearest to him, a boy so new his ID card still gleams, hesitantly raises a hand.

“Sir,” he says, voice small. “Did you mean reinforce the support?”

Dorn blinks once. Slowly. “…Of course.”

He doesn’t blink again for fifteen seconds.

Inside, his brain is listing alternate explanations in quick succession: he was misheard, it was a slip of the tongue, it was a tactical metaphor. Yes. A tactical metaphor. Siege architecture. That will do.

He straightens to his full height. “It’s a medieval term from siege architecture,” he says smoothly, as if explaining a theorem to children. “Raiding a structure’s weak point before reinforcement. Historical reference. Quite elementary.”

The team murmurs an impressed “Ah.” The intern nods, eyes wide. Someone scribbles research siege architecture in the margin of their notes.

Crisis averted. Temporarily.

Dorn exhales quietly through his nose and returns to droning on about pending tasks.

From across the room, you notice the faintest flicker in his expression, the faintest unguarded pause. It unsettles you in a way you can’t define. For the first time since you joined Phalanx Structural Design, Rogal Dorn looks… human. Still intimidating, yes, still carved out of sheer willpower, but there’s a shadow under his eyes and a tension in his jaw that reads more like exhaustion than anger.

You tell yourself not to overthink it. He’s your boss, not a puzzle. You train your focus back onto the context of his lecture, trying not to look as though you’re watching him.

At noon, a small mishap further erodes his composure.

The office printer – that ancient, temperamental creature that should have been retired three budget cycles ago, chooses this moment to jam. The timing is cosmic cruelty. Or perhaps comedy. Depends on who you ask.

A young engineer, desperate to avoid attention, starts tugging the stuck sheet. Bad move. The printer, rightfully offended at such insult decides to rip the paper that is fighting for its life. Half of it curls inward like a defeated flag. A muffled groan of despair echoes through the cubicles.

Then the floor goes still. For, the Wall is moving towards them.

His footsteps carry him to the machine with slow inevitability. The crowd parts like a sea parting for a very annoyed Moses. He stops before the printer, surveys it with grim patience, and says, “Step aside.”

The engineer obeys instantly, revealing the misbehaving machine to the man determined to make it behave.

He crouches; a movement that is precise and efficient, and examines the jammed rollers. His sleeves are rolled to the elbow, revealing forearms lined with the kind of sinewed definition that seems engineered for command. He may be dour and surly, but he does work out! A few of the younger interns can’t help but gawk at the way the muscles in his forearm ripple as he presses two hidden catches, lifts the casing, and reaches into the machinery like a surgeon correcting the heartbeat of an obstinate patient.

The onlookers hold their breath. At least one intern bites her lip and then starts when she recognizes that she is doing so.

“Sir,” ventures the engineer, “the – the roller might—”

“I can see the roller,” Dorn replies without looking up, tone calm but cutting.

He extracts the mangled sheet with clinical grace, smooths it against his palm, and taps the edge lightly to test alignment. “You persuade the jam,” he says, relatching the casing. “You never force it.”

The printer whirs back to obedient life.

There’s a collective gasp of awe, followed by nervous applause from one overly enthusiastic intern. Dorn fixes him with a look that could disassemble a semi-automatic. The applause dies mid-clap.

And then… he hears you laugh.

It’s not loud; it’s a small, involuntary sound, quick and bright and genuine. The kind of sound that slips free before you can stop it. He turns his head slightly, eyes finding you through the tangle of cubicles. The laughter dies on your lips, replaced with the colour of embarrassment.

“Apologies, sir,” you murmur. “Just… that was impressive.”

Something softens, just barely, at the corner of his mouth. It’s not a smile, not quite, but the nearest architectural cousin to one.

“Machines,” he says, voice lower now, “respond best to patience. So do people.”

And then he walks away, leaving the entire drafting floor reeling in the wake of what can only be described as the closest thing to a philosophical statement Rogal Dorn has ever uttered in public.

For the rest of the day, he is quieter. The kind of quiet that hums under the skin and causes his subordinates to exchange uncertain looks. His usually clipped commands come a heartbeat slower, his eyes flickering to you more often than they should. But nobody notices… not even you.

At one point, you catch him standing at the window overlooking the city. The late afternoon light makes a faint gold halo around him, softening the sharp edges of his profile. He looks like he’s thinking: not about blueprints or regulations, but about something he can’t measure.

You don’t know that he’s watching your reflection faintly mirrored in the glass, that the tilt of your head as you adjust a drawing has become a focal point in his vista of unravelling control.

He tells himself he’s assessing your posture, your productivity, the neatness of your station. None of those excuses explain the way his gaze lingers.

By four o’clock, the floor has adjusted to the strange phenomenon of a gentler Dorn. Someone jokes under their breath that maybe he got a promotion. Another voice whispers that perhaps his morning coffee was decaf. The mood lightens, cautiously, like animals testing the edges of a trap.

And you… you decide that maybe he isn’t as terrifying as everyone says. Maybe he’s just… tired. You even catch yourself thinking that he looks good tired. The thought horrifies you, so you promptly bury yourself in work.

He ends the day in his office, back turned to the window, the city already dimming beyond the blinds. His pen moves across paper in disciplined strokes, but his mind is elsewhere. Every number he writes rearranges itself into sentences that sound suspiciously like your messages. Every graph line becomes the curve of your handwriting.

When the last employee leaves and the lights dim to standby glow, he exhales into the silence. The façade holds, barely, but there’s a hairline crack somewhere in it now… the kind that starts invisible and ends in catastrophe.

He rests a hand on the desk, fingertips against the grain of the wood, and murmurs to himself like an architect taking inventory of damage:

“No collapse yet. But the foundation… the foundation is compromised.”

And outside, on the near-empty subway, your phone buzzes with a message from the same man, under a different name, asking softly if you made it home safe.

TA DAAA!!! I actually wrote more... But I feel that would work better as the next chapter.

In the next episode of "Help!! My Subordinate is my secret online Beau!!", we will be having a special side character making an appearance and see things get complicated a lot more!

Stay tuned!!

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