Chapter Text
Faffnr Bludbroder understood what was going on. It wasn’t difficult and he wasn’t stupid. Sometimes someone got so weighed down by responsibility and always doing the right thing that he decided purposefully to go out and make some bad decisions. Of course, take a straight-laced guy like Guilliman who’d never done anything fun or out of line in his life and you could see he had no idea how to act out. He’d probably read that people got drunk and disorderly at times like this in one of those many books of his and was hoping he’d figure out the details as he went along.
‘Is this fun? Are we having fun?’ Guilliman’s words weren’t slurred, but they were clipped like he was thinking about it too hard, like he’d heard you were supposed to slur your words and he was still trying to figure out if he was doing something wrong because he wasn’t.
‘Yes, we are.’ Quaffing mjod wasn’t fun. Not in and of itself. It was who you were doing it with. Guilliman may or may not have figured that out already. More importantly, Guilliman was in a mood to insistently keep throwing himself in the direction of fun through bad decisions until he caught it, so it was best to humour him before things got too out of control. He’d had the Alpha Legion yesterday and there’d be Dark Angels tomorrow. They might be the Emperor’s executioners, but then there was just being unbrotherly and there was ignoring hospitality obligations where they were due.
‘Have another, blue boy,’ Kuro Jjordrovk pressed on him.
‘Show more respect,’ Faffnr corrected him.
‘Lord of the blue boys,’ Kuro amended before continuation the story he was boisterously repeating for his brothers, ‘Then his teeth went flying everywhere, and the other ork said, “Great, yur rich now, but whudda gonna spend it on?”’
Guilliman looked at the mjod, sniffed if (though whether he smelled more or less than a Wolf, Faffnr didn’t know), made a face, then swallowed it as quickly as possible to keep from tasting.
‘What do you even like about this?’
‘What else would you drink, the brine in the water?’
Guilliman sighed long-sufferingly. He tried to relax but it didn’t ease the tension deeply coiled in him and he winced minutely at the pull of his injuries. Faffnr was hardly sentimental, but he did feel sorry for him on some level; watching his total lack of success here induced the kind of pity of looking upon something half-formed and misshapen. He wondered if Russ himself could do better.
‘Let me get this one home to his bed.’
Accompanied by the whoops and hollers of his brothers, it wasn’t hard to get an arm under Guilliman and lift him. The primarch was much larger than he was, but he’d lugged around larger mammoth carcases before and only being drunk rather than dead he got some help from uncoordinated feet.
‘I’m not sure if letting you drag me around will lead to more or less embarrassing rumours than if I were stumbling on my own.’
‘Blame your injuries.’
‘I shall. I don’t know how convincing I’ll be. Try to breath on everyone so they can’t smell mine.’
Faffnr accommodatingly belched at Guilliman’s guards, who were appropriately careful in confirming he was who he said he was even though he hadn’t been out of their primarch’s line of sight in hours. Their primarch had been wrong once.
Guilliman fell back on his bed after they were left alone as long as they didn’t make any too loud noises, but didn’t untangle himself from the arms supporting him first, pulling Faffnr with him. He wound up on his back with Faffnr straddling his chest, their faces plenty close enough to share mjod-flavoured breaths. He didn’t believe for a second that a primarch could be drunk enough for that to have been by accident.
Guilliman held his eyes for a moment, then another, giving him time to pull away that he didn’t take, then kissed him, wet, messy, clumsy. Faffnr wondered if he was a virgin.
‘You know, jarl, you don’t have to make all the decisions you’ll regret along with that hangover in the morning all at once.’ Never let it be said that wolves had no self-control or good counsel.
‘No, now is the best time to get it all out of my system, but you don’t have to keep humouring me if you don’t want to.’
Faffnr snorted. ‘Of course I want to. What kind of man would turn down a drink, a fight, or a wench?’
‘If you think I’m a woman, you will soon discover you are very mistaken.’
‘You don’t have a beard.’
He was met with a laugh and another sloppy kiss, rough with still healing scabs from all the damage he had taken that not even his primarch body had been able to repair yet.
Despite the teasing, he certainly had no intention of trying to dishonour Guilliman by treating him like a woman or thrall, and the primarch had made no show of pushing him down and making him submit so far in their acquaintance. This was between men, helping each other out the way men did.
His hands found the coarse texture of bandages under robes. Lots and lots of bandages. Some part of him wanted to be surprised even though he’d seen the extent of the damage earlier. Primarchs were still meat and blood, like everyone else.
It wasn’t like he was planning to undress him, planning to get all intimate. Just slip a hand under his waistband and hear an appreciative groan. He ran his fingers down hot flesh before closing his grip.
Guilliman bucked into his hand. He had a certain control that never left him, even when he chose to be jocular and friendly; the Wolf could see that it was a choice, calculations and analysis beneath the surface as surely as emotions and both just as true. He was allowing himself this because he wanted to and he was genuinely enjoying it, but he had surely overanalysed everything before letting the situation get this far and decided on his course of action with various tactical justifications.
His muscles had no give, but alcohol and regenerative hormones instead of combat ones worked to unwind the deep tension in them. He wasn’t making an obvious effort to keep quiet, he just was; maybe to him the slight hitches of breath and sharp gasps were wanton cries when he could have kept silent if he tried.
Faffnr found a good rhythm with his strokes and ran fingers over Guilliman’s balls, and the primarch’s hips twitched more and more erratically in response. He grinned, leaning close and watching the way Guilliman’s eyes closed for a moment and he twitched and arched as he came.
‘This is how you’d kill me.’ Despite his glazed eyes, Guilliman’s voice was all seriousness.
‘Aye.’ Of course it was. He hadn’t lied about why they’d been sent all along, and he wasn’t going to about it, as if it would work. His Legion wasn’t one of the ones with a reputation of fighting dirty, but it was all circumstantial. If you’re fighting for your honour, then you fight honourably, even at the cost of your life. If you’re hunting to eat, you stalk, you ambush, you separate your prey from its herd and gang up on it, you do anything as long as it ends with the blood of what you intended to kill on the snow.
‘Are you going to try to slit my throat now?’ Guilliman didn’t sound worried. Maybe overconfidence. Probably trust.
He’d have done it a few moments earlier if he had been going to, obviously. ‘Not tonight.’ Maybe some other. Maybe just like this and with lies and no warning of malicious intent until he struck. It was not that he wouldn’t. It was only that he still deemed the Lord of Macragge loyal to the Imperium and worthy of life. Maybe he could have done it just then and succeeded; he’d thought about it. Maybe. He nuzzled his neck, letting him feel fang against his jugular, but not biting down.
Guilliman allowed it for a moment, then flipped them. Even drunk and wounded, the primarch’s grip was something he could not break and he let Faffnr struggle against it until he gave up and forced the instinctive tension from his muscles. This man wasn’t seeking his submission, but he had no intention of being pushed further than he intended to give, and the wolf had better not forget that.
Satisfied he had made adequate show of dominance, Guilliman let a hand trail back down his body. His erection had definitely not flagged from the threats. Faffnr groaned contentedly at the warm, calloused palm slipping under his breeches and stroking. Whatever his experience before, he had definitely analysed Faffnr’s technique and was eager to try out his theoretical practically.
‘That’s good,’ he muttered, and damn it was, even in all the drunken, sloppy, messy glory between them. He smelled all wrong for being pack, but a primarch reeked of strength and masculinity and Faffnr was totally unabashed about wanting.
Guilliman looked deeply satisfied as Faffnr came in his hand, but still thinking, still analysing. He thought about kissing him but didn’t, because they weren’t lovers, weren’t anything but what they had been before and that was a sword of Damocles. Likewise, he shook his head to Guilliman’s offer to share his bed as too intimate. ‘I’ll sleep by your hearth. I’m not your dog to have curled up at your feet.’
‘And you’d rather be out of arm’s reach when the hangover hits,’ Guilliman said, and from him it was a joke, and Faffnr barked a laugh.