Chapter Text
Gadriel stared, hatred in his heart and expelling from his lungs, at the front line. It was full dark, and tracer rounds still shot through the air, but the tyranids had withdrawn, to lick their wounds for the night, probably to breed more, mutate further into obscenity. The others had gone back to the Resilient : Gadriel paced the front line, stalking past the Cadians keeping wary watch, waiting for the Apothecary to come down to reclaim the bodies he had marked.
A solemn duty. A somber one. He felt he had to stay. He was the one who had marked the bodies. And he was now…irrelevant to the leadership of his own squad.
It stung, but it was true.
The whining roar of a landing Thunderhawk behind him, far enough behind the lines. He headed back, resolute in his mission, arriving just as the backramp of the craft dropped, an armored Apothecary stepping out, a bandolier of reductor containers slung over his chest.
“Sergeant,” the Apothecary said, inclining his helmet. The helix caught in the dim light of the camp’s lumens. “You need not stay.”
Do not tell me what is needful, Gadriel snapped, in his own head, even as he said “There may be pockets of tyranids. I will escort you.” Not a question, but a command. In medicae matters, the Apothecary ruled. On the battlefield, Gadriel’s authority overrode his. It was not the Apothcary’s fault he had tried to offer Gadriel a way out of what was next.
The Apothecary simply nodded, stepping off onto solid ground, sweeping his gaze over the jumble of light vehicles and people gathered around the LZ. “We could use one of those grav sleds,” he said, finally, speaking, it seemed, to the open air.
“I can drive it.” A Cadian detached herself from the group, her uniform muddy and wrinkled. She clapped a hand over her chest. “Corporal Coratie, my lords.”
“Very good,” the Apothecary accepted, with a nod. “Shall we be on our way? I think none of us wishes to prolong this.”
Coratie drove the grav sled throttled medium high, to keep pace with the Astartes. The speed over the churned up ground left her jostled, every bump hitting hard, but she gritted her teeth, and her backside, and pushed on. This was an important mission to them, though she did not know what it was, did not know what the red fancy figure 8 on the white-armored Astartes’s helmet meant. But she wouldn’t know if she didn’t go, right? That was a motto she lived by. And they needed (sort of) her, at least to pilot the currently empty sled.
Coratie could not tell if they were talking, as they walked ahead of her–the Sergeant sweeping his eyes and weapon from side to side, warily, on alert. A true soldier, she thought, and then laughed at herself. Of course he was a true soldier. If there was anyone a truer soldier than a Cadian, it was an Astartes.
Still, she felt a connection–she felt like she understood at least part of what he was.
She had seen them fight, earlier today. Not entirely, because of course she had her own weapon and her own sector to keep clear, but she had seen snippets, from the sides of her eyes, or when they dove down right in front of her into the thick of the fray. If death-dealing could ever be considered beautiful, they were beautiful, with the economy of motion, the grace of long practice doing even simple things like swapping magazines. But it was something about them–her friend Pauri called it ‘aura’--that was like the confidence of a god, or, someone doing what they were made to do, living perfectly within their vocation.
Unlike her, and Pauri, all messy edges, spilling over emotions worrying about each other, their friends from other regiments, their families. They never had to swallow fear,like a lump made of iron and needles, she bet.
They stopped by a hulk that took Coratie a full second to place as an Astartes, but…dead. She’d never seen one dead before. She almost could not imagine it was possible to kill one of them. She did not like it. It felt like something striking one of the supports of her world.
“Decius,” Gadriel said, stopping over the body of his fallen brother. He heard the grav sled mutter to a stop behind them. Hopefully the noise, or the sudden lack of it, drew no attention.
“Armor,” the Apothecary said, his voice neutral, steady. Almost cold. He handed Gadriel one of the small field disruptors, that could be used to remove armor without damaging it. They tended to hurt, temporarily shorting the connection between the carapace and armor, but Decius was beyond any pain.
The two got to work, moving with no great haste, but efficiently, as though this was something they had done hundreds of times before. The Apothecary probably had. Soon the armor was piled up, as reverently as possible, on the grav sled’s broad bed. Gadriel spotted the pale face of the Cadian driver, watching with more curiosity than he thought seemly.
And Decius was stripped, the outer and underplating gone, reclaimed, to be brought back to the Resilient and refitted by Techmarines and the Mechanicus for new wearers, perhaps portioned off to replace damaged pieces. Decius’s armor would live on through the Chapter, and save many lives as it did.
“What do you need now, Brother Apothecary?”
“I do not need your aid, Sergeant.” The Apothecary was adjusting some settings on his narthecium already. His tone was flat, but Gadriel got the impression the words were not meant to be unkind. “It is best, perhaps, if you turn away.”
“I can assist.” He could bear it, he told himself. He had to bear it. It was his way of honoring a death he had not witnessed. He did not want to bear it, but there was much in his life he did not want to endure.
Want quailed before duty. As it should.
The Apothecary knew better than to argue. He rolled Decius onto his belly, and knelt, placing the narthecium against the back of his neck. This one was…less disturbing than the later one, and with a fhwump, the geneseed fell into the reductor container.
Then the harder one. Just as easy, technically, but harder for other reasons: rolling the corpse onto his back, temporarily hiding the black red hole he had blown in the back of the head. Decius’s arms flopped, dead and useless, slapping against the mud. His face was smeared with dirt from having been turned over, eyes like waxed paper, wide and unseeing. The Apothecary saw the look cross Gadriel’s face before he mastered it. “A prayer might be fitting,” he suggested. Not for Decius. He was beyond the words of any Litany–at the feet of the Golden Throne, perhaps, but definitely not here. The prayer was, as the Apothecary long held, for the living, to feel they had contributed, taken part in the transition from life to death. Every Ultramarine, every Astartes, was intimately familiar with death. Sometimes, though, death stalked close enough that its breath fogged your vision.
The bump of the reductor was bigger here, needing to punch through the rib plates and into the chest, to grab the second geneseed. The whole body jolted, and the Sergeant’s voice, in the middle of a litany, hitched, just for a second, and then it was done.
The Apothecary was not the most devout man. He had spent his tears in prayer in the Apothecarion, over regen tanks, over patients decompensating on the table before him. And his tears had rarely, if ever, paid for an answer. But he kept a moment of reverent silence, resting a palm on Decius’s cold, livid chest. Again, for the living.
He rose, mud on his greaves, and cupped Gadriel’s arm, turning him away. “Do not remember him like this,” he whispered. He had medicines in his narthecium for a hundred different injuries, and pains.
This was not one of them.
The Ultramarine stayed, after the Apothecary had left. They had found three of the marked bodies, and the process repeated, only with more or less mud, more or less blood, and, oh, the third they could not find one of the things they harvested, because the head had been crushed to a paste. That had been the hardest to watch, and Coratie had kept her gaze on the controls of the grav sled. Some griefs were not for the eyes of mortals.
Coratie watched the Ultramarine sergeant now, though. He was not pacing anymore, no nervous energy, no fire of vengeance. He looked…hollowed, staring at the no-man’s-land with the eyes of a skull.
She had seen that look before.
Coratie approached, carrying two mess trays. The cook had protested, until she’d jerked her thumb at the hulking blue figure, and then the cook had piled the first tray high, reconstituted root vegetables and some sort of protein in an inoffensive sauce. Not her favorite, but not the worst. A hot meal in the belly was always grounding.
“Here,” she said, thrusting out the heavier tray toward the seated Astartes. “You could eat.”
He detached his gaze from the churned up land, with effort, turning to her, recognizing her vaguely. “I am not hungry.”
The arm she was holding the tray out to him with started shaking. She did not have Astartes strength. “Please take it,” she said, again. “If only not to waste the food.”
That was something apparently even the Astartes understood. He reached out, stabilizing the tray.
Coratie settled down next to him on the stack of ammo crates he had taken as a seat, only her legs dangled far above the ground.
For a long moment, she said nothing, shoveling the food into her mouth. It had been a long day, and this was her first meal that wasn’t a handful of an old ration bar jammed in her mouth between salvos. And it was better eaten hot, before the sauce congealed.
“You’re probably used to better stuff,” she said, just to say something. He hadn’t protested her sitting next to him at least. She had heard of Astartes berating soldiers for their presumption, even for looking upon them for too long. But these, all of them, had seemed, if haughty, if distant, at least, well, brothers in arms, even if at a great distance.
This close, she could smell him–the familiar smell of unwashed soldier and the too-too familiar scent of dead tyranid, but with a sort of chemical tang. He smelled a bit like the medic tent. It wasn’t bad. Just. Unusual. As was everything about him, really.
“No,” he said, looking down at the food. He pulled a combat knife from…somewhere–he moved so fast that she hadn’t caught the unexpected movement—and scraped some of the mashed roots on it. Eating like a true soldier, she thought, and then took it back. Of course he was a true soldier, why did she keep thinking of him like that? Like he needed to prove himself on her level, and not the other way around? He shrugged, after a moment, evaluating. “It is better than our standard combat rations.”
“I don’t believe that.” It was not the worst thing the Cadian cooks whipped up, but it was also not the best.
The Ultramarine stabbed his knife into the crate beside him, freeing the hand to reach into one of the leather pouches around his waist, pulling out a pouch, and handing it to her. For a moment, a brief moment, she felt the metal of his phalange armor. She had actually touched an Astartes. Pauri would not believe her.
She tore a small corner of the pouch, squeezing some into her mouth, and, “Ew.” Seriously, what even was this? It tasted like rancid dirt and cleanser. “You eat this stuff?”
He nodded, and something haunted one corner of his mouth, but flickered out. “It is nutritionally optimized.”
“For everything except flavor,” she retorted. “I would have thought they fed you delicacies.” She pulled her canteen off her hip and washed out her mouth to get the taste of it out and then held the canteen out to the Astartes.
He shook his head, declining, but he took another mouthful/knifeful of the food on the tray. “We require too much,” he said. “Too many calories. Too much protein.” Always too much, he thought.
But their weapons were so good, she protested, to herself. Not only well made, but beautifully so. Even his armor was a marvel of the Imperium. It galled her that they were fed this…paste. Still, he was talking to her, at least, and some of the hollowness had left his gaze. They ate in a semi-companionable peace for a few minutes, save for the sidelong glances she shot him from time to time. It seemed strange to see an Astartes do something as normal as eat. She laid her tray aside about the same time he finished, and when she offered the canteen this time, he took it, though seemingly careful to not drink the whole thing. Too much, he had said, like it was a problem and not an honor to share something with the Emperor’s Angels.
“I’m sorry,” she offered, finally, and she saw the way his face froze, stricken. The wrong thing to say? Not really a consideration when there was no right thing to say, and her heart could not allow her to stay silent.
But he knew immediately what she was saying, what she meant. “They fulfilled their duty.”
The noble answer, the one she would believe from an Angel.
And yet, she didn’t. Not entirely.
“That does not make it any easier on y–those who remain.” She caught herself, trying not to make it an accusation, or even an observation. Just a hypothetical. A thing that might happen.
She saw his face go stony cold, his gaze shifting from her back out to the distance, but seeing nothing.
“It never gets easier for me,” she said, like an admission, a failing. “Reminds me every time that it could have been me.” She shrugged, toying with the canteen lid in her hands. “Sometimes I think I’d wish it had been me. Instead. You know?”
She did not expect him to know, but when she raised her eyes again, she met his gaze, over the heavy blue pauldron, his eyes piercing and grey. He said nothing. But he was listening, with no judgment on his face. An Angel, listening to her.
Coratie ducked her head. “I don’t want to fall asleep sometimes.” She was a mere mortal, a baseline human. Surely he would not judge her too much for being lesser than he was. Weaker than he was. It felt like a confession, shriving of her sins. Because if he did judge her, she would take his correction as seriously as if it had come from the Emperor himself.
“And it’s not about nightmares or anything.” She made a flappy hand gesture at the battlefield before them both. Life was nightmare enough, horrors beyond what she could conceive of in her own subconscious. “But sometimes, I have, you know, good dreams. Where we’re all alive and together, and doing some dumb thing like shore leave, or playing a game, or telling stories in the rear echelons. That stuff.”
He nodded, following along as though he knew, exactly, what she was saying. Because he did. He had those dreams, as well.
Coratie squeezed the canteen cap in her hands, just for something to do. “Because then I don’t want to wake up, because then it’s like…losing them all over again.” She was supposed to be comforting him, and a shit-poor job she was doing of it, since he was watching her with his uncanny eyes, and she found herself on the verge of tears.
“And what do you do?” His voice was as soft as it could be, an Angel’s voice, created to boom over the roar of combat.
“Wake up. Cry Suck it up..” She shrugged at the insufficiency of her answer. “Find someone to fuck.”
He flinched back, though at the vulgarity or the profanity, she couldn’t tell.
She shrugged. “Sorry. But it helps.”
“How?”
She’d never thought about it. Probably something chemical a medicae could answer. “I don’t know. Just…to do something life affirming in the face of death. To shove despair aside with something that connects you to someone else. Pleasure to spite the pain.” She was not an eloquent woman, and never had been. The war had made soldiers of every Cadian, but had not made many of them scholars.
That quirk of the mouth returned, looking like a sad smile. “That is…not an option for my kind.”
“It’s not?” That seemed…improbable. Why would the Emperor create his perfect Angels without…. “Well, I mean surely you do something that feels good.”
He shrugged. “Training. Combat.” Vengeance was as close to pleasure as he could conceive.
“I mean, other than those?”
He looked at her as though she’d asked a question in a foreign language.
Coratie hopped off the ammo crate, and moved in front of him. “Bend down a little?” Pauri would die at her boldness. Hell, she was ready to die at her own.
He looked at her, puzzled, but tilted forward.
Coratie wrapped her arms around his neck, over the metal rim of his heavy armor, pulling him closer, pressing her cheek against his. On some ancient reflex, he placed one palm against her back, holding her up.
“How does this feel?”
How did it feel? Strange. In Gadriel’s entire life, there were only two occasions anyone got this close–they were an enemy trying to kill him, or they were an Apothecary, trying to repair an injury. He had no context for this–contact that was not a threat, contact that did not require violence or pain. “Unobjectionable.” That was the best he could manage.
She laughed, against him and he could feel her ribs moving under his hand with it. “It’s a start, I guess.” She was touching an Astartes, close enough that his hair was brushing her forehead, his cheek warm and alive against hers. She could feel his pulse along her arms, as she released her arms, a little bit, sliding back to look him in the eye–those big, uncanny eyes. She traced one finger down the scar that sliced across his face. She had her own scars, on her arms, across her back, but this was different, and for some reason it didn’t make him uglier, at least in her eyes. It didn’t mar the inhuman perfection of his face and body, but called attention to it, like underscoring it.
His eyes met hers, the warp-touched purple of most Cadians, lit from the low lumens on his armor, and then the way her mouth moved, like she was trying to come up with something to say. She had been there, earlier. She had seen the ruin of Decius, Cordanus. She had held a respectful space and silence while they had done what was needful. But she knew, and understood, in her way, and was trying, he knew, to help. Trying to take the burden of an Angel’s pain, trying to shoulder all the loss and death an Astartes faced, had chosen to endure. It was an impossible task, that would crush the light out of her eyes if she succeeded.
But here she was, trying anyway.
He tipped his head forward, bumping his mouth gently against hers, as though he had heard that something was called a kiss, but had no idea how to perform it. Her mouth, against his, was warm, her lips soft, and he swore he could taste the water from the canteen in her mouth, as he felt one of her hands tighten along the back of his head, tangling in his hair.
It fixed nothing. It brought no one back from the dead. It did not fill the chasm of their loss in his hearts. They were still dead, brutally so, and he was still here, mourning them and dreading the morrow, not for the fighting it would bring, but the moments at the interstices, the silences, which grief would rush to fill.
This fixed nothing, but he understood, finally, what Coratie had meant. To do something in defiance of death and loss, to make some connection, when grief wanted to plunge you into loneliness, was fighting the war on another front, one that threatened to tear them down from within– against the enemies of despair, hopelessness, and death.
It fixed nothing, but it made a difference, the way that lighting a candle did not make darkness disappear, but claimed a space in the light.
He pulled away from the kiss, slowly, and he could feel something now, when she pulled him again into that hug, her breath warm against his cheek, her skin soft and vital against his, and her desperate want to help, somehow, one of those who should not need help burned like a tiny ember against which he warmed a part of himself that had grown unnoticed cold.
“I can stop,” she said, softly, her breath tickling his ear, stirring his hair.
“You can. But not, perhaps,” and he brought both arms up around her, and they were both covered with the mud and stink of this accursed place, and they had both seen atrocities, and would again when the sun rose, but right now they were here, leaning against each other, pushing back all the horror of war with the smallest gesture, contact, intimacy. “Just yet.”