Invictus

Title: Invictus
Fandom: WH30K, post-Heresy
Pairing: Fulgrim/Daemon!Fulgrim/Ferrus Manus
Rating: NC-17
Warning: angst, torture, gore, etc. Because pain looks just too good on the Emperor's Children primarch...


As the long night comes we shall all fall down.

…among ashes from the stars that burn out.
…carried by solar winds that ruffle comets’ tails.
…into a hall of mirrors to reflect our debasement.

Most of all he hates mirrors.

Everywhere, siding the walls, clinging to the high ceiling, lodged onto one another in a strange sort of embryo nesting so that a tunnel of ever diminishing reflections is created, leading nowhere. Window into a window, turning on itself, and even the floor is tiled with perfectly smooth glassy surfaces.

It leaves him no room. It gives him no release. Whichever way he turns, he stares at himself, or a being that looks strikingly like him, the same features, the same paleness, the same perfection of image. These mirrors never break.

Fulgrim, they say, look at yourself. Do you like what you see?

One of these smooth rectangles has to be a door. His mind, forever caught in a feverish tumult, refuses to accept the notion of a completely isolated, static space. If he got inside, he surely can find a way out. Somehow. Some time.

That is, if time still exists here. He isn’t sure it does because before that cell, his dreams used to be timeless.

There are, however, two aspects in the room he can seek shelter in. One is the ceiling, which is mercifully high, and in the darkness that moves in thick clouds under its vaulted beams the reflection of his shape becomes tiny and unreal. Sometimes he lies on his back and stares at the reduced likeness of him above, and wonders what this toy of a man is staring at. It certainly can’t be him, not this writhing, crippled creature with pools of deep black for eyes. Sometimes he shouts at the distant figure, and then it disappears in fright behind another cloud.

Or there are still the places on the floor where his blood has spilt to. These spots, covered in disfigured clogs of faded red, reflect nothing but unfortunately, they don’t last. Soon, too soon the blood is imbibed by the floor, drawn in through the invisible pores, and here comes the shiny smoothness again.

Don’t look, he commands himself, and of course, each time curiosity takes the better of him.

He likes to watch, in fact. Seeing himself from any possible angle at any moment enhances his senses beyond imagination, and the cold thrill of mixed emotions makes him shiver disgracefully.

The daemon has kept its promise and acted up to every single word of it. Indeed, his imagination has long been humbled into total perplexity of submission and awe at the untiring ingenuity of the daemon’s devices. Knowledge, experience and expertise in every possible vile and violence has become his, first hand. He knows everything about the human body and its limits, and then some. He could fill a book with ideas as to how to test it; in fact, he already does.

One of the many walls of the room refuses to absorb moisture and is still covered with his writings. He crawls across the floor, dips his finger into an open vein on his arm and straightens to add another line.

Sometimes it is a full sentence, and sometimes just one word. Now and then he reads aloud what he has written and chides himself for his poor style.

Ferrus. Ferrus. Ferrus.

Too many repetitions.

***

To keep his senses awake, the long needles that have been driven along his nerves stir and shift at random intervals. He vaguely remembers something of this kind was employed by the Adeptus Mechanicus to link a titan and its moderators together. Thin threads of steel, wormlike, underlie his skin in a net-like skeleton. The places where the needles went in are continuously inflamed and swollen, and when the infectious burn becomes too hot he scratches at the sores until his broken nails catch a loose end of the wire, and his whole body convulses in shattering pain. Now he knows better than to try and pull at the ends in a vain attempt to draw them out.

The uses of this inner wiring are multiple. At the beginning, when he was determined to conquer the daemon, the impulses sent through the threads rendered him immobile, and his own body turned traitor on him, leaving him with no option but to shout curses and obscenities at his own reflections. Being helpless was new, and somewhere on the deepest level he enjoyed it.

He keeps on betraying himself in every new torture the daemon devises.

The electrifying sting never grows old. His modified physique is still human, and the daemon makes sure he never finds the redemption in turning numb to the anguish. But still, he discovers a way to cheat by shifting the angle just by a split of an attitude, and so torment becomes expiation, pain – a means of cleansing.

Of course, the creature from the Sea of Souls that has taken possession of his body and locked him in this cell sees the trick and does its best to counteract before the prisoner convinces himself he has moved from hell to purgatory. He is frozen with horror at first when he beholds his new tormentor, his nightmare returning to haunt him in his wakefulness.

Many a time he has dreamt of seeing his brother again, but not now, not here. Not this way.

Ferrus Manus pays no heed to his protests, like none of the ghosts that have visited him before did.

“Brother,” he says, as if it were one of their normal conversations, “what have you done to yourself?”

He can’t answer. For the life of him, he can’t answer and only stares at the poorly healed scar running across his brother primarch’s throat. The ugly wound still bleeds, and the gap opens with each word Ferrus pronounces in a twisted imitation of speech. When Manus falls silent, expecting a reply, the wound freezes open, like a wide toothless grin.

“Don’t you like it?” asks the ghoul and points to his cut throat, where the blood is fresh, and red, and bubbling, saturated with the air he has drawn in to speak. “Come on, brother, take responsibility for your actions and admire what you have done.”

The daemon lied. He was promised oblivion, but he received none. He is sprawled on the floor in a helpless, defenseless heap of naked flesh, and can only watch, unable even to direct his gaze elsewhere but on the ghost. Ferrus observes his frail state and smiles sadly, drawing his finger across the slit on his throat absent-mindedly.

“What a wreck you are, Fulgrim,” he says in kind reprove and brings the reddened finger to his lips to lick the blood off the chrome-coloured skin. “Come. Come, and taste your victory.”

He can’t resist the command. He rises from the floor, feeling a wave after wave of neural stimulations wash over him with each step, agonizingly sharp as ever. His brother watches his limp progress with unhappy amusement.

“Have you forgotten what I taste like?”

He hasn’t. He has forgotten nothing, and he could rebuild the image of his brother from his memories of smell, touch and taste as easily as he used to do when their missions in the Great Crusade drove them galaxies apart. Perhaps this is what his mind is doing right now, for this apparition can’t be real, shouldn’t be real.

The wound looks very valid, though. Mesmerized, he reaches up and presses his lips against its sore edges. Manus gives out a short, surprised gasp and presses his brother’s head closer to prolong the kiss.

“It stops to hurt when you’re doing it.”

It might have been only a whisper but it still makes the bleeding wound open up even more, and drops of blood fill Fulgrim’s mouth, making him to back off. Each drop is like molten lead, and he staggers as they burn their way towards his stomach, force him to double up and shiver in excruciating convulsions when his body tries to vomit the alien substance.

“Purge,” says Manus coldly, cruelly.

That he would very much like to, but he can’t. Every muscle of his body strains, but the spasms bring nothing out, the droplets of blood forever swallowed and digested by his being just like the killing of his own brother has become part of his history. He looks up at Manus and tries to say that it is beyond his abilities, but his sore throat refuses to produce a sound.

“Let me help you,” the black giant concedes.

The words are what he has been waiting for, what he has been dreaming of, doing his best to keep those visions secret from the daemon. His brother is towering over him, and he watches the silver hand reach for his face without even a thought of resistance. The feel of this metallic skin always astonished him, and once again he finds that where there should have been the coldness of iron there’s actual warmth and softness of flesh. He bathes in the feeling and the memories it brings as the ghost presses his fingers against his lips, traces the outline of his mouth and then pushes forward, demanding entry.

Deeper, deeper. He’d have urged Manus to go on, if only he could speak. As it is, he can’t even take a breath, he chokes on the largeness of the intruder in his throat, and it takes all of his willpower to command his body into cooperation. When the hand finally withdraws, he is again spread impotent on the floor, all the bile the daemon’s devices had pumped into him leaving in a seemingly endless rush of fluids. When it does stop, he looks up and manages a tiny shade of a smile.

“You are truly inside me now.”

Ferrus Manus tilts his head slightly in a manner devastatingly reminiscent of the times they still discussed the plans how to better promote their father’s directives into reality, and his more sophisticated brother would often surprise him with a cunning stratagem.

“If you say so, Fulgrim. I don’t know where I am now.”

This is the moment to be made into a turning point. Whether it is his mind showing things or the daemon’s manipulations, he intends to make the most of it to his benefit. He struggles to stand up and clings to his brother for support, noting all the while how his pale flesh merges with the black contours of the ghost’s shape. He continues his climb upwards like vine embracing a rock, and Ferrus raises an arm in protest as the weakness of his victim turns into compelling seduction.

If the daemon had intended this apparition to drive his prisoner into a state of cowering fear, he is grossly mistaken.

“Can you forgive me, brother?”

“I’d have died a thousand deaths if only it could save me from having to say ‘no’ to you, ever.”

Ferrus’s eyes gleam with the same shade of warm silver as in the times long past, when their love was still unblemished. With his arms entwined around the ghost’s neck and his legs forcefully locked around its waist, Fulgrim revels in how correct and intact he has preserved his memories. It feels right down to the tiniest of details, and he chuckles contentedly at discovering once again that not only Ferrus’s hands are made in the likeness of mercury. It makes him feel engulfed in fire, but who else than he, nicknamed in honour of a fabulous bird from ancient myths, is better suited to accept it?

It has always been like this, every time pleasure mixing with pain, and he wonders if he has his brother to blame for getting him addicted to this strange mixture of sensations. After all, a primarch’s body wasn’t designed for anything but waging war, and when they first tried to tame their nature into something entirely different, it had to be the initial step to damnation. He doesn’t care; never did, and isn’t going to start now. He welcomes the pain and the fire, and triumphs when he feels the thin nerve wires under his skin melt and burn to ash in the heat.

“Enough,” says Manus eventually and pushes him away, gently but with iron resolution.

No. No. He is laid down like an old burden, its bearer determined to turn away and leave it behind. All dignity forgotten, he crawls across the floor on all fours, begging, pleading, promising things he wouldn’t have been able to give even in the best of his days, ready to do anything to stop his brother from dissolving in the mirrors.

“Don’t leave me. Please. Don’t.”

He has failed to even make his brother take one final look back.

***

But his brother is still with him, even if locked within the mirrors. After that one visitation, he is forever accompanied by the vision of the two of them, and it’s always the same scene, the one that ended in the death of Ferrus Manus and his own imprisonment in this cell of true illusions.

“It wasn’t me,” he repeats time after time as the mirrors replay the same sequence over and over again. But even if he’s telling the truth, it doesn’t seem to help. It’s always him delivering the final blow, it’s the same image of perfection he has always strived to achieve, and he recognizes himself in the confident, powerful creature that has defeated his brother.

He has to create a difference. There must be a way to differentiate between himself and the daemon-possessed warrior in the mirrors. If only he had any of his apothecaries’ tools, or at least the chisels he used to employ for sculpting… but he has nothing of the kind. He feels around the floor in fruitless search, but the only thing he finds is his own waste that the glassy pores have refused to consume.

He laughs, his eyes never leaving his double in the reflection, as he applies a handful after a handful of foul-smelling substance to his face, his white hair, and eventually his whole body. Right. Just so. Until the mirror itself is so appalled that it refuses to reproduce him.

There is a moment of victory when the images of a glorious warrior in purple and gold standing over a kneeling figure in black start to fade. He stands before the perfectly blank mirror, triumphant exhilaration thrilling him to ecstasy, until a new shadow is born inside the glass. He takes a step back, reluctant to recognize what he sees, and yet the memory comes as readily as before.

What he sees in the mirror now is the perfect likeness of the portrait Serena d’Angelus once painted of him after the victory on Laeran and which he had always been jealous of for the unnatural vividness and intensity of colour.

“Full circle,” proclaims the daemon, this time using his lips to articulate the words.

***

He refuses to admit defeat. It doesn’t matter if all the prophecies have come true. It doesn’t matter if the daemon has robbed him of all choices.

The many reflections mimic his snarl, but he refuses to notice the similarity of his grimace to the one he had often seen on the portrait. If the route to escape is blocked in one direction, he will try the other one.

If he can’t get outside, he can always go deeper.

This time he doesn’t care for the absence of suitable tools. His own fingers will do; his nails are sharp enough to break the skin around his eyes, and he will find enough strength to drive them as deep into his eye-sockets as needed.

If he can’t stop the mirrors from showing him unwanted things, he still can stop himself from seeing what he doesn’t wish to see.

***

He is floating, swimming weightless in a sea of blood, tears and his own waste dispersed in that amorphous translucent matter that fills the spaces of the Immaterium. Perhaps it is the amniotic fluid of the universe; perhaps he should stop struggling to stay afloat and drown in its warm, welcoming embrace.

Have no fear, for I have come to take you home, his father once said when they first met on a distant planet.

Now he is ready to go.