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Constantin Valdor is lost in thought when the knock sounds on his door.
He hears it distantly, far away and unimportant.
He has been sitting in silent contemplation for hours, with nary a muscle twitch to evidence the frantic activity of his sculpted mind. It, like him, is a thing of crafted perfection, tailored to task by hands that are themselves inimitable. But it is not His hands, nor the path they have set Valdor upon, that dominate his thoughts this day.
He should be adrathic-focused on the coming siege, the traitorous spawn who come to reap the bounty their puerile resentment has sown. Some—wrongly, and always out of earshot—seek to place him among the Emperor’s loyal sons, but Valdor is not part of that family, not truly. But neither is he stranger to internecine conflict. For he has extinguished thousands of bloodlines, countless patriarchs and their progeny, and the Apollonian Spear has made the truth of each and every one a part of him.
He feels the pull of these other lives at all times, the stolen wisdom they whisper, and knows what it is to be both sire and child.
Valdor has always planned for this: the inevitable moment when son turns against father, seeking to extract payment in blood for childish grievances. Or perhaps he is too cynical, and it is simply the natural result of the burden borne by all sons: to realize the visions and methods of the father fall short of what is needful, and seek to correct it.
He has always thought of the primarchs as children: mewling infants, before, headstrong adolescents, later, sagging under the weight of their own hubris, convinced of their own immortality and infallibility, or else enfeebled by the utter lack thereof. Flawed and imperfect tools, either way.
Sanguinius is no exception to the rule, but he is childlike in the best way: open and infinitely surprising—though Valdor cannot feel surprise, not truly. Instead, Sanguinius inspires in him something much worse: the clean, bright ache of something that has been excised with immaculate precision, and cannot be regrown.
Sanguinius inherited his father's grace in a way the others did not. So much so that he sometimes reminds Valdor—though reminds is the exact wrong word for it—of what He must once have been, in a time far beyond reckoning. A rawer version of Him, from the early ages of the world when all was yet green, and He little like what He is now.
Ever since his return to Terra, Sanguinius has been tinged with a barely-concealed sorrow Valdor cannot place, one that seems not to belong to the present moment at all. Valdor sees the grey cast to his ever-changing eyes, and understands. Sanguinius has tried to conceal it, ever eager to please, to be everything to everyone, but for Valdor’s part, he would only ever have him be himself.
For all his private objections and marked disdain for the Emperor’s sons, Valdor cannot help but see himself in Sanguinius.
They were both created in service of a dream of order they will never see: would-be custodians of an age that will never dawn. In truth, Valdor does not think they would have taken to it. The veneer of honor wears thinner by the day, and will soon cease to exist entirely.
The idea does not discomfort him. Nothing ever does.
They are what they were made to be: elemental violence restrained only by the bonds of loyalty and unshakeable commitment to His vision.
Caged, the darker parts of him dare to suggest.
But the same could be said of himself and any of the remaining loyalist primarchs. Ultimately, it is a mere pluck of the odd loose threads they share: never enough to weave a common understanding.
His affinity with Sanguinius runs deeper still.
In Sanguinius he sees the relentless churn of his own mind, the endless cataloging of faults and foibles. Though they are both imperfect, Sanguinius seems to be so by design. His flaws are nothing like Valdor’s, measured in microseconds; like his wings, Sanguinius’ shortcomings are grand, ostentatious things, driven by emotion and a humanity Valdor counseled against including in His generals-to-be.
And Sanguinius is indeed imperfect, despite appearances. Grown more reckless than Valdor remembers; near-suicidal, even.
Valdor knows all too well what it is to be flawed and yet held up as a shining example.
To be peerless is to be the only one capable of recognizing your own failings. To be peerless is to be alone.
And yet, when he keeps company with Sanguinius, Valdor does not feel alone.
He does not feel like himself at all. He becomes talkative instead of terse, animated instead of stolid. The ninth-found son unlocks something in him that he should but cannot feel, and Valdor wishes only that he had the words to name it.
Sanguinius no doubt is capable of identifying his feelings towards Valdor, could put them to words if asked. Valdor envies him that, and some small part of him that is the closest to reckless he will ever come wants him to. For he has wondered many times what Sanguinius sees when he looks at him. Does he envy him? Pity him? Resent him?
Valdor has no dreams, but if he had, Sanguinius would no doubt haunt them as surely as his waking thoughts.
There was once a time when such feats of imagination would have been impossible for him. But that was before the spear. Contrary to what everyone—including he himself—believes, that gift has changed him; he is no longer simply himself, as Sanguinius is no longer an infant snatched from a birthing tank cradle.
But some things cannot change. Of Valdor’s loyalty to Him, there can be no doubt; it is a thing biological, gene-coded and hardwired. He could no more betray Him than cease to breathe, and both would ultimately unmake him. In that aspect, he has and only ever will be what He shaped him to be; all the forbidden knowledge in the galaxy could never change that. He is as cool and unyielding as the Palace’s marble floors, a fundamental physical constant blessed—or cursed—with intrinsic knowledge of what he is, and, more pertinently, what he is not and can never be.
He can be no other way.
But that does not mean he cannot imagine others.
To pledge fealty to the Lord of Baal, Valdor imagines, would be a thing of pure will, freely-given, and all the fiercer for it. To picture it alone is to court faithlessness, and yet he does it time and time again regardless.
Sanguinius, bedecked in jewels that could never equal his splendor, wings spread, no longer needing to make himself small. Lordly and grave and beautiful, feral and joyous and terrible, equal and opposite qualities perfectly embodied in one soul.
Valdor, knelt at his feet, Apollonian Spear held out over bent knee, proffering it no less than his whole being. Vowing never again to allow a trace of doubt or sorrow to shade those star-bright eyes, now burning crimson as red sprite lightning.
Sanguinius, reaching out to draw his bowed head upwards, tracing the line of his lip with his thumb, and—
The knock comes a second time, and Valdor frowns, a mere tic of his facial muscles. He has forgotten it sounded at all: a disturbing, impossible lapse.
When he opens the door, he is rendered momentarily speechless by the object of all his vexation in the flesh.
Sanguinius’ cheeks are flushed, his long hair tousled, windswept as the Katabatic plains. A light dusting of manufactorum soot coats his golden armour, and the barbules of his flight feathers are separating in several places. His eyes are the pale blue of early-morning sky behind snow-capped peaks: the cold promise of dawn before the blaze of the sun.
He looks weary, and elated.
“Captain-General,” says the Great Angel in greeting.
Still Valdor cannot speak, convinced he has conjured him from the thin Himilazian air, that he is not really there at all. Sanguinius hesitates, then a flash of emerald-colored understanding crosses his eyes. He gives Valdor an all-too-familiar sad smile, then leans in. Valdor, aware of every muscle in his body on a cellular level, could dodge him easily, even at this range.
He does not dodge. He does not shrink.
He simply allows Sanguinius in.
Valdor is rewarded with a featherlight kiss against his brow. Dark locks glossed and perfumed with pungent oil brush his cheeks, leaving a trace sheen on his golden gorget. Sanguinius’ lips are soft and cool and faintly copper-scented, gone before Valdor even has a chance to truly take in the feeling of them against his skin.
Valdor does not know why he has done this, but suspects it is why he does anything: because Sanguinius has a feeling heart, and he has only his duty, and the pursuit of its perfect and impossible accomplishment.
For one breathless heartbeat, Sanguinius’ gaze holds him in embrace. Valdor, frozen still as the gilded statutes in the Hall of Worthies, wishes it would stretch into eternity.
“I wondered if you might have a moment.”
Valdor simply nods, for he cannot conceive of a reality in which he speaks the real answer, the truth that would be revealed should the Apollonian Spear ever pierce his own heart:
For you, always.