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There are days when Mortarion hates the damned shop.
He’s proud that their fights meant no one has to inhale factory run-off anymore, vindictively happy that the Overlord Corp human experiments aren’t just stopped in the shadow but brought to light in a way that destroyed every surviving board member for good, and he’s more relieved than he cares to admit that he and Calas still get to work together. But he does hate the damned shop.
When Imperium Corp came to the sector of Barbarus, they had been forced to comply. And while the paper contract itself was meaningless, the guns behind the man pushing it towards Mortarion had not been as foreign a concept.
There had been all of two bright spots; First, to the Death Guard’s relief, Barbarus had enough to offer to earn aid in clearing the most deadly of the toxins and bar all human experimentation, but not enough to be, like Baal, paved over in full. Second, Mortarion had managed to leverage the corp into allowing him an independent research position with some sharp stipulations about how certain things would be distributed. They are still bound to the Imperium’s plots and experiments, but they are free enough that Bitterblood can brew illicit drinks in one of the storage vats and Calas can help Mortarion deal weed strains the country over.
Still, Mortarion is reluctant to leave, even as he knows Calas hates more and more being back on the soil of Barbarus. He gets why Mortarion doesn’t like the medical industry, and Calas has admitted, no matter how much he enjoys the idea of neural surgery, there are no great schools nearby and no local resources beyond ones that actively go against their ideas. Mortarion gets it. He does.
He only thinks about Calas running away to one option or another once a week.
His oldest friend wants to be out there, getting to at least do more in-depth research on viruses. Mortarion loves poisons, toxins, venoms, and counters to them all. Calas loves the organic diseases, the molds and rot that had hidden under all of the Overlord run-off. If not the mind, the mold is an acceptable alternative, nature beating out all expectations afforded to it.
It could be worse, all things considered. Bitterblood works a different shift than Calas, Haznir bakes well and shares generously, and there’s a steady enough stream of quiet regulars that they can stay afloat without plastering on corporate sponsorships and bullshit policies. If it keeps them all alive, Mortarion will be somewhat content as he contemplates whether or not he’d have a reasonable chance of poisoning a tea and sending it along as a birthday gift to his ‘father’ or if it would be too suspicious after the last gift of rotting pig intestines.
The bell dings, pulling him out of the usual thought spiral, and by the mild condescension in the footsteps alone, Mortarion knows it’s Magnus.
Magnus coming here is still contentious. For an academic, and one specializing in application of certain surgeries and their effects in animal and human trials at that, he’s spiritual enough to consult tarot cards and say prayers to gods every member of the Death Guard is fairly sure are long dead. He’s obnoxious, insufferable, and a blatant proponent of many surgeries that Mortarion last saw in the employ of the Overlord Corp.
Nevertheless, there is peace. Magnus pays double the already-upcharged-just-for-him price for several of the herbal teas, tips well, and gives free lessons to Calas and Caipha, which means Mortarion tolerates his presence well enough most of the time, as long as Magnus has the decency to leave promptly. And Magnus is, for all his arrogance and bold declarations about the future of medicine, sincere in his care for his patients, to the point of expressing confusion that anyone could possibly not want to help those that are sick or disabled live lives of better quality.
The arrival of Magnus is still more tense than most are. Everything one brother is, the other is not. (Really, there’s enough of a difference that apparently Calas suspects the corp uses ‘brother’ for the Primarchs the way he uses ‘batch buddies’ for test tubes of the same samples. Magnus is broad all over, with dark brown skin, an oddly red afro, and a relaxed, open face where Mortarion is lean and eerily pale, the frown and toxin-damaged hair doing no favors in the openness department to those not from Barbarus.) (Mortarion had not bothered to tell his true brother how right he was about his experiment brothers. What would be the point in stating something so obvious?)
This time, however, Magnus is oddly tense. There’s none of the usual posturing, grand-standing, or side-eyes shot at Bitterblood’s vat.
“Do you have more judgments of our shop, or does the favored researcher of the Imperium have nothing better to do than linger here?” Vorx snaps, seemingly reaching the end of his patience with Magnus after only two minutes.
Normally, there would be a harsh quip and a hasty exit. Instead, Magnus looks up at him, face fully somber.
“They confirmed it.” What it is, he doesn’t specify, but Mortarion waves him over to the breakroom’s table and they sit, Calas hovering awkwardly to the side and pretending he isn’t eavesdropping.
“You recall,” Magnus starts, “the testing that father wanted done on our genes, yes?”
“Of course.” An open secret within the Imperium Corporation that the alleged sons of their mysterious leader were little more than genetic experiments that happened to use his DNA for the sake of a control variable. Barely more hidden than the secret that those same strains were used on different divisions of the corporation’s workers when they are found to be insufficient in some way.
Magnus looks only marginally more at ease that Mortarion knows the basic ground of the bad news. “My genes were confirmed as,” he looks down to finish the broken sentence with “defective.”
“Ah.” Mortarion’s voice, already quiet, is linen soft as he looks at his brother. “So your Thousand, and yourself, all-” He’s cut off.
“Most likely.” Again, too quiet for Magnus’s usual boldness, the shame almost a physical force pushing down on the man’s usually proud shoulders. “High odds of the body quite literally dissolving itself from the inside out and falling apart at any moment.”
“I’m sorry.” Whatever feelings Mortarion holds for his brother, the regret is as genuine as the hatred. It’s a cruel thing their father did to create them, but at least most of them came out with reasonable odds of living an average life. Magnus, doomed to fall apart in his own body, doesn’t make that cut.
It’s such an Overlord thing to do that Mortarion almost wants to ask if that is how their father designed his experiments.
“I’m lucky,” Magnus says, “They tell me that the dissolution is a result of two incompatible genomes within those that had transplants. I should be spared from that but not the other effects.”
He waits. Magnus likes to talk, likes hearing his own voice almost as much as he likes new information.
He wins.
“The pain- The pain I can even live with, Mortarion, though I’ll never be as good at bearing it as you are.” A bitter chuckle and a faked sip of his tea before he keeps talking. “But the same thing that causes the pain causes the nerve damage and the tremors, and-” He doesn’t finish the sentence, and Mortarion doesn’t make him.
He’s no Angron, and Magnus is no Sanguinius, their ideas of acceptable surgeries blur far closer together than either of them care to admit. And even if half of the surgeries Magnus deems acceptable Mortarion rolls his eyes at, he knows his brother will do them perfectly. Nothing less than excellence is tolerated, nothing that can heighten the risk in the slightest, each operation performed with a rigid calm and perfectly precise motions through steady hands.
“The odds of error?” He asks flatly, even as Magnus shakes his head.
“Negligble.” Another faked sip of the tea. “I can’t- after everything-”
Mortarion would not count any of his fellow experiments as ‘friends’ aside from Konrad and sometimes Horus, but he and Perturabo have worked together efficiently enough to tolerate one another’s presence outside of pure mandate. Perturabo had mentioned in passing how Magnus would break down by ranting and pacing, seemingly determined to make a spectacle of the whole thing even when he purposely did so away from the eyes of all but those he trusted.
This breakdown is not that. This is a death sentence to someone like Magnus, someone whose life has been half being a patient and half proving himself too useful to be shunted aside. In that moment, it doesn’t matter that Mortarion had hoped his entire field would be banned and his research forced to a permanent halt, he’s probably the only one Magnus can talk to. Perturabo will always be efficient, Jaghatai won’t understand, and Sanguinius-
They both know how Sanguinius feels about the lack of shame Magnus has, the openness with which he bears his defects. Neither of the two had the option of fully hiding it, but Sanguinius goes to great pains to make himself as average as possible while Magnus seems determined almost to flaunt the differences between himself and others. If Mortarion hates the way Magnus brags, he can at least respect the lack of shame and judgmental glances about their differences.
He makes a decision he wouldn’t have thought possible even ten minutes ago.
“My research is open to all who need it.” He takes in the way Magnus straightens at the words. “The only stipulation is that those seeking treatment with us are discrete.”
Magnus finishes his tea in one gulp, flattening the paper cup and scribbling on it with a pen he must have pulled from his bag’s clip. “You’ve recently been focused on compounds designed to counteract lead poisoning.” His scrawl is clear, as it always is when he actually makes the effort for it to be, and both the generic and brand names that he jots down tell Mortarion instantly where they’ll need to redirect their attention to in the coming months and years. “But any of these would be able to-”
“Take the first.” He cuts Magnus off from saying what they already know, focusing on planning something better. “Next week, your usual time, two hours. I’ll see if I can’t get you something modified by then. If not, we have a few herbal strains that focus on calm and stabilization.” They won’t save him, of course, but they might delay the effect long enough that any emergency surgeries can be done and the rest handed off to sufficiently advanced underlings. Clever Calas is already slipping Magnus a small bag of a more relaxing strain, muttering a quick ‘Emergency rounds on the house’ before Magnus can reach for his wallet.
And maybe, if Magnus is, as Perturabo and Horus both claim, a braggart able to back his boasts up with progress in any field he turns to, another Primarch-grade experiment in Mortarion’s research would be worth dealing with their clashing ideals.