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The first time they’d met, Sanguinius had pulled him aside and quietly said it was nice to see another brother dealing with what their creator would consider ‘flaws’. He returned the sentiment, secretly also relieved to know he wasn't alone.
The second time, Sanguinius had pulled him aside and quietly asked why exactly he ‘flaunted’ his differences. Magnus had no answer then and none now beyond wanting to ask why exactly it was either of their jobs to hide who they were.
They’re still close, but he can feel when Sanguinius forces his eyes to not look at the surgical scars on Magnus’ skin, or how he tenses up if Magnus takes the eyepatch off and doesn’t cover the empty socket.
It grates on him sometimes, less harshly than dealing with the hypocrisy of Russ or Corax, less infuriating than Mortarion’s obstinacy, but it grates. He understands how Perturabo, without any of those same flaws, might consider it a need for Magnus to conform. He doesn’t expect Jaghatai, born and raised in full health save for a few broken bones by his own volition, to understand.
But Sangunius ought to, despite how irrational that sentiment is, know better than to treat them as defective simply for being different. Magnus has fought that sentiment for his entire existence, and he’ll fight it until his bones are all that’s left of him.
Lorgar once told him, whilst drunk and smoking something oddly lavender-like, that suffering has to have meaning. He likely meant it in the great cosmic sense, still clutching to the idea that being made to join the Imperium was a pilgrimage of faith and not half-conscription half-rescue from the cult that raised him, but Magnus takes it to heart in the more literal sense. All results stem from prior actions. The way a dropped coin lands is affected by gravity, air resistance, the steadiness of the hand as it had dropped the coin, a thousand other little factors that are lumped under ‘random chance’ but aren’t any more random than gravity or hand tremors, merely too difficult to easily account for.
The mutations in Magnus, Sanguinius, and several ‘brothers’ who like to pretend they are without those same flaws are all results of prior action taken during experimentation and then left untreated for too long. The surgeries Magnus had to have, the loss of his eye, they’re all the end result of a chain of decisions and trials. His suffering was part of what allowed him to survive, and his knowledge of how kind that sort of care can be is what drove him to medical school, to surgery, to pioneering new medications and operating techniques and to investigate how late in pregnancy certain genetic sequences can be modified without causing harm to either the child or the carrying parent.
Mortarion, of course, spits on most of that research as meddling overreach.
His brother is a scholar, a medic in every sense of the word, one of the only other people smart enough to actually understand half of the topics Magnus writes on, even if his written commentaries veer wildly between articulate insights and empty threats of bombing laboratories. He just also seems determined to see what happened to him as inevitable, and not the product of one company irresponsibly allowed to enact whatever cruelties they want with no oversight.
Hospitals don’t just execute children, or mutilate their patients. Surgery isn’t done on a healthy body for the sake of amusing a vague board built on cruelty. Magnus knows, in a way that Mortarion never can, what it’s like to go under anaesthesia barely able to breathe, and emerge fixed. Mortarion hasn’t seen a girl take her first shaky steps with a new prosthetic. He doesn’t get what it feels like to have a doctor carefully explain to him the way the rot congealed in his eye and necessitated removal, all the while gesturing at the little jar with said eye floating in it. (Magnus has since transferred both the liquid and the eyeball into a shatterproof container, but he’ll be damned if he loses it. He can still hear his surgeon’s voice lifting as she tells him he won’t ever need to worry about that rot again. He makes sure to keep that tone when he tells his own patients good news.)
If it wasn’t for the proof the survivors of Barbarus and the Imperium had both documented, the writings and photos of the corpses, and recorded announcements about ‘requisite samples’, Magnus would have trouble even believing that Mortarion has gone through any of what he’s claimed to survive. Most of it shouldn’t even be possible to survive, but Mortarion is living, walking proof for all their cruelty, the Overlords had been able to advance research.
They’d killed a boy and brought the body back to life minutes later.
That said, Magnus is grateful that he can refuse to fall back on their research no matter where he is, time and time again. For all his talks with Perturabo about efficiency, Magnus cares more about ethics in the end than pure optimization. He knows his own treatment had only gone so well because there had been great care taken to give him choices, hours to think over what would be happening to his body, as much information as he and Amon requested given so the decision would be made in full awareness. He will not allow his work to be reduced to the utilitarianism of a disaster pop-up clinic, treating all choices as instantaneous life-or-death unless that is truly their case.
(Perturabo had nodded at all of those sentiments, of course, but Magnus knows he doesn’t really understand. His only experiences of mandated medicine had been removal of shrapnel and administered stitches, not choosing between amputation and death by gangrene. He’s never had his nerves sewn back together for a forty percent chance of success at the risk of permanent pain in the event of failure. Magnus is glad his brother does not understand, because to understand one must first undergo enough of those decisions that it would be a cruelty to ever wish on someone who doesn’t need them.)
Magnus is no longer the scared child hours away from death by organ failure. He is an adult, a doctor, a person whose legacy will include bettering dozens of fields in their methodology of research, operation, and general treatment.
It hadn’t made getting the news any easier.
The pity is the worst part of it, he thinks, the way Malcador is likely trying to express a genuine sorrow over the result that just feels like the same well-meaning pity that Horus, as good a brother as he is, sometimes casts on him. Magnus does not need pity. He almost prefers the indifference of their father, the knowledge that this is only relevant in his eyes by being another way in which Magnus’ failing body has disappointed its creator yet again.
(Really, Magnus was a disappointment for not just needing surgery but depending on treatment for a good chunk of his childhood, but he wants to dig his heels in on the principle, protest that he’s done enough to still be worth keeping, that his work is as great as, if not greater than, the work of Leman or Corvus or Vulkan or any other brother deemed ‘acceptable’ in their father’s eyes. What is the rescue of twenty people from freezing mountains compared to saving hundreds from liver failure? Why is the loss of a frostbitten limb ‘unavoidable’ but any chance above one in trillion making further research into a medication ‘dangerous’?)
Ferrus has prosthetics, although acknowledging them beyond not offering him gloves risks getting a punch for the expressed concern. Mortarion’s skin is deformed by the actions of torturers. Their father doesn’t care as long as he can treat those sons like any other. Magnus knows he is different from that, knows that no matter how fine and well healed his scars are, they are still proof that he’d needed fixing to his father’s eyes.
Magnus had teetered between them and the way Angron and Konrad, too damaged to function in standard society, are perceived for the past decade. Good enough that he manages his own flare-ups and aches, bad enough that his health is a factor that can’t be ignored when he plans the next six months of his life, when he takes sabbaticals or has to switch out his pharmacies. That position was secure before this morning’s results. Now, he’s not sure.
At best, relegated to being outside of the operating room for the rest of his life. How long will he be allowed to work in a lab setting? How long before his hands are damaged beyond all repair? Mortarion rarely complains, but Magnus knows his bones bitch about the cold, and oncoming storms in any season tense the scarred tissue in his hands. But Mortarion’s hands don’t shake or tremble on those days. Magnus’ did before the surgeries, before the physical therapy and grips on writing utensils. Magnus’ hands still shake on his worst days.
He doesn’t want those tremors to be a normal part of his life again.
He knows Mortarion hates him, being visibly flawed wouldn’t change that, but at least Mortarion has the decency to look at him the same as he always does, if with some of the usual animosity replaced by the look he always gets when a problem is put before him. Mortarion has called truces in that state, even gone as far as to swallow his pride and ask Magnus for advice on neuropathy.
It’s a cold comfort, but a comfort nonetheless to know he has at least one ally in all of this.
He can chop the vegetables perfectly without thinking. How long until he can’t?
Absently, he starts fixing a quick dinner while running down the list of brothers he can and can't break the news to. Perturabo won’t coddle but he’ll also assure Magnus his work still has merit without any pity. Perturabo doesn’t lie about the quality of other people’s work, even when he doesn’t understand the full intricacies of it. Jaghatai won’t understand but again, no pity, and there’ll be the offer of riding or learning to hunt, and he won’t change anything unless Magnus asks him to. Horus won’t have the time for more than token sympathy and that will be mitigated by a sincere offer to listen, no matter how busy their first-found is these days. Lorgar will offer any healing Colchis has gathered under its wings, and prayers, more focused on fighting because he knows Magnus wants to fight. Vulkan-
Maybe not Vulkan. Not until he has to. Not Sanguinius. Not the others either.
The vegetables are slid into this morning’s stir fry and the plate put into the microwave. It doesn’t fully feel like the movement is made by his own hands, even as he sees his own index finger tapping in the exact forty-three seconds. How long has he been living on borrowed time? How much is left?
He wants to keep working. He wants to keep doing what he does, and the odds of their father revoking his laboratory access are low, as long as he keeps producing at least some desired results. Even if he can’t ever perform surgery again, he can help people. He won’t let them freeze him out of his own work.
Mortarion won’t tell anyone, he’s sure of that much. One of the few policies of his that Magnus finds himself firmly in agreement with is the confidentiality of treatment. He’ll be able to hide it on his own terms.
He stops the microwave at the last second automatically, resolving firmly that this will be a problem for tomorrow. Tomorrow, he’ll text Perturabo that they need to talk and maybe start digging up his full records and building a rough outline for the next time he sees Mortarion. Tomorrow.
Tonight, he sits on the balcony with his bowl of stirfry, rolls a joint without a second thought (and extends a silent thank you to Calas for knowing he’d want pre-ground today of all days), and lets the warmth of both wash over him as he drifts into an artificial calm.