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He couldn’t stop looking at his hands, at the glaring red ceramite of his vambraces. Sinner’s red it was called, marking someone who had been judged guilty of heinous crimes, his life to be forfeited at his superior’s whim, without mercy, warning, or cause.
Uzas did not doubt he had done wrong. Which of them had not, after all? They were Night Lords, and violence was their creed. The air they breathed was rank with the reek of the corpses decaying around them, the blood that had soaked into the rubberized gaskets of doors, that no amount of powerwashing would or could remove. This place was a charnel house, but of it all, only somehow his killings were crimes.
Uzas had never held himself to be smart. That was Talos, and Mercutian, with his upper hive education. Uzas had always only been a night fighter, a heavy brawler who spilled blood as easily as his lungs inhaled the fetid air of the Damnation. In combat, he was lauded, his armor hung with what passed for honors among his kind: skulls of a handful of different xenos species, three different kinds of hides forming a half-tabard that stuck to his armored thighs.
“You have no off switch, that’s your problem,” Cyrion had said, finding him over yet another body, deep in the hold of the ship, his hands holding a coil of intestine up like a child examining a snake. Cyrion was right. Cyrion was always right, even when Cyrion was being sarcastic, which is why his words cut so deeply–even his jests had an edge of obsidian to them.
He couldn’t remember any of it.
It must have been bad, then, very bad. So bad he had hidden it from his own mind.
There had been an old saying that their Primarch had alternately laughed at and lauded in turns, about punishment fitting the crime. How was Uzas to know if his did if he couldn’t remember?
Maybe he wasn’t meant to know. Maybe that was the point.
It felt bad to be punished for something you didn’t know you did wrong, though.
He turned his hands over, as though the answer rested, perhaps, in his palms, but all he saw were the palmar plates, where the color had been worn down, ablated by combat, grooves worn in where his chainglaive had made itself home.
The glaive was in his quarters now, one of the few personal possessions he had. Everything fell by the wayside, if you lived, long enough, he thought. Everything. The little trinkets you took as an Aspirant, when you thought it was luck that got you through, fell away to the trophies you took when you knew luck was a lie that people told themselves to feel better–to feel favored by survival. But even those fell off, or cracked, or got torn in battle, and sometimes something replaced them, and sometimes nothing. Until your room was as bare and empty as you wished your thoughts would be sometimes.
His head was always too full, he thought. Crowded with memories, and thoughts of blood, so crowded it took him over from time to time, blinding him like having his head shoved in a tub of boiling blood. He knew he screamed at times like that, because he came out of it with his throat sore, jaw aching, tongue slashed bloody by his own teeth. But it felt like coming out of deep water, where you’d been held under so long you’d stopped fighting it and found something like peace.
The door to strategium opened before him and there was an almost audible wave and hush of noise as the human crew and the servitors clocked him: a Night Lord, then First Claw, then…Uzas. He saw their space pale skin grow even paler, their heartbeats stuttering with fear.
They knew what he’d done, he thought, suddenly. Enough to fear him, openly, enough to cast sidelong glances as the sinner’s red of his hands. Enough to know, and enough to avoid telling him.
It was like everyone knew but him.
Beneath his feet the decking was pitted and stained, a few phalangeal bones kicked into gullies: he looked up and saw Ruven’s corpse, bled out dry and dessicated by now. His blood had left a mark, a passing, on the floor of the strategium itself that could not be erased. Ruven was gone, but even still he left a mark here of what he had been, beyond his life, that would exist as long as the Echo of Damnation held together.
He’d outlived Ruven, he thought, but the flare of satisfaction that came with that guttered as quickly as a flame in oxygen.
Sometimes the only value in his life seemed to be the long list of those he had outlasted.
Victory was sometimes an endurance run, and bleeding the enemy white often laid your own flesh bare.
He would outlive the Damnation, he thought, suddenly, with a red-edged surety he knew was not entirely his own and not built on his own desires, to outlive Ruven, to outlive the legacy of a ship like the Damnation.
They’d all lived too damn long.
Long enough to have lost the plot, long enough that he had lost the thread out of the labyrinth of his mind.
Long enough that it took him almost a minute to place the body in the corner, left there half as a discard half as an honor, of Xarl, his head a stinking wreck, brains dessicated and shriveled around the edges of black-blooded skull, his face flattened, contorted in a way that made the darkness that lurked in the back of Uzas’s own brain stir, slither like a greasy eel. Skull and bone and blood that had once pulsed through Xarl's veins, the bright arterial red of life, the same shade as Uzas's hands, stained not with blood, but with shame.
"You're too late." The voice beside him startled him. He'd missed, somehow, Cyrion stepping toward him, his thoughts buzzing in his brain, drowning out the soft serpentine hiss of Cyrion's power armor. "Talos has already harvested it." A bump against his pauldron, meant to be friendly, jesting, but it still felt like an assault and Uzas felt his hackles rise, a black cloud of spores of rage in his mind. "Besides, it would be a bad look to eat your brother's progenoids, and I think you've already done enough."
Cyrion, even now, making a joke of everything, even aggression, as though he got some visceral pleasure in taunts.
Uzas pushed back, red hand flat on Cyrion's chestplate. "Not. Now." Not the place, not the time, not the state of mind, black and red and fraying, for Cyrion's humor.
Cyrion took the push with an easy step back, mouth quirking up. "Come on, Uzas. I'm the closest thing to a friend you've got."
And Uzas felt a sickening thrashing in his belly, as though he'd swallowed something alive: the dreadful thought that Cyrion was right.