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There was a short period where someone would have helped her. When a Sororitas takes ill, there are medicae, hospitallers. Stims. Holy tinctures. A bed with white linens, or at least a stretcher and a fellow Sister's supporting arm. A glass or canteen of water to sip.
There's a longer period — bissected by those four bright years of Sisterhood — where no one really cares at all.
There's a rumbling from somewhere high above. Slowly it falls into a voice, words, meaning.
"You smell terrible."
Sitting up takes some concentration. She isn't sure if the ship is listing, or if her head's just spinning.
"We leave for Kaois VIII tonight," Mirko continues, not knowing or maybe — more likely — not caring about the pounding of Domina's skull, how his face swims in her vision. "Yet you're in no shape. Pathetic. Did you throw up on yourself?"
This is spoken like it's her fault. Like he's disappointed in Domina for taking ill, like he blames her for ruining his fun little raiding party plans.
(And she did not throw up on herself. She threw up earlier on the lines she was penning, which was a tragedy, she'd been working on them for hours and she's already running low on parchment; and then, not long after, into the rusting urn she found in Mirko's quarters and dragged to her bedside before she felt quite so out of it.)
"Trot out a newborn," she snarls. Let Copil or another idiot carry his raiding garbage, follow him around like a hound, shoot where Mirko points. She is in no mood to deal with his antics. "Leave me alone."
"Are you trying to speak?" Mirko cocks his head. Again, uncertainty: is this mockery, or is she slurring her words worse than she thought?
Domina growls — this, at least, is easy. When she moves to fall back against the pillows, she realizes she never managed to rise from them at all.
"If you die," Mirko says, "have Shrilla vox me. I'll find a replacement on Kaois."
"Find…vellum. Parchment." Less a demand than a hissed plea, but it's all she can manage right now. She had planned to go herself, to find a tidy administratum building and refill her personal stock, but as it stands…
Mirko barks out a laugh. "So you can vomit on it, or write on it? Which is worse? Maybe I will find a new servant. Someone hardier, and with better pastimes."
There is, on her bedside stand, a beautiful little envelope knife carved entirely from filigreed bone. As Mirko stands to leave, Domina imagines grabbing it and thrusting it deep between his big ugly ribs. She would twist her wrist and the fragile blade would shatter against his inhuman bones: hah. Let his quick-healing Angelic body deal with a hundred ivory splinters left in the wound. Maybe he'd get an infection. Maybe he'd get a fever.
Her fingers twitch, weak, useless. Mirko's already gone. She's alone in bed, alone with the rusted urn and the soft human smell of sickness.
Mirko comes back, once. He stands in the doorway to Domina's little en suite, bulky form silhouetted by the light of his main chambers. She can't make out his face, shadowed as it is, but she can feel him staring at her. The little hairs on her arms raise under the weight of his gaze, some too-human fear instinct, and sweat prickles down her neck and chest.
She curses at him. He doesn't blink.
Domina does blink, and he isn't there. His quarters are dark. She's left wondering uncomfortably if her eyes had closed longer than she'd thought, or if he had ever been there at all.
The sweat doesn't leave, even now that Mirko — whether he was there or not — is gone. She tries to kick the blankets away, too heavy and hot, suffocating, but only succeeds in tangling herself further. The room spins. Her mouth's dry, tasting of something gone to rot, while the bedsheets are soaked with perspiration.
She could call out for Mirko. He wouldn't answer, even if Domina managed to shout. She doesn't bother trying.
She could call for Shrilla, the nasty little underhive thing he scooped up from whatever grubby planet, the actual servant. Shrilla would help her. She would fix the blankets, find her water. Cringe at Domina's bedside, like maybe if she prostrates herself enough, if she lets Domina vomit on her, Mirko will grunt some vague approval and make Shrilla's whole damned year.
She would rather suffer. Shrilla, with her tattooed eyes and her fawning ways, makes Domina want very deeply to kick her, hard, like a stray dog.
Hand on her cheek. Weight gone across her body: the blankets removed, or finally thrashed aside. Soft hot weight next to her, new, too present to ignore. All Domina's attention hones to the body perched beside her, every nerve attuned to the physical presence even as her vision swims and struggles.
"Ohh," the hand on her face croons, "you look awful. Just terrible. How long have you been dying?"
Domina whimpers. If she says anything, then Aidos, Mistress of Repentia for the Blazing Star order, her Mistress, will surely, finally, let her die. Worse: she may stop stroking Domina's cheek. Her fingertips trace the fleur-de-lis beneath her eye, the scar that breaks it, soothingly.
"Mirko just left you, huh?" Mistress Aidos continues. Her voice is strange. Distant. Like a vox tuned slightly wrong, or as if Domina is underwater. "Ugh, Dom, you are so clammy. Downright wet, not in a good way. Though—" and here Aidos leans in, hair falling to tickle against Domina's skin, and her breath is hot and close and scented like lho and perfume— "not in a bad way, either. Death's door suits you. Makes your eyes all big and shiny. Glassy? It's not unalluring."
"Please," Domina says, without exactly intending to.
"Hm?" Mistress Aidos cocks her head. Her eyes are such a deep brown they're nearly black, huge and dark in Domina's swimming vision.
Please help me, she means to beg, and please don't leave me again, and please can I have some water? Please can she keep touching Domina's cheek, and stop touching Domina's thigh? Please stop haunting her, please don't hate her?
What she manages to croak out is: "Aidos."
"Say again?"
"Mist —" Domina tries to sit up. She manages a shuddering few inches, propping herself against the sweat-soaked pillows. "Mistress Aidos, I…"
"Aidos," her Mistress repeats, slowly, like she's tasting the name, rolling it on her tongue. "Mistress Aidos. Hm, hm. A little curious, Mina, I have to say. A Sister?"
"Sister —"
"But not quite," she murmurs against Domina's ear. "Not sisterly at all, not even like you Sororitas do. Schola crush? A better Battle Sister? A rival, a lover? No, something deeper."
It's not Aidos at all, she's realizing. Anger slowly kindles through her overheating brain. A different woman entirely is sitting on her bed, this bed that is not a Sororitas bunk, licking at her thoughts. Navis Nobilite. What a joke. She's anything but noble; how dare she pry into Domina's past, into her fevered mind? Domina spits, wordlessly, and lets herself fill with fury.
"You are so rude!" Haydée exclaims, straightening. "Prickly little aura you have. Fine, then, Dom, die all sweaty and stinky and full of stupid secrets. Bet your Aidos wouldn't help, either."
It's dark. Someone — Haydée, Mirko? — turned out the overhead lumens, leaving her to molder tomblike in her box of a room.
The door is cracked. Wedged, maybe, by the edge of a rug. No light spills from the main quarters, for Mirko can see in the dark, and he doesn't care about mortal eyes. Only sound filters through. The grating cchhh-cchhh of the main chamber's door. The hum of Mirko's power armor, joining with the pulse thrumming in her ears, until she can't tell what's her heartbeat and what are his heavy footfalls. Clanks and thuds echo around her room, a hundred fists knocking against her walls.
No one asks to enter Domina's quarters, despite her grievances. Mirko intrudes, Haydée intrudes. Who is hammering at the door, then? Who is playing the reveille, signalling time to rise, to don one's armor, to repent? The Warp? A ghost? She groans, curling onto her side, and wraps both arms around her head. It does little to block out the trumpeting cherubim, the distant chatter of her Sisters. Her skull pounds.
The door opens with a rusty scrape. Something like a servoskull glares down at her, overlarge and overly pale in the pitch dark. A cherub? Her Sister Superior?
"Are you alive?" Mirko's voice voxes out from his skull-painted helm.
She doesn't answer. He can hear her pulse, surely, beating in time with the blaring trumpet. He can see the feverish huddle of heat that is Domina on his helmet's readout. He's just here to be a bother.
"Kaois VIII was a disappointment." A burst of static, as the vox tries to transmit whatever annoyed grunt he's made.
Will he blame her, she wonders vaguely? Because you stayed behind, I wasn't able to find that store, track that signal, I missed their hiding spot. Because of you it all went wrong. To blame her, though, would be to admit that Domina is a necessity. That despite his preternatural advantages, she, in all her dismal humanity, is still useful. That she is a good Sister, a worthwhile repentant.
But to not blame Domina would be to acknowledge his own ineptitude. It would confirm that the Iron Claw simply launched a bad raid. Bungled it somehow. Idiots.
"Looked like orks got there first," he finally says. So no one's fault at all, really, except the slow ship and bad luck. "While ago."
It was orks that killed Sister Repentia Natalie-Marie and Sister Repentia Sunita. Domina had been left bleeding and jealous. The reveille rattles brassily off the walls; Domina claws at her ears, curls tighter into herself.
"Tell," she mumbles into the blankets, "that Emperor-damned cherub to stop."
"Invoke the corpse-god again and I'll kill you myself," Mirko says.
"Go bother Haydée," Domina snarls, "or Natalie-Marie."
She doesn't hear his response. It's drowned in the warbling trumpet, and the wet rush of her pulse in her ears.
The fever breaks with a cool damp cloth on her head, and blessed quiet. No hum from the quarters beyond hers: Mirko must be gone, or at least stripped from his power armor. No more spectral reveille, no one hammering at the door, no Sister Superior's sharp gaze blending into Haydée's. Just the low, ordinary rush of the air vents, cool and calm. Her lips are chapped, but her mouth is moist and tastes like water.
It's still dark, but someone has lit the candles on Domina's desk . They cast a warm light over the clean sheet covering Domina's body, and the skinny woman holding a tarnished bowl. Shock of black mohawk. Spikes jutting from her thin leather cuirass. Ugh.
"You're awake." Shrilla's eyes are wide. Her entire face is tattooed like a skull: cheekbones hollowed as much with ink as hunger, nose and lips darkened. Teeth across her cheek and jaw. Deep circles around her eyes, the very whites of which have been tattooed pitch dark, so that she looks eerily Nostraman. It is transparently servile, this death mask inked to mimic and honor the Night Lords.
Domina is never sure if this devotion is extended to her too because of her vague status — she is not an Angel, of course, but she still wears their midnight blue — or just some misplaced human comradery. A pitcher is sitting on the bedside table, a cup beside it. Shrilla has been making sure Domina had water: she might even have held the cup to Domina's lips, gave her careful sips. Mopped the sweat from her brow. Listened to her fever-ravings.
The fever's gone now, but her blood's still running hot. Anger builds in her chest like a physical pressure.
"Should I tell Lord Mirko?" Shrilla asks. The cloth slips from Domina's forehead as she sits upright, and Shrilla catches it, draping it over the side of her bowl. It's filled with water, looking cool and clean despite its dinghy container. "Your color's better. I was a little worried. How do you feel?"
She presses the backs of her fingers against Domina's forehead to check her temperature; Domina reels, jerking back as she seizes Shrilla by the wrist. Fragile bones grate under her grip.
"Get out of my room!" Domina hisses. A cruel twist, a snap. Something in Shrilla's hand or wrist pops, and Shrilla yelps.
They're evenly matched, all things considered. Domina's stronger, but she is also weak from days of illness. Shrilla could slap her, hold a pillow to her face, shove her, backhand her with her fingerless gloves and their spiky knuckles. She's a sycophant, but still a bruiser. You don't survive as hive scum, or on a heretic ship, without being a fighter.
She sees these same thoughts flicker over Shrilla's skull-inked face, or imagines she does. Maybe it's just surprise.
Idiot. Moron, she thinks, as Shrilla yanks her injured hand away, dropping the bowl of water. Fool. Did she expect gratitude? Intruding in Domina's quarters. Draping cloths on her brow like they're close, like Shrilla's her Sister or comrade. How dare she. Did she think Domina would feel indebted for this affront? Oh, Shrilla, you are so kind.
Pathetic. The bowl clangs and splashes against the vomit-urn before thudding, empty, onto the rugs.
A soft chck as the door slides open, and again as it shuts. Shrilla is gone. The room is empty. Only Domina, in the bed, anger still boiling in the pit of her chest. The candles flicker, small and hot and bright, comforting in their mute familiarity.