Ruptor Vacui lurched in realspace, functional but old and bruised. Her guts churned within the black smog of the lower decks, far below where static rang through the bulkheads. Through the wall-mounted vox units, officers on deck would discern the call first to their Captain.

The Ruptor growled warily as her maw opened to the gilded intrusion, airlocks and machines hissing obediently. The arrival of the shuttle into the main dock sent a thrum through the waiting crew, an Inquisitor's name like dry ash on the tongue. This one drier than the rest when not lapped down also with blood. They all belonged to him- lives a tithe under the Black Warrant.

Rust and flickering lumen led Inquisitor Thule's way to the upper decks from the transfer lock, gratings protesting at the Emperor's will over them in burden. The walls were presiding and sighed as airlocks and doors parted for Origen's company. He would be met by Aelias on the way to the officers' deck and bridge, lumen-light relaxing into a constant, dark thrum of light offering their way to his chamber.

Shimmering stone alloy led them deeper still and to the lift awaiting the ascent of the inquisitor and his host. A retinue had followed them both. Bruises of broken bone followed them both plastered over by the relief of gloved, untouching hands.

Aelias had anticipated him as he always did. The Lord Inquisitor was a threat to him: his seal a pragmatic scrutiny, meticulous in its expectation and will to have done what it required for the ever-watching skull carved into the seal. Bitter, jealous dogma waited to obey use while innards of bile and scar tissue wrenched at the sight of him.

It had been quite some time, sidelong to one another, now that Aelias would see him draped in ash and grey again. How long had it been since? Aelias, shorter and stiffer, did not look at him. The sight of him turned the Captain's minds inwards in recoil. Like the moment's malfunction of the lift door on their leave that forced them to stand for a moment overlong in betrayal of order.

Aelias' chamber writhed in the make of his own discomfort. Books and linens were strewn where they had been left during recovery, bloody or no, swept away into piles in regard of the inquisitor's path within. A presiding desk hosted a long, steel alloy table for such meets. At one end, it hosted also bandaging and medikits. Syringes and a pile of bits he'd swept from the unoccupied end of the table to this one to make way for Origen's audience. Punctures through some of the medikits and the piles of boxes and papers where those syringes had been run through and needles fractured from their caps.

The two of them conversed in this chamber under sickly lumen as always, not about weeks before. The retinue lingered at the door and amasec was produced for Origen in a glass and a bottle on the table, its surface carved by blood and the scarring of objects over its length after years of use. Years of cleaning over brutal use until the Lord Inquisitor himself had set his hands to the table to tend it and drink and eat upon it.

Aelias lurched in moving impatience, dressed to cuirass and overcoat. Uneven breaths curtail the way his nose-bridge curls in regard of the inquisitor's presence. Breaths come unevenly in imagine as he caresses the data-slate, its report... reasonable. He recognised Origen's hand in annotation and his thumb pets over the words.

An exhale between his mouth just parted escapes him, catching it and inhaling sharply when he hears his own sigh. As his breath returns to silence for a moment, Aelias looks over his shoulder at Origen with a pursed, hoarse frown. The stars glittered far beyond split by the sight of the small, solitary world over which they orbited.

Should they exchange glances, Aelias' lips curl coldly to meet his master's.

"And how is the drink? Does it coat your throat nicely?" He asks, standing feet behind Origen and then around him with a long stride that met Origen's side with a data-slate he had taken from him. Replaced by his own glass as he sets it back down on the table with a pointed drop.

A swallow caught in his throat where his flesh still complained at him of its bruising and smiles, watching sidelong. He waits by his side to see if Origen would drink at all, eye flickering between mouth and amasec. Any such gaze or lift of the features on that silvering face felt to blacken his own spit to tar in contempt instantly, filling his mouth as it felt to do.

Origen stood under sickness as it petted his gilded coat. Over his shoulders and hair. Aelias imagined bare hands in his mind still gloved on the table.

The corner of his mouth facing Origen smirks at him, lifting the glass to his chin to not drink.

"My men have been at your report's disposal for some days now. Anything you require," Aelias offers, the seal around his neck writhing at the end of its chain as he leans near intently and takes an appraising, bitter breath in through his nose overhead. "will be done. Including any such urge to exterminatus."

He offers a curt pause. Cold strings threading his words in some bitter wheeze.

"I have heard there are still pirates amidst this rubble of worlds, you know."

Origen remained perfectly still, his flint-dark eyes observing Aelias not with anger, but with the detached focus of a master artisan examining a blade that has been used hard and returned still sharp. He saw the uneven breaths, the resentful curl of the lip, the bruises both physical and psychic. He saw the pain and the fury barely contained. Origen’s gaze traced the old, silvery lines of claw marks that raked down the right side of Aelias’s face, culminating in the sewn-shut ruin of his eye. It was all... satisfactory. The tool was not broken, merely strained. Its edge was still keen.

And he was a lord of fine blades.

He let the silence stretch, allowing Aelias's challenge about the pirates to dissipate into the chamber's oppressive quiet. He picked up the glass of amasec Aelias had poured, not to drink, but to study the way the sickly lumen-light refracted through the amber liquid. Aelias watched him, a predator coiled in his own right, waiting to see if the offering would be accepted. Origen, for his part, was an old hand.

"The drink is adequate, Aelias," Origen said finally, his voice a low, calm resonance that cut through the tension. He met Aelias's gaze, and for a moment, allowed a faint, knowing smile to touch his lips. It was a rare expression, not of warmth, but of profound, almost paternalistic understanding. "It coats the throat. But it does little to wash away the taste of the Warp, does it?"

He waited for the contempt to flash in Aelias’ eyes before he spoke.

“Your report was sufficient,” he continued, gesturing to the slate in Aelias’ hand. “The data-cult on Cygnus-X7 has been… excised. Your methods, as always, brutally effective.” So much like me to collect the blades with the serrated bites, he thought. “The collateral damage was within acceptable parameters.” He paused, letting the rare praise settle. "But you are mistaken. We are not here to hunt common pirates."

He took a slow, deliberate sip of the amasec, an act of absolute confidence. It was a gesture meant to convey a simple truth: Your petty resentments, your bitterness, even your potential poison—they are inconsequential to me. He savored the burn of the liquor, a familiar sensation. He was an Arch-Inquisitor of the Ordo Originatus; he had ingested substances a thousand times more lethal. This was part of the game, the constant testing. He would indulge his agent's minor rebellions.

Origen’s eyes narrowed, a flicker of his true, ancient purpose showing through. "The pirates are a symptom. I am interested in the disease. The report you annotated mentions their leader carries a blade of an unfamiliar, pre-Imperial pattern. Their ship's name, the Stolen Lament, is a direct reference to a vessel lost during the Age of Apostasy. These are not random corsairs, Aelias."

He rose slowly from his chair, his presence seeming to suck the very air from the room. He walked over to Aelias, stopping just short of invading his personal space. The amasec felt warm in his veins, a pleasant and utterly unremarkable sensation.

"They are a historical echo," Origen stated, his voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper. "An origin story waiting to be unraveled. And you..." He felt a strange, momentary lag in his thoughts, a slight blurring at the edge of his vision that he dismissed as fatigue. "...you are the perfect instrument to pry it open."

He reached out, not to touch Aelias, but to lightly tap the data-slate Aelias was clutching. The gesture felt... heavy. His arm, a limb he had commanded for centuries with absolute precision, felt suddenly distant.

"Rest," he commanded, his voice sounding perfectly normal, he thought. "Recover. Then you will take your ship and you will find me the source of this echo. Bring me their leader. The pirates themselves... are merely..."

He trailed off. The word he was searching for—footnotes—seemed to have slipped away, lost in a sudden, thick fog that was blooming behind his silver eyes. He looked at Aelias, and for the first time in a very, very long time, Origen Thule felt a flicker of genuine, cold surprise.

The sensation was not one of pain, but of disconnection. A syrupy slowness began to flood Origen’s neural pathways, a creeping static that sought to sever the absolute command he held over his own flesh. He recognized the agent's signature—a fast-acting neuro-reactive compound, likely of xenos origin. Crude, but effective. He had underestimated his agent's audacity. A rare, and perhaps final, miscalculation.

He gave Aelias a hard look. He could feel the fog thickening, the connection to his limbs becoming frayed, like trying to command a ship through a storm of vox-static. He had to maintain the facade. The dignity of his office, of his very being, demanded it. He would not give this scarred, ambitious boy the satisfaction of seeing him crumble.

"The drink is adequate, Aelias."

He recoils when their gazes met. He did so hate how his Lordship perceived him, his nape crawling in challenge instantly as he performs through one eye only. All in solitary, sharp, furious defence of adequacy. What is adequacy to a Lord Inquisitor? How amasec does even lesser to wash away the scrutiny and memory of one privy to him for so many years. Just how old was he?

Thinking too furiously.

Aelias simply smiles, one-sided as he stood away from him. Yes, Lord Inquisitor. It is.

He tries not to see the man's expression in turn. To look at Origen Thule for too long inflamed him.

The cult on Cygnus-X7 also coated the throat. They were parasites, annihilated by the Ruptor's housed regiments and the infected wound purged. Many of the treasures excised were precisely kept away for observation in the bay holds. Meant for appraisal and shipping off to the Ordo Originatus under Origen's hand- it was not so long after that Aelias had become indisposed, for just a while.

He presides over his gift, waiting. One left wilfully and eagerly at the apex predator's door as a tithe for his own continued survival- one of many. One of many bitter ones.

It was bitter when he complimented him just so. Words that set Aelias' nape furiously rigid and his mind closed off amidst something black and sensational. It was a clinical and sincere interest to duty and the Lord Inquisitor's will that set him to his annotations and reports at large even despite himself. To hear that such dossiers and documents were adequate almost...

"But you are mistaken.--"

Aelias' brow raises attentively, deliberating him with his grip white-hot on the data-slate. Deliberating him a little more attentively still when lips touch the amasec and down the glittering amber. As demurely as his Lordship might, the touch was a small thing. Perhaps yet enough.

He could rush over and push the rest of it down his throat. The nerve to take a sip only. Did he know? Is that what this was?

Aelias lips tighten as he watches on with a thumb running over the data-slate. It flicks over the report, closing it and opening it again in some rising trepidation. Words only meet him at the surface of his flesh and then disappear as he imagined so much.

"--These are not random corsairs, Aelias."

"Indeed, Lord Inquisitor." He answers flatly, turning his thumb over the slate to toy with a document as he watches Origen stand. His Lordship taller than himself, by few inches but nonetheless. Such was a commanding shadow even beneath lumen and Aelias is forced to watch him. To allow him towards his own space.

He turns on his heel to allow himself the pleasure of indulging him with his good eye, watching the creature stop short. Handsome, immense.

Was the dose not enough? Aelias frowns at him, head tilting towards him. Something boyish and rancid twists in his gut and compels his head to dip also, towards him.

"--And you...--"

He knew what to expect. Almost. He had fed himself the very same days before in some attempt to understand. That it should take longer moments at a small dosage but that it may work nonetheless. Anxiety revelling compels his lip to curl in a show of nerves sizzling.

That he would be asleep before long. Catatonia -- coma. That no thing should wake him.

He takes a step nearer as he sees his Lordship falter. A cold, unwavering step towards a space beginning to fold from him. The flicker of the smile disappearing for a hard brow and a frown concentrated on him.

"Are you well, Lordship? You look unwell." Aelias asks. Casual, flat rehearsal as he nears. He sees it in his eyes. The fear, contained within a prison of his own made flesh. A gesture of fingers waved behind his data-slate when he turns a briefest signal to one nervous guardsman followed by the other from the chamber in near silence.

The slurring. The look. The thrumming of the Ruptor somewhere behind them silent as breaths in staccado dance between them both.

Aelias nears him as he wavers and sets the data-slate aside, hands unfolding to grab him.

One hand reaches to take the glass from him while the other reaches for his jacket.

He sees the smog in those abyssal eyes and shoves him -- from the table, from its chairs. The audience that sought to grab him was the floor of cold alloy and discarded medicae, as Aelias' blunt fangs flash with the effort.

"I think I've heard enough of your words, Lord Inquisitor. I think I'd like to relax." He spits, in cold indignity as he takes a step forwards and brings a boot over the slender chest with a twist of his heel into the sternum.

He peers down his nose at him and in the thrill of remembering jealousy-- fears him. He fears the judgment and the replacement of his own attention with xenos artefacts.

Aelias bends down after him and straddles him with a fury. The glass half spilled is brought forwards and poured over his mouth- amasec spilled across his lips and throat heedless of if he could swallow. Discarded with a throw against the wall and a sigh.

A sigh, as the hand reaches for Origen's jaw and grips, bringing them flush to one another over the floor.

"I see the way that you fucking look at me. Are you disappointed?" He hisses. "You are a filthy whore. A whore--" -He growls, meeting fury with a hard kiss over the lord's mouth. The caress of lips becoming one of teeth as he parts with a bite. His hips roll over the pinned chest as he chokes him.

"I think I'll enjoy you without your words for a while. Be a good girl now." He breathes, panting as he clambers from him to turn him roughly onto his belly.

He saw Aelias's lips curl, saw the boyish, rancid twist of anxiety and elation in his gut. He heard the words, "Are you well, Lordship?", a flat, rehearsed question that was a prelude to the attack. Origen's mind, still sharp as a shard of glass, cataloged it all. The fear of replacement. The jealousy over inanimate objects. The desperate need for validation through dominance. Predictable.

He tried to speak, to utter a single word of command that would bring his retinue crashing through the door, but his throat seized, producing only a low, frustrated growl.

He felt Aelias's hands on him, shoving. The motion was clumsy, fueled by fury, not skill. Origen's body, however, was no longer his to command with its usual precision. The command to brace, to use the boy's momentum against him, was lost in the thickening fog between mind and muscle. He felt himself fall, not with the crash of a felled giant, but with a strange, detached awareness of his own weight. The cold of the alloy floor was a distant, academic sensation.

Origen felt like a spectator so suddenly, trapped behind the lens of his own failing eyes. He could feel the Amasec’s chill, the waste of it, but the complex mechanisms of swallowing were already beyond his reach. He felt the pressure of a boot on his sternum; Watched as Aelias straddled him, a storm of desperate fury. He registered the words, the hissing accusations- “filthy whore,” “disappointed?”- and filed them away.

The subject's rage has transmuted into a crude display of sexual dominance. A predictable, if pathetic, psychological transference.

The kiss was an intrusion, the bite a spike of sensory data. Painful, yes, but distant. His jaw, held captive, could not recoil. His eyes, however, remained open, sharp for a few moments longer, no longer comprehending the immediate situation but simply... recording.

His mind, for a few final moments, was still a raging star, cataloging its own defeat before the darkness finally, completely, took him.

Aelias would see his Lordship to sleep in bruising and in branded pride as he climbs over him and fucks him with his clothed hips first, hands clenching down over the poised throat and jaw. He could break his neck in rage. He could. He could.

He suffocates until he feels the heart welting in panic beneath his hands. Curiosity next as he tugs his hair and wrenches his head to look at him. Handsome creature. His eye traces the scars, the lines of a face he'd never seen at rest before. What did he see in him that made his skin crawl like so?

"I hate that you know me, you know," he sighs. "That you saw that shit. That the drink is only ever adequate. You're an arrogant beast, aren't you, Lordship?"

He remembers the drugs before he does anything else and brings them down to the floor with them, in a pile poured over both their bodies. Syringes, phials, stimulants, sedatives. Depressants to null the nervous system and break his connection to the Warp for just a while longer. Lest the both of them be killed for the shame he already felt pitting within his own gut and burrowing bloodily through.

He'd betrayed him. As they'd betrayed one another when the Lord Inquisitor saw him like this.

Time loses itself in the endlessness of night and lumen already darkened, drugs giving way to impulse increasingly daring. To bruising when he grips him and shoves him against the floor as he fucks him.

To his own pleasure- he turns over Origen with effort before then and grips his cock, blunt claws scraping down its modest length and squeezing his balls in frustration; punishment, in reflection. In open admiration of the musculature down at Origen's slender hips and at the scarring curling around his flesh. He watches- and bruises his cock flush with his clawing.

A spiral of inadequacy. He couldn't get him hard. Aren't you liking this, Lordship? Is it not adequate?

Aelias would have him like this, and fingers him, and admires him on his back. Shuddering hands take up the used syringes and puncture him again through the back. Through the arms and the muscles as he filled him with Chlorinton made to keep the bitch asleep. Depressants to numb over the Warp's calling and keep the Lord Inquisitor docile.

Kalma. Meant to make him forget if he could ever remember.

"Fucking whoreson. Don't look at me like that." He'd complain, again and again, in overstimulation as he fucked him. As he bore into his skin with his own needles and landed knuckles across his shoulders. His cheek once. Not again.

He turns him over in effort and gasps, feral as he fucks him again with hands pressing the side of a cheek against the floor. Had he the right to claim him himself? Betrayal laces his own nerves and keeps him at the precipice of a furious sob.

"You've been-- mhh- good to me." Aelias gasps then. He does cum. He finishes inside and pins him there with his own hands in euphoric silence, his eyes rolling.
He removes himself in depressed afterglow and rubs his flesh over Origen's flanks in flushed overstimulation.

And pets him. He grips his hair, pathetic, and redresses himself, and lies beside the bruising and blood next to his Lordship's body.

Shame? Of course. Furious, clumsy shame of betrayal. He stares at him and through him and at the floor beside the fallen star in cold shame for a while.

"You'll feel that later, sir. The bruises," Aelias sighs, eyes rolling as he adjusts himself onto a hip and faces away. He crumples against the alloy and lets his lips touch where perhaps the Lord Inquisitor's boots had walked before. "The blood. I bled too, my first time. Weird, isn't it."

He frowns at himself in some embarrassment. It was rancid, wasn't it. Betraying a Lord of the Inquisition in a way so crude. Could it be undignified if no one else had seen?

Perhaps Origen would feel it later in euphoria-- dread-- betrayal-- exterminatus. For all aboard this ship and the Ordo they served and the cults they hunted after. The static of the vox a constant thrum of the souls far beyond the reach of them.

Starved noises. The hum of the Ruptor broke his mind to bleeding as he rolls his head against a panel on the floor and scrapes his scalp.

A portion of small punishment dealt to him for his betrayal.

Time passed and therein the boy would turn in shame to face his slumbering Lordship, watching in bitter, motionless contempt for longer.

Another bruise to the flesh later of a needle's bite when it was time to simply drug him again before he woke.

Awareness returned not as a single, sharp intake of breath, but as a slow, muddy tide seeping through the static of a dream. For days—or was it weeks? Time was a fractured concept—he had been drowning in that static, a disembodied consciousness adrift in a fog of neuro-toxins and sedatives.

Sound, first. A low, grinding hum that vibrated not in his ears, but deep in the bone of his skull. The familiar, thrumming heart of the Ruptor Vacui. It was a baseline, a starting point.

There were loops of sensation, fragmented and repeating:
The dull, rhythmic ache in his shoulders, a constant, weary strain from his wrists being bound somewhere above his head.
The unfamiliar, rough texture of synth-linen against his back, a world away from the cool austerity of his own sanctum.
The hiss of a syringe, followed by the sharp, familiar bite of a needle, and the subsequent, welcome slide back into the grey, painless nothing.
The weight of another body, the ghost of a desperate, panting breath against his ear, the phantom sensation of being held, of being... used.

Pain was a distant continent, a dull, bruised geography he could sense but not yet fully explore. A map of insults written across his back, his shoulders, the side of his face.

His mind, a fortress built over centuries, had been cataloging these fragments without context, filing them away as corrupted data from a long, terrible dream. But now, the fog was thinning. The static was resolving.

The first true, coherent sensation was the cold. Not the sterile chill of his own chamber, but the damp, living cold of a poorly heated room on a voidship's lower decks. He felt the rough fabric of his own trousers bunched uncomfortably around his hips, the cold air a profound violation against his exposed skin.

...a voice, hissing accusations close to his ear. 'Filthy whore... disappointed?' The words were an irrelevant, pathetic variable, yet they were logged...

He sent the ancient, ingrained command: Report status. The feedback was a scream of dull, aching pain from his shoulders, the chafing of bindings at his wrists. Physical restraints. Prolonged.

He sent the command to open his eyes. The return signal was a void. He sent the command to flex the muscles in his right hand. The feedback loop was silent. Motor function: offline. Neurological pathways... compromised.

...a phantom sensation, the pressure of a boot on his sternum. The weight of another body, a storm of desperate fury. A memory of his own lip twitching in a spasm he could not command...

The fragments began to coalesce. The amasec. The taste. The flicker of cold surprise. Diagnosis: Neuro-reactive agent. Xenos-derived. Dosage... punitive.

He remembered the kiss, the bite. The clumsy, furious assault. The violation. He remembered the boy's hands on him, the desperate need for validation through dominance.

He remembered it all then, not as a dream, but as a sequence of events. Yes, the amasec. The fall. The dragging. The needles. The weight. The hissing, desperate words. The violation, repeated.

He tried his eyes again. This time, they obeyed. The world swam into focus, not with the clean, unwavering light he preferred, but with the sickly, flickering glow of a single, dying lumen-strip. He was in a small, chaotic chamber. He was in Aelias's bed.

The fury was there, a cold, ancient thing, but it could wait. It was just another data point in a new, infuriating equation. First, as always, came the analysis.

He tries his hands again. Sore, sore. Even the breath he chased from his lungs was a slow, heavy, miserable one. His consciousness limped not with pain but weight. Even further, his eyes, scanning the dark, felt heavy. They logged his surroundings without the saccadic movement required to parse detail. Everything hung in place and dripped when he rolled his eyes to the next picture. The next image to log but barely comprehend.

He closed his eyes again, not in defeat, but some grasp towards assisting his own calculations without the distraction. His pupils were blown wide behind his eyelids as his brow just barely furrows-the pain of his own body was as white hot to his senses as the lumen-strip-and as distracting now.

And in the quiet of his own skull, behind the mask of feigned unconsciousness, he began the slow, meticulous work of prodding his surroundings with a gentle probe of intention. The warp’s familiar current felt distant, muted. How long, he wondered, had he been unconscious? How close might he have come to a breach of his mental fortress while he was unable to man the parapets? Or, perhaps he already had been?

It had been... a week, or more. It had been days, certainly. Long enough for exterminatus to pool at the base of his mind like a thick oil; oil viscous enough to hold his own clarity together in calculation.

He did dread whatever life lay on the other side of the door. The discordant thrum beyond the bulkheads sung of the Ruptor's suspense for her master. She waited, dark maw sealed, for the digestion to finish simply.

Aelias waited. The Lord Inquisitor's retinue also waited.

They asked after him over the vox.

He is in a state, he'd told them. Over-eager with the amasec, but well. Dissected and sent to sleep.

"His Lordship requested before his slumber a full assessment of the artefacts from Cygnus. A cohesive report of each and every thing in those bays to be procured within a-hundred-and-sixty-eight standard hours."

He'd told them. As his hand gripped his Lordship's head again and he'd slurred over the static of strange obedience, the cold metal against his own cheek in caress and in afterglow again. He'd made the order deep in Origen again as another shot pricked his neck with blood, collar and jacket stuffed away.

Lumen-light saw everything past the grin of shame, miserable shadow blacking the light from Origen's body.

It was more and less that passed in hours spent alone, in meandering orbit.

He was left on the floor for a long while first, discarded and half-dressed. Aelias would have him posed for his own use and he fucked him. He bruised his neck and shoulders and his scalp where he pulled at him. He tore through the flesh of a hip with a used syringe to see what it would do; for his fury and for Origen's supple, scarred skin.

It bled, splitting capillaries and the first layers of his flesh unevenly. The wound tapered where he hadn't the strength to tear him open and a speckle of blood betrayed the path the syringe had taken to where it was thrown.

"You'd hate that. If you were awake." He'd chuckled, a sigh from the mouth coy and between uneven teeth when he snarled at him.

He struggled to inhale through his nose when he was mad. Too much rage. Too much air needed to convey himself. It was all that his own maw was good for.

Origen wouldn't see himself be rearranged shamefully from floor to bed. More violation, objects and fingers within and out in experimentation. More drugs. More to keep him docile.

Drugs in the Lord Captain's veins to dull the passing hours.

"Look at the way you writhe. Stupid. Expecting me to do everything, as always." He'd complained, manipulating his Lordship over discarded sedatives until they were deeper within the chamber, to where Aelias slept.

Also an arranged mess. His bed was never made-- but that was adequate to him.

Adequate to the Lord Inquisitor? He'd join it, jacket and collar unfolded. The light in this room became a dull, single strip of mercy on the ceiling- the other fixtures were broken.

Aelias fucked him again, laying over him in shame again. He could not sob, poised in eye-rolling, embarrassed pleasure. Half-dressed and tired in sweat and blood. The rosette of his hung from his neck in blood, in residue. He'd gripped it and held it as he'd laid over him.

"You're a good whore, sir. I miss those shitty critiques of yours, though." He frowns, gripping his hair. He could rot between the bulkheads for what he'd done to him, hips rolling against another fresh set of bruises.

"A shame my seed won't do anything to you. Something to remember me by when you split my brain." He grins, cold, distant. He grips his manacles when he fucks him- primitive binds to stop escape, to stop attack. They were fitted and locked into place clumsily when Aelias had given him his last shots-- a prolonged dose of psychic dampener, a relaxant.

Other hours, he sat far from the room. He watched him from the light with eyes tracing over the violence there. The crumpled form of another body in his bed that he scarcely joined for long.

He'd had days to stew. Days to rot in the guilt of his own indulgence, his betrayal. Manic attempts to atone by cleaning Origen's flesh leaving behind bruises, phantom kisses.

Aelias deigned to stop feeding him his concoctions, eventually. Does he reverse the sedatives? His eyes dragged over the table, over discarded syringes and a rack of medicae thrown to one side of the room in a rage.

Plasteel-alloy and substance shattered where he'd rolled and kicked those injections across the floor and discarded them under his grinding heel, torn up in waste. Inadequate doses. He didn't need them.

He was in contemplation with hands clutching the linen of his own jacket when he wakes to a sigh-- frightened suddenly. Ashamed and his gut turning over itself in nausea. Anger, now that he had had time to consider the Lord Inquisitor's words.

Aelias' eyes roll towards the floor, beneath the bed where he hears the sounds of Origen's breaths.

"Lordship." He says, eyes glazing in deference.

A shudder runs down a sore, uncleaned nape and he stands, behind the desk, over discarded papers. His data-slate and tokens of guilt. The amasec that had been emptied while locked in here and his own glass. The shattered phial of Origen's remained and the liquor evaporated long ago.

He takes a step nearer to bring his hips against the table and he lifts his chin in no desire to cross the threshold towards the smaller room.

"Lordship."

The word was a distant anchor in a sea of chemical static. A single, coherent data point in an ocean of corrupted noise. Origen’s mind, a fortress built over centuries, seized upon it.
He began the slow, meticulous work of rebooting, of forcing the connection between his will and his poisoned flesh. He sent the first, simple command: Flex the fingers of the right hand. The return signal was a void of silence, a chasm of unresponsive nerve endings. He did not panic. He simply noted the failure and rerouted his focus. Left hand. Index finger. Twitch.

A flicker. A single, minute spasm against the rough synth-linen of the bed. It was a victory as profound as any battlefield triumph.

He used that single, re-established connection as a beachhead. Sensation began to return, not as a gentle tide, but in painful, disjointed fragments. The chafing of the restraints. The unfamiliar, rough texture of the bedding, his bunched top, against his scarred back.

Origen’s ancient, flint-dark eyes opened for another attempt at seeing. They were not panicked. They were not furious. They were lucid, analytical, and held the profound, weary weight of ten millennia of human failure. They fixed then on Aelias-the agent standing a few feet away-a portrait of guilt and terrified defiance. In Origen’s gaze, Aelias would see no sign of a victim. He saw only the unwavering, terrifying focus of his master.

“Mmh.” A simple grunt, testing his vocal chords before attempting to speak. Satisfactory performance. He could discern immediately that he would be hoarse, however.

When Origen spoke, his voice was a dry, rasping whisper, the words heavy with the effort of forcing them past a drugged throat, yet they cut through the silence with the precision of a scalpel.

“So... that was the shape of your trauma. Crude. But... informative.”

He paused, taking a slow, rattling breath that was a testament to his internal struggle. His gaze did not waver. The faintest, most terrible hint of a smile touched his lips. It was not a smile of amusement. It was the smile of a master craftsman who has just discovered a fascinating, dangerous new flaw in his finest blade.

The expression held for a long moment before a subtle wince finally broke his composure. A tremor ran through him, a violent shudder as his fractured nerves screamed their report to a mind that had long since learned to ignore them. With a languid, almost impossibly slow deliberation, Origen tested his control further, rolling one leg slightly on the rough synth-linen. The simple motion dragged the fabric of his trousers, a minor adjustment that cost him a universe of effort.

He had been holding his breath against the strain. He released it now in a quiet, weary groan, allowing his eyes to close. As ever, he was in no hurry. The game had simply entered a new, more interesting phase.

He continued his internal inventory. Toxin residue... significant. Motor control... returning, but sluggish. Dehydration... acute. That was the first practical problem to be solved.

Origen’s eyes opened again, fixing on the frozen form of his agent across the room. When he spoke, his voice was still a rasp but it was no longer a diagnosis. It was a command.

"Aelias."

He watched Aelias’ face.

"Water."

The single word hung in the air, absolute and undeniable. It was not a request. It was the first link in a new chain.

Aelias, in the churning maw of recognition, tried to recall the past days or week in clarity. Searing flexion in his mind that warned him of his inadequacy to serve, and inadequacy to be trusted.

He remembered the hours he was sober. He was aware of what he had put this man's body through, for hours. Days. The wounds and injection sites carved into him.

All around his neck, his flanks and bare, slender hips.

It was a boltgun through the forehead or perhaps a thrumming static of the vox that Aelias expected, once the Lord Inquisitor was awoken. He stood in the mire of his own death and simply waited for it, watching Origen- the name undeserving on his own tongue- reconnect with the sinew he'd tried so experimentally to cut apart under his own hands.

He sees the flicker of digits as they flex against the bed.

The gaze, that turns over and lands on himself. Aelias, bristling, casts his eyes in a hurry to the Lord's body. He recognised the Inquisitor's discernment: clinical, terrifying diagnosis of the systems wrenched apart while he had been so absent.

Something had seeded within to make him miss him when he was away. He missed command.

"Mmh."

When the Lord's breath touches him his nape stiffens in contempt, shame of betrayal. Lucid jealousy. His nose creases and he looks at him hard- not at his face.

His face was better at rest; at the precipice of nothingness, where perhaps they both belonged. Origen for that dignity of his. Aelias for the rot that coiled around it.

He bites his own tongue in silence when he hears the rasp and anticipates himself for inadequacy. Starvation of his efforts.

What he hears was worse a thousandfold. The perception of an observer at length who he had known long enough to know him. Lord Inquisitor Origen Thule, who would hear every word of his puzzle. Such easy dignity and collection made Aelias turn sidelong to him on a heel with a grimace cast tight-lipped away. He could not hold his gaze.

It was shame, disappointment-- hatred. Humiliation above all other things. What a shameful, useless scolding. Informative.

Aelias awaits him, as he waits, waits, waits. For the punishment of something in lockstep with his own last breaths.

He would be made to simply wait and his eyes drag towards the bed when Origen groans. Away again as he waits in inescapable scorn. It did no such thing to ease his shame. Worse now that guilt had won; Origen had been put to the end of his leash and had seen him. He had felt him like this.

Aelias' fists ball in fury with all things around them as his gaze rests on a bruised injection-site on one of the Inquisitor's bare flanks. He resists another unsatisfying rage bound by his duty to the rosette around his neck while it did not snare him.

When would the execution come? The declaration of arrest? Inventory of madness and consequence rolled through Aelias' mind in more pointless jargon.
Aelias.

He so hated when he said his name. Hated when he lapsed whilst in uniform. Aelias forces himself to look at him in that moment, brows hard.

"Water."

He's silent, for a long moment. The near-silent intake of a breath through a nose just slightly congested was the stiffness of his own self-destruction.

A scream traps in his throat silently and his eyes. He blinks. Furiously.

The command turns him away in frantic, welling regret forced him against his own mind to reach for the empty glass left on the table, flicking a used syringe away from its base as he takes it quickly.

His jaw burned with the grimace omnipresent as he marches around the table. The sanitation unit-- provided recycled water fit enough for drinking. Above the sink, hairline fractures drew over a plasteel mirror in old bruising. Aelias considers his words to it for the flickering moment that he sees himself between the abused surface and he practices taking a breath in between his teeth.

His own sanitation unit had been barren for a week now, taps unused. When he flicks the lever it chokes before it pours.

A quiver of the lip out of sight marred duty further as he fills the glass and returns in terrified frenzy to proffer it idly by the Lord's resting form.

Aelias bites his own tongue, practices again.

"How am I going to be executed?" He asks flatly.

The question hung in the stale air of the chamber, pathetic and small. Origen’s flint-grey eyes remained fixed on Aelias. He did not answer. Instead, with a minute, almost imperceptible motion, he inclined his head towards the glass of water Aelias held with a trembling hand. The command was unspoken, yet absolute.

Origen’s head was a dead weight against the synth-linen; he could not lift it himself. Aelias would have had to slide a hand—the same hand that had bruised and violated—carefully behind his master’s neck to support him. The skin was cold, the silver hair like fine-spun silver against his knuckles.

The water was a cool, clean shock against the dryness of his throat. He drank slowly, methodically, his gaze never leaving Aelias’s single, terrified eye. He felt the boy’s hand trembling as it supported his head. He cataloged the sensation. Fear. Guilt. A desperate need for a verdict.

Origen’s eyes, which had closed in concentration after moments of trust, opened again. They were clear. The fog was gone. When he spoke, his voice was still a dry, rasping whisper, but it was steady, each word a perfectly weighted stone dropped into the silence.

"Execution?" The word was spoken with a faint, almost academic curiosity, as if Aelias had asked a particularly foolish, irrelevant question. "Child, you have just provided me with the most intimate, unfiltered data on your psychological breaking points. You have spent days screaming your deepest traumas and insecurities directly into my ear."

He paused, letting a flicker of something that was not a smile, but a profound, weary sadness, touch his lips.

"To execute you now would be like a scholar burning a priceless, one-of-a-kind manuscript after reading only the first chapter."

He took a slow, rattling breath, the effort immense.

"We are not finished," Origen whispered, the paternalism in his voice now a chilling, absolute certainty.

His gaze fell upon the data-slate still resting on the table, where Aelias had left it. His fractured sense of time, blurred by days of forced unconsciousness, began to recalibrate, locking onto the one constant in his universe: the work.

"I was making annotations," he said, his voice clearer now, stronger. He looked at Aelias, his eyes holding no malice, no anger, only the cold, unwavering light of purpose. "On your report for Cygnus-X7. My thoughts were... interrupted. The annotations are incomplete.”

Aelias' eyes linger overlong on the hand. It stakes him with something guilty and pleasured even deeper within. Weakness on display to him gorged on itself in some strange desire. Jealousy? Possession? Like witnessing a dying sire at his total mercy.

A week earlier, he might have dared to puncture his heart with those syringes of his.

He cannot hide the guilt and reminiscence on his frown as he stares into him and over the texture of his hair where it lay across pallid skin. He had starved him, knowingly. Unknowingly, in the stupor of drugs for so many hours.

Aelias does oblige him in bringing a palm behind his Lordship's nape, chilled at the feeling of flesh and hair at the tips of his fingers. He does bring his head up, angling him while the other hand presented the glass. Intensity. Fear. The immense weight of the waiting sentence he held and nursed back from what he had done.

He stares at him in trepidation of the unanswered as he feeds him, terrified. Guilty while aquilas and rosettes and skulls had watched on and done nothing.

He was attentive to the words, his own breath withheld when his Lordship speaks. His own mind pounded in shame and fatigue and anger.

"Execution?"

It felt-- like he was a fool? And why was that? He stares at his eyes in newfound frustration and some fear.

Child. It burns. He bristles in insecurity woven between the threads of anything he could ever say back. How--?

"To execute you now--"

"But you--!" Pause. He takes a breath through his nose and his lip curls, disbelief yanking at his mouth first.

He would not?

It was horrifying. Implication, realisation. The tremor beneath Origen's neck falters as Aelias is brought into a spiral of implication. The look upon him intimate, beyond ignoring.

The breath captures him in abyss.

"We are not finished."

They were not. He was to suffer far worse than any execution. And did he look forward to it?

He meets his gaze in a horrific knowing of the very nature of Inquisitorial torment and lifts the drink from his Lordship's lips, swallowing the dehydration from his own mouth and into his throat where it simply caught and clotted lower.

It forces him to smile. Lop-sided in empty-eyed, distracted guilt. Acceptance of death beyond death.

His eye follows the gaze then. It promised retribution for this-- this disruption of service. This failure of his painted across his skin where his service to the Lord Inquisitor had faltered before. So many discrepancies and marks of tardiness and disruption to a record already split through.

Instinct lifts Aelias' palm against the back of Origen's head to assist his gaze upwards where it then lingers, holding him above the drink.

The data-slate waited where it had for a week now. One of the few things left untouched by madness in a chamber that had been struck by its fullest force. He smiles at it, furiously also.

"I was making annotations,"

Yes, and then he was... made indisposed.

Say the words, boy. Fucked bloody. Beaten. He glances back to him with that guilty smiles and feels it droop at the sight of blood gathered under the cheekbone where he'd hit him. Bruising on the throat where he had strangled him more than a mere few times.

Aelias cannot look at his gaze for long when he looks at him. Something about it made him writhe and set his blood to boiling in some jealousy beyond his own comprehension.

"Yes." He answers, after too long, his lips pursed by tremor and his fingers turning inwards towards the silver scalp. The other hand tightens around the glass half-filled and he clenches his teeth, eyes rolling back towards lumen-light. Forced to consider their time together. The syringes. The broken glass. Blood marked along the floor on the path of obliteration towards the data-slate.

"You're asking...-- for my report." The thought stops, and he eyes him dissonantly. And his ribs fill with air that relieved him nought to breathe.

"I tasked your retinue with securing the relics and stocks found on Cygnus-X7 days ago," he says then, a waver over the syllables curling back. "I had them scour for each and every object and notation and document we procured. Full reports-- at your request. To be delivered by the one-hundred-and-sixty-eigth-hour. I..."

Aelias' throat tightens in admission and he tugs a small clump of grey hair, angry again.

Origen listened. Yes, this was what he needed to hear. A bridge to time before his memories were reflections refracted through handfuls of shattered glass. He recognised some of the words; Repeated as they were from, apparently, days ago. Origen’s eyes flicker to a spot in the dark in some deep thought. The reality did unnerve him. For a being so intensely observing, he could not stand to believe his universe had turned inside out. For days, he was the observed. What do I… look like when I sleep?

With the slow, deliberate grace of a being for whom time was a patient servant, Origen moved. He did not pull away from the hand tangled in his hair. Instead, he leaned his head fractionally into Aelias’s grip, a gesture of absolute, unnerving acceptance.

"You may let go now, Aelias," Origen whispered, his voice still a dry rasp, but devoid of any anger.

Origen remained where he was, his head still slightly tilted from the pressure. He did not immediately try to right himself. Instead, he used the moment to continue his grim inventory. He tested the strained muscles in his shoulders, the chafing restraints at his wrists, the sluggish, poisoned feel of his own blood. He took a slow, rattling breath that was a testament to the effort it took just to draw air.

Then, with immense, visible deliberation, he engaged the muscles in his neck, slowly bringing his head back to a centered, dignified position. The movement was a silent declaration of reclaimed control, a small pocket of order asserted in a universe of chaos. His ancient, flint-dark eyes, which had been half-lidded with pain and fatigue, now opened fully, their focus sharp, analytical, and fixed entirely on Aelias.

"You are unwell," Origen stated, the words a simple, terrible diagnosis. "Your trauma has become a contagion in your mind, and you have attempted to infect me with it to feel some measure of relief."

He paused, letting the silence stretch, his gaze holding no judgment, only a profound, weary focus.

"The treatment for such an ailment is... complex. It requires a thorough understanding of the wounds. Both old," he gestured subtly with a slight tilt of his chin towards the scarred side of Aelias's face, "and new."

His gaze dropped, deliberately, to the dark bruises blooming on his own pale skin.

"Unbind my hands," Origen commanded, his voice quiet but absolute. "Then, you will show me every mark you left upon my body. And you will tell me, in meticulous detail, the precise nature of the failure that compelled you to make each one."