Work Text:
Editorial Note:
This extract, like the one previously published, is not from the Cain Archive with which all of its readers will be familiar, but instead from my personal correspondence with Cain in his later years, after his final exploits during the 13th Black Crusade. In fact, this one reached me some four years after the one previous, the warp and Imperial communication priorities being what they are, and dates to very close to the end of his life.
It is being disseminated to a significantly smaller pool of Inquisitors than the one before it, and I expect those who receive this particular extract not to spread it further. If you are reading this, it is because you are a personal acquaintance, and have expressed an interest more solicitous than prurient in this aspect of Cain's personal affairs, and my personal opinions on them. This is illustrative more in the first than the second, but I feel that, regardless, it is the best way to resolve those concerns.
As with the last extract, this one is rather more explicit than any anecdotes in the Cain Archives. Additionally, I have removed text from both the beginning and the end that was not relevant to the subject at hand. However, this extract does make up the bulk of this particular letter.
Amberley Vail, Ordo Xenos
As you well know, the cover story about the end of the Second Seige was only vaguely proximate to the truth. We couldn't let out what had really happened to Donal, or for that matter to anyone else Varan subverted. The very idea of a psyker that powerful, who could that easily steal people's souls away from the Emperor, would make the populace riot.[1] So I was resigned to having to publicly condemn him as a traitor to the Imperium, just like Governor Trevellyan, and I'm sure you can imagine by now how heavily that weighed on me.
But Rorkins must have gotten some inkling of my mood regarding the matter and decided that there was enough heroism to spread around. Which is why that by the time we were releasing official statements, I was able to stand in front of a pictcaster and say, with perfect sincerity that would look to everyone else like heroic modesty, "I can't take all the credit. Besides my aide Jurgen, who was beside me on the rooftop, I also must commend to the emperor commissar-in-training Donal, one of my own students, who secretly infiltrated Warmaster Varan's forces to provide us with critical information on Varan's weaknesses. He died delivering that information, doing his duty to the Emperor."
Which was far easier to deliver than denouncing him as a traitor would have been, I'll tell you that.
One side-effect, though, which took so long to come to fruition that you had come and gone again on your own business, was that they wanted to turn the formal confirmation of the commissar trainees into a major public event, in which the new Governor herself would deliver an honorary commissar's rank to the absent Donal in commemoration. I was more than pleased with the idea, in theory. He deserved it, and so did all the others who had survived to graduate, and showed the makings of fine, hopefully long-lived commissars in doing so.
In practice, though, that turned out to mean a long day in the company of Trevellyan's niece. I've done it before and will do it again, but I'm never going to do it easily. There's something about standing next to the woman after publicly denouncing her uncle as a traitor, knowing that I had played a part in the circumstances that had so blackened his reputation, that leaves a bitter taste in my mouth. Frak it, I had respected the man, even liked him. For all I know, his niece secretly hated him, but if so, she put on a good show of being shocked, horrified, and reinforced in her determination to oppose heresy in all its forms by his sudden betrayal.
Which is a digression from the account I promised you, but I'm getting to that. As I said, I was to spend all day alongside the new Governor Trevellyan, handing out sashes, saying a few words, and standing at attention while she said a lot more of them. She was a champion at the kind of long-winded speeches that aristocrats seem to be competitively bred for. We wound up this whole affair at Donal's memorial, which had been installed at the schola only days before. I ceremoniously wound a red sash around the upright pillar and said a few words to precede her much longer speech about all the heroes of the Second Siege, sung and unsung, and how we honored them too with this ceremony, et cetera.
(No, it wasn't the sash I'd given him myself. That seemed more appropriate to me, as a military man, but the new Governor had painstaking standards of cleanliness, and was so aghast at the state of it when I made the suggestion that I had to go to great effort to keep it from being full-on disposed of by her more eager attendants.)
So I had to stand there next to that memorial, with that fresh clean sash fluttering in the breeze, trying to look proud and heroic and not like everything about the situation was designed to make me miserable. I've mentioned already that Donal reminded me of myself at his age. I'll go one further, just between us, and say that while I've never had a son[2] (that I know of, though if I have left any offspring behind during my long career that you may be aware of, I trust that you would be an excellent guarantor of their welfare[3]), Donal was as close to one as I personally am capable of imagining. Immortalizing him as a hero of Perlia was one thing, but giving any sign of that degree of feeling regarding a student would have undermined all the rest of them, and my general impartiality as an instructor, to an impermissible degree.
At least I wasn't alone in my misery. Jurgen, too, had been a victim of the Governor's mania for cleanliness. In order to be permitted to be present (and he was hardly going to let me go anywhere alone with Varan's converts still on the loose), he had been scrubbed to within an inch of his life, dressed in a brand-new uniform that might very well have been tailored for the occasion, as mine certainly was, and doused in enough expensive scent to serve as an at least equal match for the remaining odor that no amount of soap could have removed. Even that couldn't make him cut an impressive figure of a Guardsman, but at least he looked only moderately rumpled, and his usual collection of skin diseases had been smeared with enough medicated gel to be waved away as healing battle damage.
Given the meticulousness of the Governor's people, he hadn't had a chance to replenish his familiar coating of grime by the end of the reception. By which point, I will confess, I was very thoroughly drunk. It had been some years, perhaps decades, since I had allowed myself to indulge to that extent, and I'm still not sure why I let my guard down so completely. Maybe it was the familiar environment of the schola, almost restored to its pre-battle condition, combined with the sense that the worst was over. Maybe it was my freshly-roused grief. Regardless, I was in no fit state to get myself back to my rooms alone by the end of the night.
Brasker had inexplicably assigned himself the guardian of my reputation once it was clear how deep into my cups I was diving. He'd been doing an excellent job, engaging anyone who approached the corner where I was propped up in such tedious conversation that they fled before ever reaching me, but he was visibly relieved to see Jurgen appear as the last few dignitaries were filtering out.
"Come along, commissar," Jurgen said, tucking himself under my arm and getting a good grip on my waist. New pouches had appeared upon his uniform since I'd last seen him, bulging with what was doubtless the leavings of the refreshments table. "The Sister said you might be wanting a hand."
Even as soused as I was, I had the presence of mind to glance around and see who might catch sight of me being hauled off to bed by my aide. But the Governor and her toadies were long gone, and it seemed that even the new graduates had been sent packing. The only people left were a few servitors, mechanically cleaning up the mess, and Brasker and Julien. She was hovering by the far door, and gave me a nod as Jurgen set about hauling me away, apparently willing to forgive my sins of the flesh just this once.[4]
Jurgen ushered me back to my room with his usual efficiency, supervising closely as I readied myself for bed. Even once he'd gotten me securely into my bunk, he didn't depart for his own quarters, instead settling himself into one of my chairs with the air of a sentry taking up a watch.
"You're off duty," I told him, my voice by now only somewhat slurred.
"Right, sir," Jurgen agreed, but his jaw was set in the same intransigent way it usually was when he was facing down someone trying to get past him to my office.
I could have ordered him to leave, though I'm sure he would have been surly about it. But I was just recovered enough from my self-impairment to realize just how impaired I was, and as unlikely as it seemed that any of Varan's few remaining people could make it through the defenses on the schola, his presence still lessened my anxiety at the knowledge that I'd be less than useless right now with a weapon.
As always throughout my life, self-preservation won out. The risk might be remote, but it was still a concern. And there wasn't anyone but Jurgen I would rather have standing watch as I slept.
***
Watch or not, my sleep was far from peaceful. I was tormented by nightmares, broken images of the necrons and Varan's puppet-string hordes combining in unpleasant ways with earlier horrors, from the hungry maws and slashing claws of tyranids to the demonic horror I'd faced at Slawkenburg so early in my career. I stood on that civilian-packed snow-crawler on Nusquam Fundumentibus, the whole thing shaking as a tyranid burrower chewed its way up through the underbelly, and watched Donal stand before me with his lasipistol under his chin and squeeze the trigger, over and over again, the tremor that followed it stronger each time.
Before the burrower could finish boring through under our feet and end the horror in front of my eyes, I was being shaken awake, Jurgen's familiar odor nearby nearly suppressed by some stranger's strong, woody scent. I reached up to grab whoever was manhandling me, and opened my eyes a moment later to Jurgen himself, bent over me with his face screwed up in concern. The room was dim, with only faint moonlight filtering through a window on the nearest wall. Everything fell back into place: my rooms at the schola, my aching head, the gallant efforts of the industrial-strength cologne Jurgen still wore.
"Just a nightmare," I said blearily.
"Right, sir," Jurgen said, but didn't move.
Given the way my head was pounding, the amasec was most of the way towards wearing off. I wasn't going to go back to sleep with that headache. And I didn't much want to, either, and risk those nightmares again.
"Since we're both up, any chance of some tanna?"
"Right away, sir," Jurgen answered, but remained poised unmoving over my bed.
Belatedly, I realized I was still clutching his arm. I let go, and he moved away, heading to the little samovar in the far corner of the room. Moving slowly for the sake of my aching head, I sat up.
"Better stay in bed, sir," Jurgen said, returning with a fragrant-smelling bowl. "Might want some sleep when you're finished."
While I, like the Valhallans I once served with, find the flavor of tanna restoring and conducive to wakefulness[5], it doesn't create the same antipathy to sleep as recaff. So I took Jurgen's advice, on the reflection that he might be right once the headache had gone away.
I drank my tanna in silence, Jurgen hovering by the bed, and handed it off to him when I was finished. Instead of whisking it away, he set it on my bedside table.
"Anything else you need, sir?"
Looking up at him, buoyed up by his steadfast presence, something occurred to me that normally never would have been spoken. I suppose I could blame the amasec, but even the headache was fading now, so I can't truly say how much of the sentiment came from that source. Only the honesty, at most. And while I'd like to say I was thinking of you when I said it, in all truthfulness, the closest that impulse came was the bleary knowledge that I had felt another body in my bed recently enough to miss it.
"I don't want to sleep alone."
"All right, sir," Jurgen said, with his usual unflappable approach to his orders. Before I could open my mouth to excuse the words, rather delayed by my still-aching head and my complete lack of a suitable explanation for them, he had already shucked off his boots (an action which seemed liable to decisively turn the war against the cologne in his favor) and climbed up into the bed beside me. On top of the covers, rather than under them, and the arm he slung over my shoulders had more to do with accommodating both of us without troubling me to move than anything else, but it was comforting nonetheless.
Words continued to fail me. I felt in some way like I might have offended him if I'd simply reversed the order, though Jurgen had never protested a sudden change in direction before. And it wasn't as if we hadn't bunked so close in our campaigning days, albeit usually in much rougher circumstances. His presence beside me made something deep within me relax, certain of my safety in such close proximity to him. Even his odor, familiar after all these years, had a certain lulling property.
I began to surrender to that effect, the words that would have propelled him off me never leaving my mouth. As I drifted towards sleep, though, the same impulse that had been behind my words drove my tired body into movement, and I rolled towards him, unconsciously seeking out his warmth.
In the letter you referenced when you requested this account, I mentioned that Jurgen couldn't possibly have been comfortable in tight trousers. At some point that night, likely while I was sound asleep, he'd changed into his own loose sleeping pants, and they allowed him considerably more freedom than a uniform would. As a result, I was suddenly very aware of his own reaction to our close quarters.
He'd gone as stiff as, well, the the part of him that I'd just come in contact with, and I could hear the sticky sound of phlegm as he cleared his throat.
The events I've previously related you flooded immediately into my mind. I knew that he would retreat in an instant, if he thought I was uncomfortable, and it might have behooved me to let him. But I had had, as I mentioned, a miserable day, and so had he. And while the kindness and solicitude he'd shown me tonight was far from unusual (in fact, he doubtless thought it nothing more than his duty), I was in such a vulnerable state as to be far more touched by it than I might otherwise have been.
And there may have been some personal need at play, too. The last few fragments of the dream had flickered through my thoughts as I drifted off, and even this method of driving them away seemed favorable to replaying Donal's sacrifice again that night.
Regardless of the reason, I managed to extract my arm from beneath the covers before he could move, and lay my hand over his his hip.
"Sir-"
"Not needed, or not wanted?" I said, softly, in the dark, very deliberately evoking that last encounter of so many years ago.
It seemed that Jurgen recalled it just as well as I did,[6] because I heard his breath catch, which in his throat was a remarkably moist sound, with several stages. Then he said, almost reproachfully, "You're drunk, sir."
"Not that drunk," I answered him, moving my hand up just far enough to touch the bare skin above his waistband. "I won't be writing you up for assaulting a superior officer in the morning, if that's what you're worried about. Just so long as I don't have cause to write myself up either."
"No, sir," he said, sounding vaguely choked-up. "That wouldn't be necessary."
And then he flung himself out from under my hand so fast that I had a bewildering moment to wonder if I'd misstepped, after all, and damaged the deep esteem he held for me to boot. (Not that that was a serious concern, as I don't doubt Jurgen would have willfully given me every opportunity to attribute it to the amasec, or to simply pretend I had no memory of the event in the morning.) Then I saw him digging through the pouches strewn around the chair he'd commandeered earlier in the evening, and the coin dropped.
He fumbled the protective on before returning, saving me the trouble, and gave me another questioning look as he hesitated in front of the bed with his pants around his knees. There was such unguarded trust and longing in that expression that it drained all the inherent ridiculousness out of his position. I reached out and beckoned, once, and he scrambled back onto the bed again.
Once more, he stayed on top of the blankets, so I had to reach over them to apply myself to my intended task. At first I had meant only to handle the issue, if you take my meaning. But just as the previous time this had happened, Jurgen seemed determined not to show any reaction to my ministrations, tense and tight-jawed even when I employed maneuvers that had previously served me well. Impulse rose up in me once again, a rather selfish desire to see him actually undone, and I was in no state to resist it. Besides, between the morning's scrubbing and the forlorn hope of the cologne, this seemed as good an opportunity to apply other skills as the Emperor was ever going to give me.
I pushed the covers back as I moved downwards on the bed, to Jurgen's evident confusion. Realizing my goal too late, he had just enough time to say, in shocked reproach, "Sir, you don't-" and then I had the satisfaction of turning the rest of his demurral into an unintelligible groan.
This particular angle wasn't one I'd been at with another man since my juvie days, but to my surprise my muscle memory was as good for this as for anything else I'd learned back at the schola, if much rustier than my chainsword drills. Though I doubt my degree of skill was of particular import to Jurgen, who seemed to find my current position simultaneously nigh-blasphemous and arousing, in equal measure. Nor was he the only one. I'd had no particularly amorous thoughts when I'd first embraced him, only the rather childish desire for comfort, but the sounds that he was making and the way that he writhed beneath the hand I'd placed on his hip was rousing a thoroughly un-childish reaction in me.
Spurred on by Jurgen's evident appreciation of my work, I summoned up every scrap of memory I could still recall regarding technique, and devoted myself entirely to reducing him to unintelligibility once more. I'd never acquired the trick of accommodating someone of Jurgen's size, but I knew others, and from the sounds I reduced him to, they were more than sufficient.
He did try to push me away as he reached his peak, which I permitted despite the protective, given that I had no idea how sensitive he might be in the aftermath. For a long minute I simply lay there, filled with a glow of satisfaction as I watched him pant. The moon was beginning to set, but there was still just enough light to see his face, and just little enough to give a more flattering impression of it than usual.
Then he opened his eyes and dared a glance at me, and from the determination that filled his face I realized that the covers I'd thrown back earlier revealed my situation to him as clearly as the earlier touch had revealed his to me. Producing another protective from the bedside table, and how I'd missed him secreting it there earlier I didn't know, he sat up and advanced so mulishly that I knew waving him off would be impossible. Fortunately, I wasn't inclined to do so.
I did previously mention Jurgen's unlikely competency in this particular area. While I was far from as deprived as I had been during our past encounter, given how recently you'd visited Perlia, I must admit that it seemed to have less to do with the efficacy of his work than I had, at the time, believed. His steady touch, normally so familiar as to make even the closest intimacy seem impersonal, was applied in remarkably pleasant ways, and while it took him some time to bring me to completion, that had far more to do with the dregs of the alcohol and my exhausted state than anything I can say about his performance.
As might be expected, he took care of all the tidying up afterwards, the used protectives vanishing somewhere in the increasingly dim room and the blanket deftly replaced without more than a breeze over my drying skin to show for it. When he was finished, he hovered nervously between the bed and the nearest chair, pants back around his waist, clearly trying to determine if he'd worn out his welcome.
"Come back to bed," I told him, even tireder than before, and feeling absurdly affectionate in the aftermath. "I'm hardly going to make you sleep in a chair after that."
"Of course not, sir," he said, nearly concealing his relief, and shuffled back over.
I raised the covers up with my arm, despite the near-certainty that my nose would regret it in the morning. Jurgen climbed under them and settled down beside me. For the first few minutes he was once again ramrod-straight on his back, but some of my loose-limbed relaxation must have seeped into him, because I could feel him slumping into the mattress. Warm, contented, and my headache and all traces of nightmares entirely gone, I fell once again asleep.
Neither of us commented, in the morning, on the fact that his arm was slung over me once again. It seemed to me that there were no words that need to be said. I've always taken it on faith, given our mutual understanding given each other's personal arrangements, that you would not object to such measures of mutual comfort between us. Regardless, I am glad, and am sure Jurgen would be glad, that your last letter so emphatically confirmed that faith.
And given that confirmation, I will confess that I never did entirely shake off those nightmares, even after the last of the heretics were purged from Perlia, and despite the excesses of hygiene it forced him to, Jurgen was assiduous in helping me recover from them whenever they struck. I'm sure that, given your Inquisitorial training, you have no need of further details. In fact, it seemed to me that you knew more than you let on already when you spoke at his funeral. [7] Regardless, you should know that your joke about how retirement drew us "only closer" was very much on the mark.
On which note I will end this extract, the rest of the letter veering so sharply into the maudlin that I have no question that Cain was supplementing his memory with a fair portion of amasec.
---
[1] A very sensible approach, one I suspect influenced by Commander Rorkins' previous experiences within the Inquisition. He wouldn't have appreciated going to all that effort to save the population of Perlia, only to have the Ordo Hereticus called in to suppress such sensitive information immediately after.
[2] I am uncertain whether the specificity here is solely because of Donal's gender, or if it bespeaks some other knowledge on Cain's part that he didn't care to directly address.
[3] Again, I've never been quite sure if this was pointed on his part, or just a general indication of the respect he had for my greater access and resources.
[4] One presumes that, given the considerable esteem in which the four key figures of the Second Siege held each other, this was intended as a joke.
[5] In much the same way that one might find a kick in the teeth conducive to wakefulness, I presume.
[6] Quite likely much better, given what Cain's regular reference to Jurgen's personal entertainments imply about the nonexistent frequency of his liaisons with other individuals.
[7] It's always a good idea to make sure your more valuable assets are actually dead, and haven't been subverted by someone else with a very good cover story. And it seemed appropriately respectful, in this case.