Chapter Text
When the Praetorian of Terra enters his strategium for the first time that morning, all those able to acknowledge him turn and straighten themselves in greeting. You salute him as you always do - fist to chest, head down - but when you raise it, you catch his steely eyes boring through your skull. Steel, not stone, as if he were girding himself against a threat of magnitude you could not possibly comprehend.
You do not presume any familiarity whatsoever with the great Rogal Dorn, and so you do not ask if he slept well or if he wanted a bit of recaf before the day began to drag. A Primarch was above such things, after all, and who knew if they even ate or slept? You flash a gentle little smile in his direction and turn away, unable to bear his gaze for long.
His eyes are still coring your entire being and sucking the fortitude from your spinal cord as you tend to the data scrolling across your station. The pressure of a Primarch’s attention was a thing any creature could feel in the nucleus of their cells, a primordial command of matter eclipsing the intellect of life. Compelled, you glance over your shoulder at him. A stray lock of hair shadows your vision, soon tucked behind one ear. Your fingers run along the back of your neck in the slightest unease. He’s still staring at you. You would know if he were staring into space, deep in contemplation. His eyes usually fixed much higher than the waist level of a baseliner.
You run a quick mental checklist of your appearance - uniform, boots, hair, facial expression - but find nothing another bridge officer wouldn’t have alerted you to were it found lacking. The data at your station gives you no clues, and you process it as best you can, leaning against the hololith and taking some of the pressure off your back. A graceful curve eases into your spine, pushing your backside out from beneath the split flaps of your uniform. Black trousers, yellow jacket, white undershirt. Nothing special.
The Unyielding One has to close his eyes to fortify himself against the sight. But he soon opens them to stare hard at the projection maps swirling in the center of the room, because the things his mind conjures in the privacy of his thoughts do not belong anywhere near you. Spreading you, burying his face in your warmth, begging for forgiveness even as his tongue is too occupied to form anything like sense…
One of his Huscarls speaks to him and he gives a noncommittal grunt in reply, another inquiry answered with I’m thinking… and not a word more. Whatever he’s thinking about must surely trouble him, as he hasn’t said so much as an inspiring quote to kick off the day’s operations. He was not a particularly personable man by Imperial standards, but he always tried. He is not trying today.
Rogal does not know why he wants you, only that he wants and he wants and oh Throne, how he wants. Maybe it is your competence. Maybe it is your beauty. Maybe it is the diligent way in which you attend your duties day after day, serving a cause you will never live to see the fruits of. You do not fold. You do not complain. You endure.
Rogal Dorn respects that.
It does not explain his dreams. It doesn’t give him any reason to be burrowing his gaze into your body like his will could just reach out, peel you out of his Legion’s colours and eat you alive. No, every fragmented angle of this is broken and illogical, inappropriate, borderline heretical… but worse than any of that, it’s irresponsible.
What bestial horror had possessed him to fill his mind with such thoughts of assaulting an innocent, loyal officer of the Astra Militarum? He needed correction. He needed punishment. He needed… penance.
He will force himself to remain here, he thinks, sharing space with the object of his desire to convince himself they will come to no harm. Not by his hand or the weakness of his flesh. No, he will stand right here, a bastion of fortitude and protection, and any pain he feels will be his own, rightfully deserved.
This pain, however, is not at all one he is accustomed to bearing. It is a soul-sick yearning that drags at his chest, leaving him hollowed out inside but for the imagined ghost of your touch. The little smile you’d flashed his way had left him a gaping chasm for another, your side-eyed consideration denoting an interest of sorts, reciprocity-
He’s getting hard again. No.
Physical pain. He can bear that. If his body thinks to betray him then he will fight it. Fighting, he’s good at that. He resists, allowing the pressure in his codpiece to torment him, staring inward and challenging it to do its worst. This is just another inconvenience of mortal DNA that even the Emperor’s genecraft could not iron out.
You are mortal. Your body was likely primed for this, lush and fertile and waiting for him to-
Stop it.
Rogal takes a slow, deep, steadying breath. There’s no point in holding it; his multi-lung is far too efficient to try and starve his brain of oxygen so it would cease its lechery. He feels the pain of his meat aching to rip through his glove, as if it could shred the Auric Armor like it were a folded paper model in the way of his path to you. Minutes pass, the ache just as unmoving as he.
And then it warps. Whatever secrets the Emperor put into his genecraft now turn against him, seeing an obstacle to a goal and flooding his every sense with data to conquer it. In that breath he’s been not quite holding, taking thin little sniffs like a maiden on the verge of tears, he absorbs the odors of the room.
His Neuroglottis tells him about the concentration of laundry powder in his nearest Huscarl’s freshly pressed uniform. The mineral content of the liquor-spiked recaf one of the bridge officers is drinking. The single particle of nutrient paste stuck in a Fist’s moustache from hurrying through his breakfast.
One of those smells is you, and before he knows it, he’s moving towards the hololith in a direct beeline to your blissfully turned back. The entire strategium’s attention laser focusses on Rogal, and he feels it, pivoting at the last moment to take a long walk around the table. Idly glancing up and scrolling the projected globe with a gesture like it had changed since he last saw it.
Any data worthy of his notice would’ve been brought to his attention the moment he entered the room. His fingers casually flicking the globe like a cat with a yarn ball set most of his officers on edge. The Praetorian did nothing casually. He certainly didn’t pace the hololith in thought. Rogal Dorn did not move without purpose and not a soul in the world needed to know his purpose was to lock your scent into his eternal memory.
A quiet warmth blooms in his chest, turning sharper, fuller into pride. Oh, he knows what you smell like now. He could hunt you through the whole ship if he had to. The Phalanx being the size of a continent is no matter. He has a new wrinkle in his brain solely dedicated to how clean you are this morning, and the light musk of your skin beneath the standard-issue soaps.
What if he covered you in something else? A vision of his earlier disaster in the shower slams into his mind with you now viscerally in the picture. Struggling to raise your head as he damn near drowns you in cum, your sweet little face shadowed by the obscene girth of his cock. An innocent baseliner who’s only trying to do their job-
Rogal’s paused in his journey around the hololith and has come to a stop beside you. Anyone might have called it a proper circle, his journey ended where it began. You have every last hair on the back of your neck standing up in the way any animal would when faced with a power beyond its ken.
Of course you look at him. Very, very slowly, craning your face up and catching the magnificent artifice of his armour… and a mildly unflattering view up his nose. His cheekbones are high and sculpted but not overly prominent, a human touch of softness to his chiseled features. Someone had made that face with love, as thumbs stroking clay would smooth their stresses away in every gentle pass.
His eyes are hazel. That’s all your brain sputters out when you catch the intensity of his gaze pointed over those beautiful cheekbones directly at you.
Oh, yes. You’ve definitely fucked up.
The fear within him is beyond anything your soul can make. You haven’t noticed his fingers lingering inches from the top of your head, tremors stilled by his gauntlet servos. They’re behind your line of sight, loosely arranged in what could be called a harmless idle pose. He’s standing close, too close, and Rogal Dorn was always conscientious about his size and proximity to baseliners. He knows how he frightens them.
Right now, he can hear your heart hitting the edge of panic and how slow you’re breathing. Your training kicking in. And thanks to his armored gauntlet, he can’t even feel the warmth of your scalp. But you’re… there.
You’re there, you’re next to him, and-
Your face is precisely the height of the straining seals of his codpiece.
His very obviously tented, overextended codpiece.
And when the rest of the strategium inevitably land their gazes upon you, who seems to have caught the Primarch’s notice, the Praetorian of Terra’s golden giga dong is the first thing they see.