Getting Warhammered [WH 40k Fanfic]

90 – ‘Me’

“How is it?” I asked eagerly as Selene finally placed a tiny bit of food I made for her into her mouth after what felt like an hour of poking and prodding, like it’d jump up and crawl off of her plate if she did it enough.

“It’s,” she coughed, her face strained. “Not good.”

I deflated like a popped balloon. I knew it wasn’t anything like actual beef, but this was the best meat I could make based on all the food samples I borrowed from our oh-so-generous hosts.

I pushed myself up and ambled over, taking a small chunk of the ripped meat and throwing it in my mouth to at least see how wrong I went.

I chewed and chewed, the meat not giving way as if it was made of rubber. The taste isn’t too different either.

Absorbing the health hazard, I fake coughed as I quickly reabsorbed the rest of it too.

“Sorry about that.”

“Sure,” Selene looked on amusedly. “I’m not saying I wouldn’t rather eat normal food instead of those bars, but … well, this thing didn’t quite count as food I think.”

“You don’t need to keep kicking me. I’m already down.”

“I appreciate the effort, though.” She gave me a sweet smile. “It was cute.”

“It is decided then!” I closed my eyes, fist thumping on my chest in a mock military salute, trying to mask my embarrassment. “I shall devote myself to replicating actually edible food by tomorrow night.”

Selene just hummed with an insufferably adorable smirk on her lips, I had to restrain myself from embarrassing myself further after a glance at them. Dangerous. Stupid horny alien.

“Anyway.” I changed the topic with all the grace I could manage. “I sort of know what I want to do in the near future — or at least I have some ideas —, but I don’t think I ever asked what you wanted to do?”

“Huh,” she blinked at me owlishly, before a smile lit up her face. She stood up and walked up to me, hands snaking around my waist as she looked up at my stumped expression. “I have all I ever wanted. You already gave it to me, knowingly or not.”

“And what was that?” I asked, suddenly my embarrassment getting the better of me as a tinge of red crept up my cheeks, but what else could I do with a beautiful woman wrapping herself around me like a cloak.

“Freedom.” She whispered, then stood on her toes. Despite my supernatural reflexes and cognitive speed, my brain short-circuited for a second as her lips pressed against mine. Then they were gone and the tinge of redness certainly became much more pronounced as a result.

“Freedom?” I asked, just now remembering to hug her back as she laid her face down on my chest.

“Yes, freedom.” She answered with a smile in her voice. “I can be whatever I want to be with you, with neither literal or metaphorical shackles holding me back. I so hated roles being forced on me, Noble Daughter, Guard Captain, Rogue Trader. Not once has anyone ever asked me whether I wanted those damned titles. Nobody ever cared to ask.”

“I see?” I blinked, rather stupidly if I might say in retrospect. “Still! You must have something you wanted to do? Even if it’s not what I was expecting.”

“Nothing earth-shattering,” she said. “The one aspect of being a Rogue Trader I liked was travelling the Galaxy without much supervision and getting to see all the different planets and civilisations hidden out there.”

“Hmmm,” I thought that over. “We could take some time just exploring. I’m sure there are a billion worlds I know nothing about, and a billion more that have never even heard about the Imperium before.”

“You don’t need to do anything more for me.” She poked me in the ribs. “I owe you so much already. I promised to help you with imperial politics, but I don’t think I can actually fulfil that, not with how things have been going.”

“I don’t expect you to.” I squeezed her tighter. “I’ve gone off rails, it wasn’t exactly planned, or a well-thought-out thing, but I sort of ruined that plan already.”

“I should have stopped you,” she said with a bit of guilt tainting her tone. “That’s why you kept me around at first right, that’s what you said? To help you keep your … morality? Plans?”

“I think I explained that more than well enough already.” It was my turn to poke her in the ribs. “I keep you around because I like you because just being around you makes me feel normal. It grounds me. You don’t need to do anything else … though telling me I was losing my empathy was very helpful.”

“Right,” she nodded, still leaning into me which made me very aware of each of her movements. “I just … want to be helpful.”

“And you are. Haven’t I told you that enough times already?” I sighed. “What do I have to do to hammer that into your pretty little head? Hmmm?”

“I’m sorry.” She deflated, slumping into my hold like a puppet with its strings cut.

I just placed my cheek on top of her head and rubbed her back comfortingly. If I told her she was already good enough, it should slowly erode her stubborn feelings of inadequacy or whatever they were. For now, I had no other solutions. Some problems just took time and consistent effort.

“Nothing to be sorry about.” I smiled, lifting her for a moment as I sat back on the couch. She didn’t even yelp, just instinctually held onto me tighter. “All that matters to me is that you are here and doing your best. That’s all I can ask for, and all I’ll give in return.”

“Alright,” she relaxed into me again, placing her chin on my shoulder as we just stayed there.

I closed my eyes, enjoying having a warm body so close to me, having someone hug me when I needed it, and having someone who actually cared about me. It almost made me tear up, well, not almost. I did tear up a little.

Somehow, just a simple hug made me feel much closer to Selene than any one-night stand of my previous life ever could. They never cared, few even bothered to learn more than my name. What a sad life I lived. If I didn’t have to fear turning into a monster without the memories of that life grounding me, I would have wiped them from my memory already.

I was a new person, not even a human. I was better; I was so much more than a human. Yet, somehow I still came to love one, even if she hardly had anything in common with the humans of my Earth.

“So,” Selene started softly, still … cuddling? “Are we just going to stay like this until the fleet gets here?”

“I wouldn’t mind,” I said without thinking, prompting a giggle from the girl in my arms.

“Me neither,” she said, which surprised me a little. I mean, we did kiss that one time when I confessed, but since then we’d been sort of awkwardly orbiting each other.

That meant this situation was doing wonders for my hidden anxiety, and my doubts that whispered that I was going to ruin yet another relationship. Just a few more moments like this could probably smother them to death. I couldn’t wait.

“Don’t you need to prepare though? I mean, if he really is coming here, will you just stride into a talk with him like you did with the commander?”

“What could I do to prepare?” I resisted the urge to shrug, still having a delicate little head on my left shoulder. “I know that I have things he wants, I know what I want from him and I think I already did all I could to paint myself as the sort of person who should be negotiated with instead of any other options.”

“He is a Primarch though,” she mused. “They say they have divine intellect and power unrivalled by any other than the Emperor himself, you know?”

I gave a snort. ‘Divine Intellect’ my ass. “Want a crash course?”

“On the Primarchs?” she asked back, not quite as curious as I’d hoped. “Just what’s relevant, so Guilliman?”

“Well,” I collected my thoughts. “He is the weird out among his siblings. Where almost all of them got some supernatural power, he got the ability to do logistics very well. Plus, while all of them had some inborn strategic abilities, Guilliman certainly stood a head above most of the others when it came to efficiently commanding armies, be they few-person squads or galaxy-spanning fleets.”

With Selen just humming along, I continued. “What I know is one of his main weaknesses, is that he regularly overestimates his own combat capability, or just tends to go for ‘winging it’ when he has no other ideas.”

“What do you mean?” She perked up, looking a bit offended.

“I mean, they are all rather strong.” I shrugged, now with her head off my shoulder as she stared into my eyes. “But not divinely so, they all got a fair amount of ass whoopings and Guilliman was an expert at throwing himself into fights where he could objectively say he had zero chance of winning.”

“What could harm a Primarch?”

“A lot of things.” I hummed. “Greater Demons for one, there was a big fuckoff Demon on one of the moons that used to beat Sanguinius black and blue for the laughs during the Great Crusade. The same Sanguinius who could butcher all other Primarchs with his hands tied behind his back.”

“Didn’t he die to Horus?”

“Horus cheated.” I shrugged. “He got beaten up rather badly before he got juiced up on Chaos God mojo or whatnot.”

“Why do you know these things?” She asked, more confused than accusing. I could tell she was believing me, even if she had to force herself to do so.

“Now that is something I don’t know,” I said. “I just know what I know, and in the grand scheme of things, it isn’t much.”

“It’s more than I ever knew,” she mumbled.

“All you need to do is ask and I’ll tell you whatever you want,” I said. “I could shove it all into your head right now, though that might be … uncomfortable.”

“Really?” She was suddenly staring at me intensely. “I can ask anything? And you will answer? No sidestepping or anything like that?”

“I mean,” I was a bit stumped by her intensity. Weren’t we just talking about some obscure history? Was there any reason to get so worked up about it? “Sure? I’ll answer if I know the answer. Sure. Ask away.”

“What are you then? No, who are you?” She asked, her silver gaze boring into my soul. “And please give me a more detailed answer than ‘I don’t know.’ I’m not buying it.”

“Eh?” That was NOT the type of question I was expecting. “Ehm, but I really don’t know though. I just appeared on that planet one day and that was it.”

“You promised you’d answer.” She narrowed her eyes, and I had to fight the urge to avert my gaze shamefully. Why did she have to ask the one question the answer of which I’m trying to forget myself? “I want to know who you are. Please.”

I promised. Never go back on a promise. I sighed, trying to push past my instincts screaming at me to sidestep her question, to just straight up lie even. But no, if I wanted her to trust me, I had to be honest. She deserved to know who I was; she had to know if I ever wanted her to love me back the same way I loved her.

“Alright.” I took a calming breath, and then I opened up the telepathic channel between the two of us, letting my feelings flow freely on it. Selene recoiled at first, but she steadied herself and I could feel her own shields opening up and her hopeful doubts and curiosity flow into me. “I’ll tell you. No, I will show you. You wouldn’t believe it otherwise.”

I went ahead with it before I could regret my decision. I didn’t just dump a lifetime’s worth of memories onto her though, I just showed glimpses, just enough to show her Earth and my life before coming here.

I showed her Earth as it was in the 21st century; I showed her me growing up alone and abandoned; I showed her the technology we had and flickers of the life I lived. Dead-end jobs, failed relationships, depression, loneliness, and anxiety, bundled up under the guise of a woman never feeling enough. Never feeling like she mattered.

And she didn’t. It didn't matter. The woman I was back then was barely alive, floating along the currents of life and barely keeping her head above the water.

I knew there were many that had it much worse than me, and that compared to the average Imperial citizen, my life might as well be heaven, but it wasn’t to me.

I ended it with my death, the paralysing pain surging through my body before it all went away and the eternity of aimless existence I lived in purgatory afterwards. How I watched countless souls drift off into an afterlife that had been denied to me.

The next thing I showed was a dark hand wrapping itself around me and pulling me down into the abyss, then showing me into an alien body that somehow felt so right to be in. The last image was me reforming my humanoid body in that dark room covered in blood and ritual circles.

Selene snapped out of the trance-like state as the last image came to a halt, gasping and heaving for breath. I just watched on worriedly. Would she look at me differently? Now that she knew I used to be just like her, a simple lowly human?

No, let’s be honest here, she was leagues above me. I was a failure of a human, and she was the best one could be. I was weak and quick to give up, while she endured god knows what growing up and fighting for her life in the Imperial Guard.

I would have been jealous of her in my last life. I was sure of that. Even if I knew now that her life was much worse than my own, I knew I wouldn’t have been so understanding back then.

“Show me.” She whispered once she caught her breath, her palm coming up to caress my cheek. I leaned into it instinctively, happy that she hadn’t just jumped back and decried me as a liar, or a fake. I didn’t know what she meant though.

“I showed you everything,” I said distractedly.

“Show me how you looked before all these artificial changes you did to yourself.”

“I don’t want to,” I blurted. “I don’t want to be the woman I was before. I never want to be like that again.”

“Please,” she pleaded. “Just this once. Show me.”

With a weary heart, I obliged her. I might resist it, or deny it, but I knew I couldn’t ever say no to her. If she asked that nicely, with those eyes glimmering with unshed tears and her soft fingers on my face, I could never say no.

I felt my body shift. It wasn’t an internal change, only external. Muscles went away, hips dimmed, waist thickened, and curves went away, but my face changed the most. My skin turned bland, my eyes went from glimmering emeralds to boring green and my beautiful silky hair went back to being dirt brown hair bleached white amateurishly. I didn’t have the money to spend on barbers back then.

I didn’t know what to do. I could feel the buried anxiety bubbling up in my stomach. I didn’t even dare look at Selene. She was so damned far out of the league of the woman whose face I wore. It wasn’t even funny.

Then I felt her fingers on my chin, turning my head as a hand wrapped around the back of my head. Before I knew what was going on, we were kissing. Well, Selene was kissing me with an intensity I never felt from her before.

I just … let it happen to me, letting her do as she wished.

Still, the anxiety evaporated and for the first time in my life I felt that someone could maybe, just maybe, actually like the person I was back then.

After all, ‘impossible’ was a much looser term here, and miracles happened every other Tuesday.