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His father’s young double– pale and perfect and as yet unmolested by the Emperor’s cruel control and corruption’s mad grip– sat so close to him that it was as if he were once again warmed by the rays of Terra’s lonely sun. But on a ship there were only lumens and glow-globes, and this proud bright reminder of a legion he had largely left behind.
Fabius watched him read. Not all of the Apothecary’s tests and examinations of the version he had made of what had once made him were invasive. Occasionally it was necessary to engage in passive observation, whilst creating internal records that would be forever encoded in the mind that would occupy the next iteration of the flesh that held him.
Fulgrim sat quietly, his eyes skimming the data-slate with inhuman speed. At rest like this he seemed so peaceful, despite being bred for war. But he was bred for this, too, Fabius knew– for a more learned and charismatic mode of conquering. Despite the cold false light of the ship he looked uncannily pretty, as he turned every room he sat in into the backdrop of some painter’s masterpiece, like that of a remembrancer of old.
Unconsciously Fabius licked his dry lips and he smoothed down his man-skin coat. If he truly wished for an objective recording of the nature of the beautiful boy, it would be best if he moved away from him– even out of the room.
“Is something wrong, teacher?” Fulgrim looked up at him with lovely purple eyes that were wide with concern.
Nothing was wrong, of course. He was perfect. And yet everything was wrong, really. Fulgrim was sitting so close by that Fabius could feel the blazing phoenix heat of him. He leaned even closer, then, and raised his hand to cup Fabius’ cheek.
Time slowed, viscid as it ran when one travelled through the warp. The song this Fulgrim’s gaze sang harmonized with notes of the depth of a father’s pride, the purity of a child’s wondrous adoration, the clear musicality of a student’s great respect, and the melodious sweetness of a lover’s deep desire. He found himself frozen as if chained in place as the clone leaned in towards his thin cracked lips.
It felt like the hardest thing he’d ever done, and worse than a new experiment’s failure, to lean away at the terminal moment. Fulgrim’s lips landed on his cheek, already lined and loose even on this new body’s face.
Even the chaste aborted touch was enough to pull his eyes shut; to spread warmth from the point of contact throughout his body. The reaction was like stimms in his system, and his Chirurgeon chirped and whirred as if worried about what was happening to him.
He swallowed and let out a slow steadying breath to try and dispel the ghost of what he had narrowly evaded. He could almost feel the lips of his father– still young and still perfect– upon his own. Achingly soft and sweet they would have been, warm with a young man’s yearning and a lifetime of love.
But he had been right to resist: if he had let the clone kiss him he’d be completely ruined, like a ship trapped by the warp, lost with all hands. He would be forever a captive as if he’d been kept like a pet by the real thing.
And so he gripped the tempter’s wrist, this thing that would turn his face from the future and drag him, pliant and willing, to the soft embrace of the past. He resisted the one that would inevitably deliver him to the sick roiling chaos of the future, where the legion wasn’t united and strong, but broken by the negligence of a father who’d abandoned them and returned as something different; something wrong.
The new Fulgrim in his grip looked at him with hurt and confusion in his eyes and it cracked something old and brittle in him.
“It’s what I wanted,” Fulgrim whispered, and Fabius felt the hurt that bled from him inside his own guts, fresh before the cancers ate them.
“No,” Fabius replied. “No, it’s not what he wanted.”
He thought about what Alkenex had said about his father wanting him chained to his throne in his pleasure gardens. Fulgrim wanted him with a collar tight around the sagging flesh of his neck. He wanted him on his knees while he held court, forced to watch him toy with his other sons and playthings. Forced to watch him torment and caress them; curse them with the most excessive agonies and ecstacies. He wanted him pliant in his monstrous hands, eager and willing to accept his venomous touch.
But he would have him resisting, pulling away from his lips and his fangs and his warp-rotted serpent’s tongue. And that tongue would promise him raptures beyond his wildest dreams and nightmares, while bringing him only a closed cage and cold captivity. He would tear him from his life’s work, and break the only one who had the brilliance and the dedication and the bloody-minded focus to protect mankind’s future and save humanity from static obsolescence and its slow slide into inevitable destruction.
“It is,” the clone of Fulgrim pleaded, the clinging pull of his words begging his teacher to understand. “You’re wrong,” he continued, stubborn and so certain of his truth even now. “He loves you; loves you best.” Fabius swallowed and his grip on Fulgrim’s wrist tightened. He’d been called stubborn, too. Like father, like son. “And I feel the same,” the clone insisted, his clear voice seductive in its youthful innocence.
“No,” said Fabius again, and he loosened his grip, releasing Fulgrim’s wrist. The red marks left by the enhanced strength of his armored fingers quickly faded. “He doesn’t.” Fabius stood. “He doesn’t know the meaning of the word,” he whispered, more to himself than to the powerful, beautiful creature beside him.
Fulgrim looked devastated. His soft amethyst eyes were damp, and his long pale lashes caught glistening tears like dewdrops on a morning bloom.
Fabius pursed his thin lips. The hardened core of him wanted nothing more than to fall to his knees, to worship and to weep. He wanted to brush away this Fulgrim’s tears and open himself to this perfect thing that was his father and his son and his student, the guiding star in the black firmament that made him, a false phantasm of his everything, a mirror that reflected only an emptiness as dark as the void that was filled with just as many cruelties; just as much mindless hunger.
He would flay himself just to prove that all that he was belonged to that most perfect and beautiful of beings, but that wasn’t really him at all.
But that road led only to the serpent: to fangs in his neck and talons in his heart; to an abandoned fleshless body, cast aside for better and brighter trinkets.
“You will not touch me again,” Fabius told the sweet young clone.
The false Fulgrim that he had crafted, the perfect copy before him, reached up to wipe the corner of one eye. He seemed surprised to find that his elegant fingertips came away wet.
“As you say, teacher,” he whispered. “I shall not.”