I hesitated at knocking on the door of Bliss’s quarters. I did not know why—was I hesitant to suffer the horrors she had taunted me with? Doubtful; I could not imagine they could have been worse any worse than those found in Abseradon. Was it, then, that I did not want to get too close to her? Also doubtful—I enjoyed her company greatly, and owed her my life twice over. Whatever the source of my hesitation, Bliss snapped me back into action by calling out from her quarters, “You going to knock or just stand there all evening like an idiot?”
“Does that mean I should enter?” I asked the monolithic plate of metal that was her door. How she had sensed me there, despite my inaction, I did not know. Perhaps she heard my footsteps approach and recognized their cadence; that seemed the most likely to me.
“Yes,” she answered, and I did so. Upon my entry, I recoiled at once not from smell but from sight, and only from having been taken aback by the brute simplicity of her abode. “Welcome, Callant,” she said, smiling as the door shut behind me.
“Your place is…kind of cramped,” I noted, bluntly, while standing up to her. Indeed, there was not much elbow room; it may have been more accurate to call her choice of residence a closet with a small bed in it as opposed to a living quarters. And aside that bed had been placed a small dining table, with a bottle of Gleece sitting upon it. Nothing else, no furniture or items of note, was present in Bliss’s closet of a home.
“Oh, shoot, I’m sorry, yes. It is. Sorry, I didn’t really think of it much,” she fretted.
“You’re used to this, I take it?” I suggested. She nodded insistently.
“Yes, the Temple teaches to forego material needs. We were made to suffice in smaller living spaces like this, or even those smaller still. But I can see how it neglects the opportunity of company,” she explained, still fretting. I calmed her a bit in placing my hands atop her shoulders.
“We can make do here, unless you yourself wish to go elsewhere,” I assured her. “May I?” I asked, gesturing for her bedding, which served for the sole place to sit in her closet-like room.
“Bless you, Callant, yes, you may,” she grinned, slowing her breath and ceasing her worries. I took a seat upon her bed, and if nothing else found it a bit firmer than my own, though noted to myself that perhaps Lucene and I had simply overcome that firmness in ours. While I thought about the nature of Bliss’s bedding, she herself sat to my right, close enough that our thighs and shoulders were touching one another. I read into that closeness that she wanted me to throw an arm over her shoulders, which I did. She leaned into my grasp, against me, affirming my reasoning. “So I see two avenues for our evening,” she declared then, while I, with my augmetic, reached for the bottle of Gleece on the table before us.
“Oh yeah?” I asked, moving the conversation along while, for the time being, eyeing the Gleece in an attempt to discern its vintage. No luck in that regard.
“Yes,” she nodded, eyes tracking the bottle of Gleece in my grasp. “One avenue is we drink into that. We have some very flirtatious fun together. On account of my reaction to alcoholic beverages—most of all Gleece—this stuffy little closet of mine will likely smell quite foul, but I get the sense you’d put up with that for my sake,” she explained, recognizing that I was here for her, not so much for my own needs or desires. “Was a time, or an era, in which I thought I wanted that. The fun. The play. The childish games of two Inquisitors.”
“It sounds to me you don’t want that anymore,” I acknowledged, tabling the bottle of Gleece again and turning to her. “I admit, I rather came prepared for that sort of play, but I’m here for you, Bliss, as you deduced. So, what do you want if not that?”
Bliss replied not with words, not at first. Instead, she leaned more into my grasp while turning a bit to her side, putting a hand first to my chest and then, thinking better of pressing upon my recently-wounded upper body, moved it to my right shoulder. As she pressed my shoulder back, I realized what she wanted, and spun ninety degrees, kicking my legs up onto the rest of her bedding, boots and all, while I began to lay back. I wondered how far she was going to take this immediately, sex an omnipresent possibility and a point of concern for a devoted husband such as myself. Yet while it remained a possibility, it became evident that sex was not Bliss’s immediate goal, which upon reflection I should have known; she was not so shallow. No, Bliss pushed me onto my backside and for a moment laid to my right, on her side, but that did not last long before she slowly crawled over me, nestling her head between my right shoulder and my neck. I embraced her as she embraced me, even if I found myself a bit pressed under her weight, which I again found to be greater than her form would suggest.
I knew all too well what Bliss wanted in that moment, and I tried to give it to her. A shoulder to cry on. A warm body to rest upon. Arms to call home. I had wanted these things too, long ago. I, however, found only the cold, deathly embrace of the Black Ships. Now, seeing another in a position of loss I was all-too familiar with, I wanted better for them than I was given. And thankfully, for a few moments, I was able to provide for her. If I had to guess, I lasted about ten-to-fifteen minutes beneath Bliss’s great, overpowering form before unintentionally releasing a grunt from the strain of supporting her bulk. That stirred her from her sorrow, after which she sat up on my waist, letting my breathe, albeit still weighing down upon me. “Sorry. Thank you, Callant,” she murmured, wiping tears from her cheeks into palms and clenched fists.
“Don’t apologize,” I wheezed, catching a breath. “Why are you so heavy?” I asked after a few moments of strained breathing. The bluntness of the question made her blurt out a laugh despite her prior—and, likely, lasting—emotions.
“What did I tell you about asking a woman about her weight?” she lectured me, grinning widely while her crimson eyes remained reddened at their edges. Black hair fell beyond her face, partially obscuring my view of the mess her otherwise beautiful visage had fallen into.
“Something about it not being very polite,” I answered with a return grin. “To which I had pointed out that politeness was never really how I handled our relationship.”
“Quite right,” Bliss agreed, laughing again. She then leaned back a bit, stretching her legs out past my head. Unlike me, at the time, she was barefoot, wearing only a white nightgown over some yet-unseen undergarments. She, too, seemed to notice this difference in attire between us, and glanced behind herself to my own feet, whereupon she moved to start taking my boots off. “Also not polite to put footwear on a bed,” she chided me.
“Oops.”
“You’re forgiven. This time,” she smiled, tossing my boots to the floor. “Polymorphine.”
“What about it?”
“Why I’m as heavy as I am,” she answered. “I mean, you had probably deduced that much. And truthfully, the polymorphine didn’t make me heavier itself. As a reaction to my body’s rejection of polymorphine, the Temple did what they could to keep my being more stable. One such attempt involved increasing my muscle density. More density over the same volume meant more mass.”
“And also more strength, which explains why you’re cleaving Astartes in two and lugging power armor around with such ease,” I inferred.
She nodded, but tauntingly added, “Oh, getting you to safety there wasn’t the easiest thing, mind you. You’re not the lightest thing either, in all that getup.”
“Well you managed with Lucene and her armor,” I offered. Lucene, for her size, weighed more than I did, and her own power armor would have likewise been more significant of mass.
“Well, I wasn’t carrying her in an active warzone. People kept shooting at you while you were out, you know,” Bliss explained. “You’re welcome, though. I’m happy to have brought you to safety.”
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“And now we’re here,” I nodded.
“Yeah, we are,” she muttered, nodding in agreement again, though her smile faded. “So that second avenue I was talking about…bonding. Talking. Resting. Together. Sure you don’t want that bottle of Gleece?”
“Curious though I am about whether you’d smell worse than Abseradon, it’s up to you, Bliss. Fun and games or rest and recovery—choice is yours,” I shrugged, caring not about the decision itself, but about what she felt she needed or, more, wanted in that moment.
“But it’s not really, is it?” she sighed, leaning further back and placing her hands on my ankles in the process. She stared up at the dark, rusted iron ceiling of her alcove-abode, breathing slowly and longingly. “All I want is you, Callant. And I can’t have you. The universe makes that painfully obvious every day.”
“You have me here, now, don’t you?” I suggested.
“For what, twelve hours? If that? And what about the next thousand years I’m doomed to live without you? Would you ask me to live alone, Callant? Would you ask me to live after having killed you? Because I will not want to,” she shook her head, slowly moving her gaze back to me. “This pain…Jack, Emile…even Caliman,” she began, lips trembling as tears began to well in her eyes again. “It burrows so deep. My heart feels cavernous, empty, with the low howling memory of what was. And you’re the only glimmer of light, of hope, of what could be. Without that…I think you know better than anyone else on this ship how much that’d hurt. I think you dread it too.”
“Yes, I do, Bliss. I’m so sorry,” I sighed, and took to rubbing her left thigh with my right hand, flesh to flesh. I figured the augmetic grip would not have been as warm or inviting as she needed.
“So am I,” she agreed. “Ouranos taunts you with the death of—” she began, but bit her lip and shook her head. “I don’t want that for you, Callant. I don’t want her to die. I love you, and you love her. I want you to be happy. I need you to know that, and I need you to know that if you’re not, I’m here for you. Always.”
“Thank you,” I muttered, barely audibly. But it had been loud enough for Bliss to hear, and she nodded again. “Lucene is…unconcerned with the possibility of her death. And logically, I understand why. We can all die at any time. Our foes lurk in every shadow and every corner of our negligence to see them so, and even at the most vigilant, they may strike out all the same. Death is inevitable. But that doesn’t make it any less impactful. Such is our curse, our dreadful burden.”
“Which is why we need to find time to share that burden. Time like this,” Bliss agreed, leaning forward again, pulling her hands from my ankles and retreating her legs into a near-kneeling position, though she still kept the bulk of her weight on my waist. “We won’t survive otherwise. And our survival is too valuable to the Imperium, to the point that the Inquisition mandated yours and my Temple tried to engineer mine. Tell me, are you familiar with Inquisitor Jaq Draco?”
“I can’t say I am,” I admitted, shaking my head. “Who is he? And why do you ask?”
Bliss nodded, then moved to lay upon me again, that we were face to face. I threw my biological arm over her again as she embraced me in turn, but she kept herself somewhat on her side, that her own right arm could trace circles into my chest. “Ordo Malleus. Also dead. Probably. Served the Throne in the 39th Millennium. He loved one of my Temple. She…I don’t know if she reciprocated that love. But he was mad for her. The Temple has since hammered home into its agents not to give in to the machinations of the heart. In that regard I suppose I’ve failed. And here we are again, Inquisitor and Callidus Assassin. Just as with Draco. So close our kinds have a habit of coming, it seems, but ever doomed never to be fulfilled. What?”
“Hm?”
“You’re staring. At my face, which I mean, I’m used to people staring at my chest,” she muttered. “Still gotta get you to stare at my chest one of these days. Do you think it would count if I just jammed your skull into it?”
“I’m leaning toward no.”
“Yeah, me too, unfortunately. Doesn’t mean I won’t sometime, though,” she winked to me. “Now what were you thinking about?”
“Just…what if…us?” I stammered out, caught off-guard by her calling out my staring, and also not sure how to formulate my thoughts to words in the first place.
“Yeah, I’ve wondered the same thing for a few decades now,” she nodded. “Frankly, I see many areas at which it could be problematic. I worry we may distract each other.”
“The Inquisition would want to keep me under its thumb,” I suggested.
“And the Temple would want me back if they felt I was being misused,” she noted. I nodded again, agreeing with that assessment. “We are assets to the Imperium, you and I; and assets can be risks if not in safe hands. We are not…people. Not in the way you and I see others. Perhaps it has to be this way. We are too competent, too capable, too dangerous. It’s not likely that the pen-pushers above us can know to trust us with each other.”
“No, it isn’t,” I again agreed. “But despite all of that, I think I would like it.”
“Like what?”
“You.”
Bliss stared at me, then, in silence, while her pupils dilated and her breath, as felt by the side of my face, grew warmer. A moment later, she moved herself to me, and I reacted in tandem, bringing us together, in full, at last. We started slow, and stayed as such for a while, but that did not last; as nightgown and jacket joined my boots on the floor of her room, and as pants and undergarments fell upon the growing pile of clothes, the pace of our love grew brisker and more fervent. Did I bring us there? Did she coerce us to that point? Was it right?
None of these questions mattered in the moment, but to the last point, it certainly felt right. I felt her, in the full extent of her physiology, and I invited her to feel me as well, inside my mind and outside my body. I touched countless scars that had befallen her form over the years, some old, some very new, all of which were otherwise normally hidden beneath her attire, scant though it often was. We were both wounded, deeply, physically and mentally, yet in different ways. And in that difference, in the extremes of who we were, we found completeness. Wholeness. Something I had not ever felt before; not in my love for Lucene, which was faithful, dutiful, and profound; not in my love for Mirena, which was passionate and burned as a flame. In Bliss, I found bliss. Peace, that thing Mortoc had once claimed to offer me, but no material or political peace could have matched the sort that I needed and that I found with Bliss. Peace was not something that could exist in the world for killers and soldiers like ourselves, but it was something that could be found and made, at least in part, and temporarily, together.
Peace, as opposed to the eternal war that consumed all reality. Perhaps that possibility, the hope for that reality, made all wars worth fighting. Perhaps ‘perhaps’ was a bit redundant.
Unfortunately, all good things come to an end, though thankfully Bliss was possessed of enough vigor—unsurprisingly—to keep us going for a long enough while. When the end did finally arrive, Bliss lifted herself off me somewhat, hands upon my shoulders, while continuing to sit on my waist. “I didn’t break your chest again, did I?” she asked, catching her breath while wetting lips which had dried.
“I think we’d both know,” I grunted, also panting. “You are quite heavy, though.” I was very much so out of breath for that reason; she seemed to have the energy of Mirena, the fervor of Lucene, and more mass backing her efforts than the two combined. In other words, the perfect storm of a lover.
“One of these days, Callant, I’m gonna make you regret the insults,” Bliss laughed, twirling some of her hair with her right index finger while her left hand rubbed my gut.
“I had assumed that was the intent behind the Gleece,” I suggested.
“Yes, sorta. I admit, I think I prefer where the evening has gone, though,” she shrugged. She then laid herself upon me again, cuddling up in my arms while she rested her head to my side, rather than atop my face as it had been. “Stay the night?”
“Truthfully, Lucene was under the impression you might steal me away for more than merely one day,” I admitted, and Bliss’s eyes glimmered with hopeful grins. “I’m here as long as you need me to be, Bliss.”
“Need or want?”
“Need.”
“Pity,” she giggled, then pecked my lips again. “Could you imagine a thousand years of this? Of us? To sleep like this each night, and to awaken each morning with your face buried in this chest, that you might finally stare at it?”
“Is that my fate tomorrow?” I asked, grinning.
“Spoilers. Oh, the stars would go out, all of them, before I had finished with you, Callant Blackgar. But I suppose that is not what I need, no, not yet,” she admitted. “I’ll try to have you back to her in…two days? Maybe three?” she suggested, a smile widening before she again tapped her lips to mine.
“Oh, is that all? Something tells me that bottle isn’t likely to last three days,” I suggested.
“Hm? That one? No, we’ll have that after I’ve brought you breakfast tomorrow,” she confirmed. “That’ll give some time for my cabin to air out by tomorrow evening for more of this,” she explained, and moved her face over mine more properly once more, beginning to kiss me again. “Thank you, Callant.”
“I think I’m the one that should be thanking you, Bliss,” I replied, making her laugh some more before she reignited her fervor for me in full. For the second time, yet far from the last, we fell in together, she the perfect Assassin-turned-Inquisitor and me the whatever-I-was. But for the first time in my life, with her, I felt like I was more than I had ever thought of myself. With her, I thought I could do or accomplish anything, and that we were both so devoutly, passionately loyal to the Throne was the icing on the cake; together, we could be the perfect, harmonious exterminators of any heresy we came across.
And we would love it the whole while.
That, I deemed, was the answer to the ‘What if?’ that had plagued us both.