#me vs making my OCs ginger… me 0-♾️ redheads

[pleiadesnuts]

WIP: Garviel Loken Earned His Wings

A Garviel Loken/f!OC drabble/WIP. Not 100% canon-compliant, but the 63rd were orbiting 63-19 for SOOOO long and I didn’t want to write anything else. I cannot believe how long it’s been since I last posted FIC on this site. Jesus.

Word count: 1421… for now…

Warnings: Gore mentioned, corporal punishment mentioned, parental death, but nothing too far out of left field for the setting. Garviel Loken being slightly weird around women.

The Emperor Protects. 🦅

The aftermath of such an effective speartip campaign was unexpectedly drawn out. Sixty-Three-Nineteen was proving to be more of a pain than anyone aboard the Vengeful Spirit could ever have imagined, save for the Warmaster, especially for a world so similar to their own. It irritated Loken — the men of the Tenth Company were growing restless acting as caretakers and guards for the few civilians aboard while the niceties of conquest took place, if they could even be called niceties. Politics were never his forte, Captain Torgaddon had always been the better speaker, but it didn’t take a pundit to realise that the sudden influx of planetary officials aboard the Gloriana-class flagship was, for whatever reason the Warmaster only knew, a sign of improvement on the surface.

It amused him, in some childlike way, to see baselines escorted by squads of Astartes that towered over them, herded like cattle through the ship to where they needed, or, more likely, where they were permitted to go. Loken paid little attention to them. Perhaps this was to his detriment: a half dozen men from Tenth Company now walked towards him in pairs, boxing in a fragile looking thing in a black dress and with hair like flame. He watched them approach, stomping their way across the debarkation deck with the little woman in the middle, her hair bouncing with each heavy thud of sabatons on plasteel.

“Captain Loken.” Sergeant Anton Ferrick raised his hands to his chest in the sign of the Aquila in introduction.

Loken mirrored his salute. “Sergeant. What do you need?”

Ferrick glanced down for half a moment before looking back up at him, his lips pursed only barely, but enough to raise and warp the scar that ran through them. It’s unlike him to hesitate. Loken followed his eye to meet the almost unsettling gaze of the woman at his feet, unflinching even while surrounded by men almost double her size and immeasurably stronger. “The lady has asked for an introduction, sir,” he answered, hoping the minute strain in his jaw was enough to tell his Captain that this was done begrudgingly, with as much resistance as he could gather.

The message is received. Loken nodded, his own jaw set in silent reply, and Ferrick and the others stepped back. The woman stared up at him, her posture remarkably straight in a practiced, though not at all military way. She stepped forward, her neck craned up to look him in the face, skin so clear and pale he could see the blue veins thump in her throat. Between this false Terran and the remembrancers, Loken comes to the conclusion, somewhere in the distant recesses of his mind that, yes, all women are frail and beautiful.

“I am Elita,” she said, her voice clear even over the background noise of dropship maintenance and passing squads of men who dwarf her, and he waited for a surname that didn’t come. “I have been told you met my father.”

Loken swallowed. His eidetic memory guides him through the assault on the city and the significantly less pleasant experience in the mountains, those four True-Terran months ago, grasping at names and faces to think of anyone he can describe as having met. “You are mistaken,” came his answer. He considered tacking on an honorific — madam, my lady, Lady Elita — and refused to. She dressed herself the way he imagined a noble would, fine silks from head to toe in a deep, empty and unadorned black, the way he had seen illustrated in a book he’d skimmed somewhere out of boredom, but the words fell short. “I have seen many men on the surface, and none bore me enough importance to distinguish them.”

She frowned. Her eyebrows were brown. Loken had never noticed such a discrepancy before — he’d never had any particular reason to, with Euphrati’s being pleasant to look at though unremarkable in this way and Mersadie’s lack of them altogether. He’d have to ask them, eventually. Perhaps this, too, was some kind of dye. “I have it on good authority that you did,” Elita replied, her words aimed to cut in a tone that made the man beside her stiffen. “We have just left the company of a woman named Oliton who told me as much.”

“The…” Ferrick cleared his throat with a performative cough into a closed fist. Loken met his still hesitant eye once he had lifted his own upwards. “The Emperor, sir,” he muttered in explanation. “That is to say, the false one.”

“Ah.” He thought back to the few seconds he’d seen the ‘Emperor’ as he dragged his eyes back down to the stern-faced woman before him. She bore little resemblance to the charred, smoking remains of her father’s bottom half. “You bear him little resemblance. Forgive my ignorance, lady.”

There it is — lady. Lower case, as it would be if he’d written it, her former, false station reduced to so little in his mind that he could never consider capitalising it. He watched her lips bulge and her cheeks hollow when her tongue moved to suck on her teeth behind them, irritated. “Then either your memory isn’t all I’ve been told it’s cracked up to be, or you have lied to your documentarist.”

“Forgive me,” Loken echoed, as he watched the men around her shift on uneasy feet and Ferrick’s good eye close slowly in the edge of his vision, opening to look up at the ceiling with a long, silent sigh. “It was only for a moment.”

Elita let out a sigh of her own. She shifted on her hip, her arms folded tightly around her ribs beneath the thick shawl across her shoulders. Not an inch of flesh below her chin was exposed to the cold, recycled air on deck, and even her hands were gloved to the nail beds. “It is of no consequence,” she answered, rolling her neck. The lithe casualness of the movement made him balk inwardly. Were she under the regulations of the expedition, or the slightest bit aware of just how far above her socially a neophyte of the Legion stood, never mind a Captain, someone not so much harsher than him would have had her whipped for it.

He stared down at her for a long, painstakingly silent moment. “If there is nothing else I can do for you—“

“Here,” she barked, a slender, silk-clad hand jutting out from beneath the shawl in a closed fist. A glimmer of shining metal between her thumb and fingers caught in the fluorescent light of a passing servo skull as it hovered by. “Take it.”

“I will not.”

Elita huffed. “I will not leave this spot until you do.”

Loken looked to Ferrick, both just as confused by this backwater noblewoman as the other. She had been checked over, surely, before being allowed aboard — any hint of her bringing a weapon or an explosive, no matter how well hidden, would have been found and dealt with on the surface, and with extreme prejudice at that. He held out a giant, ceramite covered hand, his palm facing upwards. It dwarfed hers, the same way it had dwarfed Mersadie’s when they met.

With a soft, delicate clink, a piece of wrought gold dropped into his palm, followed by its twin. In a wondrous, serendipitous circumstance, the familiar shape of a two-headed eagle laid spread across the white plate. “The Emperor’s Mark,” she explained, her silvery eyes fixed on the bird’s wing. “A medal, for those honoured enough to meet Him, even if only for a moment.”

“I cannot accept this,” he replied, not as sternly as he’d intended.

She didn’t seem to care either way. “In His place, I, the Grand Duchess Elita, Lady Royal of Kaentz and Empress-Exile Regent, bestow upon you, Garviel Loken, Captain of the Tenth Company of the Sixteenth Astartes Legion, the Luna Wolves, this holy relic.” The words come quickly, rehearsed almost to the point of sounding bored, and she drew her hand sharply back into herself before he could force the trinkets back into it. “The second I give for you to offer your Lord Warmaster.”

Loken’s lip twitches upward, and he knew that Ferrick, at least, noticed, because he nearly swallowed his own. “You will not honour the Warmaster, lady?” he asked, the amusement in his voice well disguised.

“No, I will not,” came her stalwart reply, her eyes refusing to meet his. “You can give the tyrant his prize yourself.”