Chapter Text
Perturabo strides through the Imperial Palace on day he ought to be resting, traversing the immense corridors in a loose toga and sandals. This was the closest he could ever truly get to rest in this place, spending hours upon hours inspecting leagues of polished marble veined with gold. His analytical gaze calculates the arcs of the vaulted ceiling, stripping away the gilt and filigree to the load-bearing skeleton beneath. The artistry is undeniable, a gaudy monument to his Father’s ego, but the engineering… is simply mid. He sees a dozen ways to improve the structural integrity, and the conversation is already rehearsed in his head. A dry recitation of facts and figures so as not to waste the Emperor’s time, who would listen with that infuriatingly patient smile of his before handing the project to Rogal Dorn.
The Unyielding Praetorian, the great and golden builder. While Perturabo was sent to shithole rimworlds to grind civilizations into dust, Dorn got to carve the faces of angels into mile-high pillars. Never mind the pretty words the Emperor had said those few decades ago when he held Perturabo atop Mount Telephus and spoke of the beautiful things they would build together. Perturabo had spent the last hundred years turning every stripe of beauty across the galaxy into powder.
‘You shall be my Lord of Iron,’ the Emperor had said. He had forgotten to mention the Breaker of Cities part, his name a curse on a thousand worlds until Perturabo ordered genocide on their populations. The facts mix with facts until all Perturabo sees in the ceiling and walls are the faces of his brothers laughing at him.
He turns a corner, mind deeply mired in imagined mockery he swears he can hear, and nearly collides with the sun.
A great, scintillating presence glides down the hall, crimson robes swirling about long legs sculpted in swanlike grace. Perturabo slows, the sight blotting out his thoughts and sucking his focus into a vision of purest light. The cold glow from the crystal chandeliers seems to warm as it touches Sanguinius, to cling to his golden hair and the ivory perfection of his face.
Perturabo typically avoids his kin. He found Russ a barbarian, Fulgrim a peacock and Dorn an arrogant brick, staying far enough away from his brothers that the sight of a fellow primarch still struck him to some degree. Beholding one of similar power and size to him, Perturabo’s instincts command him to freeze. Despite Sanguinius’s beauty, the animal part of him sees only a great winged predator.
The wings. His analytical mind fumbles over them, drinking in their every detail in a million synaptic sparks. They’re not just white - they’re the colour of fresh cream in dawnlight, smooth as the tender-petalled heart of a rose. Folded neatly behind the Angel’s back, they’re massive enough to displace the air around them, motes of dust flowing by as if repelled by the shield of his will. Each feather is immaculate, from the broad, powerful primaries to the soft downy coverts near the joints. They remind Perturabo of the doves he kept in Lochos, their simple, honest beauty his only peace in a world of endless schemes.
Perturabo finds himself drifting forth, lips parted in reverent awe. He’s close enough now to see the individual barbules of the feathers, to imagine their wondrous softness and the unyielding strength of the musculature beneath. He wants to understand their construction, their texture, the secret of their existence. No matter how hard he stares at them, he can't.
Sanguinius’s golden gaze fixes upon him, his elegant stride settling to a halt. A gentle smile touches his lips, the easy warmth of it reaching his eyes. He’s seen that look of slack-jawed reverence on a billion mortal faces, in the postures of his own Astartes, even a few of the Custodes. But to see it on the harsh, brutal features of Perturabo… that is new.
Perturabo can’t speak. His throat feels lined with sandpaper, throat a vice as if preceding tears of rapture. His skin feels too thick, his hands too destructive to be this close to something so pristine. He waits for the silent dismissal. He waits for Sanguinius to walk past him as if he were just another pillar.
"Brother." Sanguinius's melodic tenor echoes softly in the corridor. He shifts slightly, unfurling one wing a fraction in a pearlescent ripple.
Perturabo jolts as if waking from a trance. His jaw tightens, the familiar walls of paranoia and resentment slamming back into place. He gives a curt nod, face naturally hardening into its customary scowl. He’d been caught staring in a moment of unguarded wonder, and for one who had been robbed of the joy of discovery all his life thanks to his intellectual gifts, it feels like a spear through the chest.
But Sanguinius's amber eyes hold no judgment. In their depths is an empathy so profound it unnerves Perturabo – he had seen the awe, and now beholds the wall that shot up to conceal it. He takes a small step closer, tilting his head. The great pinions behind him shift, a whisper of movement sending shivers through the air.
"You may touch them," Sanguinius says, his smile turning playful at the edges as he sees Perturabo stiffen. "Once."
The permission hangs in the air. Perturabo blinks, his brilliant mind stalling. He expects a trap. A jest. Go on, brother, touch the pretty feathers so we can laugh at the dirty digger yearning for the sky. His hearts thunder as his mind crowds with a hundred thousand possibilities. He can’t follow any of them quickly enough; it feels like years pass the longer he fails to dignify Sanguinius with a response. He honestly wants to crumple to a knee and bow. His muscles seize.
He looks down at his hands - calloused, scarred, ingrained with the phantom grime of a thousand warzones, wide and thick-fingered. Back to the cloudlike plumage arrayed before him in a welcoming spread. Sanguinius waits patiently, his posture open and unguarded.
Perturabo cannot do it. Not here. Sanguinius seems to know this, turning slow with a coy glance back as a wing sweeps towards Perturabo and crosses his face with a feather tip.
“Come along,” he says, “My quarters are not far.”
Perturabo has no eyes for the gothic opulence of Sanguinius’s private chambers when the Angel steps into the room and turns. In a gesture of pure willingness, he drops his robe in a shimmering puddle on the deep red carpet, revealing his full nudity as one might unveil a masterpiece.
Perturabo stands there in shock for the second time, and Sanguinius takes a private pleasure in knowing not even the sullen siegemaster is immune to his beauty. His long, lissome legs invite lingering glances at the breadth of his thighs, plush and shapely without the barest hint of a scar. Marble-smooth and seeming to glow subtly with inner light, his pale skin shifts over rippling musculature only apparent when he flexes, stretching in a great arc to push his abdominals into full view. His wings flare and stir fragrant winds around the vast chamber, causing various perches and platforms to sway from golden chains in the domed ceiling above.
Even for all his majesty, Sanguinius casts no judgement. “Perturabo,” he breathes, hearing his brother suddenly exhale a breath he’d probably forgotten he was holding. “Come.”
Pulled by the unseen force of his soul’s own yearning, Perturabo drifts closer, head lowered like he can’t bear to gaze upon Sanguinius’s splendour for long. A wing rises to let him move behind the Angel’s back, settling back into place with the softest of whispers. Perturabo can hear each and every feather swishing against each other, can pick out the barbs hooking in minute places and zipping back smooth in sequence.
He’s concentrating now, taking in the full breadth of the wings and calculating at max speed as his pulse rises to a frantic pound. Sanguinius’s hair cascades in glossy rivers to his lower back, pouring over his wings. Perturabo wants to move it, to map those feathers from their very origin point. He only gets to touch once. He has to make it count.
Sanguinius tilts his head in that birdlike way of his, the shimmering curtain of his hair shifting, and Perturabo sees an opportunity. A thin dusting of downy-soft feather fluff trails from the nape of Sanguinius’s neck all the way down his spine, spreading into the bulk of his wings. Perturabo gently parts the hair to set his thumbs there, his broad, spatulate hands unfurling thick fingers that spill the Angel’s lustrous golden curls forth over his pale shoulders.
Sanguinius toys with his locks idly and shifts about as Perturabo’s hands begin to glide. They’re barely to his scapulae when a new warmth comes near, the peak of his brother’s nose brushing the fluff at his nape. Heat radiates from Perturabo’s flushed cheeks, something he instinctively wants to lean into but only bows his head to let him have more room.
The scent of him fills Perturabo with a soul deep comfort he’s never known in his life, sweet sunshine and musk, like cuddling a warm animal close to his chest. He exhales a thin sigh through barely cracked lips, a benediction seeping into the lightly fluffed feathers. The skin beneath is exquisitely sensitive, drawing shivers of pleasure from Sanguinius’s loosely folded wings. Perturabo’s hands are almost to the juncture at mid back now, thumbs smoothing down his spine and spreading as his feathers begin to thicken.
From there, his grasp broadens over the prominent musculature at the base of both wings, wide enough to enjoy heaping handfuls of deep plumage. His face is still buried between Sanguinius’s shoulders, and the Angel is drenched in a yearning so raw and naked it humbles him. His gift had granted him many powerful flashes of intuition in the past, but what he feels now, knows in his soul, makes him want to give his heart to the Lord of Iron and let him do as he pleases forever.
Perturabo’s body melds as close as it dares, begging in silence for contact he could never ask for. The downward pressure of his hands begin to flare Sanguinius’s wings as he follows the anatomy from joint to joint, spreading his armspan as far as possible and not clearing even a third of the wings. He huffs a little through his nose as if disappointed, tucking his fingers beneath the topmost row of feathers and running them along the seam of those beneath.
Sanguinius’s breath hitches. The skin there was sensitive enough to detect minuscule changes in air currents, somewhere only his own detached preening had ever brushed past. Perturabo’s running all his fingers and the side of his thumbs in perfect symmetry along as he draws his hands together at the spine, only to repeat the outward spreading motion back along that same row and tuck underneath the next.
Sanguinius starts to whimper. It’s a squeaky, chirpy little sound he can’t quite let out of his throat at first, but by the fifth row there’s more breath behind it, a low, lilting crooning. Perturabo’s stroking him with glacial slowness, methodical as if counting every feather by the bump of their rachis. Occasionally he’ll swing his fingerpads up close to the quills in waves, drawing higher, sweeter sounds from his brother. These send Sanguinius panting and shaking at the knees, the very tips of his wings curling as they arch around his body in embarrassment. He hides himself in them, drawing a hand to his mouth to try and stifle his noises.
To Perturabo, they are the most beautiful music he’s ever heard. More than mathematical perfection, Sanguinius’s voice shudders out in staccato clarity as if wrenched from a syrinx, warbling high and pouring low depending on how he plays his fingers. The precision with which Perturabo touches him is rewarded in a thousand instant points of stimuli, his cortices devoting every molecule of energy towards them. He can’t hear himself thinking anymore.
Sanguinius hikes his wings up higher so Perturabo doesn’t have to bend to reach the lower pinions. He’s pressing himself much closer as he goes through the rows; Sanguinius can feel the bulk and stretch of his pectorals near crushing him as those arms spread to their limit to reach more of him. Perturabo’s so desperate for this, so starved the shuddering breaths against Sanguinius’s damply feathered neck almost sound as if he’s crying. Sobbing in want, gasping for more.
Breathing hard from the strain, he reaches the lowest row and it is here he takes his greatest care. It will only count as one touch if he removes his hands. So, he keeps his pinky fingers extended to trail along feathers he will never be able to touch again while the others explore all they can. Index and middle pressing from quill to vane and sweeping back up again. Thumb-edged caresses to tender fluffed undercoat. The lightest scrape of his nails along shafts that transmit the hard sensation to tender skin.
Sanguinius’s wings are almost entirely wrapped around himself now, feathers flaring out in full puff and exposing as much of the delicate underlying skin to his brother’s needful hands. Perturabo sniffles into the thick scapular plumage as he reaches the final feathertips, back bowed and face buried in the dense fluff where the wings meet Sanguinius’s back.
And finally, tenderly, does his touch withdraw.
Sanguinius does not turn to him. When Perturabo approaches his front, the great white cocoon of feathers slowly unfurls to reveal a vision of demure divinity as seen in the ancient oil masterworks of Old Earth. Sanguinius stands contrapposto, his shoulders and hips tilted at opposing angles with one hand to his mouth, sucking on his fingers, the other wrapped around his cock. It’s a long, lovely column of flushed pink, tapered to the glossy, leaking head. So hard it fills his elegant grasp with the clashing obscenity of raw, carnal need. He’s squeezing it tight as little throbs pulse through and his hand shakes with restraint.
Perturabo is awestruck for what feels like a thousand infinite lifetimes before Sanguinius’s lovely voice drips through his ears, washing through the back of his skull and down into his core.
“Lie with me,” he whispers in a broken voice. “Please.”