Editing Lovedagger (section)

==== Icar and Valeria ====

"Please, Icar! Don't do this! If you've ever truly cherished our love, even if only for that, don't go!" 

Valeria's cry echoed through the vast, empty bridge of the tiny ship, her normally booming voice fading into a metallic whimper between the beecrystal panes of the viewscreen and the black silver and nanocomposite pillar surrounding the two of them. Bitter stars rolled slowly by, distant and unfeeling in the void outside. 

The tech-priest's body did not stir. His robed form, tall and gaunt and proud like a shining chain-blade, remained stiff. His shoulders remained firm. No hint of emotion could be gleaned from the serene, alabaster smile frozen upon his angel's mask. 

She stepped forward once more, her boot clanging against the floor. If it hadn't been there, if it hadn't been him – Icar, and his beautiful, terrible, regretful smile – she would've cringed at the noise. Centuries of war have sharpened her senses at least that much. Yet, at that moment, she could make no sound above the drumlike beating of her own heart. It was more awful than the roar of all the bolters. It scared her more than the thunder of nuclear blasts. 

"That is my choice," she said, anguishly, from behind gritted teeth. "My choice to make, and noone else'. I've already chose. I chose to love you."

"I'm afraid that I can't let you make such a choice", he spoke. His voice was the calm, ever-so-slighty artificial singsong of a Mechanicus acolyte. Another wall placed between them by the young man's obligation. Another mask. "You do not possess the correct data. Your conclusion is erroneous."

Valeria thought she could detect a twitch – the barest sign of hesitation, in the way his head nudged beneath the hood. He continued as if nothing had happened. 

"I cannot allow you to make such a choice. My heart – my mind will not bear it."

He turned from her, as if there was anything in his face not already hidden. In the darkness of the bridge, the light of the holographic data-panels floating majestically in front of the viewscreen cast his statuesque features in a pale, blue shade. A silhouette of black and crimson robes against the cyan glow. 

"You deserve someone better than me, Lady Inquisitor. You deserve a man. A beauty such as yours… a passion, such as yours… I would do it a dishonor."

He began to walk himself, quiet, measured steps. They made no clanging sound. He might as well have floated. 

"This isn't a question of data", she whispered back at him. She knew he could hear. "This isn't a calculation. This isn't a formula! I know that I love you. You have a million eyes, how can you not see that? Love is the answer. It always has and always will be the answer."

For the first time in twenty years, for the first time since the battle of Imexa – the first time since Valeria first gave the order to end three billion lives in an instant, a tear glittered upon her pale cheek. It crawled down her neck and over her gold and silk cravat, leaving in its wake a salty trail of torment no less horrific than that which followed that fateful Cyclonic missile.

"You're a coward, Icar. You claim to be free of emotion, but it is fear that drives you now. You are as terrified of love as you're blind to it – but all your implants can't make you truly free from its grasp."

"You do not understand, my Lady", he said calmly, without looking back. "You have not seen the face beneath this mask. You haven't seen this refined flesh. Heavy is the toll that must be paid in the service of the Omnissiah. That is the price I have paid for my faith. In my faith, I am endless. The Sang Mechanica flowing through my veins has made me eternal."

"What good to you is an eternity spent alone? What good to you is faith without light?"
He leaned against the control console in front of him. It was a human gesture – one that he shouldn't have made. One that he didn't need to. His synthetic fiber muscles did not tire. 

"I am hideous, my Lady. My body is deformed. I am not worthy of being looked upon by eyes as beautiful and holy as your own. Please, my Lady – Valeria… Please, leave me be."

"I refuse, Icar. My love is far greater than this."

He shook his head, the hood flowing hypnotically from side to side. "No. It is not."

"Please," she begged, "please, let me take that chance. Don't leave me alone –"

"YOU KNOW NOTHING OF LONELINESS!" he screamed, turning back at her with savage, mechanical speed. His pale mockery of a face remained flat and expressionless, but his voice rose for a second to a blaring, static screech, like vox comm through heavy jamming.

Inquisitor Valeria has heard such sounds before, of course. Mechanicus voicebox implants tended to flare uncontrollably in moments of distress. On the battlefield, the death cries of the Skitarri were a horrid, unnatural chorus, as grave as any foul demon's. 

She froze in mid step, less than a meter away. Even Icar was visibly shaken. 

"Leave me be," he repeated, in celestial quiet, and returned to face the holo-display. "You do not know me. You do not know the price I've paid. The grotesquerie that is now my enfleshed face. The magi tell me that aesthetic sensibility is a weakness of the biotic mind, but I'm weak, Valeria. Far too weak to bear such… emotions as yours."

"Then let me give you strength", she replied, wrapping her arms around his broad, robed shoulders. 
Even if his heart still beat, she could feel nothing beneath the black and red cloak. The fabric was as cold and indifferent as the stale air around them. Icar made neither movement nor sound to acknowledge her existence. 

She knew that he could see her. Even with his face turned the other way, the nanytes floating around him showed him the bridge in all directions, at all times. 

"Let me give you my strength, Icar", she said again. "You don't have to be alone."

"I… I am unworthy", he whispered. With a gesture, the holo-screens in front of him began dancing, data running and windows opening and closing faster than even Valeria's augmented eye could track. He would lose himself in that empty bliss, if she let him. Give entirely to the automatic tranquility of data processing, to the job that was as much his very 
nature as it was his duty. 

"You're worth the Imperia to me," she replied. Slowly, with a deliberation the powerfully built woman normally reserved for the handling of guns, her hands travelled down his shoulders, his neck, his chest. Trembling like those of a conscripted guardsmen, her fingers explored the folds of his cloak, turning and burrowing into the silk until she could almost imagine the feeling of the cold skin beneath. 

Icar did not answer. The holo-screens ceased their waltz. 

Valeria could feel his muscles giving beneath the cloak. Strength has abandoned him. Just as she did, the nano-morphed man had been, in the end, no more than a weak, fragile human. No less. 

He turned around in place to face her. Blank, porcelain eyes stared coldly into her own. 

"Won't you take it off?" she asked, not even daring sound hopeful.

"No," he answered somberly. "You know that it is forbidden. You know that is as it should."

"I know nothing", she pleaded. "You yourself said as much."

Before he could move in protest, Valeria's hands rose from within his cloak and reached up into his hood. Gently, so much as her shaky fingers could be, she gripped at the edges of the mask. It was cold and hard under the skin of her thumbs. Thin, like the sweet blade of a knife. Brittle, like a skull.

She pulled.

"It would not budge."

"…Nor should it. The material is magnetically locked to my nanytes. It will not unbind from my skin unless I command it to."
Valeria's legs weakened. It was worse than any shot she's ever taken, any slash of the sword that ever drew her blood. For a moment – an all too long, moment – she could feel Nurgle's icy fingers closing around her heart. Was that, after all these years, the feeling of true despair? The nigh-forgotten sense of defeat?
Icar didn't speak a word. Nothing sounded within the bridge but the powerful heartbeat and weak sobs of one. 

Then, in the dreadful silence, slowly, a surface of porcelain moved. The attraction between Icar's skin and the mask having faded away like the light of a long dead star, it slid off his face like a fragment of dry ice. 

The inquisitor stood stunned, holding the white mask in both hands, lost in the torrent of her emotions. Before her eyes, only a few centimeters away, was Icar's true, human face. 
It was as vile to look at as he'd described, as inhuman of that any of mutant. The skin, a pallid and sickly shade of grey, a mockery of the pristine perfection of the mask. Black veins trailed beneath, beneath the man's forehead and cheeks and nose and neck, like rivers of sacred Machine Blood over a desert of salt. Every so often, a faint pulse of bluish light blinked within his dark eyes, or behind his lips, the nanytes in his blood concentrating on some arcane, physiological task.

And yet, his face moved. Subtly, only so little, they moved. As inhuman as they'd appeared, in that, they were as close to Valeria as the memory of her mother's face, beneath the forgotten sun of her homeworld. 

A tick of sadness under the eyes, where tears would flow. A wrinkle of shame beneath his shaved head. A tinge of resignation in the twist of his lip. A bitter, tortured smile – the knowledge that now that she'd seen him, there love would have no more future. No hope. 

He was magnificently, terribly, human. Beautifully, dreadfully, human. 

"Icar…" her voice shuddered. 

"Valeria, I – I'm sorry." 

"Do not be", she answered. Her hug tightened around him. Without even noticing, she's laid her chin on his shoulder, for comfort. For a warmth that was not there, but which she could feel nonetheless. "You are as beautiful as the dawn, Icar. Beautiful as the dawn."

[[Category:Warhammer 40,000]]