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Knife's Edge Minuet | Chapter 10

✨Read on AO3! ✨

She takes her cup and holds out her little finger—a habit she took up the moment he first spoke of Guisorn III. “And what do you suggest we drink to? Triumph on Rykad Minoris? Two years of successful ventures? The glory of the Holy Ordo Xenos?” Heinrix shifts to sit flush beside her, a kiss planted in her hair. "To us." Van Calox and Fehr: a perfect match in a logistic sense, of course. His Excellency Calcazar chose well in fitting their skill sets together. But it was always more than that, no matter how long Heinrix fought not to see it.

Chapter Summary: After their success at the Electrodynamic Cenobium, Inquisitorial Acolytes Heinrix van Calox and Heliora Fehr take a moment to themselves while the rest of Rykad Minoris celebrates its triumph. Heinrix has wanted for little else—but want alone may not prove enough to forestall the darkness that lies in wait.

(Acolyte AU time, baybee!!)

Rating: E

Tags (chapter-applicable tags bolded): Canon-Typical Violence, Canon-Typical Body Horror, Eventual Smut, Hurt/Comfort, Hurt No Comfort, Slow Burn, Angst and Feels, Mutual Pining, Crime Lord Rogue Trader, Canon-Typical Hallucinations, Heinrix van Calox Has a Bad Time, Dual POV, Heinrix POV, Canon-typical PTSD, Angsty Kisses, A Whole Lot of AU Dreamscapes

Word Count: 4,623

This fic will update on Tuesdays and Fridays — stay tuned!

Fantastic art by @infernaldaydreams, whom I could not do any of this without. 💕

... Chapters 'til smut: five. 😈

10. Held in Fading Light

Heinrix

note: This chapter is formatted with text alignment changes that do not format properly in a tumblr post. For the full reading experience, I suggest reading on AO3 with the link above if you can! But either way, it should be readable in either form.

On assignment, agents of the Inquisition are never afforded the luxury of fine lodging, and so Heinrix looks over the capitol of Rykad Minoris from a narrow window in a cramped room.

This is a better vantage than he’s used to: a room without many leaks, a cot tucked into a corner, a couple mats on the floor in place of where a pair of chairs might have otherwise been.

From the top floor of this building, he can even see the fireworks in the distance marking the beginning of tonight’s parade.

A triumph, Governor Medineh called it. The Arbitrators stationed on the planet managed to quell a burgeoning rebellion while, in the Electrodynamic Cenobium, the cult leader Aurora was quietly eliminated under the order of the Esteemed Holy Ordo Xenos. To attend the celebration, though, would be to boast the Inquisition’s involvement and paint targets on the backs of the entire Koronus Conclave.

So all that remains is to… wait. There will always be a next task, a next lead—but tonight, Heinrix found time to bathe in peace, and peace enough to breathe deeply, just for a little while.

There will be weeks of quiet, now—or however long it takes for the voidship of Theodora von Valancius to dock here and deliver him to Footfall.

Weeks of… nothing.

The room’s lone door opens behind him. A draft rushes in; Heinrix turns, and his whole world brightens.

Acolyte Heliora Fehr stands in the doorway, her arms full of spoils, her crimson cape blown forward and around her slender frame in the wind. She curses, and Heinrix hums a laugh that thrums around his stuttering heart. He crosses the small space, pushes the door shut… and utterly unspools, the day’s tension gone from his shoulders as he bends toward her like a plant to the sun.

With a careful thumb, he sweeps the one strand of hair that’s come loose from her ponytail away from her face—then he kisses her, soft and slow and savoring. She laughs against his mouth, and he only pulls her in closer, all the prizes in her arms now pressed between their bodies.

“What’s this for?” she asks, but he’s only parted from her long enough to steal a breath. If she had another question, it’s lost in another press of their mouths.

“I was waiting for you,” he answers when next he comes up for air.

A little pang runs through his chest. How long had he been waiting, before now?

Because it isn’t weeks of nothing that await him, after all. Nothing, he’s come to find, can be a utopia all its own, in the right company.

Heliora quirks a brow. “I wasn’t gone long.”

He sneaks another kiss—her cheekbone, this time—and smiles again. Always, again. “And yet.”

“You haven’t even looked at what spoils I’ve returned with. That’s unlike you.”

She’s right—in this, and in most things—and so he gains just enough distance from her warmth that she can open the bag that’s compressed between them.

He can’t stop the soft gasp that takes hold of him at the sight.

“You—no.” When he meets her eyes again, she’s already smiling, that conniving thing he’s come to cherish. “Amasec and cheese? Here? While the celebrations already demand so much for the upper castes? Surely you didn’t formally requisition…?”

“I didn’t have to, much as you’d have loved the paperwork if I had.” Turning, she saunters down what little passes for a hall in this tiny suite, and back into the central room, unclasping her cape from her long, trim coat and letting it fall to the floor while she moves. Kneeling on the mats of their ‘sitting room,’ she spreads out her trophies: a bottle of amasec, two small plasteel cups, and a small wheel of cheese wrapped in real paper, tied with real twine.

Heinrix lowers next to her without so much as a thought, following in her orbit. “So how did you…?”

“I have my methods.” Now, it’s her turn to sneak a fleeting press of lips to cheek, just at the edge of his smile. “Governor Medineh seems to like me, and I paid a second visit.”

“Everyone seems to like you.”

“That’s my job,” she grins, peeling off a glove before tucking a strand of his hair behind an ear, “Interrogator.”

“Malifixer,” he murmurs in retort, a fingertip circling around one of her temporal augments before he surrenders into another, deeper kiss.

While not an official title, that’s what the Inquisition internally names those like Heliora. A gatherer of information on the underworld, capable of assuming countless identities in service of blending in, however the situation requires. Someone capable of getting to the heart of any great conspiracy—or the heart of any individual—through charm alone.

Someone equally capable of cleaning up every loose end left in their wake. A criminal’s skill set, honed by Xavier Calcazar himself, employed for the good of the Imperium.

… And a near-exact complement to everything Heinrix offers to the Inquisition. Someone capable of smiling her way into countless open doors, countless valuable pieces of information, while Heinrix has only known harsher avenues. Someone able to quietly rid the Inquisition of anyone who still proved uncooperative after interrogation.

His partner—the perfect partner—for two years, now.

She sighs into his touch, her tongue curling amorously against his. Just as fast, she slips from him, catching her breath an inch from his lips. “Easy does it. The amasec will go warm before long, and we can’t have that.”

Heinrix draws back after a mournful last press of his lips to hers, humming an acquiescing noise against her skin. Then, they settle into a routine they’ve both grown used to by now: he pours the evening’s drinks (more often water than recaf, more often recaf than amasec) while she arranges the day’s food (more often incomprehensible gruel than anything else).

Only this time, while his focus was on pouring their amasec, she scrambled not to find plates, but to unfold their regicide board. He turns back to find the parcel of cheese laid atop it, and Heliora untying the twine with a reserved grin.

When she looks up to find him laughing, she only shrugs. “You would’ve insisted I find a tray—” that’s true, he would have—“and we don’t have a tray. Are you going to fault me for improvising?”

“Fair enough,” Heinrix cedes. “But what will you use for a—”

Heliora unsheathes her dagger from her belt and lays it on the board. The second Heinrix opens his mouth to speak, she cuts him a look. “It’s clean. How do I know it’s clean? Because I almost never need it. Not with you.”

He would sweep her into his embrace here and now, all pretense of dinner and drinks forgotten, were his hands not already full with two cups of amasec.

“Here, woman,” he says around a laugh that he tries to quiet, trying and failing to feign scorn. “Before it warms.”

Heinrix shifts to sit flush beside her, a kiss planted in her hair. “To us.”

Van Calox and Fehr: a perfect match in a logistic sense, of course. His Excellency Calcazar chose well in fitting their skill sets together.

But it was always more than that, no matter how long Heinrix fought not to see it.

Heliora, for one, had never taken issue with psykers: her mother was an accomplished Astropath of the Imperium. He waited for months for the moment she would flinch from him… and she never did.

In fact, those first months, she always talked with Heinrix—throughout their days, yes, but then long into every night. It was an abrupt change, a stark difference from anyone he’d ever worked with or fought with. He was used to being alone… or in such indifferent company it felt rather like being alone.

He couldn’t name the day he began waiting for the inevitable moment her voice would permeate the dark spaces they shared—only that he caught himself doing it once, and could hardly remember a time where he hadn’t.

Heliora does her best thinking in the dark. She said as much in their early days, then proved it every night thereafter.

But her intelligence staggered him from dawn ‘til dusk anyway. Her charisma. Never before had he met anyone who so easily wormed their way into others’ good graces.

That has always been their way, though: a dynamic that deepened and richened each year. In Terran terms, she is the honey and he is the vinegar. She is the bait and he is the trap.

She is the best sort of challenge, across a regicide board—harmlessly inviting, then impossible to refuse.

It was only a matter of time before protocol broke under everything they’d said and done.

“To us,” she echoes, tipping her head back to take the first sip alongside him. Heinrix closes his eyes, indulging the taste—she’s always had a fine palette, despite her lowborn upbringing—while more fireworks sound in the distance outside.

Something warm spasms through the air. Deep in the walls of their cramped abode, the heating pipes chug erratically. The whole time they’ve studied the Cult of the Final Dawn, it’s been like this: some nights warm, others bitingly cold—and not in any way owed to him.

Heliora laughs into her cup. “Well, I suppose we’re in for one of the warmer nights. At least it brings an excuse to change.”

She hands her cup back to him—he takes it without looking, his gaze caught on every shifting line of her form—before she shrugs out of her Inquisitorial coat. The sight never loses its draw: the garment’s cut to fit her narrow waist, left to flare over the modest swell of her hips. The lapels are embroidered with suns’ rays on their corners; her small epaulets are gold-threaded crimson, like their matching cloaks. The result is a mantle of his favourite colours laying just under the golden-sugar blonde of her hair—one that brightens his view each time it enters his sight, and one that he mourns the loss of each time she casts it off.

Tonight, though, she awards him by making a slow, taunting show of unfastening the front of her thin shirt underneath one button at a time, pulling the wine-red fabric over her sternum until a flash of lace peeks through beneath.

Her rosette, left to dangle over her chest, reflects the flickering lumens in the room. He’s long since stopped pretending not to look when his eyes are drawn there—especially when she draws his eyes there—and he hears her chuckling after a long moment. In his periphery, she reaches for his chin.

In the last moment before her touch finds him, his vision skews. The lines of her rosette warp and curve, almost like a star—a bursting gold nova, implanted dead-center over her heart.

A snap of cold pushes through his veins. The air chills, just as Heliora’s hand cups under his jaw.

“Something on your mind?”

Heinrix tilts to press a kiss to her palm; then another, longer one to the inside of her wrist, tremoring under his lips when his touch earns a shiver from her. “Only you.”

Her green gaze stays fixed on his, tender yet expectant. After a moment, he confesses, “And a small headache. It must be left over from the Cenobium.”

Her smile hardens, just a little. “So we lie down.”

She says it gently, but the stern undercurrent in her tone, however subtle, brooks no argument.

Sighing, he entreats, “At least finish your amasec.”

His attempt at negotiation, at least, softens her look. “Together?”

Of course; they always do—

—together—

—and this is no exception: a clink of glasses, and both down the rest in unison. A rich drink like this always awards a pleasant haze, a warm thrum through his veins—something that offsets the cold creeping through his limbs.

At least while he obliges her, he can allow his mind to swim in this state, sinking deeper into the contentment of the day’s victory. He can hold that sweetness close while he goes through the motions of undressing to his undershirt and small-clothes, as has become a routine each time she enforces this particular verdict. Enough beds of heresy cleansed, and Heliora’s caught on that every now and again, a little Chaos clings to Heinrix—echoes of the necessary pain of purification, little more.

She kissed him for the first time on a night not unlike this one: a little worry burrowed deep in his chest, a little frost in his veins, all dispelled by the warmth of her mouth.

Throne, he’d thought about it for weeks before—

—dreamed of her—

—and still nothing he ever conjured measured up to the real thing.

At least now, the shedding of layer’s proved comfortably cool against the rising heat. Even aside from that, no order from Heliora Fehr is ever a disagreeable one—not when they’re so often paired with beguiling smirks and laughter so muted, so earnest, that each breath feels like a secret earned for his keeping.

He consigns himself to the thin cot with closed eyes and deep breaths, listening to the idle noises of Heliora packing away their room for the night: the clinks of their metal cups, the rebinding of their untouched wheel of cheese, all manner of fabrics folded and stowed.

A few moments later, the lumens dimmed in ways he can make out from behind his own eyelids, her weight settles next to him—and her bare knee skims against his shin.

A hand laid on her thigh finds that bare, too.

“Keep your eyes closed,” she murmurs, not inches away. Her forehead comes to rest against his; then her fingers find his temples, two pressed gently on each side.

Heinrix grumbles in spite of the smile that twitches his lip. His hand ghosts up her leg to the curve of her hip, and only there does he find the lace hem of her nightgown. “This isn’t fair, you know.”

“When did I ever claim to be fair?” As every time before, Heliora begins to work her fingers in small circles, and his tired sigh rumbles in the scant space between them. “Distractions help. We know that.”

“I’m starting to think maybe it’s you that helps, not just any distraction,” he protests, an unconvincing and already thick-voiced murmur. “A little light in the void.”

“Look who’s getting all poetic. Maybe I’m just a little warmth in your usual cold.”

“And if I need you—”

—need her—people need her—

“—all the same?”

Heinrix bends to kiss her again, fingers indenting lightly in the plush of her hip while he pulls her bottom lip between his teeth. A little more warp-ice eddies through him, but he ignores it, sliding a hand down her thigh, arcing an appreciative thumb along her bare skin.

The noise she makes cuts short the moment gooseflesh starts to bloom under his touch. “One round of Truth or Lie.”

A groan falls from his mouth; another bend, and now his forehead’s the one to land on hers. “You insist?”

The child of a psyker, she knows what to watch for. Even though she can’t feel every current of his sorcery under his skin, she understands the look that shadows the features of the cursed when the whispers of the warp don’t quite leave their ears.

That her lips don’t find his again is answer enough.

Instead, she says, “I’ve had feelings for you since the moment I laid eyes on you.”

That’s what cracks his gaze open, at last: the need to study her face. “The moment you first laid eyes on me? But that was…”

… Why can’t he remember—

—remember, remember—

—that moment?

“The Tricorn Citadel,” she supplies, “not a day after I tried and failed to run from a purge, when I was taken to be questioned. I know.”

“So it’s not true,” he concludes softly. “Not all true, at least. You were younger, then, far before we were ever assigned together. You reviled the Inquisition.”

“Thank the Throne it wasn’t you doing the questioning.”

Heat climbs up Heinrix’s face—he doesn’t have to suppress the sensation, with her. “I hadn’t mastered the art of torture, then, twenty-eight years ago. Subjects would… expire.”

Below his temples where she still makes her circles, one of her thumbs finds his cheek. “I never specified that feelings meant love.”

His chest squeezes. Hasn’t it always? Hasn’t it always taken so little, with her? “So what did you feel?”

“Hatred, on principle.” She quirks a brow, just visible in the dim, and he feels her barely-audible scoff against his mouth. “And that you are unfairly pleasing to the eye.”

He can’t help but fall quiet; a little twinge of cold runs through him again.

“That was later,” he corrects, almost a whisper, “I… regrew my eye later.”

“You are dashing in an eye patch, thank you very much,” she protests, crinkles spreading ‘round her gaze as she smiles. “And I like more than just your eyes.”

His lips press against hers—entreating, then insistent, then needful—and cut the game short there. Let her have the victory; let her have anything she asks of him, if she’ll only indulge this. Every kiss, every touch, a show of gratitude for every mercy she’s ever shown him. A plea for her to stay, stay, until they can’t outrun the seeds of corruption any longer, until the void takes them whole.

The thought sends another lance of cold through his middle—

—and he fights to pull in a breath.

To move. To think—

—but he pushes away the sensation. There’ve been nights like this before, and the closeness has centered him. This small undercurrent, outside of warpspace—it isn’t anything. Aurora is dead, by his hand.

Heliora is very much alive, her body slowly bowing against his. The desire between them—pressed against her thigh, shortening her breath, stoking warmer with every new touch—is very much alive.

They can take their time tonight. There is nowhere for them to be, nothing the Inquisition will request of them, between now and their landing on Footfall. That alone will ease the cold, even if it takes ‘til dawn.

Only the cold is not so quick to depart. It furrows deeper into his core the closer she arches into him, the soft of her chest pressed firm against his. It grows there, feeding on something starving—no, desperate, afraid—until his arms need to wind around her for her body to feel near enough to his.

The shallower her breath becomes, the more Heinrix’s pulse races, as though her every heartbeat is ticking rapidly toward her last. The higher his need climbs—

—he needs to move, but what’s stopping him?

The more he tries to pull against his constraints—

—the more he feels like if he loses his hold on her, it will break him.

As though the second the heat is allowed to fade will be the last time he feels it—feels her—for as long as he lives.

“Heliora,” he pants between frenzied kisses, “I—”

“—Damn it,” he slurs through a mouth that barely moves, “Need to—”

A splitting ache tears through his head before the thought concludes. Heinrix recoils, clutching his own temples, fingers winding in his own hair, pulling tight as his hands clench to fists. A dull whine barely reaches his ears through the ringing that overtakes his hearing—no, not a whine.

His own agonized cry.

Everything—everything—darkens as swiftly as the air leaves his lungs. Heinrix gasps for breath, blinks frantically. It must be blindness, sudden blindness, wrought by the warp—

—he can’t crack open his eyes.

Can hardly twitch a finger.

Something’s in his blood, slowing him. One of the needles buried in him is—

“—Here,” Heliora pleads, suddenly an inch from his face, shrouded in this impermeable void along with everything else. “I know it hurts, but I’m here.”

“No, I—” Heinrix chokes on the next word, and tries three times to gather enough breath to try again. “The—light is gone.”

“It’s been a long day—”

“No,” he fires back, suddenly a growl. Scrambling back, he pushes up off their cot, staggering to an uneasy stand with only the glow of distant lumens far past the window to guide him. “I need the light. I—I need to see you.”

A lumen. That’s what he needs. A light source—

—a source of this damned toxin—

—because the world’s gone dark, his heart is racing, and he’s terrified he knows what this is.

He’s only seen it once, and from a distance.

But he will never forget the echoes of a Daemon World ringing out across an entire system as billions of souls begged in unison for relief.

If that becomes Rykad Minoris—if that takes him, takes—

Heliora makes to grab his wrist as he stumbles away from their bed. “Heinrix. Listen to me: you’re seeing things. You need to relax—you’re scaring me.”

He whirls, wrenching his arm back, and her grasp slips down the length of his hand.

“I said no!” Another shuddering rush of cold takes him. His whole body spasms. He’s aware of his volume, but only dimly—only a delayed twinge of mortification when his own voice rings against the cloistered walls. Strangling a shout down to a pained mutter, he furthers, “We don’t make it out of here—not if we don’t leave. Now.”

But how? How, when the von Valancius ship is already weeks late in arriving? How, when their contacts are all so impossibly far away, no doubt swallowed in the calamity rising outside?

Why would Heliora fight against the idea, either way? Why—

—damn it all, why can’t he hold a thought long enough to—

Heinrix swears under his breath and fumbles through the dark, trying to find his trousers. The second he catches their fabric, they’re on in a blink—this isn’t the first time he’s had to make a quick break from the forces of Chaos.

Only he’s never broken away from an entire world—

Heliora catches at his arms before he can shrug on his coat. “Heinrix. Please.”

“You don’t understand. This isn’t how this night ends, I—”

He what?

How could he possibly know?

“Please. Listen to yourself. Your senses are lying to you. Just look at me—just me.”

His head’s shaking before the words are out of her. He swallows thickly, pulling back—again, again. “I know I’m right. I don’t know how. I only—”

Something stutters under his sternum—

—he will raise his blood to boiling if he has to. Anything to stop this before—

—Heinrix falters, voice on the edge of breaking.

“I only know I don’t stop thinking about you after tonight. After this. Not once.”

He steps back, no matter how she reaches for him—

—he jerks his arms toward his middle.

Something has to give. If he can just remember how, every time he’s been lost like this—

He meets Heliora’s eyes with a plea, backpedaling toward the lone window. “Don’t. Give me a moment—trust me a moment.”

But she doesn’t. She fights to close the gap between them—

—Heinrix pulls his limbs tighter toward his core—

—but he retrieves his data-slate before she can seize him again.

Every lumen on Rykad Minoris goes dark at once, the whole world now lit only by the first distant flames beginning to consume it. He can only feel for the switch he needs—

—he can feel the curl of his own fists now—

—and turn the sudden light toward the only glass that will reflect it.

And in so doing, show him the brutalized beast he is outside this dream.

A broken husk, his features beaten almost beyond recognition. The sight causes his pain to bloom in full—all over his face, through his head, through every inch of a body that is probably lashed and fractured where he can’t see.

Heinrix plunges into the feel of it, though: the pain, the cold, the fear.

He squeezes his eyes shut—

—and awakes with a cry.

He blinks, realizing with muted horror that only one eyelid can open at all. The other, mercifully, is still there—the last natural eye he has left—thank the Throne.

His vision is a blur of muted colour. Focusing it is a lengthy battle, but not one he’s prepared to lose. While he fights to see, he can deduce his circumstances in other ways.

Pain pricked up and down his arms tells him that a half dozen tubes connect his arms to what is probably a series of contraptions behind him. An intravenous device has stretched a vein in his throat, however minutely, as well as at least one in his hand and another on his brow.

That’s where he’s coldest: everywhere the needles puncture his skin. That’s where the cold he couldn’t shake in the vision came from: his sorcery, fighting the toxins while he was not awake to command it. A body’s instincts, pulling on the warp of their own accord, desperate for survival.

Something still chains his ankles, but the bonds on his wrists have broken in his unconscious struggle. A small mercy: one he can’t afford to waste.

He can’t wait for perfect vision to act. Not again. Writhing, Heinrix acts quickly enough to tear the wires and tubes from his flesh, even when their exit leaves him bleeding.

He can see enough to know he isn’t where he last woke. There is no long hall with a cogitator at its end. This room is smaller, tanks like his packed closer together but left empty. A new place—a new plan—and likely more bodies on the way, and more Drukhari to bring them here.

He can’t let himself stay idle, trapped, ‘til then.

Bringing a fist against the wall of the tank, he bites back a cry and keeps himself distant from the pain of the impact of bone against reinforced glass. He brings the other down next, then the first, again and again in alternating blows, muscles suffusing with sorcerous cold, until a crack splits across the clear, curved surface. He keeps going even when his knuckles crunch under the force of his own blows, and doesn’t relent until shards have lanced up his arms, until the tank shatters apart all down its front, until the jagged edges slice him all over as he pushes through to freedom, spilling out with the viscous fluid and falling into a heap on the floor.

Both ankles have dislocated, his feet held back by manacles while the rest of his body fell away from the shackles. With a wrenching motion and a wave of nausea he keeps suppressed, Heinrix forces both feet through the metal with a snap of cold, then resets his joints while his clenched teeth split the skin of his bottom lip. Frost fans over his skin everywhere the liquid touched.

It doesn’t matter.

Heinrix rises at last: bleeding and frozen, barefoot and lost—but free.

And never more determined to run for his life.

Because he knows, with grim certainty, it isn’t only his life he’s running to save.

#another delicious au dreamscape? heck yeah!! 🥳#fic rec #rogue trader #other people's writing

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