nighthaunting:

Contrary to what some of his brothers might have said about him, Roboute Guilliman wasn’t born starched and gilded, and he had never preferred to go about his days draped in the more egregious trappings of his office.

The thought of any of his brother Primarchs brought such a sharp and sudden wave of longing and misguided homesickness it was difficult for Roboute to stomach. He had survived the wretchedness and strangling, encroaching darkness of Horus’ heresy (even as he hesitated to use the word, knowing the connotations most often derived from it, Roboute struggled to find a similar word that conveyed the strength of the starkness of Horus’ turn against the ideals of the Imperium they all had labored to build) only to watch those who’d survived drift slowly away to their own private battles and ends; but even still, it had been a larger galaxy then, he had not been what he is now, and he had not been alone.

Now, Primarch Roboute Guilliman is a demi-god reborn; sitting through what seems like endless, painstaking briefings while average citizens and astartes both scrabble for the barest glimpse of him, and he pieces together how exactly the foundations for a secured future for the Imperium he’d laid down after the Emperor’s death had been so badly mangled by time. He has kept his peace, for the most part, and endured the prodding of the Magos and the rapturous sermonizing of the Ecclesiarchs, and certainly not mentioned in very strong words that the Imperial Truth laid down by the Emperor had been the very antithesis of all of this. It is another thing that makes him miss his brothers, at least some few of them. Sanguinius, who always seemed so near the divine; the Lion, who would have taken all of this merely in stride and allowed himself to be trotted out, an inscrutable idol if it would serve his ends; Russ, who Roboute had longed for so dearly when he’d been making the choices that brought the Imperium Secundus to fruition, and whose presence would be perhaps most comforting for its canniness.

In the late evening, after finally having convinced the multitudes of attendants and courtiers and scribes and mummers and politicians and sycophants and religious devotees that he well and truly wishes for solitude, Roboute changes into a plain duty robe and escapes rather gracelessly over the balcony railing.

Unlike some other Primarchs, Roboute has always fallen rather in-line with the physical disposition of his genesons; the proportions of the average astartes frame. Without the gilt armour and honor guard and endless train of people who insisted on dogging his steps, he passes for an Ultramarine. It is some small comfort that this is still true, and Roboute knows, from a lifetime in the company, acquaintance, and business of soldiery, that even on the grounds of the Fortress of Hera there is some secret place where some industrious soul is brewing and sharing the same mouth-numbingly awful rotgut that must have accompanied the Emperor himself across the stars.

The small comforts are all that Roboute can find for himself, at the moment, and so he sets out to find which cellar or barrack or locker his sons gather around at their most casual–at their most Thiel-like, he tries not to think to himself, wistfully–and listen to their gossip with a keen ear for everything he isn’t being told in his ivory tower of divinity.