Space Marines Can Have A Little Kisses - Tumblr Posts

"I did it!" Brighid cried, breathless as she presented a horned, porcelain seashell painted with stripes of mauve and deepest pink. After seeing the pearls Argus had idly gathered from the seabed to occupy himself, Brighid had made up her mind to bring an ocean trinket of her own to the surface.

She had marched into the surf, only to realize--in her peculiar way--that she no longer possessed the watertight circuitry and plasteel certainty of a service android. She had let out an involuntary yelp the instant the water was deep enough for her feet to leave the sandy floor and her corporeal instincts urged her to swim. Argus had watched her eyes go wide as shock turned to panic, and panic turned to gridlock. The waves knocked her off balance and she floundered, sputtering and gasping like...well...a human woman who had spent the last 40,000 years in the body of a machine.

Argus was there in seconds, grasping her beneath the arms and lifting her head above the water in one effortless motion.

She gasped for a moment, clinging to his massive hands like a wet sheet, before she collected herself.

"I'm fine," she had said, scraping chunks of curly red hair away from her eyes. "I just have to try again."

Argus remained silent as, over the next hour, she reacquainted herself with the water.

"I want to try diving," she declared, looking up towards where Argus stood in the surf a few feet away. "Will you show me?"

"This isn't the best location," Argus replied slowly.

"Where did you find those pearls?" she gestured with her head to the tiny pile on the beach behind.

"There's a small reef by those stones," said the Space Marine. "Can you swim that far?"

Brighid squinted at a ridge of mossy grey rock nearly 500 feet away, the bridge of her nose crinkling in consideration.

"I think so," she declared, planting her hands on her hips.

Argus pursed his lips incredulously, warping the scars at the corner of his mouth.

"I will be close by," he said, knowing that she would attempt the feat no matter what his opinion on the matter was.

"I know," she said, grinning, and held out her hand.

Sparkling beads of seawater fell from her pale fingertips like drops of starlight, and as Argus reached out, he suddenly found himself following the curve of her arm to her freckled shoulder. The beginning stages of a sunburn was beginning to pinken her arms, back and cheeks. His stare lingered, taking in the way that the water and the sunlight turned the ripples of her hair into spun copper, like sheets of fine chainmail set alight. Her eyes, creased in a smile, were cut from the ocean itself and set into the alabaster mask of her face the way a silversmith would present a masterpiece.

The sleeveless white tank she wore clung to her skin, and Argus found himself transfixed by every delicate curve made by her body. She had always looked like a doll to him--something fragile that he needed to protect lest she shatter on a stone floor Argus hadn't been aware of.

Now, she appeared as something softer than that, something more like a snowflake or the new petals of a rose. A soap bubble cast in the shape of a woman, the whisper of daylight on linen sheets.

Suddenly, the gap between subspecies had never seemed wider, and Argus felt every bit like the brutal, ugly, rough creature that he was made to be.

-O-

More 40kRenegade content, featuring Argus and Brighid, an OC by @icantbelieveitsnotwormstm and I cannot stop drawing these two morons they don't even know they're in love