another of my Errant Valour stories (first, second). this is a prequel and takes place when brekt was around

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Warhammer 40k original characters: Fireteam Errant Valour, a unit of the Imperial Guard roughly equivalent to a squad of Army Rangers.
Warnings: character death

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Xanon was of House Vulpin in a village named Balneum: a place of sulfur-smelling springs, in the southern fringe of the hill-country. He had the fair hair and pale eyes of a southerner, but spoke with an accent soft and burred like a northerner's. He was an emotional man, given to poetry, and he took leavings hard. When they went skyborne he wept silently and unashamed. The true southerners - there were none in the unit Annie'd been given sergeantry of, but plenty surrounded them in the hold - looked down their long thin noses at him; the northerners closed ranks around him defensively. Southerners, they muttered amongst themselves, held themselves too close and high: not that they would shed tears in public, personally, for that sort of display was a private thing, done at the hearth, but to look at the southerners you would think a man couldn't have any feelings at all. Annie offered his arms to Xanon - then still a slight-built little thing, 15 years behind him, like the rest of them - and let the young man's tears salt his shoulder until his weather cleared.

They all shared their tears after battles, and Xanon's gift of words brought songs for fallen comrades: thus did they speak farewell to their friends' spirits, to keep them from feeling lost and alone when they died on those strange foreign worlds.

Xanon's sorrowing at leavings returned when they left their temporary home, where he had found a woman he called wife, and she had given him a child he'd named Xia. All of the men who wanted women had found them there, and for few was it an easy leaving, but again it was Xanon whose tears fell in plain air. Annie opened his arms again - this time taking into them a larger man, for Xanon had grown broader and heavier though not much taller with the years - and thought of his own woman, Carli, and the swelling beneath her shirt when they spoke their private farewell.

There were plenty of southerners in the centuria by then, but they had all become brothers, and one man's emotion gave pause to none. Annie's far-northern accent was as familiar and homelike as the crisp, sharp-voweled enunciation of the deep south spoken by some of the men: they were all Fimimundan; and skyborne, their home was in each other.

Of the southerners who became Annie's nephews, noteworthy was Simon, of House Iagus in Aquine, a great city. He'd found he had a natural talent for speaking to the spirits of machines, adjusting to their acquaintance and use long before any of his comrades. By now all were accustomed to it, and could laugh speaking of their early days of puzzlement at every new thing: and think what our mothers, our fathers, our sisters would say if they came to these ships, then! But Simon had known the machine spirits longest and learned to know them best, and had even spoken in friendship with the strange men or once-men who made themselves priests of those spirits. It was to Simon you went with a recalcitrant rifle, or a question of working some new machine. Annie had less talent than he, but he enjoyed the company of the machine spirits, and they two could speak of them together. Simon would have liked life on Nadys-21; to make the acquaintance of the servo-skulls would have pleased him immensely. Annie would have a great deal to tell of, if they could speak again.