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The Atreides boy fights well.
Feyd tells him so, though he cannot hear his own voice on his tongue. He cannot feel the emperor’s blade as it is wrenched from his body. He only begins to fall.
there is nothing he is nothing on and on and on until
Darkness. A cave, faintly lit by distant glowglobes. Water. His naked body, floating in too much water for Arrakis, but this is Arrakis. That he knows. The pulse of spice is all around him.
A blur appears in his peripheral vision, slowly divides, slowly resolves. Two women. The first he knows on sight: the small stature and pinched brow of the emperor’s daughter. The other is known by instinct, by the revulsion that sparks in his bones.
“Witch!” he chokes, recoiling, as blood bubbles up from his lungs. His chest throbs in agony. His immortal death-wound, now living, stripped of its honor. Only a devil woman could wake a man from his eternal sleep. Only the Atreides whore.
“Don’t struggle,” the princess tells him, after he tears his arm from her grip. “You’re very weak.”
Weak he may be, but he has strength enough to drown them both, to wring their fine white necks in his hands, to spit at the witch’s freckled, tattooed face. His best attempt only wets his chin. He coughs. There’s a taste in his mouth that lingers, metallic and faintly sweet.
The witch takes no notice of him as she stabs a needle through his living death-wound. Blood seeps out from under her hands, staining his chest like wet ink.
Like blue ink.
Abomination, the emperor’s truthsayer had groaned, her voice shaking with fear. He hadn’t cared what she meant, then.
He swallows past the taste in his throat. “What have you done to me, woman?”
“What was deemed necessary.” She is silent while she finishes her work, tying off threads, spreading a stinging poultice over his wound. “Paul’s sister is unusually gifted. She has slipped between the boulders that bind her ancestors in search of a new path. If Paul is to live, then you must live as well. Alia knows the way.”
She stares down at him with an unsettling expression, too old for her still-unlined face. “You know it, too.”
It comes to him in flashes.
Dirty trenches in battlefields on planets he can’t name. Days of killing, of flaming pyres piled to the sky. He fights shoulder-to-shoulder with Paul, ringed by desert warriors, their eyes all blue-on-blue. The blue-on-blue of Paul’s eyes. The blue-on-blue of his own.
Blood in the air. A crowded tent. His hands bandage Paul’s hurts. He crouches at Paul’s feet, removing armor. Inspecting weaponry. When they eat, Paul’s extra rations find their way into his bowl. He does not refuse them.
The council meet. Arrakis. A growing sense of unease. He stands on guard, his back to Paul’s front, twin kindjals salivating in his grip. It is not the Fremen way. He does not care. Those who would strike at them will kneel, or they will die.
A low, luxurious stretch of a bed. His front to Paul’s back. Sometimes the princess joins them, or the desert pet, others, both. The permutations branch out without limit, but always, always there is Paul. Paul’s mouth, Paul’s hands, his wiry limbs, his deceptive strength.
A blade flashing in the night.
His life for Paul’s. Would he give his life for Paul’s?
“Yes,” he whispers, and Paul’s bitch-mother smiles.
“Now you understand. Soon he will, too. Irulan.” She nods, and the princess lifts a bowl scented with incense and herbs, traces patterns on his face in warm oil. “Sleep, Feyd-Rautha,” the Atreides witch commands, and he finds that he cannot resist.
there is nothing he is nothing on and on and on until
“Paul,” he breathes. The only word that exists. A man approaches in the dark.
Feyd opens his eyes.