Chapter Text
When the crysknife sinks into his cousin’s flesh, it doesn’t chip, nor shatter. Warm blood rushes onto Paul’s fingers, still clenched around the hilt, and he looks to the thick red coating his hand, thinking of all things, Thank you for your water.
Feyd-Rautha leans into the blade, mouth stretched into a perverse grin, like he knows a secret, like Paul hasn’t seen this moment play out in his head over and over.
Paul shoves him off, a tinge of alarm under the Bene Gesserit mantra, and his cousin folds into himself, crumbling to the ground.
The room has congealed in time. Paul breathes in, out. The body on the floor stays motionless.
As he kneels to retrieve the crys, his own water gushing out of his side in bursts, Feyd-Rautha groans and rolls on his side.
Paul stills, hand hanging in the air halfway to the knife. In his dreams, his cousin died in this room, disturbing grin frozen on his pale face. He should have known, Harkonnens are hard to kill.
His milky white hand moves blindly in search of his knife, but it is still buried in Paul’s side.
“Finish it,” his cousin rasps. “You coward.”
He is not even done speaking before his head collapses to the floor again, and he passes out.
A thousand possible outcomes unravel in front of Paul, what he does and what he does not, infinite lines tracing back to this moment.
He blinks, eyes too dry from staring, unseeing. Gritting his teeth against the pain under his ribs, he steps over the body and dethrones the emperor.
Later, when the chaos has died down to an ominous simmer, he orders Gurney to hide Feyd-Rautha away. Not in the nice guest apartments, where his bride-to-be sulks her days away, but a dungeon cell with a sink and a bucket, and a host of Fremen at the door.
Paul never visits. He almost forgets he’s there.
***
A smirk on a pale face. Arrakis’s ruthless sun flares in spice-blue eyes. A carved blade glints before painting an arc over his head.
‘May thy knife chip and shatter.’
He startles awake, searching the sheets for Chani. Even after weeks, his back hasn’t gotten used to sleeping on the even, spongy surface of a mattress, and the soft silk pillowcase scratches at his skin. He longs for the communal sleep of the sietch, for the light filtering through the tent roof etching diamonds on brown skin.
But emperors sleep alone.
***
After the report for the day is done, and the war council adjourns, his close men linger behind.
“The prisoner calls for you, Muad’Dib,” Stilgar says, amused, and Paul doesn’t need to ask who he means.
Gurney runs a finger over the 3D map, rolling the planet on its axis. His eyes don’t meet Paul’s. He doesn’t approve of keeping any Harkonnen alive. “Yells, more like. It unsettles the guards.”
“Get new ones,” replies Paul vaguely, too busy following the strands of possible futures where the Guild stops sending cutthroats after his family, where the Landsraad accepts him as emperor.
Stilgar watches the exchange, wise smile pasted on his lined, burned face.
Gurney scoffs. “I already did, twice this week. That ugly son of a bitch has a silver tongue. We can’t keep him there forever, he’ll break out, or bribe someone into freeing him.”
Paul shakes curls from his eyes. There is really not much time in the day for a haircut, in between assassination plots and intergalactic trade. “Where would you put him?”
“No need keeping him around,” says Gurney. “He has no one to ransom him to, and even he did, I wouldn’t release him. Once you free the sick fuck, he’ll come for your throat first, and mine right after that.”
Stilgar cleans his nails with the point of his knife. “I could lead him to paradise.”
Paul finally raises his head. “You would have me kill my blood.”
“With all due respect,” Gurney says with the air of someone who is about to be disrespectful. “You found out you were related six months ago. And you had no problem killing the Baron, not that you didn’t do the universe a favor. I say we execute him.”
Paul smiles faintly. It feels foreign on his face, pulling at unused muscles. “Maybe I’m a magnanimous ruler.”
Gurney looks to Stilgar, then to the heavens, but he lets it go.
***
‘You have to mean it.’ Deep voice and soft pale lips forming the angry words. ‘You don’t fucking mean it.’
Blade slipping in his sweaty palm. Heavy breaths.
‘I mean it.’
“Muad’Dib.”
Paul’s eyes slid open, blinking slowly like a cat against the afternoon light. “Yes?”
A young Fremen he doesn’t recognize stands by the door, frozen in a bow. He tries to remember her name, but every day he meets a thousand new faces, all tinted with the same devotion.
“I’m sorry to bother you. It’s the white snake.” That’s what the Fremen have taken to call his cousin. “He demands to see you.”
There is sand on her shawls, and Paul rubs his fingertips together, feeling invisible grains on his hands. He hasn’t buried his palm in the dunes of Arrakis for weeks.
He raises an eyebrow. “Last I recalled, he wasn’t really in the position to make demands.”
“He has a hostage.”
***
“He attacked the guard who brought his meal.” The girl rushes behind him as Paul strides down the hall, guided by the blue light coming from narrow slits in the wall. “He says he will kill him if you don’t come.”
Paul nods, following the maze of thinning passages to the dungeons. As he nears the cells, clamoring voices lead him to his cousin’s. The crowd falls silent at his command, and they part around him, letting him see into the room.
Feyd-Rautha holds a Fremen guard by the neck, pointing a crysknife at his throat. He nods in Paul’s direction, smirking. “Nice of you to join us, cousin.”
Paul stays by the door, studying the room. There is no cot, just a thin bedroll on the ground, and he almost envies his cousin. It looks more comfortable than the foot-thick goose feather mattress he can’t fall asleep on.
He thought the cell would be smaller, darker, but there is enough space for ten men, and the high ceiling is split open by a large skylight, probably to torment prisoners with the cruel midday sun. Light pours like a waterfall onto the ground below, illuminating a square of dirt where his cousin stands, crushing the Fremen guard against his bare chest.
“Well?” Feyd-Rautha’s voice drags out of his throat, bouncing around the stone walls. “Aren’t you going to ask me what I want?”
Paul’s head started aching three days ago, and it still hasn’t stopped. He is way too tired for this, but he needs to focus for the Voice to work.
“Let him go.”
The command booms across the room, and a new spark of pain ignites at the back of Paul’s brain.
A thin veil falls over Feyd-Rautha’s eyes, before he shakes it off with a cruel laugh, digging the blade deeper into the guard’s neck. A sliver of blood pours from the wound, and Paul thinks of waste.
“Will you ask me now?”
Paul isn’t surprised. His command was weak, and it is not uncommon for heirs of the noble houses to be trained by Bene Gesserit to resist the Voice. He still has to keep frustration from showing on his face.
“I don’t care.” He shrugs, and the gesture enrages his cousin.
Before he can slit the guard’s throat, Paul’s fingers find the crys at his belt, and he aims it at Feyd-Rautha, already knowing it won’t land true. His cousin releases the guard and dives to the side, and Paul is on him before the knife sticks into the wall behind them, his second blade trained at Feyd-Rautha’s unblinking eye.
The guard scurries to the side, out of their way. Beneath him, his cousin is unnaturally still, watching him with half-closed eyes.
Paul adjusts his foot on the hand holding the blade that wants to kill him, pressing the white wrist into the ground. “Are you done?”
His cousin works his jaw, his mouth a dark, gaping maw. “Finish what you started.”
“No.”
With a foot to Paul’s chest, Feyd-Rautha flips them, and Paul scurries away before he finds himself trapped between the floor and a knife. He is quick as a sand mouse, but his cousin is taller, stronger, and a fist hits his left side while the blade nicks at his right one, leaving him breathless.
He hits his cousin’s stomach in retaliation, aiming for the wound he gave him weeks ago. Feyd-Rautha grunts and rolls his shoulder back to punch. Paul lifts his arms and blocks two swings aimed at his face, bones ringing with the impact, and somersaults out of the way of a third.
In their first duel, the stakes were too high for Paul to think of anything else, but this is entertaining. What does it say about him, that it’s the most fun he’s had since riding Shai-Hulud for the first time?
Feyd-Rautha charges him, and Paul swings out of the way, kicking at his wrist to make him drop the blade, failing. He watches the knife coming for him in slow-motion, and it is intoxicating, the way he hasn’t seen any of this, he can’t predict or command his way out of this one.
Before the blade kisses his skin, his cousin crumbles to the ground. His white fingers close around the knife buried in his shoulder, and Paul looks down, confused, before realizing his own crys is still in his hand.
“What the hell is going on?”
Paul flinches at Gurney’s furious tone, but his eyes don’t leave Feyd-Rautha, coiled on the floor like a sand snake ready to attack.
When Gurney steps into his field of vision, along with a dozen of his men, his face is furrowed in a scolding frown; Paul hasn’t seen it since he was a child on Caladan, fumbling around with daggers longer than his arm in the training room.
“It’s fine.” Paul says as Gurney kicks the knife away from Feyd-Rautha. He’s out of breath, and blood coats his lips. When he swallows, it doesn’t taste as salty as it did when he lived in the desert.
Guards pour into the room, approaching his cousin from all sides. He fakes taking a bite out of one of them, making them jump. Paul would laugh if Gurney wasn’t beside him, watching like a hawk until Feyd-Rautha is tied by both wrists to the iron rings on the wall.
Then he turns his furious gaze on Paul, who meets his eyes with a shrug. Harkonnens, am I right?
“Are you out of your mind?” Gurney explodes before looking around the crowded cell, remembering himself.
“Calm down, old man.” Paul wipes blood from his chin, then turns to the room at large. “All of you, leave.”
His Fremen guards and Gurney’s men are quick to obey. Gurney crosses his arms to his chest, looking between Paul and the man hanging by the wrists in the darkest corner of the room.
“You too, Gurney,” Paul says softly, and this time the order is too direct to ignore.
“Don’t get reckless on me, pup,” Gurney grunts before leaving the cell. “This one’s trouble.”
Paul listens to the light steps fading down the hallway. Then he waits some more, pacing the cell without getting in kicking range of his cousin. His headache faded to a dull buzz during the fight, but it’s quickly coming back, lighting sparkles of pain behind his eyes.
“You won’t let him kill me.” His cousin tilts his head to the side.
Paul can see the strain in his biceps from holding himself up by the wrists, the rivulet of blood dripping from his shoulder down his smooth chest, impossibly red against white skin. He doesn’t look pained at all. Paul wonders if they have trained that out of him, too, until only anger and cruelty remain.
He comes to a stop in front of him, and he notices with a twinge of annoyance that he has to look up to meet his cousin’s eyes.
Feyd-Rautha licks his lips. “Soon you will have to untie me. In a week, in a month, it doesn’t matter.” His neck strains to get closer to Paul. “You see it in your pretty little head. I will slaughter every one of your dirty rats until you finish what you started.”
“Not very grateful, are you?” Paul quips, subtly shifting back. He wouldn’t put it past his cousin to headbutt him. “I’m doing the honorable thing and keeping you alive.”
“You know nothing of honor, Atreides. You are a false emperor, on top of a false messiah. The throne has not been won, not until one of us dies.”
Paul snorts, letting his eyes fall shut. The headache is getting unbearable. “You can try all you want. I won’t fight you again.”
“Are you afraid I’ll win, little mouse?”
Paul’s eyes snap open at the pet name. “I already won.” It comes out childish, like he’s trying to reassure himself.
Feyd-Rautha seems to know it too, because his smirk stretches wider, inhuman.
“Are you sure?” He says with gravel in his low voice. “Do you fear you’ll like it?”
Paul steps back, disturbed. Feyd-Rautha’s vicious laugh follows him out of the dungeons.