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sebastianswallows · 2 months ago

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The Little Death — 20. A universe of chaos

— PAIRING: Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen x Bene Gesserit!Reader

— SYNOPSIS: A Bene Gesserit gets left behind in the Arrakeen palace. When Feyd becomes the Planetary Governor, he finds her there in hiding. The Harkonnens don't traditionally keep them as truthsayers or concubines like other Houses do, but Feyd might have a use for her. After all, he's never had a Bene Gesserit of his own before.

— WARNINGS: angst, violence

— WORDCOUNT: 1.2k

— A/N: Here we are 😭 The final chapter. This is really just a brief epilogue and won't be very long. The conclusion to a rather angsty story. Thank you for sticking with me all this way, my dears! You've been very patient and sweet. Thank you also for your likes and reblogs 🫂 I don't know when the next time I'll write a fic will be, or for what fandom, as I want to focus on other things for now, but it was great to share this story and the others will all of you 🥹🩷✨

— TAGLIST: @elf-punk @lowlyloved @pomtherine @slytherins-heir @babyofneptune @localravenclaw @missbingu @wo-ming-bai @torossosebs @mrsjobarnes

The search for an ultimate, unifying explanation for all things is a fruitless endeavor, a step in the wrong direction. This is why, in a universe of chaos, we must constantly adapt. — Bene Gesserit Azhar Book

She saw no bright, blinding lights, nor felt the weightlessness her body yearned for — even after everything that happened, and the sense of escape that came with drifting away from it all. Instead, there was only dead weight and darkness. Arrakis was a distant memory. So was Wallach IX. And as the adrenaline slowly drained from her body, she realised she had perhaps never truly cared about these things. Yes, she’d been terrified — when first dropped into the care of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood, when abandoned on Dune, and at many points between and since — and there was only so much the litany against fear could do. But now that it was all behind her, growing distant, those fears seemed almost silly.

Her scheme with Feyd, born of spice-laced nights and looming danger, had always clung to a narrow, shifting path to victory.

But his uncle had been more of a terror than she could predict. Furious about the loss of spice and that of soldiers, angry with Feyd for the gamble over the North Pole of Arrakis, and humiliated by his failures, he had arrived wanting blood. Like the fat black leech he was, he sank his teeth into Feyd almost as soon as he arrived and all those years of progress — of Feyd ingratiating himself in his uncle’s good favours, or earning his trust, of seeming valuable — evaporated. She could still remember the way the halls sounded that night, after he had left her to go meet with his uncle — the silence. There wasn’t any calm to it, but terror, as if all the soldiers knew, and the slaves, and the mentats sequestered in their small square rooms. She could feel it too, high up in a lonely tower, far from all of them. All that was left was to wait for life, or death.

And now, floating up in silence, through the dark, leaving everything behind made all those efforts worth it.

The Guild Navigators hovered above while they landed, a smaller vessel carrying them down. The winds beat against the windows with fragmentary shards of stone and ice gliding off like claws. After the vast emptiness of space, this pale and violent sight seemed welcoming. At least it was something. At least it was life. She held Feyd’s hand as the gravitational pull shook their cabin.

The Baron had screamed and vented his frustration until he was out of breath, and then Feyd asked him for a private audience, away from the mentats, away from the guards, just to explain himself, as meekly as he could. His uncle obliged. He loved little more than private moments with his nephew, especially when he was in a supplicating mood. There hadn’t been many of those in recent years, since Feyd had grown up and gotten angry. And all Feyd had to go was get close, and act remorseful, be the frightened boy his uncle used to love. And while Baron Harkonnen ranted on about the importance of supply chains, his meaty hand around his nephew’s tense and sweaty cheek, Feyd slid his smallest knife out of the holster at his wrist and slid it slowly through the shield around his uncle’s body and stuck it right between his ribs. The tip of it, through all that fat, could barely reach the heart, but it reached it enough to shock the old bastard, to cause a stutter in his breath as all the air was pressed out of his lungs. And then Feyd pounced on him and covered his bleeding mouth to muffle the screaming, and stabbed him once again with enough strength to pierce through his breastplate.

He left the Baron floating face-up, his swollen feet dangling, blood dripping to a little pool beneath the swaying black veils of his robe.

None of the soldiers protested. None of the mentats cared. And the Navigator’s Guild gladly took several silos of spice in payment to transport him and a small host of servants off the planet — not back to Giedi Prime, but Lankiveil. She was counted among his servants, of course, as his loyal Bene Gesserit, but unlike the rest, she travelled alongside him, in the same windowless room as they hovered up in space, their position at once still yet moving through the portal of a wormhole. She tumbed the dry blood of his armour, and held his hand through the shakes, and kept him warm when the vastness of space threatened to take it all away.

By the time they arrived on his ancestral homeland, the Empire was in uproar. Arrakis had been given to his care after all, and in defiance of an Imperial mandate he had abandoned it. Moreover, he’d committed murder. But before there could be an investigation, let alone a trial, the fremen took advantage of the lack of leadership to slaughter the remaining Harkonnen troops and ransack the Arrakeen palace, and whatever evidence there might have been of Feyd’s wrongdoings was washed away by dust and trampeled underneath their feet. With the intervention of the Navigator’s Guild, Feyd could plead his military blunders were done by the order of his warmongering uncle, and he ceded the planet, more or less intact, back to the Padishah Emperor. It was a worthless formality, of course. It took the Sardaukar to restore order to the planet anyway. As for Giedi Prime, he offered that up as well, and all of its reserves of spice, as compensation for the trouble.

And that was the price it took for him to earn his peace, together with his Bene Gesserit.

“Two planets is rather steep,” she mentioned a week into their stay on Lankiveil, once they had become acclimatised enough to the cold weather to step outside without feeling dizzy, or breathless, or stiff.

“Two planets for a lifetime’s freedom… It could’ve been far worse,” he said, grinning from behind the grey fur collar. “In any case, Dune is someone else’s problem now.”

“The Fremen will never be stopped,” she frowned, gazing in the distance at ships sailing in from the fog on the horizon. “Not unless they’re chased into their hideouts in the south.”

“Then I suppose we’ll have a new Emperor someday,” he shrugged. And then he wrapped his arms around her, his grip tight around the fluff of her warm clothes, tight enough to feel the shape of her beneath. “I have all I want right here.”

She turned in his arms, and he parted his coat to embrace her, the both of them swaddled in a soft cocoon of whale fur as they watched the ships sail in.

“You will miss it some day,” she said, but not without a tender smile. “Ruling over the most important planet in the universe.”

“Maybe,” said Feyd. “And then you can remind me why that’s foolish.”

He leaned down to kiss her, and she kissed him back, and in spite of the vicious cold winds and the rain and the frozen thunder, a warmth unlike any on Arrakis held them, reaching from within.

#Feyd #Feyd Rautha Harkonnen #Feyd Rautha #Dune #Dune part 2 #Dune fanfiction #Dune imagine #Feyd Rautha x reader #Feyd x reader #Feyd Rautha fanfic #Feyd Rautha imagine #sswallow;fanfics #sswallow;made a thing #fanfic;littledeath

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sebastianswallows · 2 months ago

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The Little Death — 19. Brutality and love

— PAIRING: Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen x Bene Gesserit!Reader

— WARNINGS: angst, smut

— WORDCOUNT: 2.4k

— A/N: Hello again, darlings. As promised, the next chapter is coming right up. The last one will be much shorter, just an epilogue. So close to the finish line! 🩷

— TAGLIST: @elf-punk @lowlyloved @pomtherine @slytherins-heir @babyofneptune @localravenclaw @missbingu @wo-ming-bai @torossosebs @mrsjobarnes

Brutality breeds brutality. Love breeds love. — Lady Anirul Corrino

He thought he would miss that delicate skin of hers. The places where it would be soft even when dry from the Arrakis heat, and the places where it would grow damp, too… The curve of her lips, the strange exciting feeling of her hair, her otherworldly scent, so alive and so organic, no hint of petrolleum in it… He could still feel her in his arms when he faced his troops that evening. They were out in the desert, in the shade of a cliff, stillsuits clinging to their bodies.

His troops had failed, of course. Just as he knew they would. Just as she planned. They wasted the whole of three days exploring empty sietches only to be ambushed and struck from behind by a small battalion of fremen. Half of their equipment blew up, the other half scrambled back to Arrakeen, and the bulk of his men were left out in the desert to be picked off like vermin. Feyd took his time in sending reinforcements, and he went out with them. The surviving officers cowered, but were executed all the same, once he was done neutralising the remaining fremen with a rain of artillery.

He wasn’t in the mood to set them on fire. He’d had enough of that already, even though as night fell on Arrakis the temperatures dropped. No, he preferred to cut their heads off, their and the surviving fremen too. The sand looked strange as it absorbed their blood… Crackling as the blood solidified around it, clumping together like fruit. It was probably the most liquid this sand had ever felt upon it.

He didn’t go to see her that night, or any of the nights across the month that followed. He’d see her in the corridor occasionally, or feel her presence just as he’d turn a corner. He kept up his spice consumption, and hers as well, and as they did so they discovered they didn’t need to be in the same room to experience each other. When she was happy, when she saw sad, Feyd felt it like a current on the air, and when he’d call his generals to give them another dressing down about their appalling performance in the desert, he knew she was sitting just outside, tasting the vibrations from his voice, the shivers of his soldiers, the echoes of his thoughts.

She wasn’t pleased, he knew, that he was getting more and more of his men killed. She wasn’t saddened either — they were Harkonnens after all, and weren’t used to giving or receiving mercy — but above all, she knew that it was necessary. Spice production faltered, fremen attacks increased, and however many times the Navigator’s Guild asked for a meeting, so many times were they rejected. It got to the point where they escalated the matter to his uncle.

That was when he felt a shiver up and down his spine, the sharp taste of her fear in the night, cloistered in a small dark room among the upper levels. Or perhaps it was his own fear, spilling out like vomit. When he hadn’t had to face the prospect of seeing his uncle for many years, the thought seemed bearable. Now that it was fast becoming an inevitability, he wasn’t sure how he was going to handle it. What a mad thought… To drive things so far into the earth that he would force the Baron to come there. In truth, it had been very difficult to get to that point. Feyd wondered how Rabban had managed it.

It took weeks — a few more devoured spice harvesters and an explosion at a cluster of silos — for his uncle to announce a visit. By then, Feyd was ready to cancel the whole thing, to go back to the way things were, to crawl back to her and beg her to just stay with him forever. Arrakis can’t be that bad… Not in the palace, with all that shade and water.

But whenever he went out into the desert, hawking another troupe of doomed men, capturing a few more fremen for their trouble and killing them against the rocks, he wished that it could be the last time. He hadn’t been on all that many planets, but there had to be something, somewhere, better than this. Better than Giedi Prime. Better than Salusa Secundus. It wasn’t fair, he thought in his most petulant moments, than scoundrels like the Emperor should take a paradise like Kaitain for his seat, or that the Atreides, feckless wastrels sleepwalking through life, should hail from Caladan. As the sand-coarse wind whipped his cheeks and the sun’s heat warmed the water in his stillsuit, Feyd buttressed his resolve with the feelings best known to him: hatred, envy, jealousy. His Bene Gesserit, his woman, was right. This wasn’t a place to live.

So when his uncle’s ship arrived, Feyd greeted the moment with an odd serenity. All around him, his men were just about pissing themselves with fear — those wearing stillsuits underneath their armour probably did just that. The Baron floated in a covered carriage resplendent with black silk, and his entourage of slaves followed him inside. Feyd followed too.

By the time he was set free, late into the evening, he was cold and dry and felt a bit like he was floating too, atop a black and inky cloud, air passing through him, nothing leaving any trace. He’d pretended to listen to his uncle’s castisements, his bitter little threats, his anger — not so much at losing spice as being embarrassed in front of the Guild. If he couldn’t even keep his nephew in line, what would become of his reputation? He tried to impress upon Feyd that it was his reputation too that was on the line, as a Harkonnen. Feyd was not so sure. He’d started to feel less and less like a Harkonnen lately. Maybe it was her hatred of them, or maybe it was her clever words, that beguiling spice — for which he could not fault her, as it was his doing, but she could be blamed for using it to her advantage. In any case, by the time he was finally alone and left the wonder, he knew he could only do one thing.

He climbed the narrow and perilous flight of stairs, sandy steps crumbling, up to her room. She didn’t look surprised to see him when she turned to face the opened door, but her eyes were wide and just a little violent.

“You weren’t supposed to come here,” she quietly said, her voice a gentle rumble.

“Are you going to tell me that it’s dangerous?” Feyd rasped, closing the door behind him.

“You already know it is.”

“It’s dangerous out there as well,” he said as he stepped closer.

She didn’t have it in her to complain, and when he took her in his arms she tilted her head back, just the way he liked it, so that he could kiss her lips. His fingers traced the shape and shadow of her form underneath the veil of her black robe, and gradually he revealed her from it as he walked her back toward the little mattress on the floor.

“I’ve felt you, you know,” he whispered against her neck, “these past few days…”

“Are you sure that was me?” she asked with a sly little smile.

“Insolent woman, who else would it be?”

When he pulled back to watch the flow of fabric down her body, she wasn’t smiling anymore. Why was she sad, he wondered… Was it because neither of them had anybody else?

“I haven’t felt your presence,” she said instead, laying down, leaning back, uncoiling her long naked legs while he hurriedly took his armour off. “Not since he arrived.”

“Well, that won’t last long.”

“He’s like a pillar of black smoke…”

“Don’t talk about him right now.”

He approached her, crawling almost, and pushed her further up. No matter what happened, his uncle wouldn’t cast a shadow over them for that much longer. Either he died, or they did. And there was something to delight in with that knowledge… That it might soon be over.

He kissed her in a way he hadn’t done before, like a condemned man. Her lips tasted sweet and even their dryness was soft, and the little breaths that puffed out when she sighed excited pleasant flames in his body. He eased her down and pulled away, just enough to look at her. To drink her in. Her hair was wild from his caresses, and the setting sun made it shine. Her eyes, so brave and relentless, stared back at him, and they felt like his own. His hands explored her body, the arches and the crests, the valleys, with a sense of sacredness that was quite new to him.

What if this was the last time he’d see her? What if he’d never get to touch her soft stomach again, or feel the soft weight of her breast in his hand, or run his thumb across the arch of her brow? So many aspects of her appeared now with fresh clarity, as if the prospect of death had lifted a veil from his eyes. From her cheekbones to her chin, the line was smooth and delicate, just like a thread of water. And down her neck, her clavicles, around to the rounding of her shoulders, her body flowed so perfectly, so tender. Feyd buried his face against her chest just to feel her on his cheeks, and smell her, and taste her once again. Her skin tasted differently here than on her lips. More cold, more sweet, gentled by the heating of her heart just a few inches of bone away. Her scent turned even sweeter the lower he went. Her stomach, so fragile underneath its thin protection of skin, nestled between hard hip bones, dipped as he approached it.

Her fingers cupped his scalp and scratched it, feeling him as well with fresh new senses. She refused to cry, he knew she would, but it was neither due to a lack of fear on her part nor some fremen superstition. It was just her pride, like his, that wouldn’t contemplate defeat. He loved that about her… Although a part of him would relish to see her tears, if only because they were a little part of her, something from inside of her that was brought out. He hugged her thighs, held them tightly in his arms, the muscles straining in his arms and back, and he kissed a path lower. She was beautiful everywhere, and cold, ever so cold.

When he was done exploring every little bit of her, she rolled him on his back. Her hair was even wilder, her lips all bitten red, and her eyes seemed more alive than ever. Here was a woman all of his own, her flesh beautiful in all its shades and colours, her mind sharp, her voice a sweet caress… What a shame it would be, if he should never hear it again.

She touched his lips, pulled one down to look at the black paint once more, and smiled. She was exploring him too, he realised, thinking the same longing thoughts: what if they’d never see each other again? She closed her eyes and kissed his mouth, her hands travelling down his chest. She paused over his heart and felt its beating for a while, then went down to his stomach where, underneath the muscles, it churned with nerves and fear. Her kisses were soft, and strayed without a thought. Her thighs braced themselves on either side of him and her hips canted back and forth, feeling the length of him, his thighs, his lower abdomen, then settling. She took him gently inside, almost as if by accident, all in one long harmonious motion with her kisses and caresses of his body.

Feyd wrapped his arms around her, holding her closer to him, pressing her chest down to his as he kissed her cheekbones. She hardly moaned, but instead melted into him, the way they often did when they made love like this, languidly and lazily in the setting heat of another angry day. Each time he took a breath, she felt it, his chest moving hers as well forcing her to breathe out, and then backwards, and she felt his lungs working underneath her ribs and his, and his heart beating alongside her own.

Slowly, he began to cant his hips and move himself inside her, skin rubbing against skin, wetness flowing sticky and sweet to ease their coming together, and each kiss she pressed against his lips felt like coming down to rest. His body was so strong, she realised, so fierce and sharp and soft. The way he supported her body, the way he held her tight… She felt as steady atop him as she would walking the bare earth of any planet, and in that moment she thought she could live like that forever, atop him, feeling him around her, everywhere.

“You’re shivering,” he whispered against her parted lips.

“It’s you who’s shaking,” she replied, palms resting on his cold chest, inching upwards to his neck.

“Are you afraid?”

“I’m not afraid… Are you?”

He wouldn’t tell her. Instead he kissed her again, and pressed himself far deeper, moaning at the feeling the softness of her flesh against the rawest parts of him. He held her still atop him as he pressed his love in every way he could, as if chasing life into her and grasping for it desperately. She gave herself to him more openly, more thoughtlessly than before, as if it was an escape for her too… She gazed down at him when he pulled back his kisses, eyes hazy with pleasure, and drank him in that way as well. She paused atop him, or slowed down, and let him cant his way inside her, while she ran her fingers up his jawline and then down across his cheek. And she was suddenly struck by the notion that, tomorrow, this could very well be like what he’d look like dead… This pale skin and rose-red lips, with his blue eyes sad and dark, and a breathlessness about him… And she thought what a beautiful boy he would be, even dead, and what a joy to lower in a cold stone tomb where he could look young forever. She kissed him again, and took the time to feel the blood rushing through the delicate skin of his lips, pushed up by his thunderously beating heart, like the blood filling up his manhood inside her, and thought for the first time that she might genuinely be in love.

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sebastianswallows · 2 months ago

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The Little Death — 18. Something more than immediate joy

— PAIRING: Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen x Bene Gesserit!Reader

— WARNINGS: angst

— WORDCOUNT: 2.2k

— A/N: Hello, my dears! It's been so, so long since I updated this fic 🖤 I've mostly been busy with work, but I've been working on it in the meanwhile. And I'm happy to say I have all the chapters ready! I will be posting them in short order. Thank you for waiting 🫂💐✨

— TAGLIST: @elf-punk @lowlyloved @pomtherine @slytherins-heir @babyofneptune @localravenclaw @missbingu @wo-ming-bai @torossosebs @mrsjobarnes

People always want something more than immediate joy or that deeper sense called happiness. — Leadership Secrets of the Bene Gesserit

She knew she wasn’t welcome to Feyd’s council, not while his troops were there. Although Feyd himself either didn’t care or sometimes even wanted her there, his generals never did. She, as a rule, didn’t care about attending either. The information she might’ve squeezed out of the harsh Harkonnen speech wasn’t worth the enmity of those who saw the Bene Gesserit as a threat. In a way, she supposed, she protected Feyd as well. No doubt, having her there would’ve seemed weak, and a departure from his uncle’s ways.

But today, she wanted to attend, at least in the small way she could afford to.

She’d had breakfast with Feyd and kept to an unusual silence throughout. He seemed to understand, or sympathise, so he let her keep her silence. She spoke to him only by holding his hand, just as she had that morning in bed, after they woke up, before he wore his armour… The ink paint on his teeth was fading, but today he hadn’t seemed to care. It was a pity, she thought. She’d come to enjoy sitting in his lap, holding his face still, drawing black lines in his mouth while he deigned to grin.

And after they ate together a meal that was remarkably scant in Spice, she walked him to his council room. That great big ugly yellow hall from which Duke Atreides had once held court.

“You know you can stand at my side,” he told her, his cold eyes fixed on her. “My men won’t dare say anything.”

“What they don’t dare to say, they will think. And on top of their thoughts about me, they’ll pile up resentment of you.”

Feyd grumbled. He knew that she was right, and it angered him to admit it even to himself. So he left her outside the great doors and had them close behind him, only a pair of guards remaining outside.

And she went and sat down on a stone bench to the side, little more than a sandy-brown slab on squat stilts, and listening. She couldn’t hear what went on behind those doors. They had been carved, undoubtedly, thick enough that no human ears could perceive anything from beyond them. And the distant trotting of servants cleaning up after the morning and preparing for the afternoon was a bit unhelpful, filling up her peripheral senses with distractions, but once she stilled herself, she could concentrate. It was almost like her meditations, except this time her focus was without, rather than within. Mild vibrations still travelled through those doors, and other things even more subtle. As she closed her eyes, she quieted her thoughts and feelings, and allowed herself to be filled with a sense of things that passed through her. Murmurs, emotions, the distant stamping of feet that her own could pick up through the floor… After a few minutes of this, she could even hazard a distance, guessing who was standing where within the room.

She could feel Feyd’s words, in a way, their energy tasting like a dark cloud on the palate of her mouth, cushioned in the silence of the soldiers around him. She could feel them as well, their fear and confusion, although as usual, there was hardly any doubt. It wasn’t something bred into the Harkonnens, critical thinking… The range of emotions that flowed from the room, radiating in a circular pattern like static, were coloured by anger, exhaustion, and spite, and oil-flavoured water, and manic spice dreams, and fear. She filled her lungs with a deep breath and exhaled it out slowly, as if trying to squeeze out the poison.

By the end, she was nearly squirming in her seat, her spine crushed with an unknown weight that she couldn’t shake off. But then the doors opened, and the generals walked out, and what remained was the silence of Feyd’s nervous presence. She got up and went to him. One sharp look was all that took for the guards to close the doors behind her. A few months ago, she’d have been struck for being so presumptuous, but it seemed now everyone accepted her to be his Bene Gesserit.

“It went well, I take it,” she quietly said as she approached him. His figure leaned against the table, its surface seeming oddly dead now that the holographic maps were turned off.

“Went horribly. But what else on this planet is new?” he grumbled, kicking the table with his boot as he leaned back against it.

She approached him with a caress on his arm, bent and crossed with the other over his chest, and soon she was embracing him, the soft black of her robes falling over the black of his armour.

“Do they disagree?” she asked.

“They don’t dare disagree. They can’t afford to. They would die.”

She held him, resting her chin over his shoulder, and soon she felt him uncoil and wrap a strong arm around her waist. He pulled her closer and buried his face in her neck.

“And so you’re afraid they’ll disobey, instead…”

“It would be a first,” she muttered. “But yes, they might.”

“What Harkonnen soldier worth his water would dare turn back from killing Fremen,” she asked with a bitter smile.

Feyd chuckled bitterly, the sound reverberating through her bones.

“They don’t care about killing Fremen. Not really. These soldiers,” he sighed, pulling away from her to look into her eyes, “they just want to save their miserable little lives, and eat and fuck and shit and sleep. Hardly better than animals.”

She smiled, indulging him and not disagreeing much, even to herself.

“They want what everyone wants.”

“Don’t defend them,” said Feyd, pulling back sharply to grab her gaze with his cold one. “They will die. And they have to accept it.”

Defending Harkonnen soldiers, brutal and cruel as the Sardaukar without the same measure of skill, was among the last things she’d ever wanted to do. But now, knowing where Feyd’s plans could lead them, she couldn’t help but feel a bit of pity. Then again, it was her plan too. The spice had shown her this path, one among so many that could narrowly lead them to victory.

“I do accept it,” she quietly said.

His hand came up from around her waist, fingers caressing her cheek, and then he gripped her jaw to hold her still.

“So start acting like it,” he hissed in his distinctive rasp.

He wanted to seem angry, but even now she felt those bitter flavours she had felt while eaves-dropping on his meeting with the generals. The subtle reverberations of sound that could reveal to the seasoned Bene Gesserit even one’s inner thoughts as they thought them to themselves. He wasn’t angry, he was scared. And she, as she often did since beginning to know him, felt sorry for him. It was her instinctive response as a woman, to want to soothe the aches of a little boy, even one as badly behaved as him. She leaned forward, closed her eyes, and kissed his cold, dry lips.

And rather than growing more gentle, Feyd’s grasp of her only got harder. She hadn’t expected anything else, of course, so she smiled. He pulled her waist right against his, and moved his grip to the back of her neck, tilting her head slightly backward as he returned the kiss a little deeper. Her arms came up around his shoulders and her fingers moved gently at the back, caressing the back of his skull in a way that, were he in a better mood, would make him purr.

“Is that what you like?” she asked, pulling away with a breathless smile. “You will live. And they will die.”

“Yes. That’s what I like,” he said, staring at her parted lips.

“And if you should die instead…?”

“You would like that, wouldn’t you?” he chuckled.

She wished he would have had some hair, so that she could tug on it. “If you died, what use would they have of me? They’d kill me before the Baron got here.”

“Oh, I doubt that,” he grinned. “I think they’d have their fun, then put you in a little box for my uncle.”

“Yes,” she sighed, smiling faintly. “You’re probably right.”

“I am right. I know these men. So, are you still sorry that they’ll soon be dead?”

“I’m not sorry. Not really. It’s you I’m worried about.”

“Why me?” he asked, and he seemed genuinely curious. Did she perceive something that he couldn’t? Was she aware of things she hadn’t shared with him? She was Bene Gesserit, so of course she did… It broke his heart a little that he could never fully trust her, but he wished he did.

She cupped the back of his head, much like he did to her, but gentler, and stretched a thumb out to brush it to the sharp edge of his jaw. He was so big-bodied and strong, much stronger than her, and yet for all of it he was just as fragile. His princeling skin was soft, his body delicately boned and proportioned, a piece of art suspended in the air of time.

“Because you have the most to lose if you fail,” she said.

He bit back some angry reply and breathed out through his nostrils, every bit the bull that stood for his House’s sigil. But his hands were gentle when they gripped her face, and pulled her closer for a kiss.

He left her for more meetings, this time with the mentats alone, poring over holomaps and the puzzle-pieces of the sietches they had mapped across the north. She wasn’t there for any of that, but she didn’t need to be. It was the meeting with the generals that counted, and although she felt their unease reverberating through the very rock of the palace for the rest of the day she knew, just as well as they did, that there was no turning back. Feyd was not Rabban, but nobody dared question him, even when the orders sounded cruel.

To his credit, Feyd had built up a reserve of confidence from his troops by making wise decisions and minimising casualties. He reached into this pool of good will every now and then, but always made sure he left plenty behind. As she wrung her hands in her black lap at nightfall, waiting for him to come to their bedroom, she wished he had enough.

Feyd seemed to share none of her concerns, however. He strode into the room confidently, if a little angry, and after shedding his armour like it were a beggar’s rags and crawling into bed with her, he closed his eyes and buried his face into her neck. And just like many nights before, she wrapped her arms around him and curled her fingers across his skull and traced random circular patterns designed to make him fall asleep. He kissed her throat, just like he often did, and squeezed her a bit tighter, and with a heavy laziness dragged a leg to straddle hers, but didn’t move much further than that.

“I’ve been thinking,” he quietly rasped.

“A dangerous exercise.”

“Don’t joke. I’ve been thinking… about our conversation this afternoon.”

“And?”

“If it all goes wrong… and if the Fremen don’t behave the way we think they would… and if my uncle catches wind of it and swoops down to stop it all…”

“You’d go from being the Harkonnen heir and Planetary Governor of the most valuable known planet to being dead, my dear,” she whispered against his forehead.

“From one trap to another,” he muttered bitterly. “What good’s a Barony or Governorship if I can’t go where I want, or choose who to be? Arguably, a grave’s far freer.”

“Yes, well, I can’t go wherever I want to either,” she chuckled.

“No… But you at least have hope that you could.”

She held him a little tighter then. It stuck in her heart like a shard of ice, the idea that he was willing to go through with their plot while having no hope of its success himself.

“And you see it sometimes too, don’t you?” Feyd asked. “When you’ve overfed yourself on spice —”

“You’re the one to blame for that.”

“And you enjoyed it,” he said, looking up at her with a hint of teasing in those cold blue eyes. “You see yourself in other places. And it feels real.”

“Maybe it is real. Sometime, far from this time. Maybe it’s the only version of time where we’re both alive, and maybe that’s why I can see it.”

He hummed, not really believing her, and not denying it as well. “That’s because death would be a load of nothing, wouldn’t it?”

“I guess so.”

“Well, if there’s only one sort of future you can see, in all the times you’ve taken spice, it sounds like that road is pretty narrow.”

“A good thing, then, that I have a little prince with such fine, delicate feet,” she teased.

Feyd grumbled and scratched his blunt nails against her ribs in warning, but she could feel his smile against her skin. “Careful, woman.”

She cupped the back of his head with her hand and planted a slow kiss against his forehead. “You be careful, too,” she whispered.

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