Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It is not in the strength of one’s arms and legs that power is found, but in the allies that bear you upon their backs.

- Sayings of the Mahdi, The Princess Kihal

The stillsuit nose plugs still chafe. No matter how many times Obi re-seats them for her, Shirayuki still feels them as a distraction. To keep from rubbing at them, she tightens her hands on the hooks.

“And you’re sure you don’t need me to show you one more time?” The way Obi’s grinning, he can tell just how much she wants to touch her face. She’s not going to give him the satisfaction. She’s a soft city-dweller, full of water, he’s told her time after time, but she’s sure she’s seen the edges of approval in his face once or twice.

“I know what I’m doing.” There’s more of a pout in her words than she means for there to be, but there’s a point to prove behind all of this. If she’s to be an ally to Zen and his brother she can’t be the weak girl who ran from Arrakeen with her tail between her legs. And if she can’t convince her minder, she’ll never convince the rest of them. Besides, Obi was supposed to be tutoring her himself. “Lata taught me everything I need to know.”

“And far be it from me to doubt Lata’s attention to detail, but from where I stand, you seem to be missing something.”

“Your thumper.” Ryuu’s voice surprises her, and from the fluid way Obi startles, he didn’t hear the boy approach either. Ryuu's shadow is small under the midmorning sun, and he squints against the light. It’s unusual to see him out of the laboratories, away from his beloved plants and their dew-collectors. He lives in their future, in the world they’re making for their children’s children’s children, and the minutiae of daily life are beneath his notice.

It shakes Shirayuki for a moment that he’s there, in his stillsuit at the border of the sand. Even more so that he’s helping her save face in front of Obi. Gently, she lifts the thumper from his hand. Hook-staffs, thumper, and the knowledge Lata imparted when Obi was too busy or distracted to fulfil the task Zen had set him; she has everything she needs to summon and ride the maker.

Today she will be a sandrider or she will be food for the giant worm. Either way, she will not be any less use to the Wisterias than she is now.

“Are you coming for a ride, little Ryuu?” Obi’s tone is fond, the kind of sound that would accompany ruffling Ryuu’s hair in Shirayuki’s childhood. Arrakeen is dry, yes, but not the kind of dry that’s a fact of life in the deep desert. Skin there is covered with cloth, shade precious, but here all of that is carried to the extreme. Sun touches only upon stillsuits, and she knows Obi as a slouch and a pair of slitted gold eyes cut with the blue of the spice melange almost better than she knows him as a man unmasked within the sietch.

Or, as she thinks of it and his multitude of smirks parade through her memory, perhaps that is a lie. His mouth is muffled behind stillsuit barriers now, but she knows all too well how his lips curve with a taunt or a joke. She’s seen the scar across his chest- she assumes the result of the duel that bought him his position of trust, but she has no proof- and watched him spin his crysknife through his fingers like an extension of his body. It’s a wonder he has any fingers left, the way he handles it. Even now it sits at the small of his back, far more worn than the one that rides at Shirayuki's own. There’s no making up for training since childhood in a few mere months.

Ryuu shakes his head. “Just going to watch,” he answers, and two sets of spice-touched eyes turn to Shirayuki. No more stalling. The wind is just strong enough to send grains of sand sliding over the peak of the dunes without lifting them into the air, and the only clouds are a distant line on the horizon. Nothing but sun and endless sand waiting for her. And deep below, the maker.

“Just think,” says Obi. “When the master gets back he’ll be so surprised. You can call the worm for him and he can ride by your side."

"More likely he'll have surprises of his own." Izana gathers his forces, shaping the desert people into the weapon he will wield against the usurpers who took his throne, who took the hair Shirayuki left behind along with her past. But Zen's dreams grow stranger all the time, his silences longer, and when Haruto thinks nobody is looking she watches her son with a mask of heartbreak.

Unlike Haruto, Shirayuki is no Bene Gesserit. She doesn’t know the mysteries they hold tight, to make sense of Zen’s dreams and Izana’s drive, but as a scientist she has been taught to observe. Her observations make her uneasy.

Without a word she steps forth into the sand. A step, a pause, a drag of feet: Obi has assured her that the skill of walking the sand without rhythm will become second nature in time, and she can fake it for so short a distance as this, but she has been too long a seeker of patterns to give them up so easily now.

With a jerk of her head, she indicates her chosen location. The sand packs more densely on the windward side of the dune, and the view is the widest from the top. Obi nods back, stationing himself a short run away. He'll turn aside the maker and take it himself should her ascent go awry. It shouldn't matter to her, but it does. He stands as her safety, and the hooks in her hand are a loan of his best. He may mock to her face, but his faith in her is deeper than he speaks aloud.

She plants the spike of the thumper deep in the sand, and in the same motion, triggers the spring. Like a massive heartbeat beneath her feet, the call begins, a warning the great worm of the desert will be unable to resist. She stands tall against the wind watching for the sign, frightened and calmed all at once. She will be a strong ally at Zen’s back, and she can do that because Obi stands at hers.

Chapter Text

The nightmare never changes.

The knife shears through her hair; she can hear the tearing sound through her skull, even over the whir and beat of the ornithopter. The floor tilts, showing her the dunes below, and she chooses the desert over a soft bed and a life of servitude.

She leaps.

And she wakes safe and whole, not torn by sand, but tangled in borrowed blankets. The room is heavy and quiet, as the yali of the sietch tend to be, but there are voices at her curtain.

“Still in bed at this hour, tsk tsk,” Obi says to Ryuu when she pulls the barrier aside. His teeth gleam ferally in the light of the glowglobe she’s only just shaken awake. Too late, it occurs to her to make sure she’s actually decent in the hand-me-down wraparound. It’s not her only garment, but the most comfortable for sleeping, and it’s certainly more suited to Garrack’s height than her own.

“It was a late night,” she argues, relieved to find she is in fact modestly covered, but his smirk doesn’t waver. He’s just trying to get a rise out of her, as always. Someday she will remember that before he succeeds.

Ryuu chooses to ignore his companion. “They lived,” he says, and that is news worth waking up for. They could have lost all the yura shigure, months or maybe even years of work. They’ll still have to remediate the soil, not a trivial task in and of itself, but the plants- the plants are what matters. The scrapes on her skin and the soreness in her fingers and knees are nothing compared to that. “The sietch awards you these in thanks.”

Ryuu holds out his hand, and two flat copper rings clink into Shirayuki’s palm. Then he turns and walks away. She hopes he got at least some sleep.

Obi lets him go, following Shirayuki back into her room. He’s far too energetic for the way she feels right now, but perhaps at least she can get an explanation. “What are these?”

“What you would have been if Master and Garrack hadn’t spoken up for you.” That doesn’t help, and he knows it. “A share of the community water, four liters you can draw on at need or trade to others. The sietch has provided your basic needs, but you lost water in the service of the plants. With this grant the herbalists take you as one of their own.”

Never have two little coins weighed so much before. She blinks, because Fremen do not cry. “What do I do with them?” Her stone room is nearly bare, and her pockets are hardly secure.

Obi shrugs. “Most women wear their watercounters as ornaments or braid them in their hair, if at all. Many never hold any, if their crysknives are clean. Your situation is unusual, earning water without so much as a single duel.”

She has seen that, actually, a chain of counters chiming in Garrack’s braid. The thought of her slaying enemies in hand-to-hand-combat is distracting indeed, but right now the more immediate concern is how the rings stay put. The shorn edges of her hair brush her neck - Zen evened the ends for her when they got a chance- but it’s still not long. “Could you show me how the braiding works?”

“Me?” The entire conversation has been worth it simply to see Obi this wrong-footed. He even glances back over his shoulder as though some woman would appear in the room to take over. He’s had an answer for every other question she’s ever asked, whether he deigned to share it or not. She’s counting on his stubbornness. “I guess I could try, if you wanted me to.”

She’s had her hair braided before, back when it stretched long and straight down her back. By her grandmother in the dusty courtyard behind their inn, years ago by laughing friends in school, and long before that in hazy memories by her mother. The Shirayuki of then wouldn’t recognize her now, seated on her single blanket in a cave, the remnants of her hair in the hands of a fearsome Fremen warrior.

His hands feel surprisingly nice. Whether his teasing by the other warriors is to be believed and he’s had his hands in that many women’s hair, or he’s just got a naturally soft touch, she doesn’t care. It’s been so long since she’s been touched in any way she welcomes that she luxuriates in the feel. Has to remind herself to breathe, even.

One ring drops from his grip and bounces on the floor, echoing in the room with a bell-like tone. He grunts. “I’m not sure-” Hair slips through his fingers, and at least his frustrated noise is louder than the moan she stifles when he pulls his hands away. “Hah. Perhaps you should consult someone with more hair expertise.”

She turns halfway, and he holds out his hand with her two counters. She frowns down at them. They are important, and Obi is trustworthy. “Could you keep them safe for me?”

Given the way his mouth drops open, this far surpasses asking for hair help in magnitude of cultural misunderstandings. He recovers at least a little, blinking as his astounded expression settles back into a far more familiar thoughtful one. “There are artisans who will make them into jewelry for you,” he says, leaning forward to brush a lock of hair behind her ear. His fingers linger. “Perhaps a clip you could wear right here.”

Hopefully he can’t hear how breathless she is all of a sudden. “So you won’t-”

“I don’t think you know what you’re asking.” His voice rumbles, so low she wouldn’t have heard it if she were more than a few inches away. “I don’t know what you’re asking.”

A moment ago she knew too, but not anymore. The answer feels close, though. Close to him, somewhere in the way his neck turns and his eyes burn into her, somewhere in the way his lips part-

With a jerk, he pulls back and yanks a bundle from his pocket. Dozens of rings of all sizes are threaded between intricate knots on a strip of cloth- “Four liters,” he says, threading her two rings on the end. The rumble in his voice is gone, and he looks everywhere but at her. “I will hold them for you without obligation until you understand the significance and ask for them back.”

It’s just what she asked for. She shouldn’t be so disappointed. “Can’t you just tell me? You are my teacher, after all.”

“Not this. The women will want to explain, and the master will not like you binding-” He cuts off, and there might be a darkening of the sun-brown of his face. He shades it with his hood, and only the Idab blue of his eyes gleams from within when he stands. “Distracting me will only postpone your lesson so long. Ready yourself and meet me at the ring, your honor demands you carry that crysknife like a real Fremen. I should fear you when you draw your blade.”

“You?” The word spits from her mouth, probably louder than it should. “I don’t know why you bother, I just- don’t have that in me. Nothing will ever make you afraid of me.”

It takes a second for him to laugh, but he does. “Even me. You’re a warrior in Duke Wisteria’s army, are you not? That soft prince back in Arrakeen should fall to the ground at the sight of you, the city-dwellers’ worst nightmare.” The curtain falls shut behind him, more silently than it should, but his voice echoes back from the hall. “But only if you are on time!”

Chapter Text

Zen finds her at sunset. The stone is warm against her back, but the air is still in the sheltered niche far above the sand. Behind her, hidden, the wind-traps hum in the evening breeze, adding to the sietch’s store of life-giving water one drop at a time.

“You’re worried,” he says. There’s no doubt behind his words anymore when he speaks, even when he expresses things he shouldn’t know.

Shirayuki slaps a hand over his mouth, and he gasps as his nose is pinched in the plugs. “Ssh!”

Below them, shadowy shapes flit from a cleft in the rock and out into the sand. The lesser moon sits on the horizon, red as blood, and if it weren’t for the long shadows she never would have seen them. Obi said he would be hunting tonight, and she knows it has nothing to do with the hunger for meat, but his need for action. Izana commands patience, but not all of the Fremen bear the wait so easily.

At last the desert is still once more, only the moon’s traverse slanting the deep shadows, and Shirayuki relaxes.

“Sometimes I want an apple so badly I can almost taste it,” Zen sighs, quieter this time. “I take it this means more rodent meat.”

“You don’t have to eat it,” Shirayuki answers. There are luxuries an offworlder Duke’s son might wish for that an Arrakeen tavern-owner’s grandchild has never had. Apples were in the books she read as a child, but she knows them only as a point of reference for her hair, a sign that someone with money sees her as a rare discovery in the Arrakeen dust. Dates she knows, and melons, but the diet of the Fremen is not too different from what she’s eaten all her life. She’s known hunger. The source of the meat she eats fills her with nothing but thankfulness.

“But I will.” He pulls his crysknife from its sheath and holds it up in the red moonlight. The intensity of the light changes as he turns the blade, from nearly milky-white to a rim of pure red, and his voice changes as well. “You don’t have to worry, you know. You can trust him.”

She knows that; her water-counters are still strung with Obi’s, even after Garrack explained. She trusts him with her water, with her life, and the question has crossed her mind of what he would say were she to ask to carry his instead. She thinks of the awkward gentleness of his hands in her hair, his firm patience in knife-lessons, and the proud smiles he tries to hide from her behind the mask of his stillsuit and she suspects, based on the evidence, that she knows his answer.

Back in Arrakeen a city wedding would have followed, with dance circles and a cake with dates and nuts. One duke’s son stole that future from her, another gave her the chance for a new one, and now here she is. With a choice to make.

“You know he’ll keep you safe.”

“Because you ordered him to.” Oddly enough, that is not something she worries about anymore. A guard is no sign of distrust, merely a way to ensure she survives to grow. The sietch accepted her; she is Fremen now. It’s like having family again.

Zen looks at her oddly. “At first, but you know that ended months ago. Everything since you rode the worm has been by his choice.”

A gloved hand slaps on the ledge, and Shirayuki throws herself back against the rock wall. Obi hauls himself over the edge, one-handed. “Gossiping, again? If there’s anything about Zakura, I insist on hearing it.”

Zen hasn’t moved a muscle, Obi’s approach apparently no surprise to him. “Clearly your ears are not so sharp as your eyes.”

Shirayuki, without the benefit of Zen’s uncanny senses, can feel her jumping heartbeat in her throat. When she thinks soft thoughts of Obi, she so often overlooks these moments where he revels in unsettling her. “I thought you were hunting.”

“I was, but I have found a quarry more in your line than mine.” His mouth is hidden behind the mask, but there’s a toothy grin shaping his voice. He brings his other hand around, and there’s a tiny wisp of green. Two leaves on a spindly stalk, peeking out of a handful of sand. “Looks like an escapee to me.”

It does, in fact, look like a grape seedling. She holds out her hands and he pours it in. “You saw this in the dark?”

He snorts. ”It’s not dark. The day-creatures are barely burrowed into their holes, and the night-walkers merely starting to stir. There’ll be hours yet of hunting tonight.” His eyes flash gold beneath the blue in the last of the light, and Shirayuki forgets to speak. His scarred eyebrow quirks at her, as though wondering where her argument is, and when the silence stretches the corners of his eyes crinkle. “Good night,” he says, and in a heartbeat he’s back over the edge and out of sight.

There’s no sound of footsteps to measure his departure, but that doesn’t stop her from listening for them. After a few silent seconds she breathes once more, and then she remembers Zen. He’s grinning at her, and for just this moment, save for the Idab eyes, he is once again the mischievous boy he was before he followed his brother into the desert. “Great strategy,” he says. “Surely that will win him over in no time.”

She and her seedling don’t have to sit here and take this. Her feet find the path, now entirely invisible in the night, and Zen’s delighted snickers echo from the rocks.

Chapter Text

Shirayuki isn’t there for the worst of it. Obi’s long hours and months of work have left her competent to carry a crysknife, but nothing will ever make her a warrior.

When Raj’s head was raised on a pike at the hands of those he’d wronged, Shirayuki was sewing stab-wounds shut in a medical tent sealed against the worst of the impinging sands.

When two armies bent the knee to Izana, one in joy and one despairing, she was in an ornithopter skirting the still-glowing ruins of the shieldwall mountains.

When the fight for Arrakis is finally over for good, she’s already back in her apothecary shop in Arrakeen. Her stocks are largely either stolen or worthless, after so long, and the neighbors who’ve known her since she trailed at her grandparents’ heels watch the blue glow in her eyes and the water-counters braided in her hair with suspicion. The neighborhood as a whole cheers the return of their healer, but she's not one of them anymore.

She sees Zen from a distance, once, shadowed by his Imperial princess and soothing the fears of local dignitaries on a walk through the market. She doesn’t move to meet him, merely watches his progress over the rim of her mortar. Two Fremen flank him, sharp Idab eyes turned equally on the surrounding crowds and the princess’ hands, and two imposing Sardaukar trail their steps. None but Zen show a single emotion, and all she can read on him is frustration. But it’s not for her to approach him in public, not anymore. He’ll appear at her back door when he wants to talk.

Shirayuki is not hard to find, after all.

In between patients and curious visitors, all is quiet. The privacy she never stopped missing in the sietch comes with an isolation she realizes she no longer can bear. She finds herself turning to look for half-heard voices invented by her own imagination in the silence.

“I never will get used to seeing people out in the streets in their sietch-clothes,” she hears, and it takes her a heartbeat to realize that she’s not conjuring the memory of Obi in the quiet, he truly is there frowning at her dress, her exposed wrists.

“You are the stranger here, you know,” she replies. He stood out among Fremen, too, a steady presence at the Wisterias’ side, but it is almost comical here so far from his natural environment. He has thrown his hood back, removed the facemask, but all it does is highlight the reddened scar tracing across his cheek.

He holds his ground as she approaches, eyes locked on the artificial skin covering the wound. She could have dressed it no better, and before long it will be just another line labeling him a survivor. Still, he waves her away from it. “That happened before the battle, even. The Maker threw up a shard of glass, and it’s the only mark on me worth the name.”

She takes one step back, not a retreat but a regrouping. Obi’s skills in combat number among the best, for certain, but very few walk away from a war that hot unscathed, and she knows he was at Izana’s side at the vanguard. “You wouldn’t lie to me about that, would you?”

“There is no benefit to lying to your doctor or-” The sentence has the cadence of an aphorism, one she doesn’t know, but he cuts the thought off unfinished. Under her scrutiny he cracks a faint smile. “You can see for yourself, if you would prefer.”

She finds the answer to that is easy. “I would.”

Obi’s quick tongue is one of his best-known strengths, but also a rarely-exploited weakness. Few but Izana have talked Obi to a standstill, but here Shirayuki has bested him with only two words. He freezes, all playfulness dropped, staring as she pulls down the window-shade. His eyes glow wide and gold-blue in the dimness.

The click of the door being locked jolts him back into motion, dropping his oversuit to work at the stillsuit seals underneath. Shirayuki is torn between averting her eyes to offer what privacy she can or watching every motion to catch any injury he might try to hide.

He doesn’t try to hide anything. There are bruises, most already yellowing with time but several deeper and slower to fade. One on his wrist he treats as nothing, watching her impassively as she carefully articulates the joint. The flesh may be discolored, but the bones and tendons beneath are sound. A second, on his ribs, is all too clearly the exact shape of a Sardaukar rifle butt. “I took the gun away and shot him with it,” he murmurs proudly as she inspects it. Again, as ugly as it is, the bones beneath are fine. His skin against her fingers is hot. “See, no blood. None of these count.”

With barely a press against his shoulder, she turns him, so responsive as to seem almost telepathic when he’s not being as stubborn as the rocks. “Nothing back there, I promise.” And he is telling the truth, there are no wounds on his back, just the line of his spine drawing her gaze down to where the stillsuit drapes at his hips, up to the whorl of hair at the nape of his neck.

He finishes his spin, the cut on his face once more catching her eye, and this time she’s in arm’s reach. She touches the edge of the artificial skin, gentle, and it’s doing well but it’s not enough. She stretches up on her toes and presses a kiss to the corner of the cut.

“I have been blessed there twice over,” Obi breathes. Everything she wants to say about that crowds her throat, but Obi continues glibly. “See, I have been treated well. It will hardly even scar.” The disappointment in his voice rouses her ire, but she has learned that is not a battle worth fighting with Fremen.

“There will be other opportunities for you to tear yourself up in the Mahdi’s name,” she says. From the grief permanently fixed in Zen’s eyes and the rumblings in the streets, that opportunity will be sooner than later. That is why she must act. “Before you do, I have something to ask of you.”

“Anything,” he rumbles, and it’s unfair of him to make this so easy when it’s been so difficult for her. Her hair tumbles loose as she untwists the cord holding her water counters, the rings chiming against each other in her hand. “You’ve been wearing them!” he says, so pleased and surprise she has to frown a bit.

“I asked Garrack, just like you said I should.” She refrains from shaking her fist at him. “You said you’d hold them until I could wear them, and you gave them back.”

He smiles at her still, but it’s not a happy look. “It was too risky for me to keep them for you anymore. Those are important.”

“Important,” she echoes. She’s been looking for the words for this for so long, but nothing has been right. He’s important to her. She presses the little cord of rings into his palm, wrapping both hands around his to keep it there. “Would you carry them again?”

He stares as though she’s speaking another language, but his fingers tighten around the rings. She holds his hand still, anyway, although she can’t meet his eyes. He knows Garrack taught her, he knows she understands what she’s asking this time- “Or I would hold yours, if you would prefer that. I might have to grow out my hair-”

“Don’t,” he says, and she looks up in spite of herself. Her eyes lock with his just as his fingers brush past her ear, then thread into her hair. “It’s perfect. I’ll learn to braid, if you want me.” He swallows as though the words are almost too much.

Nobody ever accused either of them of being good at communicating feelings. She leans into the press of his fingers, and the corners of his mouth tick upward. “I’ll jingle like a street entertainer,” she says.

“It will be no more than you deserve,” he purrs, the timbre of his voice dropping in a way that makes her insides turn to honey and bees. “Anyone who sees you or hears you will know you are well taken care of.”

The argumentative gasp of air is a reflex; Obi’s grin says that he knows it and he welcomes the scolding, yet he still finds his words before she can. “You take care of yourself quite well, of course, you and I both know that. But if I can add to your happiness, please, let me do so.”

And she can wait no longer. The scar across his chest is a hard line under her fingers as he draws in a breath, as she pushes him against her work-table and he pulls her head close. When their lips come together it feels like home.