Chapter Text
Paul Atreides knows very few things just yet, but there is a constant tide-sound, a lapping at the corner of his awareness that beckons him just so. If he allows his mind to quiet down, let his thoughts wander in meditation, Paul inevitably finds himself walking towards the sound of waves, feet rustling against the prickly grass and coarse sand, sensing without senses the hefty, paralyzing weight of this duty his life is burdened with.
He does not yet know what it entails, only senses a partner looking back through the veil of flowing sand, her face almost obscured by it, but not enough because he knows her, he needs little to know her. Like this terrible purpose he has, Paul is intimately knowledgeable of this love he’s drifting towards.
He cannot avoid it either.
Can only hope there’s enough love to offset the horror.
Can only pray they have enough time.
*
In finding Chani he discovers that there is no such thing as enough time, there never has been.
His father could've told him so if he had ever known to ask.
*
There would never be enough, but when it ends, in that abrupt little snap of her thread of life… Usul finds that the injustice of his plight should be enough to turn their nearest star into a nova, to end it all in one sweet whisper of flames.
It should be enough to justify a walk into the desert, a clean end of his own as well; only walking away would be to let go of her hand, which he cannot seem to do. It grows colder by the hour, he notices vaguely, but not much else.
The children are awake, however, and Irulan makes sure they are cleaned, clothed, fed and sent to rest.
Alia tries to wrest him off that pain, but even her voice comes out hollow. Even Alia avoids talking of the future without her. The inner circle comes to pay their respect, but he does not answer their greetings and condolences.
The only thing he’s certain of is that he spent his entire life looking to the future and paying no heed to the past or the present. That if he turn his gaze away from her hands, he might come to forget it.
*
It can be a trick of light, if you choose it to be so. An infatuation doesn't have to be anything but what it is, an attention you give someone beautiful. Or, in Paul's case, an attention he must most dutifully deny — and does.
Nevertheless, turning around in his settee and away from Irulan does not change the fact of her presence. She sits all the way across the room, near the tall windows across from which the desert spreads endlessly, like the sea at sunset, when the light crashes down just so and the water looks golden. At the deepest of nights, when their moons hang farthest from the planet and it is as dark as can be, the sand looks royal blue, taking on the hues of oceanic anger.
Against that backdrop, the princess sticks out like an open flower among the unbloomed. There is promise all around, but the eye will inevitably be drawn back to her. Even in the spice-trance, he had at times found it difficult to look away. Irulan, who kept her face in the bene gesserit way, twenty years down the line when he was blind to it in a thread of life and dead altogether in another; no matter what thread he followed, Irulan persisted. Sometimes, just out of curiosity, he would try to see what a life where he allowed himself to grow closer to her would look like.
In a life where she never betrayed Chani's trust with the medicine, he hated her for not being brave enough to do what he, himself, never would either. Except eventually he'd find kinship in the fact that she grieved, too. With Chani gone, there would be no buffer presence, no way to direct his attention away from his own grief and Irulan's relentless presence.
He would be angry, he would storm out of rooms, would make a scene.
He would proclaim that she could never know the love he felt and lost, and tears would spring from her eyes freely, abundantly, riches she would not care to restrain. He'd cry, too, only mostly in private, a river much like those of his homeland and then he would dream of soft currents, the unsteady drift of small boats down a narrow river, ropes and leaves coursing over the lazy waves, beat against his terribly small domain, that little space where he could walk on water.
Then, in the dream, in the thick heat of the jungle, he would gain an awareness of things one cannot see with a blind eye. Beneath him, a snake as long as the river itself slithered in the dark shallow current, and what he thought were pebbles were her markings. Chani's voice would awake him from the nightmare with whispers of Shai-Hulud. The desert could not be avoided, not by him who was marred by it deeply. Scratched off of his patrician beginnings to grow some thicker skin; his fedaykin marks covering up the hard won scars. That the fremen are a proud people was an interesting lesson to learn; a bitter one was that a dead duke's bastard son has nothing but his pride.
Irulan, however, was unchanged by the desert— at least on the surface— and that brought him a comfort he could not place. Determined to survive, she kept herself impervious to all change. Held onto her habits, her mythos, her ways. She learned, though, the language and the culture and before he had a thorough grasp of how, Irulan Corrino (not Atreides, not on paper, but the empty beat after her name implied it anyways) managed to win respect, if not affection.
Alia vexed her, but learned to listen; rebelled and followed, loved and then loathed in extreme hard swings, the only way Alia knew to feel about anything.
Nobody ever told him that's how you build a god— by breaking a man; that's what Usul learned the hard way. If you kill muad'dib though, there's always martyrdom. Nothing goes to waste.
Chani's death would not go to waste, Paul decided.
Only he needed help. Irulan's help.