Chapter Text
Feyd-Rautha. Feyd-Rautha. Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen.
Paul is propelled forward without clear purpose or complete consciousness, frantic heart threatening to crawl out of its cage. He follows flashes of a future, buried under men who passed thousands of years ago and the possible ends of humanity. With every drunken step taken, the visions change violently, twisting and turning over in his mind. The moon has fallen, his mind supplements every other second, cacophony splitting his forehead apart.
Paul wishes Stilgar had protected him from what he’d done, ingesting that mind-shattering amount. Wishes Chani was still here to hold him. Wishes, with all his heart, he saw anything for certain other than glimpses of Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen. He can see him around, inward, between visions of orange gas and shai-hulud mouths. The only reliable future-point, barely moving.
Outward, he sees the desert, now-battlefield. Spice glimmers silver in the light of the twin moons.
His Fremen spill the water of Sardaukar and Harkonnen – how many of them were aunts and uncles to him, bastards of the now-late Baron? – and he saunters, ever-limping, through a sea of bodies, dodging knives with frenetic jerks of his limbs. Fremen form around him, shielding their God from mortality as he passes through the rubble and stumbles over bodies both visions failed to see; blood covers his stillsuit as Marsel collapses to his right. Wasting moisture. Good man, good son. Father to two, one his own. Grieve later.
Twin moons – not twins anymore, not in his head.
Feyd-Rautha dances in his mind. His presence is glowing in so many futures that plague him. Pale flesh on rotten black, always him, seemingly inevitable. His eyes burn, seemingly not from the desert dust. It’s like they’re going to melt. I must find him.
As if voices screaming in a church – yes, a church, that seems likely, way down the line – he is guided by something basal, through the door, to the right, forward. This is future and present beating ancient drums, chanting the way to the black eyes and winking blades. Mahdi, Mahdi, Mahdi So! the Fremen Shield weeps. He doesn’t know how many he started with, now there’s two. Perfectly enough. Grieve later. The door opens its shai-hulud mouth and devours him, leading way to the Harkonnen heir, laying patiently in wait for the Emperor’s arrival. Feyd-Rautha’s al-lat eyes glean at him, flashing like crysknives in the light, Paul sees them melting out of his face for a moment – his jaw twitches, his arm jerks, they return to normal. His head pounds with the force of a million suns.
“Atreides,” Feyd-Rautha’s desert-hawk wings open wide to greet him, blackened grin bringing visions of molten stone and dripping saliva, “You’ve come to see me?”
Paul signals to his Shield to lower their knives. At least, his body does. The Fremen – he sees them in his mind, already dead, one pierced by a strange blade seven months from now, the other later today – obey, sheath blood-stained blades. Dirty water. He lifts his hood away from his face, down to his neck, feels mud on his hair – no, that’s years from now – feels sweat swelling on his back as his hair descends. His mask is tossed to the side, clangs with the resonance of Caladanian copper bowls, straps snapping like scorpion claws; he tears his nose plugs out to face his cousin. He’s aware of some Harkonnen guards staring him down, wants to blurt out the day they both die.
“Desert mouse got your tongue?” Feyd approaches with slopping, heavy boots, someone in Paul’s body signals the Shield to stay put. His breath trembles as a crescendo of timelines lays out before him. The Bene Gesserit great-grandmother warns him about his anger, and he stomps like a child to quiet her down. The future shifts. He shakes his head to chase away visions of what Vladimir did to Feyd-Rautha, of what Feyd-Rautha will do to Paul in certain futures.
“I’m here to spill your water,” Paul’s throat scratches like a trapped desert hare, eyes darting around the room and finally landing on his cousin’s face. Feyd grins that horrid grin. Paul sees him die a million deaths. Watches his father being conceived and born. His mouth mirrors the colors of his great-grandfather’s funeral.
The future is jumping around every split-second. He sees suns explode. He watches moons shatter. He sees Feyd-Rautha die, and he sees himself die over and over again in this exact room. Feyd-Rautha repeats words Paul has previously heard: “You can try, Atreides. I’m happy to kill another one of you, now that I know there’s more.” Yes, that was the likely outcome.
Paul copies half of the things his mind tells him to do. The chance for both of them surviving seems slim. Paul surviving is at even worse odds, based on the futures he can see. Millions of ancestors, back down to the animal-men of Old Earth scream back down. A wretched smile etches itself onto Paul’s face, it feels like his mouth tears at the edges and rips his face apart. Feyd-Rautha’s body twists and turns, falls apart, melts into the floor, rearranges itself. The Fremen at his side speak Chakobsa at him. The universe cackles.
With complete confidence and uncertainty, he grabs the crysknife from his back. His hand trembles like his mother’s during her training days. “May thy knife chip and shatter,” Muad’Dib slurs, knife twisting from his left side to his forehead with the glean of Caladanian moonrise. Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen’s terrible lips stretch across his face into a smirk.
“May thy knife chip and shatter,” Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen growls. They both take a battle stance, Paul imagines.
Feyd’s movements shine brightly in his mind. Paul sees, with clarity never-before experienced, where he will place those muscular calves, where his boots will clang against the floor. Impeccable footwork. They circle around, Feyd waiting for Paul to strike first, Paul knowing Feyd will.
“You dance so pretty for me, Muad’Dib,” A very possible death for Feyd-Rautha is cancer of the throat. A less likely one is Paul slaying him right here. Stick to the Path, something tells him in a language not yet invented. “Did those rats teach you to dance like that? The Atreides I slayed didn’t move this way.”
Paul’s eyes are glazed. He barely registers the outside world, can’t quite separate vision from vision. He can’t confirm if his prescience is showing the truth: possibility and reality bleed together like the million souls’ water in that sietch chamber. He feels blind. He feels more aware than he’d ever been. “Shut that filthy mouth and fight me, Feyd-Rautha,” slurs Muad’Dib, and Feyd-Rautha jumps forward.
Paul is not quite sure how he evaded the confident strike – he leapt away, as if moved by the strings of a puppeteer. And now, if he steps to the left, the future shows the downfall of an entire empire, but if he steps to the right, his mother dies. He steps back.
Feyd-Rautha seems surprised by his movement. His eyes gleam with something deeply unsettling – Paul knows it’s sick, twisted arousal, watches him pleasure himself later in the futures where he wins. He feels himself grin again – it wasn’t intentional. He dodges another attack, counters with the amateurish, quivering, forceful jerk of his hand, scratches Feyd’s left arm. Bright blood twinkles on black military suit, black paint shines on snickering white teeth. “Little mouse bites, doesn’t he?” Feyd-Rautha sticks his pale fingers in the wound, laps up the blood from them. It doesn’t faze Paul. He’s seen it before. He lies in wait, desert mouse waiting to crush a roach in its teeth.
Paul is jerked to the side by a force greater than himself to jump away from Feyd-Rautha’s next attack, rides a wave of consciousness to stab at him again, becoming a mess of flying limbs and wet blades with Feyd – his vision surprises him with images that unsettle him deeply, but seem to be a part of his future. He stumbles away from most stabs, just at the right times, yanked away by strings, gets cut several times, cuts into Feyd, watches the pale man pant and smirk and laugh when Paul kicks him in the chest, taking him to the floor. Feyd-Rautha feels alive, Paul watches stars die a million times a second.
When Feyd-Rautha finally gets a grip on him, inching Paul’s own knife towards his chest with a desert hawk-grip, cutting into the skin of Paul’s palm through his gloves, Paul is plagued by the sight of every timeline where he watches his family die and the death of every single person his troops would kill, and somewhere in the deep sands a desert mouse will be caught by a bird of prey three minutes from now, and he watches an entire continent’s faces melt off from the use of atomics, the rays peeling back the skin layer by layer, cell by cell. The breezy symphony of pain where his hand is being sliced in half doesn’t matter that much. He can’t see real life in front of him. He sees Alia give birth to a million children. He watches his grandfather watching Feyd-Rautha slaughter the drugged Atreides in the Arena and thinks – well, this will probably be familiar to him.
In an instant, his visions clear from his mind. He gasps in sharp, as if resurfacing from the salted sea of Caladan, when the knife enters his body, the deep muscle above his right collarbone, the pain blinding and brilliant and otherworldly and orgasmic; his eyes so wide he’s scared they will pop from his head and staring at Feyd-Rautha’s sickening smile, like a snake having swallowed a hare, jaw unhinged still where it doesn’t quite fit in his throat. It’s clear at this moment, just this one thing – Paul can not win. He can, however, survive.
Feyd-Rautha allows Paul to fall to the floor, body limp, breath coming out in short, pained gasps. The two Fremen watch, aware of the Amtal Rule – they know not to intervene, yet watch their messiah struggling to breathe with horrified eyes, blue as the bright sky of Paul’s home. The knife stays in his shoulder, Feyd-Rautha crouches down next to him, face wet with blood. Somewhere in the universe, the last known speaker of an ancient tongue passes away.
“Is that all it took, Atreides?” Feyd-Rautha’s whisper is met with a laugh from Paul, ragged and short. Play it well, Muad’Dib.
“Was the fight not to your satisfaction, cousin?” Paul feels blood drip from his mouth and thinks of the plants, hidden in this very building, dripping with moisture. Feyd-Rautha returns his grin.
“You fought well, Messiah,” Feyd compliments, grabs Paul’s jaw and spits in his face, slapping him twice. Moisture to the living. Paul smiles back at him once more when he pulls the knife out of his shoulder – the same searing, explosive, ecstatic pain, wrenching a deep grunt out of him – hearing his words, again, before Feyd-Rautha says them.
“Bring him to my quarters, gag and restrain him immediately. I need him alive. Make sure he stays that way,” Paul watches him collect himself and dust off his uniform, now walking with the same confidence and poise as he was before their fight, despite bleeding from several wounds. “And take those two as well, to the slave chambers,” he gestures with Paul’s crysknife, then throws it on the ground in front of the Fremen’s feet. It breaks clean in two.