Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Muad’Dib. Muad'Dib. Muad'Dib.

Everywhere she goes, his name is chanted. The south has always been inhospitable even by Chani’s standards. Fewer rock formations, fewer places to rest, fewer sources of food. Her first solitary night out on the sands, after everything is said and done and she is left in a world ruled by Paul’s choices, choices apart from her, the only source of food she finds for a full day is a single stringy scorpion. She makes do. Chani always makes do. It’s what Fremen do. They make life out of a graveyard. Life with what little she has and with less than what she has been given. Her stillsuit and only one creosote bush stretches her water nearly a full extra day, but she pushes it hard. Beyond rations. Her hands crack and peel. Her lips bleed.

Still, it is the fundamentalists that drive Chani away, the constant whispers of reverence. Muad'Dib. Muad'Dib. Muad'Dib. She finds two abandoned sietches along her route north, one with a handful of squatters and the second a larger group of more than two dozen, and both of them are led by men as blinded by the prophecy of Muad'Dib as Stilgar had been. It’s enough to hasten her journey north, even perhaps dangerously, leaving only a few days to rest.

When she makes it north, she finds it just as intolerable. Muad'Dib. Muad'Dib. Muad'Dib. Everywhere she goes, whomever she meets, it is the name on everyone’s lips. She is thankful most do not know her by Sihaya, another layer of his legacy, the Desert Spring that saved the Mahdi’s life. It is not whispers that chase her, it is a haunting. Even her known status as one of the Fedaykin feels a death shroud around her shoulders. He has taken everything, hasn’t he? And she, the fool, gave it to him.

She leaves it all behind, even her own name.

Chani becomes a ghost in the wind.

Al-diq la ashu. In bad times there are no brothers.

There are no lovers, either.

War continues because peace was never an option.

Sarduakar military strength, Atreides imperial power, Fremen Fedaykin skills. Paul may have his titles; he may have come into her life with his swordmasters, his warmasters, his mentat’s training; he may have learned the Fremen way, she may have taught him; he may have his visions, his dreams; he may have the Sayyadina as his mother, and a sister that speaks from the womb; he may have all of these things.

But he does not have her.

She owes no man her undying allegiance. Not when he has forfeited everything that tied them together. Sincere, she had called him once. She hates him for that. She hates him for many things.

That does not lessen the love.

Three months later she joins another sietch under a false name, Ramili. It is an old testing station, with plants carefully tended beneath the tunneled grounds by a elderly woman nearly blind. Chani’s skills as a warrior eases the tension of her outsider status. Still, they test her. To know a thing well, know its limits. She takes a life, certainly not her first, but the first of another Fremen. They respect her for it, a clean kill, a useful fighter, and give her the man’s water, the man’s home, the man’s belongings. Ramili is accepted, but the name is nothing special, nothing but empty shadows, a way for Chani to escape everything in her past. The desert is never safe, and the Great Houses may circle with their ships in the sky but Chani knows the battle is always on the ground. She knows what to do with a knife, an enemy, a fight.

Still, the past chases her. Not much later, she hears it on the tips of everyone’s tongue, the gossip and the news spread wide, but she hears it first from the elderly watermaster. In the midst of this Jihad erected and forced by foreigners, politics plays out in ways she cannot understand. She has never had the head for it, politics. But this, she expected. This, she feared. This, she was warned against in the same way a blind man greets a shadow.

Paul Atreides, Muad'Dib, Usul, Lisan al Gaib, the Kwisatz Haderach, the last Duke of House Atreides, the first and founding Padishah Emperor of the Atreides Empire, has wed Princess Irulan Corrino, daughter of the 81st Padishah Emperor Shaddam Corrino IV.

A Bene Gesserit herself, the watermaster tells her with admiration.

She thinks of Jessica when she thinks of this princess, at the manipulation unfolding. Surely the Bene Gesserit are pleased now, secured in the fact that any future Atreides bloodline will not be tainted with whatever Fremen bloodline has sullied Chani’s family for generations back. No, Chani is no fool. She knows they’d look upon her like a rat skittering along their dinner table. Displeasing to entertain, too unsatisfying to eat. The Great Houses would never bother with eating a rat. The pride.

Some weeks, all Chani eats is rats.

“Sallamaka al-lahu wa-nasaraka,” a man says, when Chani tells him she is leaving to scout for a few days by herself. “But you should not wander so long by yourself. Nothing good will come of it.”

“I know my way,” she tells him.

The man says nothing to this, because the man has seen how she handles herself.

The night following the announcement of the Imperial Wedding (lavish, by all gossip, meaning wasteful with the water), she rides an old Grandfather through miles of unbroken sand, a drift off the surface atop a great Shai-Hulud for so long she can see the sunrise before she dismounts. It is a red dawn, a rising of a blinding sun that brings a sting to the eyes.

But Chani does not cry.

A sandstorm comes on the third night.

Chani rides it out in a tent, erected against bedrock and the beating winds.

She has weathered worse.

The war rages on.

The whispers of his name grow into chants. Muad’Dib. Muad'Dib. Muad'Dib. She could kill a thousand men, and still the first one after would utter his name. It is pointless to run from it, to hide from it. She knows this. She does not bother with lying to herself about a truth as fundamental as this. She cannot escape him.

But for a time, she is Ramili.

And things are simple.

Chani knows how to wake up quiet. She knows how to muffle her screams, how to rally before she’s covered in wasteful sweat. She knows how to rise herself out of a dream.

Some dreams, she does not want to.

She arrives always in the middle of it, never knowing how they start. Fragments and fractures of pleasure. His lips sliding across her throat, coaxing her to life. Her, straddling his thighs, chest pressed tight to him. The sharp lines of his face. The flicker of candlelight across the cut of his cheekbones, his body. She knows the feeling of his embrace, gentle yet demanding, an inexplicable devotion to them that always rendered Chani mute. Words do not have as much meaning here as the movement of their bodies, the depthness in his stare, the hitch in her breath.

“I will love you until my last breath.”

Chani has quiet mornings these days, when she’s left with searing desire and the sting of it. Mornings in which no one expects anything of her, so if she awakens too early, if she needs a few moments to chase that release, in frustration, in resentment, no one needs to know. No one asks what she does with the sunrise. Her fingers sliding between her thighs, a treacherous pulse, imaging Paul’s hands and mouth with a groan. A talented tongue, too good for himself and his politics, but he’d been a man worshiped by all who had been more than happy to worship between her thighs. Chani had certainly never complained about that tongue before he went south.

But these mornings, afterwards, Chani is always left feeling a burn of dissatisfaction, even if her peak is reached. She licks her fingers clean, wastes no water, especially not her own. It had always been a favorite part of his, drinking from the well of her.

She wonders what his princess tastes like, and if he has a new preference now.

Months pass.

They ride the sandworms, they fight the enemy, they make strides to reclaim their planet from the worst of the foreigners. She wears a patch of his symbol on her stillsuit, watches the banners unfurl of his insignia. The Fremen carry it into battle now, almost every battle. She comes to know the man carrying it, a man with a pleasing smile and a raucous humor that reminds her of Shishakli’s wit. She has not seen Shishakli since her friend was left behind in the aviary; Chani tries not to think of Shishakli when this man smiles at Chani always with his wry humor. It is the same smile, but it is not, because this man is a man, and he thinks Chani is unattached. She — she is without a man; she owes no allegiance to one who kept none for her. But she does not encourage any smirks, does not want any pleasantries or shared jokes.

Instead, she is the first to ride into battle. The smallest, the lithest, the fastest of this sietch. A clean cut through an artery will a bring a man twice her size falling to his knees before she’s already moving past him. She kills more men, collects more water than the others. It is not a thing to boast, but it earns her a place of respect, nods of deferential treatment when they plan their raids.

They’re moving through the wind pass when someone says, “We need to send out scouts. Find out more of what’s happening. They say Muad’Dib is sending Fremen into space, into other worlds.”

Of course. Paul needs to spread his acolytes. Jessica will be pleased.

“News will come,” she tells him. “And Muad’Dib should focus first to secure this world before he looks skyward.”

The man scoffs. “So you think you know what Muad’Dib should do?”

“I know what he should not do,” she retorts.

The man grimaces. “Blasphemy. It is not your place to make judgments on the Mahdi.”

It is a little more than two years before someone comes searching for her. Underneath the ground, deep in the tunnels, a man appears before her, his face covered by wrappings, his stillsuit caked in sand.

The woman guiding him leaves him at Chani’s feet, a gruff explanation. “This man says he knows you.”

Gurney Halleck reveals himself beneath the wrappings. “Long time,” he says, voice gruff, throat parched.

She does not offer him water. She sees no reason to.

“All right, no small talk. He asked me to find you. He’s asked that you see him.”

“Tell him no.”

“He's the Emperor of the entire known universe, kid. I can’t tell him no.”

“Tell him I said no.”

Even if everyone else falls to their knees before him, Chani will not.

Gurney does not bother pointing out the fact that she still serves his forces, still follows his orders like every other Fremen. Just points out, “He commands your Naib, and I can have words with him if it makes any difference.”

This sietch’s leader is a good man, a good warrior, but even he could not force Chani to do a thing she does not want to do. Not in this matter.

“C’mon, kid. He just wants to talk.”

“Paul has no need to explain anything,” Chani tells him, warning. “I know what he means to do. I will not be part of it.”

To his credit, Gurney seems to be enjoying this conversation the same amount that she is. “Look, that marriage of his — it isn’t what you think. He’s done it for politics, nothing else. Ask him yourself. Ask him if he’s ever favored that Princess with anything more than a polite look, a conversation. It isn’t a marriage in anything but name.”

Chani does not want to know this, any of this. It makes no difference.

It makes no difference, she tells herself.

“Tell him no,” she repeats.

He exhales, a sharp noise. “I’ll be here for three days. You don’t have to decide now.”

Before he turns to leave, she asks him, “How did you find me?”

He pauses. “Paul knew where to look, who’s name to ask for.”

She wonders how he knew, but perhaps it is the way he knows everything else.

His visions.

“Then he should know my answer,” Chani says, jaw clenching.

“Why do you think he asked me to wait three days?” Gurney retorts, tiredly. “He was very clear on that.”

He turns and leaves before she can say another word, and Chani is left furious with the implications that it will only take three days to change her mind, to wear her down.

She is not so fickle as that.

The first day, she ignores him completely.

The second day, he eats with her group, food laid out on the floor, an old mason’s wife having made supper for all. In between bites, he answers questions, the burning desire of the others to know Muad’Dib making for a blunt conversation that nearly verges on impolite interrogation. They all look at her too, with curiosity. Gurney does not entertain their questioning about her, has called her Ramili like the rest, treats her with the same respect as all of the other Fedaykin warriors. Still, everyone knows Gurney is here for her, that Muad’Dib’s favored weapons teacher has come across miles of sand just for her.

“Is it true he is already changing the planet?” a young one asks, practically a boy. “Bringing paradise?”

Gurney nods, chewing a rough bit of meat. The preserved meat is always harder than the fresh kills. “The fighting is still ongoing, but they’ve brought in some terraforming ships from the far edges of the galaxy. It’s a long process, but we may see green trees before old age claims some of us – the lucky ones.”

“It is as written,” someone breathes, joyously, reverent.

Chani does not bother with adding anything to the conversation. She sits quietly and eats, though her temperament is noted. “Do not be offended,” her Naib tells Gurney, when he must stare at her. “She is a non-believer.”

“Is she?” Gurney says, as if this is news to him.

“Ramili has never believed in the scriptures of Lisan al Gaib.”

“Not an admirer of Paul Atreides, eh?” Gurney jokes. “Could’ve fooled me.”

She gives him a warning look, eyes flashing.

Gurney almost smiles, but instead obligingly tells them more about the terraforming, about the advancements against the enemy, about Muad’Dib. Chani pretends to tune it all out, to be above it all, but she listens to every word just as intently as all the rest, and she pretends not to notice how Gurney seems to address every answer directly to her, as if she is his main audience.

The third day, she comes to him midday. “Leave,” she tells him, “And tell Paul I do not respond to a whistle call.”

“I wish it were that simple,” he says, with something in his voice like regret. “But it’s not gonna be that easy now.”

She stares at him, a feeling of foreboding rising. “What do you mean?”

A shadow falls over them, a hush over the corridor. She senses the presence before she realizes it entirely, like the faint warning in her spine before quicksand shifts beneath her feet.

“Chani,” a voice calls to her, softly, from behind, achingly familiar.

She has not heard that name uttered in over two years.

She has not heard that voice either.

She doesn’t look, immediately. She does not swallow against the shallow lump in her throat, nor does she close her eyes. When she turns around, bracing herself for the only face she knows she will find — the face belonging to a stranger now, an Emperor, married and above her station, a prophet, a messiah, the man she took to her bed and had every intention of keeping him there through all her remaining nights.

And Paul Atreides, Muad'Dib, Usul, Lisan al Gaib, his familiar face with his many vexing names, stares back at her.

Chapter Text

In the stony silence that follows, Chani feels like she’s fumbling, tripping, stumbling down a slope of sand and unable to catch herself. She can feel her heartbeat thrumming. He looks the same, exactly the same, even dressed familiarly in his stillsuit caked in sand. It’s clear he has just entered the shelter of the sietch, has only just arrived moments ago because she can see his other men gathering at the entrance greeted by the Naib. She stares, and stares, and feels her breath leave her body as if to never return.

But already, too soon, she can feel the eyes of everyone else on them.

And then it begins, as it always does.

Muad’Dib. Muad'Dib. Muad'Dib.

It starts as a confused whisper as people recognize him, as they gather in growing clusters in the tight corridor. Chani hasn’t even managed to open her mouth yet, and he’s still staring at her as if she is the last sip of water in the world — and the crowd grows. Encroaches. Breaches their little world where there should only be the two of them. Before she can fully process it, she’s pushed back — shoved.

The jolt is what Chani needs to remember herself.

“Chani,” Paul calls out when she stumbles away, but it matters little as his voice is drowned out and the others converge.

She turns.

She runs.

She makes it back to her private quarters in a daze of confusion, a claustrophobic burn that crawls up her throat and feels like a scream held within. The door closes behind her but all Chani can hear is the chants of his name; the room is dark, unlit by candlelight and lacking windows, but all Chani can see is the familiar crystal blue eyes watching her; there is adrenaline spiking with a bitter aftertaste in her mouth, but all Chani can taste is the useless words lodged in her throat. What was he doing here? He had no right — no right to come back into her life. Not after she’d taken so long to rebuild it. Cruel, merciless, and he never used to be cruel. But he is now, clearly, to do this to her after all this time. Already, she knows, she won’t be able to rest here any longer. It had been bad enough when Gurney had arrived three days ago, bringing with him gossip, but Paul showing up only means she will never get a single moment’s rest here. Not anymore.

He had no right.

The thought is echoing in her head vengefully when she hears a rapt knock on the door twice. Reserved, dulled against aged wood — she knows who is on the other side. Doesn’t say a word, just waits, back to the door, and it opens as if she had granted him the permittance. She can feel Paul behind her, entering her room with slow steps, a pervasive presence that feels like a looming monolith overwhelming her. He takes up too much space in her cramped quarters. He takes up too much space.

“I’m sorry about this,” he says, into the empty distance between them.

She can hear Gurney in the corridor outside her room, attempting to subdue the fervor of his arrival. It is pointless. She has no place to rest her head tonight. He obliterated it with a single step into her new home.

She turns around, demanding, eyes hard. “What are you doing here, Paul?”

His jaw clenches, a hard swallow. “I didn’t want to make this commotion but I had to get to you. They’re coming for you, Chani. My enemies. They know you’re here, and they know — they know what you mean to me. We need to get you out of here.”

Of course.

For a moment, she cannot find the words. “I was safe for two years before you sent Gurney after me.”

“It wasn’t my intention—”

“Do not speak to me about intentions,” she snaps, hot as a poker.

She sees it, the micro expression of something too akin to shame fluttering across his face, there and gone again in a blink, something no one else would perhaps ever perceive for how ephemeral it is. She perceives it. She knows all of Paul’s tells, how he holds back his words, measures them, selects them, chooses to hide his thoughts behind an inscrutable face. Even now, she knows he’s doing that with her when there used to be no artifice between them. For someone who was once so sincere, she sees the calculations now.

She cannot do this.

She cannot have this conversation with him. He owes her many apologies, many explanations, but she wants to hear none of them.

Immediately Chani is moving, not giving him the benefit of further discussion. She is gathering her clothes, her supplies — she doesn’t have much in the way of belongings. She has never been materialistic. All she needs can fit into one single rucksack. She lives off what little the land will give her, just like all other Fedaykin.

“You cannot strike out on your own,” he tells her. “It’s not safe, Chani.”

“Is that a command, Muad’Dib?” she sneers.

“Chani,” he breathes, her name filled with regret. “It’s too dangerous for you to—”

She roughly grabs her stillsuit, the detached filter mask. She doesn’t bother to send him away, only flashing him one warning look that has him obligingly turning around while she strips out of her clothes. It is ridiculous. He knows what she looks like naked; he’s been inside her. A foreign thing, to erect decorum against a man who has drunk his fill of her arousal more times than she could count. She dresses quickly, assembling the fitted pieces of her stillsuit efficiently if aggressively, doing up the straps. Her body jolts in surprise when Paul is suddenly there, at her side, pulling the straps tight across the back of her shoulders, one, then the other, a firm tug that has her looking over at him.

Their eyes meet; she can see a whole cosmos in the color and whorls of his eyes, she can see everything he doesn’t say. Regret, longing, a plea for her to listen, to stay with him, leave with him.

“You cannot do this,” she tells him. “You have no right.”

Another flinch, stilted and half-repressed. “I know.”

But she could tell, it would not stop him.

Paul Atreides has forgotten the meaning of the word, no.

Outside, the sietch is in chaos. Paul must be serious about the threat because it's clear the entire sietch has evacuation orders to clear out. Everyone is moving swiftly; she sees her Naib conversing with Gurney, a strategic conversation that seems hushed and harried as they figure out the logistics of this mass exudos of hundreds. Across the hall, some even in their haste, stop to look at her – at her and the Muad’Dib. She sees the questions, perhaps even the resentment. An entire sietch upended for one woman, and they probably don’t even know why. She cannot blame them for their anger and suspicions; she has a sandstorm inside her as well, a tempest of rage and resentment.

This many people will be hard to move. This many people, they will leave tracks. This many people might incite the unwanted attention of a sandworm, if not their enemies — or both.

Gurney comes to them with an outline of the evacuation. “Majority will need to flee on foot, but we can take some on the kindjal ship. Anything more than a few dozen, and we’ll need to take multiple trips. We’ve already contacted Sietch Tuono, which is a day’s journey from here. They’re willing to take in the numbers for a short time, provided they’re compensated with water.”

Paul nods, an easy thing now for him to produce as the Emperor. “Begin the evacuation.”

She makes it half a step away before Paul catches her by the arm, preventing her from running off to help with the rest.

“Don’t worry about me,” she warns him, snatching her arm back. “I’ve handled my share of Harkonnen soldiers.”

“They aren’t the only threat out there,” Paul informs, tightly, “and not even the primary one I’m concerned about at the moment. Harkonnens have been picked off over the last few years, but—”

An explosion rocks them on their feet, coming from the west wall entrance. Chani looks up at the crumbling ceiling as it shakes with a second larger impact, the force of it enough to throw them entirely to the floor. As she picks herself up, the dust lands in clumps and large debris, and Paul is reaching for her, pulling her to her feet before she can refocus on the others.

“Bombers are here,” Gurney announces unhelpfully, with a sneer.

The footpath takes them past the storage basin where people are gathered to collect water. Paul orders them to move with a bark, leaving precious rations behind, as another thundering explosion hits. By the time they make it out, people are scrambling through the sands, and she can see foot soldiers on the ground, and a league armada flightship poised up above, sending off rockets to the far eastern wall of the sietch.

“Move quickly towards the kindjal ship,” Paul informs tightly, above an explosion. “We'll return fire from the air.”

There is no place for arguments in battle. Chani knows this so it is this instruction that follows her like a mantra as she is swept into the chaos of the fight. Immediately there are two men coming for her, dressed in alien garbs, displaying a mask that covers their faces entirely in swaths of black. Paul dispatches one by gutting him with a curved knife pulled from a leather holster, and the other Chani takes with two slices of her crysknife blade forged from the tooth of a dead sandworm, double-edged and poisoned at the tip.

They move in tandem, falling back behind a pillar of a rock, and judging by the sound of the enforcers’ footsteps, there remains more than a dozen enemies lying in wait between them and the kindjal ship.

She trades one brief look with Paul, eyes locking as he motions for her to take the two men coming up on her left. She readies her crysknife blade and vaults out of her hiding spot, slashing a throat, falling back to a crouch before the body hits the floor; followed swiftly by another broad slit across a second pair of thighs deep enough to sever a major artery. Then she’s up and moving again, crossing the dunes.

By the time they make it to the ship, they’ve killed half a dozen between the two of them.

Paul gets into the pilot seat, shoving off the man dead at the helm (a bullet through the head, a clean shot through the windshield); Chani doesn’t know what she’s doing, has only been in an aircraft once before, the last time she was sent into battle alongside Paul. She finds it dangerous, and foreign, and all too turbulent for her liking as it takes off, flies into the air. She stumbles into a chair, grips the armrests with tight knuckles, her confidence knocked loose in this strange warcraft. Paul doesn’t notice, or doesn’t bother to look at her; he’s too busy aiming his firepower at the other warship in the air. It’s larger, twice as large, but Paul’s aim is flawless. Two single hits to the fuselage and the propeller, and the thing falls from the sky and guts into the sand in a careening explosion.

The Fedaykin make quick work of the remaining enemies on the ground, a bloodbath against the sand; new water to collect.

Afterwards, landing the ship, Paul stands and offers her a hand to pull her from her seat, where Chani is still gripping the chair tightly. She looks down to his proffered hand, then up to his face, a clear look of expectant faith in his expression; the aftermath of a fight seems to have eased some of the tension in his body, as if their perfect symbiosis in a fight reminded him of better times, of the old times between them. Chani’s jaw clenches, and sidesteps his hand, pulling up to her steady feet by herself.

She leaves him in the wake of the battle, standing there watching her from the cockpit as she steps out into the glaring sun without a backward glance.

The kindjal is damaged on the aft side, something that would make long distance flight risky. They have no choice but to move by foot, quickly too, in case the enemy returns with reinforcements. It is a long march, a sandwalk full of sliding steps, a center step, a skipped step, a faster shuffle, grueling in the midday sun, and she is aware of Paul every excruciating minute of it; at her back or off to the side, never far enough away to be out of immediate eyesight no matter how swiftly she chooses to move.

“He watches you most closely,” her Naib notes, after the second break, where they take sips of reclamated water to rehydrate. “A man only watches a woman like that for one reason.”

“He’s married,” she returns, curtly.

“But it is not that simple, is it?” he asks her. “It would be good for Fremen everywhere if he had a Fremen woman at his side. Do not deny it. Sihaya, isn’t it? Muad'Dib’s Desert Spring.”

Chani doesn’t answer. She feels as if the way Paul looks at her is more than an answer for anyone with eyes. The entire thing feels like one of Shishakli’s bad jokes. She wishes for nothing more than to return to the simplicity she had only the day prior. She had found a life after Paul. Peace, in certain terms, if nothing else. Now, she can see the reverence in her Naib’s eyes, reverence for a piece of the scripture with her name on it, reverence for something Chani does not believe in herself.

“They’re just stories,” she tells him. “Stories meant to make you believe in the impossible, so you do not question the hardships they foist upon you.”

“The hardships were there before Muad'Dib.”

“Do you think he will ease them now? In all of the prophecies, what else was there but blood and death? Why would anyone wish for that?”

“How can you say that?” the Naib asks, affronted. He, like Stilgar, is a man of stubborn beliefs. “You must have witnessed it yourself, his miracles.”

“I’ve witnessed many things,” she says, quietly. “Never a miracle.”

Hours pass, a few of the elderly folk ask to make camp at night; most Fremen live their twilight years in the shelter of the sietch, too much of a liability in their old age otherwise, lest they be asked to walk into the desert as to not be a burden to the pack. But Paul refuses them the first two times the request for camp is brought up, concerned with moving to find safety. Their numbers are too large, too exposed. But after Chani witnesses an elderly woman stumble and fall for the third time in perhaps as many as a dozen minutes, guilt gnaws at her. She approaches Gurney and makes a case to split the group into three, half stopping among an outcropping of rocks (nothing more than a single cliff), and the other half marching onwards towards Sietch Tuono, with a smaller third contingent sent off as a decoy to draw in their enemies and finish them off.

Paul comes up behind her, overhears her plan, and makes an amendment. A fourth group, just a single pair — Paul and Chani. “We’ll ride a sandworm,” he says – decrees, more like it. “Get to Arrakeen as quickly as possible.”

Of course, the capital. His seat of power now.

Gurney looks at his maps and orients his paracompass. “It’ll be a two-day ride from here, even on a sandworm.”

Paul is confident. “We’ll manage. Once we reach, I’ll send back air support to collect you and as many others as needed.”

“I’ll get your provisions ready,” Gurney grunts, agreeing, knowing better than to argue.

Chani, on the other hand, turns towards Paul as the others disperse, avowedly to give them some privacy. “Let me leave,” she tells him, and it would almost be a plea if she could just humble herself for it. “I can disappear better than you can hide me. Your enemies will never find me.”

“I found you this time,” Paul counters. “If they find you the next—”

“How did you find me?” Chani stops him.

A beat, as he looks away, and admits in a shallow voice, “I’ve always known where you were. I never lost sight of you.”

She can’t find her voice to respond to that, suddenly finds her throat too dry, too parched.

“We can’t separate,” Paul says, not without a hint of something deep in his voice, aching. “I’m sorry, Chani, but it’s not an option. If they capture you…”

He leaves the rest left unsaid, but he doesn’t need to fill in the hanging hypothetical. She is a weakness to him, a tool the enemy could wield. What had Feyd Rautha called her? A pet. That’s all she is. An exotic pet to these people with their mighty Houses.

For a moment, she wishes she had never met Paul Atreides.

She wishes she could walk away and erase him from her existence entirely.

Later, when Paul sets a thumper into the sands, sets the vibrations, summons the sandworm, Chani pretends there is no shake in her hands as she readies her pair of maker hooks.

But there is a shake, and it is not because of the encroaching Shai-Hulud.

The ride atop a Shai-Hulud clears some of the anxiety in her. It always has. But the ride through till the next nightfall takes its toll. By the time they dismount, her legs feel strained, her muscles beyond aching. They set up camp quickly, a single tent against the beating whining winds. Chani pretends it is just another night out on the dunes, another night alongside a brethren, but she is barely even fooling herself. When she strips off her stillsuit and into nightclothes, she is achingly aware of him. When he strips off his, she turns her head and watches, boldly, too keenly, noting all the changes in his body since last she saw him undressed. He has put on some weight, some muscle. Not much, nothing too notable, but she notices. If he perceives her watching him, he says nothing of it, gives no outward sign.

When it comes time to lay down to rest, Chani can’t manage it, too wound tight despite all the fatigue. The tent is small, too small. When he unfurls the bedroll, he catches Chani’s eyes and stops, staring. “I can take watch, if you prefer,” he says, to the mutinous look she must have on her face.

“I would prefer not to be here at all.”

An exhale, soft but sharp. “I know. If there was another way—”

“There is,” she tells him, beginning to pack her stillsuit, finding any reason not to look at him. “Let me go, and this time let me stay gone.”

She will never be free of him otherwise. She needs his agreement. If she were to walk out into the sand dunes by herself, nothing would prevent him from finding her again, uprooting her life, destroying any new life she creates. She needs him to agree.

“You won’t even look at me,” he says, pinched.

She scoffs, so angry she can hardly contain herself. So angry she could spit. “Why should I look at you? Don’t you have a wife to look at?”

A heated pause, and still she refuses to meet his eyes. “I never wanted to marry her. It was a political arrangement. She does not mean— she means nothing to me.”

“All men say that when they cheat on their wives.”

“I’ve never touched her,” he says, and Chani fumbles with her filtered mask as she puts it away. A beat, where he says, softly, but firmly, “She’s never had anymore of me than my name. I promise you – she’ll have no child of mine, not a touch or softness of a glance, nor a single instance of desire.”

She weakens, for just a beat. Weakens against the declaration, against the treacherous beating of her heart. Gurney had said this already, told her something of this already. Ask him if he’s ever favored that Princess with anything more than a polite look, a conversation. It isn’t a marriage in anything but name. But she cannot believe it, she cannot. No man could marry a woman like that, as beautiful as Princess Irulan Corrino is, and not partake in the marriage bed. She has yet to meet a man as virtuous as that.

She had thought, once upon a time, that Paul was such a man.

But then he proposed to another woman right in front of her.

“Chani,” he breathes. “It’s only been you.” A laugh here, brittle and small. “Since before I even met you, it’s only been you.”

His visions.

He’d told her of some of them, once. How’d he’d grown up with the image of her in his mind, a sense of who she was and what she would mean to him.

He makes her so weak, it makes her furious. “What would you have me do?” she demands, snapping at him, finally turning to look at him; he is staring at her, just staring at her like she’s slicing him open with her blades. “You want me to go back to your kingdom, your palace? Warm your bed while the entire empire calls me your whore? Is that what you think would satisfy me? Make me your concubine like your father made your mother?”

“My mother was a wife to him in all the ways that mattered,” Paul retorts, the first spark of heat matching hers, flint against steel. “And I swear to you now, that woman is only my wife because of politics. I only meant to wield that union to make a truce out of a bloodbath. Any other way that day, and I would have been burying you. But she means nothing to me—”

“What kind of man could be married to a woman for two years, and say she means nothing to him?”

“The kind of man that’s already in love with another.”

She flinches. She doesn’t believe him. She cannot. “Why now? Why after all this time? If you knew where I was—”

“You weren’t ready to hear me before.”

“I’m not ready to hear you now!” she hisses, outraged. “I’m not one of your acolytes, Paul. This isn’t your fiefdom, I am not your chattel. You knew the moment you took that poison, the moment you accepted the role of Lisan al Gaib that you had lost me. You knew I wouldn’t stand by your side while you became the prophet of a never ending Holy War. You knew. Your royal marriage is beside the point.”

He stares at her, and oh, how she hates the way he looks at her. As if she has torn open his chest and played with his entrails, as if it was not him that had shattered her heart in the first place.

“Or maybe you didn’t,” she tells him, a weak thing, a bid to understand the stranger before her. “Maybe you drank the Water of Life, and gained your precious precognition and lost any sense of reason. I don’t know how else to explain it. The man I loved would have fought like a scorpion to prevent the gospel of Lisan al Gaib from spreading. Instead, you took up the mantle so fully I could hardly recognize you.”

So, where did that leave them?

Even if she went back to his palace with him, there was nothing left of them.

The harsh winds beat against the tent, and they are left staring at each other in an aching stinging silence.

Chapter Text

She can’t shake her wrought emotions for the rest of the night, but they don’t speak much after that. Even when they retire to the bedroll, side by side but with as much distance left between them as possible within the tent, it’s the most restless night of sleep Chani has gotten in many moons.

The morning brings with it a fresh heat wave, hotter than the last few days by several degrees, and they set out on foot, catching another sandworm shortly thereafter. When they finally dismount, they’re left to walk for several hours the rest of the way to Arrakeen because the city’s shield prevents sandworms from coming within miles of the borders. And so, for the majority of the day, Chani tries not to look back at Paul too often, because everytime she does, he seems to be watching her, unable to hide his scrutiny even for her benefit.

Even from this distance, Chani can make out the gargantuan outline of a city full of stone brown blocks, a crawling sprawl of interconnected buildings all the same color as sand, so monochromatic that it feels partially like a mirage rising within the tendrils of Arrakis’ stubborn heat. She’s never seen Arrakeen before, not even from a distance. Chani doesn’t know what to think of it, other than it’s both more and less than what she imagined. Bigger in terms of size, but smaller in terms of allure.

At the borders, Paul pulls out some communication device. Soon after they’re picked up by a motorized vehicle running on wheels and delivered straight to the palace doors. Chani tries not to let her discomfort show, but none of this feels familiar to her, none of it natural. The guards all look at her keenly, but no one says a word to her except Paul.

“Stick close to me until we’re inside the Palace Walls,” he tells her, some measure of assurance in the tone. “The city is full of spies.”

Chani tries not to frown.

The palace grounds have the same thick blocky walls as everything else, the ones constructed to withstand the blazing heat. She’s surprised to see windows, few though they are, but the thing that stuns her immediately upon entry is the cool air hitting her skin. Air Conditioning, she remembers Stilgar telling her once. After that, it’s one surprise after another, and none of them feel right. The palace servants offer them water as soon as they’re through the doors, and she takes her offered glass with perturbed silence when it’s cold to the touch — ice cold. The taste of the water is like none other she’s ever tasted, reclamated and distilled, a pure crisp aftertaste that has Chani almost hesitant to drink another sip.

“Our filtration systems are some of the best,” a voice announces as an explanation, but it’s childlike and small. Chani whirls to see a girl at the doorway, little more than a toddler of a few years of age. She watches as in the next second the girl launches herself happily into Paul’s arms with all the normal enthusiasm expected of a child, but with none of the other expected attributes. “You’re late,” the girl announces, with royal-like decree. “Mother has had her hands full dealing with delaying Count Fenring’s entourage. She is most upset that you took your leave at such an inopportune moment.”

“Our mother has managed, I’m sure,” Paul returns, smiling down at the girl with obvious affection.

It’s the first time Chani has seen him so much as smile, much less so genuinely.

His sister, Alia — of course. The child who Chani had last seen demonstrating the impossible ability to communicate from the womb with Jessica as if they had shared a mind and not just a body.

“Hello sister,” the girl says to Chani, an effervescent smile. She leans over, conspiratorially, “I have so looked forward to meeting you. We will be the best of friends, I suspect. Thicker than thieves.”

Chani cannot find her words, at first. For a child little more than two years old, it’s — unsettling, almost, how articulately she speaks. Chani manages a greeting back, finally, perhaps a few mumbled words expressing the same desired sentiment, if not in an entirely bewildered tone. The girl seems to take it all in stride.

Paul seems to read her growing discomfort, and sets the girl back to the floor. “Go, find Mother,” he instructs. “I imagine she has words for me. Tell her I’ll be along shortly.”

“You’d imagine right!” Alia screeches giddily, as if entertained by the thought of her older brother, Emperor Supreme, being scolded like a child staying up past bedtime. She hurries off, back to her minder, a dark-skinned woman with a sharp headdress.

The guards retreat to the end of the hallway to take their posts, and Chani is left standing there in the empty halls with Paul, caught wrong-footed, unsure of what surprise will come next. She looks back out towards the sprawling city beyond the palace walls, and it is so monstrously large Chani can’t think of anything to compare it with other than several stretches of a Shai-Hulud.

“Come,” Paul says, a faint pressure at the back of her hand, a small urge to recapture her attention; she turns towards him, and he retreats his fingers. Chani can feel the echo of that touch warm her skin long after, especially in this foreign conditioned air. “This way,” he says.

He is polite during their meandering stroll, painfully reserved. They track in sand with their boots and stillsuits, and she imagines there is a servant waiting in the shadows somewhere whose sole job it is to clean up after them. But when Paul starts to ask her questions, tentative broaching questions about her thoughts, she immediately deflects — returns it with inane questioning about the Palace, just to make up the silence. It feels like a conversation two other people are having, so outside of themselves.

"What is that grating noise?"

"It’s the windows closing for the high sun. The palace ground fortifies itself every day around three in the afternoon."

"How large is this palace?"

"The same size as one of the smaller sietches, I imagine. Maybe a little bigger, but not by much."

"Where are you taking me?"

"Your rooms, in the Imperial Wing. I’ve instructed them to be readied."

"The Imperial Wing, you mean—"

"Near my quarters, yes. It’s the safest wing in the entire palace."

Once upon a time, she’d expressed her deepest thoughts to this man, her darkest desires. Now, he answers questions, never condescending, even if she feels like a child asking the simplest things, but it is an awkward exchange, stilted. There is none of the aggression and anger from the prior night, but it is as if they are speaking to each other with all the decorum and estrangement of strangers. She does not remember being this stilted even when they first met.

Another part of her wonders — if she does not know him, who does?

And somehow immediately she knows the answer is, no one.

It stings, this knowledge. The loneliness that must sit on his shoulders like a death shroud.

“How long do you plan on keeping me here?” she asks, finally, when they reach her intended quarters.

The room is pointlessly wide, open and empty, a bed lodged into one wall and a bare rug faded and blue.

A pause, as Paul chews over his answer. “Right now, it’s a precarious time. I imagine that’s why my enemies looked to use you as a bargaining chip, why they set out on such a pervasive search for you. The Great Houses have sent down a delegation led by Count Fenring to begin peace treaty negotiations. They’ll last weeks, if not longer.”

“You plan to keep me here all that time?” Chani says, discomforted.

Already this strange place has disturbed her on numerous levels, and she has not even met with the politics of it, which she knows will be more dire than anything else. Chani knows her place in this, and it is not with the backroom engineering of a new world order. She does not have the head for it, nor the heart.

“Consider it a safety measure against the enemy using you to hurt others,” Paul returns. “Any sietch you go to would be hunted, raided. I need time to secure a truce, one that the Great Houses would be forced to accept. My sister was not joking when she said I had left the city walls at an inopportune time.”

“I didn’t ask for you to come after me.”

He looks towards her, meets her warning gaze with a soft but firm nod. “But risking your life was never a possibility I felt comfortable with.”

She feels like he’s saying more than she understands. She doesn’t know how he operates anymore, how his visions work, what decisions he’s made or the reasons for any of it. None of it makes sense to her. She used to be in his confidence, she used to understand why he did the things he did. Now, she barely feels like she understands the questions echoing in his mind, much less the answers.

“You cannot keep me here indefinitely,” she tells him. “I will not stay for your convenience or peace of mind.”

His expression sharpens, just fractionally. “A few weeks, at least, until the terms of the treaty are hammered out.”

A pause, and then she nods.

A few weeks. She can do that.

“Good,” Paul says, seeming to relax, shoulders loosening. “Good.”

She is left to her own idleness after that, for much of the afternoon. What he goes to do while he disappears, she does not ask and he does not offer. In the meantime, she takes a short nap, her body exhausted and pushed beyond limits. She must be more tired than she anticipates because she is awoken by a knock at the door, and many hours have passed.

Jessica is there when she opens the door. “Chani,” she says, sounding relieved. “It’s good to see you.”

Chani has nothing to say to that. She has not always agreed with Jessica or gotten along, but there is respect and regard if nothing else. Begrudgingly, even. Nevertheless, she does not hesitate to open the door further and let the Sayyadina into her room. She brings with her a Fremen servant, a girl with short black hair bound behind a hijab, tendrils of curling bangs loose about her forehead. She is pretty, and young, and carries with her a wooden chest.

“Supplies,” Jessica explains, as the girl sets the chest on the floor.

“Sihaya,” the Fremen girl greets, reverently, bowing her head.

Jessica must read the pinched expression that falls over Chani’s face. “Leave us,” Jessica tells the girl. The girl nods, and scurries out. When they are alone, Jessica turns to Chani with lips pressed into a thin line. “I’m sorry for this, but we haven’t much time. We need to get you dressed quickly.”

“For what?” Chani asks, bewildered.

“The Delegation will arrive this evening. We need to present you—”

“Present?” Chani repeats, affronted now as well as bewildered.

Presents means she’ll have some station, some title in this place that needs announcement.

Concubine, the word rages in her head.

“I will not be introduced as anything,” Chani insists.

“Your presence is already noted. Would you have us hide you like you’re a shameful secret?”

“I don’t care what you do.”

Jessica’s expression somehow both softens and hardens at once; something in her eyes, something that speaks to the same calculations she has seen in Paul’s eyes, but with far less reserve. “Listen to me carefully. The moment you entered the city, our enemies’ spies clocked you for who you are. As you’ve already heard, the stories of Sihaya have spread far and wide. It matters how you’re introduced into Court. It matters how you present yourself. They will pick apart any sense of vulnerability, any hint of weakness. If we try to hide you, if we treat you like a secret, that will only end up feeding whispers that will come to haunt you, hurt you and Paul both.”

“Why feed into any of it? I’ll be gone in a few weeks.”

“You want to survive those few weeks?” Jessica retorts. “Then, trust me.”

Chani lifts her chin, warning, “I do not.”

Jessica sighs, understanding. “I know the last time we met, it wasn’t the best of circumstances.”

“You mean when you used your Voice to overrule my free will?”

“To save my son,” Jessica returns, unrepentant. “It wasn’t the polite thing to do, but for Paul I’m willing to entertain impoliteness.”

Chani snorts, half disdain and half genuine mirth.

“I have lived this life among the Court. It is more dangerous than the sands of Arrakis. There are worse ways to die than by heat stroke or blade. Here, the poison is invisible. Here, the assassins will greet you with smiles. Let me help you navigate it.”

It does not feel like something she should like, but Chani knows there is merit in this. She knows there is a kindness in this offer, whether Chani wants to accept it or not. Jessica is a calculating woman, but she is not cruel. Not to those who matter, and Chani knows she matters to her son.

“I do not want to be introduced as his concubine,” Chani insists, voice low, a harsh whisper.

A soft look, as Jessica nods slowly. “All you need to do is walk in. No announcement, no title. But you need to be seen, not hidden.”

Chani hates it, but she nods despite herself, knowing the wisdom in it.

The chest is opened, the contents removed. Inside, one by one, Jessica removes several articles of clothing, satins and silks, a riot of colors and of such delicacy that Chani hesitates to reach out and touch it for fear it would crumble against the calluses of her rough fingers. Paul’s mother spreads them out onto the bed, but before Chani can even inspect the items in great detail she is pulling out other things, too. Bottles, mixtures and solutions of some type, other mysterious accessories.

“Let’s get you ready,” Jessica declares.

Chani just stares at it, unblinking.

A tub full of water. An entire tub, more than any amount a person could drink in a week, in several weeks, just sitting there with steam softly rising. It is — obscene. Unthinkable. She cannot do this.

She cannot waste so much water simply to wash herself.

“All the water is reclamated and reused,” Jessica insists, understanding. “Paul implemented strict use of our filtration system as soon as we returned to Arakeen, even more intensive than it was before. It will not go to waste.”

This much water would feed a frugal family for months.

“Chani,” Jessica breathes, not without sympathy. “We do not have much time.”

The jolt is what Chani needs, but it still feels like a decadence beyond her imagination when she disrobes. There is no room for false modesty as she stands naked; Fremen women do not hide their bodies from other women, and she doubts the Bene Gesserit are a bashful bunch. Besides, Chani has larger concerns. The first dip into the tub is like a holy experience and a sin all at once. She slides into the tub, fully submerging her body, her head above the water — and Chani feels a dulled sense of anxiety, a hint of alarm. It feels — warm, but so foreign, so indulgent, she can hardly find the words.

The entire time, Jessica works diligently, but gently, setting out with a washcloth to clean Chani’s body, rinse the sand and sweat off her skin, across her arms, across her shoulders. “I apologize for pushing you into the deep end of this,” she says, as she adds oils into the water, perfumed and pleasant. Chani cannot name a single item of what she uses, it’s all so alien. “But there is no room for missteps. You will need to adapt, and quickly. They will sense any weakness and strike out immediately.”

“You mean,” Chani understands, a tick in her jaw, “if the Great Houses smelled the sweat of a dirty Fremen woman, they’d lose all sense of respect?”

A pause in the hand washing hers, as Jessica stares at her. “They would belittle you, yes. They would see a pet in place of who you are.”

Chani turns to her, an eyebrow lifted in challenge. “And who am I?”

“The only other woman in the universe that has any sway or persuasion over my son, the Emperor. That is power, Chani, whether you admit it or not. They’ll see it eventually, if they have any sense to them. But the introduction of you—”

“I am not staying.”

Another pause, as the washcloth returns to her body. “Whether you do or not, that is your choice.”

Chani lets silence fall, too overwhelmed to continue the tiresome conversation. She lets it all unfold, too overpowered by the governance of this strange city with its stranger ways of living. She can feel the unexpected sting of water to her eyes — tears, gathering, threatening to fall — and the absurd thought occurs to her that it would not matter if she wasted her tears. It would mean nothing in comparison to what she is already doing, the wastefulness that feels like a death warrant.

“You do this every day?” she asks, incredulous, a faint whisper.

Jessica says, her voice soft, “We are the Royal House of Atreides. This comes with expectations.”

Her hair is washed and treated with more substances she does not know the name of, made softer. Her skin is cleaned, scented lotions applied. She is dried off with a simple towel — a towel. And then the obscene production continues, as Jessica has her select her choice of attire from an arrangement of dresses, all silks and satins, textures of cloth she has never felt against her skin.

“Not blue,” Chani says, determinedly.

Jessica pauses, lamentation and understanding in her eyes, and dutifully moves on to select the next dress. The one ultimately chosen is a delicate thing, a soft silky material, light embroidery gathered in a ring at her neck, and Jessica selects the jewelry too, sapphire, like the Eyes of Ibad. It doesn’t matter if the necklace gracing her throat is blue; only cloth matters if it's blue, a Fremen woman’s bold declaration of having claimed a love. Instead, Chani’s dress is the color of cream and sand, and it flows off her like a cascading waterfall, down her back, clinging to each dip and curve of her body.

Chani can hardly recognize herself in the mirror.

“No announcement,” she repeats, to Jessica.

Jessica nods in assurance, and leaves to make herself presentable as the Reverend Mother and make her own marked entrance with far more grandeur and spectacle. “Chani,” she says, just before she leaves. “Don’t let them see you flinch.”

Chani pauses, then follows with a firm nod.

She understands.

The Delegation arrives, led by a man in a white cape and gold trimmings, and a booming voice that echoes. “I, Count and Governor of House Fenring, Imperial Spice Minister, witnessed by the thirteen ruling members of the Imperial Court, stand before you as the Herald of the Delegation, chosen representative of the Great Houses. I have come to broker peace, in good tidings and fair regard.”

Chani waits, among the throngs of people gathered. Delays too long, perhaps, because Jessica had given clear instructions for her to come in with all the other guests. The nerves of anxiety make her bide her time, wait it out, and linger in the hallways until well after the ceremony has commenced and all the others have entered the Great Hall. When she finally gathers herself, the doors open with a hard push and Chani tries to slip into the back, unmarked. The dining room is larger than any other room she’s seen, bifurcated by a long oblong table which stretches the full length of the hall, lying overflowing with food and wines and riches and gold-plated trinkets. She tries to slip into the back among the others in attendance. The room is filled with too many people, too many dignitaries, too many people with more titles than she’d ever bother remembering.

Up, in the center — Paul, standing beside his beautiful wife, a regal princess decked out in gold and white, a string of tiny crystals and fragile beadwork covering her face; and Paul, next to her, standing on the raised dais, in garbs of black ceremonial robes, a military suit with medals pinned to his chest and a long flowing dark cloak.

As much as Jessica had warned against it, Chani is overcome with the urge to hide.

This is not where her place in the world is meant to be.

But it is a useless endeavor.

It is not even a few seconds before Paul catches sight of her among those in attendance, and all else fades into meaningless; Chani is caught, the sole recipient of his undivided attention despite far more pressing matters. She feels pinned to the floor in her opulent dress, splayed open for his gaze like a mouse caught in a boxed trap. She is enthralled, and she feels enthralling. He’s staring at her in a heated look that only reminds Chani of the fact that he’s one of the few man that has ever seen her naked. The moment stretches so long that the others surrounding him notice, even his wife, who looks up and stares at Chani with something infinitely complicated crossing her delicate features. Gurney, to the left, shifts in his stance, restless; and Jessica, to her son’s right, stands straighter and offers an acknowledging nod, her ceremonial headdress giving a slight dip.

Announcement or not, Chani is brought to the front of everyone’s riveted attention, and she knows — by the end of the night, they will all be calling her the Emperor’s concubine.

Chapter Text

All eyes are on her for the rest of the night.

When dinner is served, Chani is thankfully not seated at Paul’s table (alongside his wife, his mother, and the main delegation leaders, Fenring and his wife, Lady Margot, another Bene Gesserit). Chani is off to the side, next to Gurney and a row of other dignitaries, a placement that still puts her too much in the floodlights. People try to draw her into conversation, but Chani delicately declines — or perhaps she does it indelicately, if Gurney’s pointed elbow nudging her in the ribcage is any indication. She doesn’t engage in more than a two word response to any direct question. She keeps quiet, observes the others, eats what little of the foreign food she can muster. Gurney has to whisper in her ear to use the second fork to her left when they bring out the main course; why there are multiple utensils necessary for a portion of food that could barely feed a child is beyond Chani’s understanding, but she dutifully takes direction when he offers it.

“Try not to look like you want to murder everyone,” Gurney chides in a half-whisper, halfway through dinner.

Chani decides not to respond; it wouldn’t be a delicate response either.

Several minutes later, Gurney is drawn away by some urgent news and Chani is left to fend for herself among the vultures.

“So,” a woman says, high cheekbones and raven hair. “I’ve heard such remarkable things about the Fremen.”

Chani doesn’t respond to this either, because there seems to be no need for a response to a statement such as that.

The woman tries again, “Is that where you met the Emperor? Out on the sands?”

“As opposed to where else on this world?” Chani offers.

The woman blinks, easing back into her chair with downturned lips.

The table conversation seems to skirt around Chani, after that. Despite herself, her eyes are drawn to Paul’s table, to the woman seated to his left. Princess Irulan looks poised, charming, beautiful in a regal way that almost stings. Her hand on the table is only inches away from Paul’s, and Chani can only picture it, their hands clasped together — or her reaching forward in the mornings to fix his medals or the folds of his cape, just like Chani used to do with his stillsuit straps. The intimacy of those moments had always been about the two of them, a quiet ritual, one that she knows he must share now with his wife no matter the protestations he has made.

Paul turns his head, and catches her stare. Chani infinitesimally straightens in her chair, chin rising, unable to look away now that she’s been caught. It is an ephemeral moment that she should not extend, not after the spectacle he’d made of her entrance when all she’d wanted to do was camouflage herself into the background.

A second later, Gurney is at Paul’s ear, whispering urgently, a solemn expression on his face. Chani watches the exchange as Paul’s jaw clenches, his eyes still fixed back on her. She can see it, the moment some horrible information is conveyed because Paul’s shoulders stiffen incrementally. The Princess seems to see it too, leaning towards him, a clear question on her lips. Paul only shakes his head once, a small dismissal, his eyes never leaving Chani — and then whispers something back to Gurney.

Gurney straightens with his full rigid military posture, leaving the head table only to make his way back to Chani. The look on Gurney’s face is pinched — grimaced. “Come with me,” he urges into her ear, forgoing any formalities when they leave the table.

She walks with him outside, to a corridor bracketed by guards. There, Paul joins them only moments later and Gurney takes his leave with an acknowledging nod.

“What is it?” Chani asks.

Paul clasps her by the elbow and urges her along down the corridor, into the shadows of further privacy. The foreboding feeling overrules any protests she may have to the physical contact; she can tell, she knows — whatever he wants to tell her, it must be horrendous.

Sure enough, it is. “I just got word about your former sietch’s evacuation,” Paul announces, his voice barely a hush. His eyes are both soft and fathomless, unspoken sorrow in the depths. “A Grandfather attacked the half that took camp for the night.”

A long endless beat, and there is an eerie absence of denial, nor even shock, as she takes his meaning.

“How many?”

Paul hesitates. “Over three dozen dead. Your Naib among them.”

Chani both straightens and crumbles one after the other, a sickening inhale as she takes a step back. Her feet trip over themselves, and it’s only Paul’s hand at her elbow that keeps her steady. She cannot find the words, at first, can hardly find her breath. So many dead, so many. Most, she remembers, had been the elderly too tired to continue the journey, forced to make camp on a meager cliffside. It had been her idea for them to take rest. It had been because of her that they had had to evacuate in the first place. All lost — because of her.

“Don’t blame yourself,” Paul tells her. “Chani, there was nothing you could do. That many walking through the dunes, a sandworm was bound to find some of them. You cannot blame yourself.”

“I do not,” she finds herself saying, feeling bludgeoned. She reels back and stares at him, accusatory. “I blame you.”

The words land as if she struck him. The flinch seems to reverberate through his entire body, down to the hand holding her; he lets go of her immediately, burnt, and she can tell she’s delivered a fatal wound but she is beyond caring. She has been tugged about and placed at his discretion, and these are the decisions he keeps making. To sacrifice others, to play the messiah that leads legions to their doom. He has become what he promised he would never become.

“Chani,” he breathes, her name filled with affliction.

She steps back, skittish and awkward on her back heels — and he only keeps still as a statue, watching, his graceful throat swelling with a harsh swallow.

She runs.

Fremen do not believe in a retreat, but they do hide. A Freman can lay hidden in the sands for hours, or even days. They can lie in wait, either for a danger to pass or for an enemy to let their guard down. A Fremen knows patience, but not forfeit. They know the value of withdrawal if only in terms of a cunning game of offenses and defenses. Chani, herself, has spent more hours than she can count, buried beneath the sand, a small pipe the only thing afforded for air. She has lost days to this stratagem.

What Chani does next is none of this.

When she returns to her quarters and refuses to leave it for days, she does not delude herself into thinking of this as anything other than a retreat, a cowardly thing, shameful. She is beyond caring. This city is a plague, and there is no good to come of her further engaging with it. She has weeks left here until the treaty is reached. She will spend it encased in these four hard walls of her private quarters, a prison, blank but for a carveout depiction of a Shai-Hulud emerging from the sands. Chani stares at the carving for hours.

Her food is brought to her doors, even her water. She huddles in layers of foreign clothes because the air is artificially cold, and she has spent her lifetime in the heat of the unforgiving sun. She turns all away at the door; the servant girl with the hijab, another Fremen; Jessica, with another attempt to talk; Gurney, with an offer to spar; even Alia makes her way to Chani’s door, a precocious toddler too wise for her age.

“You cannot become a ghost, sister,” Alia says. “You’re not dead yet.”

“And what do you know of death, little one?”

“More than you,” the child returns.

It is a disturbing comment, but everything is in this place.

For days, Chani is determined to fade away.

And for days, she succeeds.

She dreams of a paradise, an ocean, rivers, the water falling from the sky just like in Paul’s stories. It seems magical. It seems impossible.

She dreams of Paul standing on the surface of the water, the same as if it were rock.

She dreams.

Chani is finally starting to get familiar with the various uses in the washroom facilities when she hears it from the other room; someone here, in her personal quarters. Her crysknife blade is out of its sheath before she takes a single step back into her adjoining bedroom. She expects — she doesn’t know what she expects. Perhaps an assassin.

Instead, she finds a woman sitting on her bed. Princess Irulan Corrino – Atreides. Elegant, poised, not in the least bit offended by the weapon in Chani’s hand.

Chani would have preferred an assassin.

“She lives,” Irulan says, as a greeting.

“What are you doing here?”

“There have been so many rumors floating around, and none of them seemed remotely true. I even stopped by Paul’s quarters to see if he had you chained up to his bed, but no. Here you are. Chani, of the Fremen. Sihaya, Ramili. I thought we should meet, we have so much in common.”

Chani, incredulous here: “We have nothing in common.”

“That speaks of a lack of imagination or intelligence, and you don’t seem the type for either.”

Chani doesn’t know what this is, but her body is fully alert, braced for anything. Maybe she’d been premature to dismiss the idea of an assassination. Bene Gesserit weren’t faint women. Jessica could hold her own in a fight – had held her own, even against Stilgar. The Weirding Way. Chani’s crysknife is an advantage, but she doubts the princess would have entered any room without ensuring her own.

“Won’t you sit?” Irulan asks.

Chani does, reluctantly.

“Shall I have some tea brought in?” she offers, politely.

There is no need for her to play this game. She imagines what’s on the princess’s mind, and it is the furthest wish of Chani. No need to belabor the point, draw out a confrontation where none is needed.

Chani will not be the other woman.

“I am not interested in warming Paul’s bed,” Chani says, direct and without reserve. “You needn’t worry about a cuckquean.”

If the bluntness is surprising, Irulan does not show it. “Duly noted,” she returns, sounding charmed, though she does not sound convinced. “I’ve already learned so much from this interaction.”

Chani lifts an eyebrow, aware that she has perhaps said only a dozen words in the entire exchange.

“You’re straightforward, honest,” Irulan offers, to the disbelief that must be on Chani’s face. “Paul was right about that.”

She hates the idea that Paul has talked about her to his wife.

“We needn’t be enemies, or even adversaries,” Irulan says. “I find the idea tedious, and pointless if you’re to be believed.”

Chani is less than amused by the implications. “I do not lie.”

“I believe you, that you believe that you do not want Paul. But the world is complicated, and women possess many contradictory beliefs, especially about themselves.”

“You were right. This is tedious already.”

Irulan smiles, a small huff of a laugh. “Fair enough, Chani of the Northern Fremen Tribes. I will not take up more of your time. I just wanted to meet you, get a sense of the woman everyone talks about. It was a pleasure to meet you.”

Chani almost doubts that — almost. She cannot pin the Princess’s true feelings, not entirely. A flavor of expected hostility and resentment coated over with a smile. What had Jessica warned her? Here, the assassins will greet you with smiles.

The other woman rises, gracefully, as if a dancer. Chani merely watches her, silent, inert — still as a statue. The dichotomy and duality between them is stark and apparent from the color of their skin to the movements of their bodies. If Paul is to be believed, it would take a great measure of resolve to not see the attraction of this other woman, to not fall for it. But dangerous, clearly. It seems all the women in Paul’s life have at least one thing in common.

“Rest well,” Irulan offers, as the door shuts behind her.

The conversation is over almost as soon as it began, and Chani is left in silence once again.

She cannot hide forever. Even Chani grows tired of the shadows.

But it is a small loosening of her grip, her venture outside after days held within. The first is a walk along the corridors, then to the courtyard still within the palace domain where she sees a Fremen attendant give water to the date palms; enough water, he tells her, to feed a hundred men every day. They are beautiful creations, these trees, but she does not forget the cost. Everything has a cost, most especially life.

The others are happy enough to see her return, tentative though it is, but they know better than to press too quickly. But Alia, especially, seems to think they are already kin, and treats her with a familiarity that at first is beguiling until it wears down into bewildered acceptance. Soon enough Jessica is sending the Royal Guards to fetch her at supper, and for the first time in weeks, Chani eats dinner with the others. There is none of the formality as there was during the Delegation’s arrival; it is just Jessica, Alia, and Chani. Still, the food is strange, the utensils remain frustrating, and Chani has not recovered her full appetite.

The third dinner, Paul stumbles on them, caught unawares of this new developing routine. He looks more startled to see Chani than she does him, and he quickly makes his excuses. “I’ll leave you to your dinner,” he says, eyes lingering on Chani.

He’s letting her keep her distance.

It’s a thought that solidifies over the next few days. The few times she’s seen him out and about on the palace grounds, he says nothing when she turns the other way. His arrival around every corner is heralded by his guards, so it is mostly simple enough for Chani to avoid him. He does not press the issue, even when she can see the rejection land like a weight across his crown. She remembers how he had looked, last they truly spoke. I blame you. The accusation has been ringing in her ears ever since, a forever echo, just as haunting as his wounded look, an inspiration that grows like a gnawing fester in her chest. Perhaps he deserved it, perhaps he did not, but Chani does not like the feeling the memory inspires.

Still, even in these vast palace grounds, there is not enough room for infinite avoidance.

The next time she runs into him, he looks tired. Shallow sockets under his eyes, bruised slightly with a purple shade, a clear remark to a lack of rest. She’s heard rumors here and there about the delegation’s treaty, and Jessica has been more than plain in her frustrations at the lack of progress with the Great Houses. “Stubborn men of high birth,” she’d told Chani in a clipped voice, “expecting too much and offering too little.” It is the way of men everywhere, high born or not, but Chani does not bother to say this to a Bene Gesserit.

Still, the look of Paul’s growing exhaustion is an alarming thing, despite herself. Each time she sees him, he seems more and more preoccupied and less and less himself. She wonders if he’s eating. If he’s sleeping, if he’s dreaming. She shouldn’t, it’s not her place anymore, but the concern lingers long after their rare meetings occur.

Truth is, he is always on her mind.

She cannot escape him.

Not even when she’s by herself.

She is familiar with the palace grounds now, knows her way around it. Today, Chani has decided to bide her time with training; Gurney has offered more than once.

But when she makes her way to the training room, she is surprised to see it already occupied; the sounds of a match well underway, the clash of blades apparent. Paul, at one end, and Count Fenring at the other. She doesn’t know how long the match has been going on, but she’s surprised at the Count’s ability to hold steady against Paul’s aggressive advancements. Paul has always been one of the best fighters she has ever seen; it’s one of the things that attracted her to him. More than once, the Count’s defensive bodyshield glows red as Paul’s knife makes a near-killing blow, but then the shimmer fades as the Count drives Paul onto his back foot, and the parry continues, a series of swift hits and blocks that moves almost faster than the eye can follow.

“He’s holding back, I think,” Irulan says, suddenly appearing at Chani’s side. She acts as if Chani is expected, and dips her head conspiratorially to whisper, as if they are confidants to one another, “The Count? He’s rumored to be an assassin, though many do not know it. My father always told me he was the deadliest man in any room, though you would not think to look at him.”

Chani stares, and it is truth enough, for the Count looks more like a rat in the face than anything else, long face, long nose, overly large eyes. But Chani knows not to underestimate a man with a rat face the same way she knows not to underestimate a man named after a desert mouse.

It seems, the Count has many hidden qualities.

“But if you ask me,” Irulan says, a delicate trimmed eyebrow raised in caution, “I would be more concerned with his wife than him, in any given room.”

Chani has only seen Lady Margot once, but she left an impression. Another Bene Gesserit, stunningly beautiful. She wonders if there is any other kind.

Paul looks up, at the wrong moment, and catches sight of Irulan and Chani talking together in a hushed corner; it’s enough of a distraction to be a fatal mistake — he misses when the Count drops his shoulder in a clear signal of attack, faults in a block, oversteps in an unearned return. And, suddenly, the match is over, with the Count’s blade at Paul’s throat.

Chani cannot remember the last time Paul lost a match.

“Well done,” Paul says, gracious even in loss.

The Count rises. “You, as well. You almost had me a number of times.”

Three, by Chani’s count, only since her belated arrival into the training room.

“Now, if you’ll excuse me,” the Count says, regally, clearly relishing the victory, “I need a long hard soak in the tub. I think I’ve earned it.”

For what, Chani thinks, disparagingly.

No kill made, no water collected, and he treats himself to a king’s prize.

The room clears out as everyone makes their way to the door, Irulan on the arm of the Count, congratulating him on the victory. The princess casts one fleeting look back at Chani when she does not move, when Chani stays after all the others have left; while Paul still collects his things.

Soon enough, Chani is left alone in a room with a man she has been avoiding for weeks.

Certainly, she should be leaving. But there is something of humility in Paul’s continence after his defeat; it should be pleasing to the petty innards of her, but instead it stings like a thorn in her thumb. She has never liked the weight of defeat on Paul’s shoulders, nor his tiredness. It does not please her even when she knows his welfare should be the least of her concerns.

Instead Chani lingers, picking up a fallen slip-tip knife from the ground, the blade Paul had lost halfway through the match. It is an elegant design, finely crafted. She weighs it in her hand, finds the balance of the blade pleasing.

“You moved too slow,” Chani says to him. “Has the Emperor gotten indolent in his reign?”

“It wasn’t my speed that lost me the match,” Paul retorts.

“What was it then?”

He merely gives her a look, because they both know precisely what distracted him.

“Are you so distraught,” she taunts, and it is almost a funny thing, “by the sight of two women speaking that you’ll make a fatal mistake?”

“You speak more to Irulan than you do to me,” Paul says, without humor. “Can you blame me?”

All levity drains out of her. She realizes perhaps she is not in the position to tease him as she once did. It is not the same anymore; nothing is the same.

“How have you been?” he offers her, in a less combative tone.

“Well,” she tells him, mostly a lie, but something about his dejection makes her feel off kilter. “I needed the time to — to be alone with my thoughts.”

“Yes,” he hums. “Of course.”

He is more than upset, she can tell. More than licking the wounds of a lost fight. Chani can still read him in how he stands, how he moves, a restless agitation as he picks up and begins cleaning his weapons. He isn’t prone to becoming emotional, too reserved for a man in his youthful age, too aware of the repercussions of his actions, but when he does become governed by his emotions, it usually lets itself be known in fits and explosions.

Men, Chani thinks, are the same as children sometimes.

“And you?” she returns, suddenly less charitable than a mere moment ago. “I hear the negotiations are putting up more of an obstacle than anticipated.”

Paul grunts, flinging a rag off his shoulder, beginning to clean a blade to a polish. “They yet maneuver to unseat me. Half the Houses still favor the former Emperor, and the other half would rather have a Harkonnen ruler than me. With them, their Spice production is cemented and controlled. With me, they know I have other concerns than just the continued production of the Spice Melange.”

It is harder to fault him when he speaks of Fremen concerns.

“I am surrounded by enemies in every corner,” he continues, unable to keep the thoughts to himself. She wonders how long it’s been building, whirling, this storm inside him. “Every corner of the galaxy, every face in the room looks for a killing blow. Do you have any idea how exhausting that is?”

She doesn’t, not really. She’s never known the pressures he’s faced; has only ever done her part to temper it, counterbalance the weight.

Now, she does not even do that.

“And you,” he continues, as if reading her thoughts, “your wounds are the worst. I know how to deflect against everyone else, but I am defenseless against you, that hatred in your eyes. I am weakened by the slightest hint of insult in your voice. I have no defenses against it, no immunity.”

“There is not,” she swallows, throat tight. “There is no hatred in my eyes.”

“Isn’t there? You could've fooled me.”

She does not like this. Does not want to be considered cruel, not by him. She knows whatever else in life Paul has, he has suffered more cruelty than is his due. She does not want to add to the tally. “I look away, Paul,” she finds herself explaining. “I cannot meet your eyes, but that does not mean that when I look, I look with hatred.”

That tempers him, but only briefly. “Is it so hard — to look at me?”

“As hard as it is for you to look away from me,” she offers.

He is always watching. She feels like she closes her eyes at night, and he is still watching her.

“It was easier, before,” he says, so softly she can barely hear him. She does not dare to take a step closer. “I thought everything was clear, the path forward. But the more I make my plays, the more the moves unfold, the harder it gets to anticipate the field. It was so clear at the beginning. I saw the narrow way forward. Now, it feels too narrow.”

He’s talking about taking the Water of Life. His visions. He must be.

“The way forward to what?” she asks, unable to help herself. “You chose violence, Paul. You chose to make yourself a messiah and take on a Holy War.”

“I chose you,” he returns, heatedly. Chani is struck speechless, unable to move, unable to comprehend; his eyes hold meanings like nothing she’s ever seen in them. She cannot even describe it, not even in a thousand words. “You do not understand, Chani. I chose the only path that would lead me to a life with you, and now you won’t even look at me.”

The declaration sits heavily in the air, breathing deeply in the space between them. The words leave her stricken, belying some unfathomable meaning she cannot understand.

How was waging a Holy War and marrying another woman the way towards her?

It makes no sense.

The tension between them shivers, waiting, only broken by a soft tentative knock at the door. Irulan, his wife, at the entrance, having returned to collect her husband. Chani does not know what she overheard, nor what the princess could possibly gleam from it; all Chani knows is that she is caught yet again wrong-footed.

“Should I come back?” Irulan asks, making it clear she knows she’s interrupted a moment.

Chani’s jaw clenches. “No. I was just leaving.”

But before she takes her leave, Chani finds herself sparing a single fleeting glance over her shoulder at Paul, who stands there, silently imploring, as if just waiting for a chance to meet her gaze.

Chapter Text

An enormous sandstorm hits Arrakeen for the next several days, covering the city in a blanket of sand so thick they do not see the sun until nearly a week has passed. It is too long, in Chani’s estimates, to go without the sunlight on her face. In here, there is only an artificial light, a hum in the air that never fades. She finds herself growing anxious in the barren rooms, finds herself wandering the halls late at night simply for a search of a nameless relief.

In her walks, the familiar servant girl with the hijab finds her one night. Radiqa, she calls herself. She is shy but made of something sterner, too, and Chani finds herself charmed despite herself. The first few times the girl seems so enamored by Sihaya that it is awkward, but there is a quiet dignity to the girl that Chani recognizes was layers beneath her own skin when she was younger.

But at the tailend of that week, Radiqa comes to her quarters with a warning. “Sihaya,” she says, deferentially. “You must take care. There are rumblings of great discontent among some of the Fremen. The disbelieving ones.”

Chani looks over. She wonders what Radiqa would say if she discovered her precious Sihaya was one of the disbelievers too. “What are the rumbles?”

“Taliq,” she says. “The leader of the Makab Sietch. There have been whispers of growing malcontent as Muad’dib sends out more and more Fremen into space to fight the Holy War. He says the Mahdi is spilling Fremen blood like it means less than water. He says he will challenge the Mahdi when the time comes.”

Chani tries to listen to all this with a carefully neutral expression, but she also feels her jaw clench, her shoulders square off, nearly every corner inch of her body turn razor sharp as a blade. She knows there is nothing in the words or the argument of this Taliq that Chani can refute. Paul is more than just a warmonger now, he is the Messiah leading a path towards devastation. The Fremens will pay for that with their blood.

But there is another cold slithering monster inside her, too, at the thought of anyone challenging Paul.

“Let him,” Chani finally determines. “He will not be the first Fremen to do so, and fail.”

The morning brings with it the first break in the dawn, a clearing of the sandstorm. It later finds Chani venturing into the heart of Paul’s palace, where he meets and confers with his advisors and council, intent on passing along the warning that Radiqa delivered. But the message is almost entirely forgotten when she arrives and feels the immediate attention of all others in the room, most of whom Chani has already become familiar with — but she is stopped short by the surprising sight of Stilgar among the numbers.

“Ah, she returns to the fold,” Stilgar boasts as a greeting. “Welcome, welcome, Sihaya, Desert Spring. I have missed seeing your face beside your beloved Muad’dib.”

It has been many days since she has seen him, more than two years, but it hardly feels like any time at all at the familiarity in his imposing presence. He greets her like it was only a matter of when she would reemerge at Paul’s side, and she tries to hide her flush, from muted anger, from a hint of embarrassment, as she embraces him back. Reluctantly, she cannot deny she has missed Stilgar. Stubborn, yes, to the point of near obscenity, but he has never treated Chani with any type of disregard, even when she was far younger than him, nipping at his heels as the youngest of the Fedaykin. She notes the absence of the Princess in the room, and is inexplicably relieved this exchange is not witnessed by the woman who the empire sees as Paul’s wife. The Fremen speak too freely of her and Paul, as if it is a preordained thing, as if he is not married to another woman.

“What are you doing here?” she asks.

“I came at the request of your man,” Stilgar returns.

Chani almost feels her eye twitch. “He is not my man, Stilgar. It would do you well to remember that and mind your tongue.”

“I am not the one that seems to have forgotten the importance of some things,” he replies, a hint of reproach in his voice.

Thankfully, Paul interrupts the first caustic response that strikes Chani; Stilgar is like family to her, but like family, he can incite her affront rather quickly. “I need to head out to the dunes,” he explains. “Stilgar offered to be my guide.”

Chani turns to him, surprised. “You’re venturing out? Why?”

“I needed something,” he replies, enigmatically. “You’re free to join us, of course. We’re leaving shortly.”

It must be a trap, Chani realizes, but well executed and tendered. Paul knows she has been climbing the walls inside this faded palace, and that she would jump at any opportunity to return to the desert outside these city walls. But with it, inherently, is further exposure to Paul’s company. She hasn’t been avoiding him as much as before, not entirely, but they have not — and perhaps especially have not — discussed his heated confession from the training room.

“I chose you. You do not understand, Chani. I chose the only path that would lead me to a life with you, and now you won’t even look at me.”

Those damning words have haunted Chani every night since, as much as she’s tried to dismiss them. Illogical, wholly mysterious, and uttering infuriating. She cannot tell what he meant by those vexing words, and she refuses to ask him further about it.

She looks from Paul, to Stilgar, and then back again.

A trap, well executed indeed.

“Fine,” she tells them. “Let me retrieve my stillsuit.”

In her personal quarters, it does not take much time for her to gather her things and strap on her stillsuit. Her bag still contains the bare minimum for essentials – her crysknife, a change of clothing, her maker hooks, a thumper, a spare filtration for her mask, a handful of food and perishables, a thermos of water, and — the water rings. Technically, the necklace contained collectively both hers and Paul’s water rings. He had only been in her sietch for a few days when he’d asked her to hold onto the metallic discs he’d won in defeating Jamis, ones that represented the volume of water released by his body processed through the deathstill. Their value is immense, but a man giving his water rings to a woman held special significance to the Fremen that Paul hadn’t realized at the time.

Not until later, when Stilgar chided the others for teasing him. “Calm, calm. He does not know the meaning.”

“The meaning?” Paul had asked, adorably confused.

Gruffly, Stilgar offered, “A man gives his water rings only to his intended.”

And Paul had turned so flush in the face, Shishakli had doubled over from laughter.

Chani had heard the teasing nonstop for the next several days from everyone at camp, even those who did not tend to partake in such levity. Chani had endured it with a forced calmness that hopefully didn’t belie the blush threatening to crawl up her neck constantly. Because even afterwards, even after learning the true meaning of it, Paul had not asked for the water rings back.

Now, they feel like a heavy weight among her belongings. She is too practical to discard something so valuable, especially if she is returning to the desert, but the false promise of them carried a burden too. He may not have given it to her with the full weight of knowledge, but he hadn’t taken them back, and Chani had never offered to return them either.

Now, they are meaningless in such regards.

He may have intended for Chani at one point in time, but he still married another.

She stuffs the water rings into her rucksack, pushing it to the bottom and out of sight, grabs the rest of her belongings and leaves quickly. But as she’s walking out the door, she hears it — Paul, in his chambers just down the hall, so close it would not take even twenty steps to get there. She has done her best to ignore his proximity, and the wisdom of this becomes all too apparent when she realizes he is not alone either. Irulan is with him, and Chani is so thrown off center, it's as if she’s missed a step down a flight of stairs. She does not know where Irulan rests her head at night, only that the closest quarters to Paul is Chani’s own. There have only been brief glimpses into this marriage, their interactions in public reduced to formality and politics. She’s never even seen them exchange more than a few words to each other, certainly never seen Paul look at his wife with a third of the intensity he bestows upon Chani. It is a petty thing to note with a bitter aftertaste, but Chani notes it nonetheless.

Despite herself, she finds the steps down the hall, inching closer to the open bedroom door of Paul’s chambers.

“You cannot be serious about this,” Irulan is saying. Chani peeks into the room to spy on Paul packing his things, the same standard items that Chani had just packed into her own rucksack. “This isn’t an errand for the Emperor, Paul. Can you not send one of your men to see the task done?”

“No,” he insists, tightly. “It needs to be me. I know where to look.”

“Isn’t that the purpose of Stilgar?”

“I know where to look, but I’d be foolish not to seek help from those who know the desert better than I do.”

“Is that why Chani is coming along as well?” Irulan retorts, wryly. “Is she meant to be a guide, too?”

“Enough,” Paul retorts, a snappish tone that startles Chani. She’s never heard him speak like that to his wife, never heard this particular flavor of frustration from him. It’s practically one shy step of using the Bene Gesserit Voice. “I am not in the mood to discuss Chani with you, now or ever again.”

“I am your wife,” Irulan replies, chin lifted in defiance.

“Let us not play these silly games, Irulan. You play a part, no more. We both know who my wife should be, who I would have chosen if given the right. I’ve made that clear enough over these past two long and weary years.”

Chani staggers back, uneasy and unsteady. She— she should not be here. She should not be listening. But the words echo as if in an empty chamber long after Chani stumbles away, down the hall receding into shadows. The voices linger behind her as she retreats, but she cannot sparse out the words. Only the tone they carry, one of hostility (his) and matching resentment (hers).

She pretends to be too preoccupied talking with Stilgar to note Paul’s arrival to the gated antichamber of the palace grounds, but she is distinctly aware of him. A heightened awareness that she has never been able to shirk, even despite her best efforts. To his credit, if he notices her false indifference, he makes no mention of it. Perhaps he is used to it by now. He simply informs them all of a displeasing amendment to their journey out of the city — they will be taking one of those infernal aircrafts, a carryall that can seat up to six. Only four are coming along: Chani, Paul, Stilgar, and Gurney. Between the latter two, Chani watches bewildered as they carry a large cart of some kind, heavy enough to load a man inside. They place it in the back of the carrier, and Chani looks at Paul in confusion.

“I’ll explain later,” he says, mindful of unwanted ears.

But later, after they take off and Stilgar is directing them west, past the Imperial Basin, Chani becomes truly concerned. “The breeding grounds are just off to the side,” Stilgar says. “Only a few dozen miles beyond the shield wall.”

“Breeding grounds?” Chani whispers, in shock.

They are sacred. Those grounds are avoided for obvious reasons, extending miles and miles of territory off limits to any sane Fremen. The Sandworms aren’t passive on a good day, but on the grounds they came to for the express purposes of mating, they are feral. No one is mad enough to venture out there, not without a deathwish or—

“I need a young sandworm,” Paul tells her.

And there is only one reason Chani can think of, for that.

The Water of Life.

It is a relatively short trip to the location; what would have taken two days of a sandwalk journey on foot is completed in a little over an hour. Gurney keeps the aircraft steady high enough over the dunes to avoid stirring the sands in anything that couldn’t be interpreted by a sandworm as another bout of bad weather, but Chani has a terrible feeling about all of this. The concern worsens minute by minute as she watches Paul gear up with a harness, one end strapped to his chest, the other hooked to the side wall of the aircraft.

“You mean to repel down there?” she asks, dumbfounded by this stupid plan. “This chasm is teeming with sandworms, some as old as a Grandfather. It will not just be a pit of younglings you find.”

“She is not wrong,” Stilgar notes, a solemn look on his face. He appears displeased to be arguing with his precious Lisan al Gaib, but he does so with reluctance as he points out, “I could take your place. I captured a younglin once.”

“Only once,” Chani points out. “In your entire lifetime out there on the dunes. It is a rare occurrence, for good reason.”

“It needs to be me,” Paul tells both of them, dismissively, pulling the strap tight across the chest. Stubborn foolish man, she thinks, he’s bought too much into his own legend. He turns towards Gurney, who pilots the carryall in a steady flight. “Whatever you do, do not land — not even to rescue me, you understand? That’s an order.”

Gurney clenches his jaw. “Yes, Your Grace.”

“This is madness,” Chani says, aghast.

It does not stop Paul from moving to the edge of the open door of the aircraft and looking out at his intended destination below. He glances back to Chani, his eyes betraying a hint of some fissure in his resolve. He says nothing, so she just stares at him, silently pleading, compelling him with her horror alone to rethink this foolish endeavor. It will get him killed. It will end only in tragedy.

He looks away from her, towards Stilgar. “Keep the cargo box ready. We’ll need to transfer it quickly.”

And then he jumps out into the open air, without pause.

Chani rushes to the edge of the platform, staring out at his plummeting figure becoming the size of an ant down below. The rope line finally catches a hard stop, halting his descent only a short distance above the surface of the sands. He dangles there, but she cannot see enough to see what he’s doing, not with any clear accuracy. She can only spot his distant figure, can only count the seconds, the long hard minutes, as he disengages the rope, a careful step onto the sands. A sandwalk in these pits guarantees nothing of the standard safety and deflection. He is at the mercy of the Maker.

Stilgar places a hand on Chani’s shoulders, a gesture of comfort. “He will be alright. A sandworm will not be his end.”

Chani could almost snarl at him, she is so affronted. “You and your thoughtless faith. He is not invincible. He could die out there as well as any other man.”

“Perhaps the true sin here is one of too little faith, Sihaya,” Stilgar reproaches. “What he needs now is not your doubt.”

It is no use talking sense to Stilgar. “What about you?” she demands, turning her attention to Gurney. “Don’t tell me you think this is a good idea.”

“Fuck no,” Gurney replies, harshly, a bark. “But I have my orders, whether I like them or not.”

Sycophants, she realizes. Paul has surrounded himself with men too blindly loyal to him, too afraid to tell him when he’s being too stubborn and foolish or just plain reckless for his own good. She turns back to glare out at Paul’s small figure down below, wandering about this death trap, a slow and cautious sandwalk that hastens her pulse. Her throat feels too tight, something heavy lodged there, too much like a scream. The fear in her is so overwhelming, Chani can hardly contain herself. Staying still is a task that requires nearly more resolve than she contains.

Eventually, finally, she sees him catch a younglin — or more precisely, she sees a younglin attack Paul, a vicious strike out, a serpentlike coil that could easily kill a man twice Paul’s size. It is perhaps not even the length of Paul’s body, but it does its best to overwhelm him, curl around his body and arms, squeeze the life out of him. The strength of even a young sandworm cannot be overstated.

But then, something happens — something Chani cannot see clearly and would understand even less if she could. Paul masters the sandworm, and she watches it go limp in his arms, docile.

“Kull wahad,” Stilgar mutters, in wonder.

He sandwalks back to the dangling rope, attaches it back to his harness. Stilgar moves quickly to ready the crate, filled already with sand. Chani dutifully operates the electric pulley, pulling Paul back up through the air, the young sandworm wrapped obediently around his body as if it were a pet. It is only seconds later that Paul is back onboard, and fewer seconds later to secure the sandworm in its crate, nestled underneath the pile of warm sand.

The entire time, Chani can hardly contain the shaking of her hands; adrenaline, or something too much like fear. Ridiculous, she thinks. She has been a Fedaykin nearly all her adult life; she does not shake like this, she should not.

“Let’s go,” Paul hollers, hand-signaling in the air for Gurney to pilot away now that the younglin is safe and secure.

The command comes just a moment too late, though.

Even hundreds of feet in the air, she senses it — the tremors in the sands below. It’s like a ricochet from a blast in an explosion, an impact that displaces acres of sand as a Shai-Hulud breaks the surface below them. Gurney veers the air carrier a sharp left, barely missing the ragged teeth of a massive maker. Chani slams to the floor, knocked off her feet, flung in the mad pitch that follows, a long careen sideways — and then she’s pitched outside the open sliding door; she catches herself on the rungs of the landing steps outside, barely, hanging on by her fingertips as the open jaw of a Sandworm tries to reach up and capture her and the carryall in one easy swallow.

“Hold on!” Paul screams, appearing up above, grabbing her hands, her wrists, trying to pull her up.

Gurney veers the air carrier into another sharp turn, which nearly dislodges Chani entirely. She slips from Paul’s grasp, briefly, plummeting a few inches further, a fall that tears a scream from her throat. Even as he gets his hold back on her, the terror on Paul’s face is only too apparent, face stark white, palled with the horror he must be seeing below her dangling feet; Chani does not look down. She only stares up, at his fear-filled eyes, eyes that had not held the same level of concern for his own welfare only moments ago.

When he finally manages to pull her back up onto the platform, his hold on her turns into a suffocating embrace, almost vicelike. Chani doesn’t have a moment to gain any steadiness on her feet, knocked once again to the side as Gurney maneuvers the carrier into a flight straight up into the clouds. Paul’s hold on her becomes a near death-grip as they take a hit, the Shai-Hulud knocking them into a tailspin by a mere glancing nudge, spiraling the carrier completely out of control.

“Bless the Maker and His water,” Stilgar prays, under his breath, eyes strewn shut. “Bless the coming and going of Him. May His passage cleanse the world. May He keep the world for His people.”

Gurney eventually manages to course-correct, but just barely, flying erratically off to the side and finally escaping the sandworm’s clutches. But it’s clear the infernal flying contraption is damaged.

“We need to land!” Gurney grunts. “And soon – or it’s a crashland.”

“West,” Stilgar hisses, shaken; he does not like these air carriers anymore than her. “Fly west. There is an outcropping of rocks. You can land there.”

“Are you alright?” Paul exhales to her, panting.

Chani shoves him off her — defensive, terrified, and still enraged. It is not the slap he deserves, but she delivers a warning just as stinging. “If we survive this,” she promises, “we will have words about your arrogant recklessness, Paul Atreides.”

They barely make it. She will never contest Gurney’s skills as a pilot, but she hopes she never again has a reason to fly with him. He lands the aircraft as carefully as he can, on a solid flat sheet of bedrock, but the air carrier is beyond salvageable.

Gurney and Stilgar unload the crate between the two of them. “It will take us a long time to walk back to the Palace with this thing,” Gurney says, annoyed.

“We can go to Rifana Sietch,” Stilgar says, pulling out his paracompass. “A day’s walk, if we’re lucky.”

Riding a sandworm is not an option, not only because of the crate they need to carry or the fact that Gurney can’t manage the ride. None of them feel yet comfortable with goading a sandworm to them, not this close to the frenzy of the breeding grounds.

“Chani,” Paul calls to her.

“Do not,” she warns, “talk to me yet. I am not in the mood to entertain you.”

The men must exchange some type of meaningful glance that she does not see, her attention entirely focused on the horizon, because Gurney and Stilgar step away wordlessly. She is left alone with Paul on a barren rock, and he must be all the more a fool for it, to test her when she still has adrenaline rushing in her veins.

“The mission was a success,” Paul says to her. “Though not without its setbacks.”

“The mission,” she snarls, whirling on him, “was madness. What possessed you to seek out a younglin? Why would you take on that risk?”

“You know why,” he simply replies.

She does. She has never missed the obvious. “The Water of Life.”

“Yes.”

“But you’ve already taken the Water of Life.”

“And I may need to take it again for the path forward to reveal itself. I am having difficulty, Chani, seeing the path forward. Nothing in my previous visions set out this future I am seeing unfold right now. Nothing anticipated Count Fenring’s plays, or even that you—”

Here, he cuts himself off.

And Chani finds herself desperately wanting to know the rest of that sentence. What was it about her and this future he didn’t see that is so terrifying? That she is not with him? That she has not fallen into his bed like a faithful concubine? He cannot be surprised by this. He cannot act shocked that she has taken such a mutiny offense to his royal marriage. It doesn’t matter if he’s unhappy in it. It doesn’t matter if it is only a political arrangement. Chani has her pride, if nothing else.

“Count Fenring,” he says, choosing the path of least peril. “Irulan informed me that he was nearly the Kwisatz Haderach, another Bene Gesserit breeding attempt that ended in failure. He is handicapped by a genetic defect.”

“What defect?”

“He’s a eunuch,” Paul informs bluntly.

Chani flinches, and then quickly understands. No lineage, no continuation of a bloodline. The Bene Gesserit would despise such a wasted opportunity. She thought she’d heard something of him having a child with his wife, Lady Margot, a baby barely a little over a year old, but she realizes that could easily be a matter of a cuckhold.

“And perhaps,” he continues, “his near fate of being the Kwisatz Haderach is why my sight does not anticipate so many of his moves. His prescience is on par with his skills as a fighter. He is potentially an enemy of more significance than the Harkonnens.”

Chani inhales slowly, knowing the words were not to be taken lightly. Paul does not overstate threats. He never has, and she doubts he ever will. In that, she trusts him.

“I need the Water of Life to provide further clarity,” he finishes, voice carefully even.

“It nearly killed you the last time.”

“It’s why I need you there, too,” he admits, on a whisper.

Chani exhales harshly, offended and outraged all over again. “I have no idea what I did last time. Your mother’s tricks forced me to do something I do not understand.”

“That’s not entirely true, Chani. You mutated the poison out of the Water of Life the same way as a Bene Gesserit does. You did it without thought, or even their advanced training. I know you do not believe in miracles, but how else would you explain this?”

That — that is not entirely true.

Long ago, long before Lady Jessica had been exiled to the sands, the elder members of Sietch Tabr had selected Chani as the expected successor to the Reverend Mother. Chani had been trained from a young age in many of the faithful ways, but she had strayed from that path long ago. She had refused, much to the consternations of the Elders. It was pure luck that had placed Jessica at the seat of inheritance instead, the Sayyadina that only felt all too thrilled to continue the lessons of Lisan al Gaib.

Still, the fact that Chani had changed the Water of Life into something Paul could consume does not change the fact that Chani has no idea how she’d done it.

“I need you,” Paul says. “I’ve always needed you. This is just another example of how desperately that fact remains true.”

She looks away. “You do not know what you are asking. I did not agree to help you take the Water of Life the last time, and I will not help you now. As far as I’m concerned, it was that poison that changed you — and not for the better.”

“Perhaps,” Paul admits. “But I am still asking for your help, anyway.”

“You are reckless,” she hisses. “You charge into situations in which death is the only option.”

“The fate of millions, billions, perhaps even trillions depends on my actions, on how I read the future.”

“Perhaps you should not,” Chani informs him. “Perhaps no one should have the prescience of the future. It is a curse, not a gift.”

He offers her a dim smile, as if a small joke occurs to him. “You were misnamed entirely. Perhaps you should have been named after something wise and terribly beautiful beyond her age.”

She scoffs, turning away. He cannot compliment her into agreement. “The answer is no, Paul.”

He nods, as if he expected this. “Then we will just have to hope that this time, when I take the Water of Life, I will not need my Desert Spring so desperately.”

Chapter Text

They reach Rifana Sietch early in the afternoon the next day. The crate has changed hands a number of times so that no two people are burdened with the heavy task, but by the time they reach their destination everyone is tired and aching and hungry. Chani wanders into the sietch as the last, and does her best not to pay much attention to the group of worshippers quickly gathering to greet Paul.

Muad’dib. Muad’dib. Muad’dib.

She is tired, and seen more than enough of such veneration to last several lifetimes.

She does not say a word, not for the majority of the first few hours. They determine to send a runner to the capital, to deliver Paul’s sealed and handwritten note to his mother, instructing her to send a thopter to pick them up as soon as possible. It will take a day for the runner to reach the city shields, but it is a safer method of communication than utilizing the comms which are monitored by too many people, too many enemies.

Even out here in the sands, Paul has his enemies.

“Have you had much talk with a Naib named Taliq?” Chani asks Stilgar, remembering Radiqa’s warning. “He’s the leader of the Makab Sietch.”

Stilgar nods. “A loud man, a dangerous man. Been stirring too much trouble. Breathing too much venom.”

“A servant girl came to me in Arrakeen. She told me he means to challenge Paul.”

Stilgar grunts, amused. “He is not the only Fremen that has threatened to do that, but I doubt a man’s resolve when all he does is talk. They are weak. They will all fall in line. It is as written.”

Chani has her doubts, as she always does.

When she tells Paul of the same concerns, it seems he’s already been made aware of the rumblings. “Radiqa,” Paul informs, “is a trusted Fremen. She came to us with the concern days ago.”

Chani frowns. If this was so, she wonders why Radiqa had bothered with informing Chani as well.

The food and water is brought out, a far grander affair than normal as the Naib of this seitch attempts to make a favorable impression upon Paul. They seat Chani next to Paul, as if it is only expected. She decides to put up no objection because the fuss it would kick up is worse than her just submitting to the arrangement. Sihaya, they call her here, even when she insists on Chani. Paul’s hand brushes hers each time he passes a plate of food to her; she takes out her portion, smaller than all the rest, and dutifully passes the food to the next person, pretending with all her might that she does not feel the lingering warmth of his skin even with a glancing touch. His thigh is pressed up against hers in the cramped space, a pillar of heat she feels even through their stillsuits.

“Is it true,” a girl asks, sitting at the side, “you are sending more Fremen to other worlds?”

“We must spread the gospel of Lisan al Gaib,” Stilgar responds, first.

Chani keeps her eyes on her plate of food, hiding her frown.

“But it is a dangerous journey,” Paul adds on, in a measured tone. Chani looks up at him. “The sacrifices that the Fremen have made — and will continue to make — cannot be understated. The other worlds are not like Arrakis. They are as diverse and varied in their makeup, and they each hold their own perils.”

“The Fremen are not afraid of perils,” a man says.

“You cannot imagine these perils,” Paul counters, softly, but intently. There is — a buried hurt, a buried shame in his voice. The others may not notice it, but Chani can recognize it in his voice, a timber too low. “Just as you cannot imagine water falling from the skies, or the changing seasons. I ask no one to go against their will, but I also know that Fremen do so out of blind faith to me.”

“It is not blind,” Stilgar refuses. “We have seen, we have witnessed.”

She can tell Paul wants to argue, wants to point out the flaw in his beliefs. The man she fell in love with would have done so, but this man only stays silent.

The internal discord she feels everytime she looks at Paul seems to build the longer the night wears on. It is why she puts her foot down at the sleeping arrangements when they assign two rooms to their group (generous given they’re outsiders). It is clear that the Fremen here expect their beloved Muad’dib to share a room with his Sihaya.

She tells Gurney to take her place, instead.

“I’m fairly sure he’d prefer the original arrangement,” Gurney quips wryly. “But far be it from me to argue with anything that avoids me sharing a room with Stilgar. The man snores like a banshee.”

She has no idea who or what a banshee is, but it is no worse than the countless other nights she has slept out on the dunes with her brethren. She will manage.

She goes into Paul’s room to retrieve her rucksack, and then pauses, indecision warring inside her as a thought occurs. Before she has too much time to debate the merits, she is opening up her pack and removing the necklace of water rings. Half belong to Paul, the other half to her. It is long overdue that she returns the handful of beads to their proper owner. As she twists off the metallic disks, she reaches for Paul’s backpack in the corner. He will find the necklace later on, and she doubts he will confront her regarding their unexpected return. He will understand the message clearly.

But when she opens Paul’s rucksack, she is thrown by the first item resting inside, carefully folded into quarters, resting atop his other necessities. Her blue Nezhoni scarf, the one she’d last worn over two years ago in the battle that brought Paul his seat of power as the Emperor. She had torn it off her arm, discarded it shortly before she had left atop a Shai-Hulud headed north; discarded it to the winds, watched it float away in the sands. He must have been watching, she realizes. It is the only explanation for how he’d found it. He must have been watching her as she’d prepared to leave that fateful day.

The realization stings.

“I know you threw it away for a reason,” Paul says, behind her, announcing his arrival. She whirls towards him, her hand clutched around the old faded scarf, meeting his soft gaze with eyes that brim with unshed tears. “But I could not part from it so easily.”

“Why?” she returns, hurt.

It hurts so much sometimes, she can barely breathe.

“I told you,” he returns, softly. “I will love you until my last breath.”

She closes her eyes, nearly losing the battle entirely with her composure. He makes her so weak. Everytime she feels as if she has finally moved on, surpassed her feelings for him, found a new way to remind herself of all the wrong he has done and continues to do as Lisan al Gaib, she is confronted in a new brutal way the futility of it all. With the pain of her love, the ache of it. It is a wounding thing, this love. She wishes for it to be over, a thing of the past. For the scars to finally scab over; she does not want to pick at it, to linger over it.

She wants it over.

She senses him before she feels him; has plenty of time to stop his proximity from diminishing as he reaches for her. She stands still as a statue, eyes squeezed shut, and feels his hand brush her cheek, gently, wiping away the reckless water trailing the arch of her cheekbones. From one breath to the next, he is embracing her, a strong hold encompassing her in his familiar arms, her head cradled into that sweet spot between his shoulder and neck. She feels the ache sharpen, then recede. Sadness turning into relief, a balm over a sting.

“Will you listen to me?” Paul tenders, soft. “There is so much I have to tell you, that I’ve been waiting— will you listen, please? If, at the end, you want nothing further to do with me, if you wish to leave and never see me again, I will make it happen. I will move mountains to make that happen. But please, let me say my piece.”

Reluctantly she pulls away from him, and nods.

“Not here,” he determines, carefully. “Come with me.”

Outside, Arrakis is beautiful.

The sun is almost setting, low on the horizon.

They sit next to each other on a rolling hill of sand, arms hooked around their knees, shoulders brushing against one another as they stare out at the dunes. “Do you know,” he tells her, “when I took the Water of Life, it did not just show me the future. It showed me all my potential futures. All of them at once. Not only that, but past versions too. I saw a world in which it was Jamis, and not Stilgar, that was my guide into the Fremen world. I saw a world in which I called Jamis my mentor, where he took me under his protection.”

Jamis.

It has been so long since Chani had thought of him. Trustworthy, faithful, but quick to temper. He had many good qualities, many flaws, but she could see it despite herself — this history that never happened. If Jamis had only given it a chance, she imagines he would have come to like Paul.

“I’ve seen worlds in which you die, too,” Paul continues. Chani sucks in a breath, turning to look at him, his face artless in his fear and muted grief. “From our atomic bombs, your skin peeling off your bones. I’ve seen you die by the blade, by fire, by thirst and hunger. I’ve seen you die in childbirth, Chani. I’ve seen you die in more ways than I can count.”

Chani says nothing to that, horrorstruck. She has never understood his visions, his dreams. She has never questioned them, either, but there is something too otherworldly in them for her trust entirely. But the dreams — she remembers his nightmares well enough. She remembers the cold sweats, the disturbed sleep. She never questioned his fear of them, or that more often than not, his concerns lay with her welfare. Paul had always made it known where his concern remained.

“That day we parted,” she asks him, a keen understanding settling in, a ghost brushing across her soul, “I was supposed to die. That’s what you saw, wasn’t it?”

“If Feyd Rautha had won, yes,” Paul answers, a harsh breath, thready. “If I had killed the Emperor, yes. If I hadn’t taken the Princess’s hand in marriage, yes.” Here, he pauses, and admits in a faint whisper, “If I did not pick up the mantle of Lisan al Gaib and make it my own, yes.”

The affront assails her, and she reels back. “So you lay this all at my feet? The pain you bring to my people, you’re telling me that you did all that to save my life?”

A blunt incredulity here, despite herself, despite the fact that she knows he’s speaking in earnest.

It is too much to take on faith.

Chani has never much believed in faith, and the Holy War he waged cannot have been done in her name. She refuses to believe it.

“No,” Paul says, forcefully. “The Holy War is not on you. The truth is, if I lived or died that day, none of it would have stopped Stilgar and the others from taking up arms in my name. The Holy War would come. It is still coming. The Fremen spread out through the universe, and my name is the cause of so much death, so much destruction— an attempt to mitigate it is all I can do.”

“You warned me once that if you went South, you would sentence millions to their deaths. Starvation, war—”

“Yes, and every action I have taken since then has been in the hopes of preventing the deaths of billions more.”

She reels back, her whole body jerking away from him. “You speak of madness, Paul Atreides. You have brought too much into your own prophecy.”

“Just because the Bene Gesserit planted the seeds of this prophecy does not mean it is any less true. Even with their insight, their generations of prescience, they could not control or predict everything. They could not see that my mother would fall in love with my father and choose to give him a male heir. They could not account for the factor of devotion superseding duty, that love would play a determining element to uproot all their calculations.”

“This is madness,” Chani repeats, because she can think of nothing else.

He sees his advantage, sees the faultlines in those defenses she has so carefully erected these last two years. He advances, pushing forward to his knees, kneeling in front of her. “Marriage to Irulan was a means of political advantage,” he says, desperately. “I made it clear from the beginning that I would never bring about an heir with her, that I would never let her visit my bed. I have only loved you, touched you.”

Chani lifts her chin, defiant, refusing. “You married her, but you kept my scarf.”

“I did.”

“Do you not see the wrongness in that? How unfair it is to us both.”

“The only thing wrong with this all is that I did not marry the woman I wanted, that you are not my wife. That scarf should have never left your arm.”

Her jaw clenches, as she remembers the heated words she’d overheard between him and Irulan. “You are cruel, Paul Atreides. You speak of reason, but — to me, to your wife, you are cruel.”

He pauses. “This is about you eavesdropping on my conversation with Irulan earlier, isn’t it?”

Her eyes widen, as she takes his meaning. “You knew I was there.”

“I imagine Irulan did, too. I told her about you, early on. At first — at first, I think she understood. Some measure of an attempt to explain why I could never come to love her. I had thought, once upon a time, we could have an understanding if not a real marriage. But the Bene Gesserit wanted an heir. Saw her as useless otherwise.”

“That’s almost sad.”

“Don’t be too sympathetic. Irulan allows herself to be manipulated, the same as my mother did once. My mother, eventually, refused. Irulan never has. She tried to force the issue of an heir.”

A hint of panic, bitter jealousy, a hesitation. “She— Irulan tried to come to your bed?”

“Many times, many attempts. The last time, she came ready with a drug meant to render me defenseless against any of her advances.”

Chani sucks in a breath, shocked, startled, horrified.

“She did not go forward with it, ultimately,” Paul assures, quickly. “But once I learned of the intent, nothing has ever been easy between us again. A bitter marriage is an ugly thing, and it brings out the ugliness in us both. There is no love there, no chance for it whatsoever. I say it in earnest when I say you are the only woman I will ever love.”

“So,” Chani picks up the thread, tugs at it so it unspools inelegantly, “you were hoping I would be happy to become your concubine?”

He flinches. “I would have made you my wife, if I could. In any world that I did, you died almost immediately. Assassinations, war, famine — childbirth.”

It is her turn to flinch.

“I saw a narrow path forward,” he continues, swallowing harshly, avoiding her gaze. “I saw a world in which I had you, and the cost of it was great, but I had you by my side.”

A bitter exhale. “And now?” she challenges.

“Now, none of it is familiar,” he admits, nostrils flaring in agitation. “None of what has happened has been in my visions. You, earlier on the thopter? When you nearly fell into the open jaw of the Shai-Hulud, I never saw a version of a world where that happened. I would have never risked it otherwise.”

She hears the rest left unsaid. Remembers his plea to help him take the Water of Life again, to find out where he’d gone wrong. That narrow path forward appeared obscured to him now. Count Fenring waited, an unclear adversary, and Paul — he seemed intent on finding a way back to Chani.

“What do you expect of me?” she asks, heavy, a harsh whisper. “How do you expect me to respond to any of this?”

“You’ve listened to me, which is more than you did before. I ask that you continue to listen, and—”

“And what?” she snaps.

“Give me a chance,” he tells her, and his hand finds its way to her face, cupping her cheek, his thumb gently stroking. “Give us a chance, Chani. Just that.”

She pulls back, because his touch is too warm, too dangerous. She cannot think clearly with his proximity so near, knows the peril of seeking his comfort, knows how quickly that could lead to folly. If he is a fool for her, for leaping after her so many times, then she is weak for him too. Weak for his touch, a taste of his love.

“I need— space,” she insists. “I need time to think.”

He nods, hopeful, sensing the way forward is not shut. “Take as much time as you need.”

She cannot bear to look at him, his hope too clear and earnest. She has granted him nothing, no promise, no permittance, but he leaps to his feet when she stands, and she recognizes the desire he tries to contain, his hands clenching at his sides. To reach forward and take her into his arms.

“I promise nothing,” she tells him, heatedly. “I just need time to think.”

“Of course.”

She storms away from him, back to the sietch, overwhelmed, and well aware that his hopeful eyes are glued to her the entire journey back.

Chapter Text

After all that, she keeps the water rings.

That night, it is a struggle to get to sleep. Not only because Gurney’s earlier taunt hits the mark and Stilgar’s snoring keeps her up through most of the night, but because she cannot seem to settle herself. Any chance of rest is squandered while she repeats the conversation she had with Paul over and over again in her head, dissecting it from all angles. The words taunt and trouble her all through the night. Yet, none of that denies the simple action that says too much. After all that, she still keeps the water rings.

And she lets him keep her blue scarf.

In the morning, she expects a few hours' wait as it is expected that the Fremen runner will reach Arrakeen by midday and deliver Paul’s note to Jessica. By nightfall, she expects to be back on the palace grounds, and the anticipation itches uncomfortably across her skin. She does not feel at home in Arrakeen, but this Sietch is too crowded with Paul’s devotees, and too small for her comfort. Everywhere she turns, there Paul is — coming out of the room next to hers just as the morning sun rises, sitting across from her during their morning meal, walking beside her as the watermaster gives them a tour of the sandpit they’ve kept the captured younglin in. He remains the center of gravity for all, even her, always pulling her gaze in even while all the others remain greedy for even a fraction of the attention he affords her.

Midday, Stilgar must notice her restlessness because he pulls her into a training room and discards his outer coat. “You need to fight, woman,” Stilgar tells her, pulling open the weapons cache. “I can feel your energy in the air like a fly. Buzz, buzz. Useless. Use that energy. Take out your aggression.”

He draws out two solid rods for each of them; they do not use their crysknives here, for blood drawn in training is water wasted. When he passes her a pair, Chani tests out the heft, the weight. It is a heavy weapon, but graceful to wield, and effective in damage. Already she can feel her body ready in anticipation of a fight. Perhaps he is right. Perhaps she needs to focus her energy in something other than the circles running in her head.

Stilgar is wielding his weapons in a twirl too artful to be anything other than pure intimidation. Immediately, the fight begins, a sharp first flex that forces Chani onto her backfoot as Stilgar proves a dangerous adversary as she remembers. “You are distracted,” he grunts, the next clash of their rods. The insult proves too accurate on the next hit; what should have been a graceful block catches her rod at the wrong angle, his weight and sheer size overbalancing her fluidity. “It is dangerous to be this troubled.”

The words anger her. She slips swiftly out of his reach and recenters herself. He, unlike many men before him, has never made the mistake of misjudging her by her size alone. A petite stature only means certain advantages as a Fedaykin — quicker reflexes, swifter rebounds. Her rod clashes against his in a series of abrupt short hits, close combat only forcing efficient attacks, bursts of strikes with enough force that she pushes him to retreat to the edge of the room.

He dodges an advance that would’ve taken out most other men, then rebounds with both a physical jab as sharp as his verbal one. “You feel off balance because you are not where you should be — at Muad’dib’s side.”

“Enough,” she grits out.

“Your stubbornness cannot prevent the inevitable.”

“Nothing is inevitable, except my short patience with this—”

His baton catches her leg, and she falters, springing back after a short stumble. She’s breathing heavily, but Stilgar does not advance, does not finish this spar in the victory she knows he could claim. “You do not think you could do more for this world, our people, with your influence at his side? No, you'd rather stand opposing him.”

Her arms lower, rods still at the ready, but she does not strike out. “I will have nothing to do with his Holy Wars.”

“Short sighted,” he tsks. “You could change his mind on so many things. You are one of the few who could.”

“I do not want to be his conscience, nor his whore.”

“Then be his woman,” he tells her, stiffly.

She attacks. He steps smoothly away, but she drops her shoulder and pushes aggressively, ramming into his side at the waist, taking him down by catching him off his center of gravity. “Who’s off balance now?” she taunts, when he stumbles.

The match ends without a clear victor, because she becomes aware that they have drawn an audience. Paul, standing at the entrance. Stilgar immediately withdraws, his batons relaxing at his sides, a clear stop to the fight. “Good,” he determines. “Perhaps she needs to take her anger out at the source.”

Paul poorly hides his grimace, but he does not argue when Stilgar passes the rods over to him and then leaves the room without a further word. Paul stares at her across the room, assessing just how lethal her mood is; it must not be a favorable determination, because the severe look on his face only etches further frown lines into his face. He’s displeased, but determined, when he takes his place in front of her — and she should probably be weary of the surge of something that zips up her spine, a strong solidifying force that makes her grasp the batons strongly in her hands, securing their grip.

“I was hoping we could talk some more today,” he offers, almost vexed.

Chani advances without another word.

They spin and dodge and strike, a series of agile blocks intermittently disbursed with bursts of aggressive attacks. Immediately, she can tell he’s surprised by her truculence but he adapts. She feels fire under her skin, nothing at all like it was when she was sparring with Stilgar, a tension that builds and spikes like a hiss of water evaporating in the air. She slides under his swing, popping back up on her feet and Paul has to turn quickly to block an attack from behind. Another time, Chani narrowly dodges his baton ramming into her ribcage by the distance of a split hair, a stumble back so rough that she slams into the wall behind her.

Twice, she takes a hit, and knows she’ll have bruises along her shins come morning.

But it has been weeks since she’s sparred properly with anyone, and most of those weeks have been spent lying around in an abysmal state of depression. All that mentat’s training, his mother’s training, his swordmasters, his warmasters. It makes her furious that she can feel her advantage slip, his skills at lethal games second to none. Even his slim stature works against her because he’s as agile as her, perhaps even moreso. She pants, acid dripping in her lungs, her muscles burning with every advance, every crouch, every hit and miss. It is agony. It is bliss. It is fire under her skin and water boiling in her veins.

Paul is a blur, a ghost, the wind, but she is determined and possessed, her entire body a sharp weapon, and he takes a hit, straight to the chest — and Chani feels victorious when he slams into the wall, spine a hard impact; she has a baton braced against his throat before he can choke out his surprise.

He pants out against her, the world shrinking until it is just him and her, braced against one another, her body rushing with adrenaline.

“I don’t want to fight you,” he says.

This — this does not feel like a fight anymore.

“Then what do you think we’re doing here?” she asks him.

He leans towards her, infinitesimally, challenging. “Pressing my advantage as far as you’ll let me.”

He let her win, she furiously realizes.

She wonders if he wants to be at her mercy.

Despite herself, she draws an inch closer, an uncontrollable thing, almost like she caves or collapses on instinct alone, a diminishing distance between their parted panting lips until she only needs to reach forward a last whisper to kiss him. She is reminded of every other more pleasurable time she has felt his body beneath hers, felt his lips and tongue slid against hers, another spar of passion. Her eyes must slip closed, and he must be fighting the same inhibition, thoughts tripping, falling, stumbling down to their lowest functions — he lets out a half-bitten moan, deep in his throat; the type of noise she remembers he would give at the wet taste of her cunt. The air charges between them with a sizzle of electricity, a heated pause.

She pulls back, wrenching herself away.

He’s staring at her with none of the conflict she feels in her bones. There is just an open want on his face, unashamed, unabashed, dripping desire and flagrant disregard to anything that would stand in its way between them. He is waiting for her to make the first move, but she’s well familiar with how Paul fights, how his body moves with lethal precision once he’s determined a course of attack. She has to give in just a little, and he’d pounce; he’d claim her as his.

“Walk away,” she tells him, instead, a bid for command while she masters herself.

“Chani—”

“Usul,” she cuts him off, warning.

A pause. “You called me Usul,” he says, sounding winded, victorious.

“Walk away.”

The batons fall to the ground at his sides.

His walk should feel like a victory, it should feel like a submission to her demands. It should feel like he is honoring her wishes, but she cannot overcome the feeling that it is not a retreat. And it reminds her of all the lessons that all Fremen learn, the same ones she taught him.

A Fremen knows patience, but not forfeit.

She doesn’t see him for the majority of the rest of the day. She meditates in her room, which Stilgar has thankfully left vacant and unused. A girl with a small scar below her mouth comes to her, finds her for supper, and Chani reluctantly accompanies the girl down the corridor.

“You are not what I was expecting,” the girl with the scar says, in Chakobsa.

“What were you expecting?” Chani asks, in the same language.

“A woman loyal to the Madhi. A woman that would — you should be happy with the way he looks at you. Yet you seem….”

Chani can hear the slight accusation in the young girl’s voice, and would take more offense to it if it didn’t seem like the girl was young enough to still be dealing with spots of acne. The girl is not even of age, and Chani remembers her now, from yesterday’s dinner. She’d been quiet, but rapt with attention everytime Paul opened his mouth. It is one thing to deal with the fanaticism of religious devotion, but it is more pitying when coming from an infatuated adolescent. The girl can hardly control her own hormones, let alone fight against the concocted fables of a messiah.

“You should not believe every fairytale you hear,” Chani warns her. “Especially the ones about the Mahdi and me.”

They arrive for dinner. Everyone is there already – the Naib, Gurney, Stilgar, a dozen of their host’s men — and Paul. She is once again seated beside Paul, and Chani says nothing as she takes her place. She can feel the split-second their hands brush one another as she takes her seat, legs folded underneath her, thighs brushing against his in the small space. It is agony once again, and Chani almost finds it intolerable. She does not look at him, adamantly refuses to turn her head even a fraction of the way towards him, but she is aware of him in a manner that should be wholly preternatural.

“Your runner should have come back by now,” Paul notes, to the Naib. “We expected my mother to send a thopter to carry us back to the city by nightfall. It wasn’t our intention to burden you with our presence any further than necessary.”

“It is not a burden to tend to an honored guest,” the Naib returns. “I am sure he will come by morning.”

Paul does not respond, and she wonders what his evident concern is. That the runner may have disappeared, or the concerns of those back at the palace. She doubts his marked truancy has gone unnoticed by the Delegation, and it can only lead to dangerous gossip among the pit of vultures making up the Great Houses.

She eats in silence. Perhaps she says a total of a dozen words the entire time. No one tries to draw her into conversation much, and for that she is thankful. Even Paul is quiet tonight, as much as he can be when every other person seems eager to draw him into conversation. He answers politely, but curtly. Stilgar and Gurney cover for the silence, both men with boisterous voices, loud voices — they seem to sense the tension in the air and do their best to displace it.

Stilgar, perhaps, gets a little too enthusiastic about the task. After dinner, he has the Naib bring out a shisha, and delightfully lights the coals. It is obvious where this is going, but even Chani is surprised by the amount of the fragrant Spice brought out to smoke, the pile large enough to entertain twice their numbers. Stilgar takes a small pinch of the Spice and sprinkles it into the bowl.

He offers it first to Gurney, to his left, but Gurney refuses. Chani doubts he’d let his guard down in such an environment, especially not when he’s one of the few charged with Paul’s protection for the night. “My constitution can’t handle it,” he jokes, rubbing his belly. “You know us foreigners.”

The excuse raises no eyebrows, but Chani grants him a knowing look.

“Sihaya?” Stilgar offers next, passing her the hookah.

She should probably refuse it for the same reason that Gurney did.

Stilgar frowns. “You’ve spent weeks in that cold palace. Weeks without the natural exposure to our sands, a life-giving substance. Withdrawal is not a pretty thing. A man can become quick tempered in such a time.”

Chani glares at him. Fremen need spice. It is a thing necessary to live, to consume, and while Chani does not believe she has gone through the full effects of withdrawal trapped in the city walls of Arrakeen, she cannot deny the last few weeks she has not felt at her best physically or mentally. Even while she knows the truth of his words, she cannot condone his subtle teasing jab.

Paul deflects this when he takes the hookah from Stilgar’s hands, quickly taking a hit, drawing in a large inhale. He passes it to Chani without a word, and she decides it is better not to argue. Besides, it has — it has been long enough since she last ingested the Spice Melange. It is one thing to eat it in their common Fremen foods, but smoking it is — different. A stronger effect, more recreational. Chani inhales a deep breath of the smoked Spice, and lets it settle in her chest, lets the flavor coat her lungs.

She holds it, and releases it — and it is like the familiar embrace of a known lover.

The hookah passes back and forth among them a number of times, so many that Chani loses count.

She relaxes, inch by inch, bit by bit, inhale by inhale.

The Spice infuses into her skin, pokes and prods and beguiles. It always has. The noises, the screaming voice in her head— it fades away. Chani is a faithful disciple of the Spice Melange. There is a reason the entire universe would go to war over it.

“It was cruelty that brought the Harkennans to our world,” the Naib says, when the inevitable conversation about the state of the Holy War arises. “But providence brought Lisan Al Gaib to us.”

If Chani weren’t so relaxed, she might’ve cut into the conversation with a caustic remark. As it is, she merely snorts her disdain, and looks to Paul to see his reaction.

But Paul does not look well.

In fact, it dawns on her that she has not heard much from Paul as soon as they started smoking. For once, he has not been staring at her, but rather as if he has been staring off into the distance for quite some time, with no focus and no clear sight. Immediately, Chani understands. The others don’t notice, or perhaps cannot notice. She doubts any of them have ever seen Paul truly in distress, have ever seen how shaken he looks waking up from his dreams, his visions.

Chani knows. Even within her haze, her altered mood, she recognizes every tick and tell of Paul Atreides, Muad'Dib, Usul, Lisan al Gaib — whatever name he dons on, she knows the face behind it.

She reaches for him, subtly, her hand coming to rest on his forearm, surprised to find it clammy to the touch. He is sweating. Alarmed now, and not just concerned, she connects her gaze with Gurney across the way and quickly conveys the concern that has Gurney straightening and studying Paul.

“It seems,” Gurney says, “it’s getting late enough. I suggest we all get some sleep for the journey tomorrow.”

“It is not late,” Stilgar refutes, with none of the clear eyes of Gurney. “The night is still young.”

“It may be, but I am not,” Gurney grunts. “Your Grace, I insist you get your rest too.”

Paul does not disagree. He does not say anything at all. Chani decides to cover for the quietness by rising up, pulling Paul alongside her. If the others are surprised at her proximity and familiarity in her touch as she drags Paul to his feet, they say nothing. But Paul leans against her, far more than mere affection. She can feel his pulse racing when her fingers wrap around his wrist, and he stumbles into her, causing Stilgar and the others to laugh. They do not notice. They do not see the haze in his eyes, only see two lovestruck fools stumbling back to their quarters.

Gurney follows at a distance, and she can hear him say, “It seems I may be your bunkmate tonight, Stilgar.”

She can feel several eyes watching her as she supports Paul’s lean frame and moves out of the room, and it must truly look like they are affectionate bumbling lovers. “It may indeed,” Stilgar answers, amused.

It is not unheard of for a night of smoking Spice to lead to this. Some Sietches even engage in rather scandalous group activities afterwards, nothing short of an orgy; she remembers when Jessica had changed the Water of Life into a harmless but potent drug. The celebration afterwards as all shared the converted Water was ecstatic, communal. Paul had disappeared into his visions again, and Chani had led him away from the encampment full of clinging bodies, some outright eroticaly writhing, shedding their robes and slipping into one another’s bodies without shame. Tonight, Chani does not dissuade this impression. It is better than people speculating on Paul’s condition.

She makes it outside to the corridor, and only there Gurney catches up to them and lends Chani a hand with Paul’s weight. “What is it? Is it — his visions?”

Chani does not answer, and Paul seems too lost, gaze hazy and unfocused. He is both shivering and starting to sweat. “Just help me get him to bed,” she whispers urgently.

They manage, but there is the girl with the scar lingering in the hallway when they arrive. Gurney only nods at Chani as she enters the room with Paul and closes the door behind her. Chani knows better than to assume that Gurney will spend the night anywhere other than outside this door, a guard ever vigilant. Paul may employ stubbornly loyal men, blindly loyal men, but tonight she is grateful for that.

“Paul, Paul,” she says softly, trying to pull his focus to her. “Can you hear me? Can you say something?”

“You are,” he mumbles, caught in some delirium, “so fucking beautiful. It’s haunting — you haunt my dreams. Promise me you’ll do that forever, Chani.”

She pushes him back, disgruntled. “You are delirious.”

He only grunts. “I’ll miss your face when I can no longer look upon it.”

She pauses; decides to destress the situation by making a joke of it. “You have to look away sometimes to ever be given the chance to miss my face.”

“Why would I do that?” he mutters back, incredulous, as if she is the one speaking nonsense. “Chani, my Chani.”

She heats in the face, flustered in a way she is thankful she does not have to explain. Lightness on Paul’s face is such a rare thing, like a desert flower, and she already misses it when she sees it so clearly disappear after only a moment. He so rarely seems happy, any humor or affection only caught in fleeting instances, his brow rising in mirth, his face opening to her, less stoic, even if for just a brief second. There is something disarming about Paul right now, so artlessly without his normal defenses and guards. Perhaps it is the drug in her own system, the one that renders her constant companion of anger a near distant yawn, but she cannot deny its appeal.

There is no scheming, no calculations in his eyes.

He is — he is her sincere Usul once again.

It is difficult pulling the stillsuit off him when he is not cooperating, but she manages. When she strips his shirt, she notes the presence of a new scar across his abdomen, a slight serrated wound that she wonders about but does not question. In the morning, she may ask him, but dressing him in his night clothing is hard enough, and she realizes she has a more daunting task ahead of her. She does not have her own pack, and must manage with only his spare clothing. There is no place to hide, no modesty afforded in this small room. She cannot sleep in her stillsuit, not if given an alternative.

In the end, she pushes a pair of sleep trousers onto Paul, and confiscates his cotton shirt for herself.

And suddenly, the feeling she harbors is no longer an innocent little thing, seeing artless adoration in his eyes. He watches her unabashedly when she strips out of her stillsuit, and it is only the fact that he is obviously inebriated and outside of his senses that keeps her sanity intact. He watches her while she changes, eyes darkening, a hunger she wishes to ignore. He says nothing; neither does she. It is ridiculous to feel such singular heat when he is so incapacitated by his senses he cannot even stand up on his own two feet, but she feels pinned by his gaze alone before she changes into his spare shirt. It is long enough to cover her thighs, but not much else.

Chani curses under her breath as she approaches him on the bedroll. “Lie down, Usul,” she tells him, pushing him back by the shoulders when he starts to rise. “Go to sleep.”

“Will you stay tonight?”

She rather thought that was obvious enough. Tomorrow, she will have to deal with the knowing looks of everyone else in the Sietch. She will have to deal with the repercussions.

Tonight, she only has to deal with Paul.

“Go to sleep,” she insists.

“Will you stay?” he repeats.

She does not imagine he is talking just about the night anymore. He tilts his head, and she sees the flash of his visions in his eyes because they grow too unfocused again. It is in the lines of his mouth, tightening, something she notices only because she is so close. His gaze shifts, then sharpens once again, fixated on her. She is not caught entirely unawares when she feels him press closer, closing the sparse distance between them, his lips catching hers in a kiss that lingers, but it would be a lie to say she is ready for it either. Desperation makes him bold, something that tastes too much like grief making him gluttonous, catching her by the neck, holding her to him as he deepens the kiss. Her harsh exhale allows him an advantage, the sound journeying through the constricted muscles of her slender throat, not one of surprise, but one of relinquishment.

She should not be doing this, for so many reasons.

Tomorrow, she will regret this. Tomorrow, she will deal with the repercussions. Tomorrow, her companion will return, rage fortifying her senses as they clear of the Spice.

But tonight, she lets herself be weak enough for this.

Chapter Text

Chani doesn’t intend to fall asleep that night, but the bedroll is simple and too comfortable – a thin blanket, her shirt borrowed from him, a pillar of surprising heat generated from the furnace of his spiced-induced feverish body. She doesn’t intend to sleep, too concerned over his welfare, but as she’s found out repeatedly these last few years — intentions are meaningless. She passes out when Paul’s gentle breathing lulls out beside her, the rhythm and familiarity calming her heart enough that she splays out on the bedroll and drifts into a dreamless haze.

When she wakes, Paul’s pillar of warmth behind her is an inferno.

She remembers the first time she woke up in a manner like this, in a tent set out on the dunes, all light blotted out by a storm that had covered their encampment in three feet of sand by morning. When dawn spread across the lands, everything outside her tent appeared through a slight dulled hue of pink against the blood-blazing sun. It was beautiful then, and Chani had all the more reason to stay nestled in Paul’s arms for it would take hours more before the group broke encampment.

This night — for it is still night, she can tell — she has no reason to stay in his arms. The warmth of him is soothing, but full of heedless caution. The ridge of his forearm encircling her waist, the press of his chest to her back, the prominent hardness digging into the small of her spine, too noticeable to ignore. That first awareness. The lip edge of sleepiness receding. Sinking into the feel of him, the warmth, the familiarity. Drowning out noises and all other senses, vanquishing sensibility, until there is only touch, the feel of him, a devouring thing full of long-repressed appetite.

It has been so long, she thinks, when his fingers press into the divets of her hip, like he’s finding pressure points to break her apart. It has been too long. I cannot be faulted for wanting this.

Yes, another voice answers, you can.

She silences the thing. A swatting of a fly. A distant deterrent left for the light of dawn and what feels like another day rather than a handful of more hours.

A kiss, pressed to the shell of her ear, bleeding heat across her skin. “You taste…” he rasps, while she tries to weather the building storm inside her. Dangerous and warning and so, so alive. “You feel—”

She hums, “Like what?”

“Like you’re mine,” he groans, low. “My Chani.”

This kiss he pulls from her lips is just like the last one he stole from her last night, so reckless and aching it’s almost filled with grief. And like grief, it does not hold anything back, a raging desperation that fills her mouth with gluttony, tangles his fingers in her hair, draws her greedily to him. His lips are familiar, but bolder than she expects. A slight scrape of teeth, of stubble, tearing away the last vestiges of sleep. It’s almost terrifying if it weren’t so intoxicating. Perhaps she has always been doomed to this; perhaps the others are right. It feels inevitable, his draw, his pull. She could fight it with all her might, has done so for so so long, but then that doesn’t explain how failing, how falling into it, is so easy it’s simpler than drawing a breath. Just like that, like it's nothing, his mouth fastening over hers, familiar, possessive — like it's his right. Where he belongs, the space behind her ribcage, the place beside her lungs. His hands grip at her hips, at the back of her neck, his touch awake and alive.

Yes, she thinks. Damnation has always tasted sweet.

Her back flattens against the floor when he moves on top of her. Somehow, her fingers weave through his hair, drawing his mouth to hers again and again, sips more precious than water. He's one long fissure of heat, wrapping around her, thrumming through her veins, pooling warmth between her thighs. Her tongue against his, wet and ferocious, his hips falling into the cradle of hers, reckless and thrusting. Shallow grinding, stifled by the layers of cloth between them, a mere imitation of fucking. She should hate herself for craving it, for craving more, but she can't. Tomorrow, she might. In a few hours, she might. But every part of her wants him, despite all that stands between them, all that he has erected between them. He kisses just like she remembers, tastes just as consuming.

“—that’s it, that’s right,” he murmurs, approving, when she starts rocking her hips against his thigh. “Keep moving, keep riding me, come all over me, fuck—” he falters and breaks off, shoves her shirt (his) higher up her waist, her small clothes a paltry barrier that does nothing to hide the spot of wetness forming. He groans, glances up at her with sharp blue eyes. “Let me,” he breathes, pleading. “Let me taste you, my Chani.”

He’s always loved tucking his tongue inside of her, tasting her wetness.

Fremen know not to waste water.

It takes just a nod, a single nod, and her damnation is sealed. He parts her sticky thighs and pulls off her underclothes. The sight of him settling so eagerly between her legs is intoxicating, empowering, seeing a man that has made prideful people, whole worlds, the entire universe kneel before him — to see him gladly take his supplication before her as if she is the one granting him a favor. The sight of his slim shoulders and bed-rustled hair bent over the apex of her thighs is a searing image even when she closes her eyes.

“I'd do anything for you,” he murmurs, like he’s making a promise, a vow. Just before he seals that sinful month over her and sucks her clit with such force, she has to stifle a scream. “Fuck,” he groans, again, to the taste of her.

She has to clamp a hand over her mouth to cut herself off, too aware that there are others nearby, in rooms next door. Gurney perhaps stationed in the hallway. Stilgar behind the door across the hall. She cannot— fuck, his mouth is good. It had not been nostalgia and pitiful arousal that had made her reminisce about how good he used to be with his mouth. It is a talent born of true desire and indulgence. He sips at her like he enjoys it, and it is a hard thing to feign (though she’s known other men to try it). She cannot manage much while his lips flick and tease her clit, fingers spreading the folds of her cunt open, lapping up her arousal as quickly as it seeps out.

Her eyes sting with piercing tears, caught on an alarming precipice of pleasure. It must’ve been too long if it takes so little, this quickly, to push her to the edge.

Her legs begin to shake, even as he pins one to the floor and draws the other one over his shoulder, the better to pry her open for him. He feasts — she cannot think of another word. She is going to come, rushing towards it with all the driving force of a thrown knife, and she doesn’t know which name will appear on her lips when she does. Paul, the boyking she found wandering the desert; Muad’dib, the name chanted by the masses; Usul, the man she fell in love with; Lisan al Gaib, the man she’s come to hate. Any and all of his names, and she knows he hungers for her in all of these permutations.

It is perhaps for the best that when she comes, finally, prolonged torture in the making, her muscles spasming in the build up and fall off — it is best that she is too incoherent for a name at all.

When he lifts away from her thighs, chin shining with her slickness, she's a puddle of helpless nerves, an obscene mess. He wipes his chin, gathers her wetness and dutifully licks his fingers clean. “You still taste the same,” he tells her. “The best water I’ve ever tasted.”

She shudders, closing her eyes. Him and his stupid, talented tongue, the same one she’s damned for ensnaring her people, for arousing legions of followers. He knows her too well, knows the ways to make her melt to him. It is unfair. It is vexing. His stupid fucking tongue.

“Tell me,” he says. “Tell me you want this, too. That you’ve missed me.” She groans in defeat, and his pleased hum thrums through her body as he places kisses up her thigh, pushing her shirt higher up as he goes. When his lips reach the divot of her navel, his fingers reach higher up to cup a breast, the single weight of it warming in his calloused palm. She arches, and groans, pressing into him even in her overstimulation. His thumb slides over her nipple, as his tongue flicks across the valley of her belly. She fists his hair, tugging tight enough to make him groan. “I’ll give you everything, Chani. Just ask, just ask me. It’s yours, all of it.”

It takes only a few moments for him to settle between her open legs again, this time face to face. His eyes are shaded; the room should be full of shadows with how dark everything is, but his gaze is nothing but open and revealing to her. She can see the love in them that he has never bothered to hide, even with an uninviting audience. It’s what makes it so easy for her fingers to join his in the pursuit of pushing his trousers off the swell of his hips. She feels him hard against her open legs, and it takes only a few seconds to reach between her folds, gather her slickness to coat her hand, and then use the same lubrication to pump him to ready hardness. Each sweep of her hand, she sees him come more and more undone, his head falling to the curve of her shoulder, an exacting triumph with every twist of her wrist, a groan of her name bitten out as she conquers him so easily it’s almost laughable.

But, as he presses against her, prodding at her entrance, she sees it in the corner of her eye — his rucksack lying open, her blue Nezhoni scarf peeking out. And she remembers — the heartache she felt, tugging it off her arm. She remembers the heart break of tossing it to the winds, letting the sands swallow it up, the last vestiges of her hope for them.

She remembers what she had made herself forget till sunrise.

She remembers he is married.

“This is—” she tries, gathering herself, pushing him off her with only the slightest warning touch. “We should not have done this. What you want and I want are two separate things—”

“I want everything,” he tells her, simply, like a plea. “I want you with me every night, Chani. I want what we had before, but I want more. I want you to bear my child – our children – the only ones that I will ever sire. I want the whole universe to know you are the only woman I will ever love.”

They should taste like ash, these promises.

They do not.

But she cannot trust them, all the same.

She has already been made a fool too many times. “No,” she tells him, just once.

The spell is broken like a fingersnap. It is almost sudden, and splitting, how quickly the coldness spreads over her where only warmth had been before. She pushes him off her, and he lets her, though she knows it costs him. Perhaps the haze of the Spice is lifting, perhaps the dawn brings with it clarity, perhaps she is more clear headed in the aftermath of an orgasm than in the buildup. In any case, she is already rushing through a list of her offenses, her stunning weaknesses, already gathering her guilt and recrimination like a manifesto as she gathers the pieces of her stillsuit and dons it back on like armor.

The entire time, he watches her in a brewing stinging silence.

“This was a mistake,” she tells him, without looking back, just as she leaves through the door.

He does not respond, but she does not give him a chance to, either.

Chani is so used to being overlooked when standing in any room with Paul in it that she almost wants to use it to her advantage, to slip away when everyone gathers for their breaking fast. The mood is somber in the morning as many are still recovering from a night of indulgences, so no one remarks about how Chani had spent the night in Paul’s room or the fact that they do not sit next to each other in the morning after.

But there is news forthcoming and unsurprising. The runner has not returned; Jessica has not yet sent a thopter. That can only mean bad things. Stilgar cautions a hasty decision; Gurney argues for a quick retreat. Paul listens to both without saying a word, and Chani does not offer her opinion. Paul has already made his decision more than likely, so anything she has to say is beside the point. She leaves the room after this Sietch’s Naib offers his services in housing the sandworm younglin until Paul can send someone back to retrieve it — and the decision is made. The four of them will leave by foot after the midday sun has peaked, allowing for the worst of the temperatures to pass, and then they will trek the remainder of the one day journey towards the capital.

When Chani makes her escape into an empty room near the South Wing, the girl with the scar blinks into existence behind her. One moment Chani is alone with her thoughts, spiraling with recrimination and regret, and the next the girl is announcing her presence with barely the sound of rustled clothing. Still so disarmingly small, too young to take seriously even though Chani can feel the judgment radiating from the younger woman. As if Chani did not have enough of that on her own, this morning.

“You will be leaving soon with Muad’dib?” the girl asks, in Chakobsa.

Chani nods, busying herself with preparing her pack with last minute supplies provided by the Naib. Generous, of course, as he has been to Paul since their arrival. She has enough provisions for three times the length of the expected journey.

A part of her wonders, distracted, if she could quietly slip away from the group at some point, make her way on her own. She has no idea where she would go, which other Sietches would even offer her sanctuary, or even how long it would take Paul to find her again — if he ever lost sight of her in the first place, a significant enough doubt on its own. She could stretch her supplies to several days, if she’s frugal. If she’s very frugal and very resourceful with some traps, some desert vermin may allow her to last as long as a week. A week could get her somewhere off the expected course, could help her manage to fly under the radar of Paul’s enemies.

The issue, however, remains Paul — and Chani does not want to think about Paul today, or his palace, or his empire. She certainly does not want to think about his wife.

Even if all those things are the only things Chani finds herself thinking about, today.

And then, it is a sharp sting in her gut, a realization that does not come to her at once, but slowly descends as she looks down at the source. There is less than a second between looking down and the realization that the hot, terrible pain is a weapon making a home in her body.

Chani stares down, and there is a knife sticking through her stomach.

“You do not deserve Muad’dib,” the girl says, in Chakobsa, with her ugly scar beneath her mouth.

Blood pools out of the wound at a fascinating rate, Chani distantly understanding the dire situation as she staggers back, the knife slipping free from her body, the handle still firmly in the girl’s cold grip. It is not even a crysknife, Chani thinks, realizing. The girl is not even a warrior.

Perhaps it is why the girl misjudges the situation so badly, why she takes her time for the second killing blow. The blood loss is a challenge, the shock even moreso, but the girl moves too slowly to clearly understand the true threat of a Fedaykin. Chani reacts before the girl can process it. Chani reacts without even thinking, training and instincts a lethal combination; she reaches for her crysknife in a smooth and singular arc, the slice across the girl’s throat fluid and quiet as a mouse. The girl dies from a scar much larger than the one on her chin. The girl’s blood pools and mixes with the splash of blood that Chani has left on the floor.

What a waste, Chani thinks, what a waste of precious water.

It is the last thought she thinks before she turns the corner, and sees Paul arrive into the room just seconds too late. She staggers back, into his outstretched arms, his features a dawning comprehension of alarm, color draining from his face as he takes her full weight into his arms. Her legs feel like quicksand, her arms like limp rope.

“Chani,” he gasps, as if he is the one that’s been stabbed.

There is a full second of utter silence and shock, then he calls for help, horrorstruck, as she stares up at him — and darkness claims her.

Chapter Text

The shoutings are a distant warning. They clammer above her in sharp spikes of sound that ebb away, feeling like brittle crumbling bone, like ash in her mouth disintegrating. Chani drifts in a liminal state of consciousness, feels hands — Paul’s hands — carrying her weight, then holding her hand in a vice-like grip once she’s set to the ground.

When he pulls back the bloodied flap of her stillsuit, pressing on the wound to contain the bleeding, the sharp pain brings her back to consciousness with a viciousness. “You’re going to be okay,” he breathes, face ashen as he searches her eyes like he’s afraid they’ll close again. “Chani, you’re going to be—”

She passes out.

Comes to only intermittently, to brief moments of chaos. “Bring Spice, as much as you have!” Stilgar is shouting, demanding. “This bad of a wound she must take—”

It is a stinging concoction they force down her throat, Spice mixed with water mixed with something else, some noxious herb, a flavor full of competing senses. Chani gags on it, and throws up violently, and they are forced to hold her down again as the acidic liquid flows down her throat.

“Don’t fight it,” Stilgar insists, above her.

She thrashes against foreign hands, pushes away, fights because that’s what Chani does — she fights.

“Shh, shh, don’t resist, stubborn woman,” Stilgar urges. “The Spice will help, it will heal. It must.”

After a second failed attempt, she knocks the bowl away to the ground, retches again, her bleeding broken body pushed beyond all limits.

“You cannot give her more!” someone shouts, from afar. “She has already wasted too much, and you give her a dangerous amount. You will surely kill her if—”

“Silence!” Paul’s Voice, threatening, echoing out.

A quiet stretching out for long moments after, only broken by Chani’s rising groan. She opens her eyes and sees Paul’s face next to blurry others — his jaw clenched, eyes blazing, rendering everyone else speechless as he stares down at her with wild fear. She’s never seen him look so feral, not after battles full of bloodshed, not after taking the Water of Life, not even after he proclaimed himself a messiah to the entire Empire.

Paul brings the concoction to her lips again, hands trembling. “Drink,” he tells her, his Voice a command.

By the time she has taken in the Spice, her body feels like it's burning up from the inside like a star being born.

She sees.

A glimpse, like gossamer wings. The future, the past, she cannot tell at first. Footsteps in the sands, a clear straight line leading down, down, down. At the foot of the hill, a child’s laughter echoes out, distant and chiming. She sees Paul, hand outstretched towards her. She sees a boy next to him, barely a toddler, walking along the sands of Arrakis on two bumbling pudgy legs. Skin dark, eyes blue, a mischievous smile. With a start, with a certain certainty she knows. This is her child, hers and Paul’s. The Emperor’s son, a Fedeykin’s son.

A concubine’s son.

The vision changes, warps, recedes, bleeds. It shifts like sand in an hourglass, and once again she does not know if she is the past, present, or future. Soldiers, at the Palace. Harkonnens. Killing by the droves. She sees a Fremen woman take a knife to the back, sees her draw a sandworm with beating fists to the sand, sees her sacrifice herself to a Shai-Hulud just to see three other Harkonnens swallowed—

It warps again, and there is a knife in Chani’s hands, and it is buried in Paul’s gut. There is a crysknife with Paul’s blood all over it, and she is the one wielding it. “Chani,” he breathes, gasping. “It’s okay, my love.” And she is crying but she has still done this, still stabbed him, still spilled his water watching him fall to his knees. She crumbles to the floor with him. “It needed to be done,” she tells him, crying. “I told you,” he only returns. “I will love you until my last breath.” And he does, this holds true, nothing but affection in his eyes as he takes that last breath, nothing but love in response to this betrayal, nothing but—

A throne, two writhing bodies on top of it. Shameless, naked, the afternoon sun slanting beams of light across the hall, as Chani mounts her Emperor and takes him inside her body over and over again, a rhythm of flesh and sin, a reckless lust—

Laughter, again, this time a twin pair—

Screams, cries, a woman crying, “Sihaya!” like a battlecry—

Paul’s eyes a milky white, dead and useless—

Bodies piling up upon the sands, decimated, rotting flesh, sunken bellies and hollowed eyes. Dozens, hundreds, thousands — more. Her people dying like a hill of ants crushed under a boot. A scream silenced—

Muad’dib. Muad’dib. Muad’dib—

Her, pregnant—

A Shai-Hulud, a grandfather, reaching out of the sands and flying into the air, outlined by the halo of the sun—

A paradise, full of neverending green, trees, and a sky filled with falling water, a crunch of rich soil beneath her feet, the two moons of Arrakis above her—

The flow of time has fallen into Chani and only bleeds out through the wound in her belly.

She sleeps, and sleeps, and sleeps.

It is never a dreamless sleep.

“You do keep things interesting, sister, I will grant you that.”

Her fingers twitch, searching for something familiar no longer there underneath her grasp. Instead, she finds soft blankets, softer than those she’s ever felt before, opening her eyes to a room full of royal blue and white posts, a bedroom grand and spacious. Her neck creaks to the side. Alia is there, with the Fremen servant girl, Radiqa. It is late evening—or early in the morning, possibly — and with a groan, Chani blinks into full awareness.

She groans. “What—”

“Rest, sister,” Alia insists, gentle toddler hands with more force than should be possible. She sends her servant girl to fetch a Suk Doctor, and tells the guards to alert Paul. “You have been in a Spice-induced coma for over ten days now. Gave us all a scare.”

Chani looks around, bleary-eyed. The room is uncomfortably large and elegantly furnished in rich jewel tones with an accent of gold dispersed throughout, large seating in one corner and a fireplace in the other. With sudden realization, she realizes she is in Paul’s palace again, awaking in his own personal quarters. She has only glimpsed it in brief moments through open doorways, but it is unmistakable.

Chani looks down, lifts the plain white shirt she is covered in, silky and soft, to find bandages. A deep breath in, and she hardly feels more than a pull of strained muscle.

“I wouldn’t do that,” Alia chides, even while Chani does not stop to lift and peel back the bandages.

It is a wonder. There is barely even a wound left, a long cut healing, a clean line of stitches that weren’t likely made by Fremen hands. A second later, the door bursts open, a man with long straight black hair walking through, a man who introduces himself as a doctor. Chani submits to the inspection because she doesn’t still fully have herself sorted out. She feels — well, she feels all right, given everything, but out of sorts. Sluggish, foggy. All her limbs are answering her commands, and she hardly feels the doctor’s prodding and pulling. It is a miracle, perhaps, but Chani has seen the Spice do much more than heal a single fatal wound in her lifetime.

“What happened?” she asks the child, when the doctor lets her rest again.

“A besotted girl turned assassin,” Alia answers. “As far as anyone has been able to discover, you were stabbed over petty jealousy. But I don’t know, I find it too convenient.”

Chani recalls the girl with the scar, the resentment she held against Chani for shirking Muad’dib’s favor.

“Convenient?” she repeats, archly.

Alia smiles. “Do you know what’s been happening while you slept? Quite a few things. The Delegation Treaty has all but come to a brutal halt. My brother isn’t in the mood to curry favor with the Great Houses, and they weren’t in the mood to wait around. Fine by me,” Alia sniffs. “The negotiations over world politics were ever so tedious and minutiae filled. Paul should have just threatened them all with our family atomics to begin with. He might still, given his mood lately.”

“So the Delegation has left?” Chani asks, and immediately she wonders if that means she’s free, if she can leave.

“They’re coming back,” Alia answers, crushing that dream quickly. “In one week’s time. Mother managed to salvage at least that much, but not after she had to deal with an upstart coup.”

“A coup?”

“When the Rifana Sietch had sent a runner,” Alia explains, “an assassin killed him before he could deliver Paul’s message to our mother. But we figured it out eventually. Lucky for you. We sent a thopter to all the closest sietches near the breeding grounds and found you. Brought you back to our doctors, brought back the younglin sandworm, brought back a very displeased Emperor with a dangerously short fuse of temper.”

Chani pauses. It is the second or third hint that Alia has left like crumbs on the floor regarding Paul’s ill-tempered mood. It is clear he did not predict her little assassin. It’s probably made him paranoid and even mercurial. Paul doesn’t like things he cannot control. He likes things that threaten those he loves even less.

She almost does not want to poke or prod at the topic any further than necessary.

“You know what they’re saying now?” Alia says, positing the pointless question for she answers it immediately. She climbs up onto the large bed to sit closer to Chani. “The Houses are all in a titter over you, especially House Fenring. You’ve upset the established expectations of an Emperor's household. Paul rather humiliated Irulan when he brought you here and set out guards to keep all others away, even her.” Alia giggles, here. “It was rather funny to see Irulan’s face turn that shade of red.”

Chani’s heart sinks when she thinks of Paul’s wife. Humiliation of the other woman brings Chani no satisfaction. In fact, it makes everything significantly worse. Chani still has not fully come to terms with the events that occurred the night before she was stabbed. She could blame the Spice, but she knows that is an excuse too flimsy to hold much water. Regardless of any altered state of mind, she had crossed a line with Paul that night. A line no honorable woman would cross with any married man. It doesn’t matter the impotent state of his marriage; that is beside the point.

“And the Fremen,” Alia informs, pitiless, marching on with the gossip. “Oh, they are fracturing. Some into a faithless faction of rebels. Paul will have his hands full trying to keep the assassins at bay.”

It comes to Chani like pieces of a dream half-remembered. The knife in her hand, sticking swiftly into Paul’s gut. It was a dream, a hallucination. It had to be, Chani insists, even if it had felt so vivid, so real. It is not the first time Spice has forced visions onto Chani, nor even the first time she feels as if she has seen a hint of the future with it, but nothing at all on this level. Nothing that could compete with the myriad of horror-struck visions she had seen, had felt, right down to her bones, right down to her soul. Some of them hadn’t been nightmares, either.

She remembers a boy, dark skinned, blue-eyed. She remembers the taste of Paul’s promised kisses.

But she remembers killing Paul.

And she remembers so many dead Fremen scattered across the universe.

It was just a hallucination, she insists to herself. All of it. Every bit of it.

It had to be.

She sends Alia away, insisting that she needs rest. It is not a lie. The young girl seems to nod in understanding, but it does not stop her from saying, “You will forgive Paul, won’t you? I know he is arrogant and insufferable sometimes, and he has the capacity to be cruel if it works to his calculations. You and I and Mother see it more than most, we women who love Paul. I daresay even the princess sees that. But we also see the good in him, Chani. He is good. He tries, and he loves you more than anything, Chani.”

She can think of no response to such an impassioned speech from a child who should barely be able to string two words together. She keeps waiting for her conversations with Alia to become less disorienting, but this last one has put Chani off-kilter more than any that came before.

Alia leaves, with her Fremen minder, Radiqa, who only dips her head modestly once, reverently, before departing. The guard posted at the doors informs her that the Emperor will be arriving shortly. Chani sits and waits, because there is nothing else for her to do. She sits and waits, and remembers her dreams, remembers her most recent night with Paul; she sits and waits, and simmers like boiling water.

When Paul invariably arrives, Chani is in the middle of trying to get out of bed. A mistake, it seems, no matter how well her wounds appear to be healing. Her legs can barely hold her weight under her, and she finds herself almost spilling to the ground before Paul is suddenly there quick as a blink. A hand around her waist, another supporting her back; she uses him to hold herself up, but she is still curling forward, a twinge of pain in her gut, a twist to a healing wound. He tucks his arm around her and pulls her to his chest, and suddenly, she is wrapped up in his embrace.

“Paul—”

“Just a moment,” he pleads, breath near her ear. “Just give me a moment.”

She finds herself inexplicably submitting to the request, closing her eyes and allowing herself the weakness of this. She feels him take a deep inhale in at the curve of her neck, his lungs expanding — and she realizes he is breathing in her scent. She has been washed and bathed sometime in the last ten days, that much is certain. She smells clean and fresh, but with none of the perfumed oils that had given her a headache when Jessica had first introduced them to her. Whatever she smells like, she can tell it comforts him, anchors him.

It takes that long moment to realize the tremble that she feels alongside her body is a shudder going through him. He presses her against his chest, holds her delicately like she is a desert flower, his little Desert Spring. Her fingers splay over his chest, splayed out over a pounding heart she can feel beneath her fingertips. There is an unnameable relief in his arms, and Chani admits to herself that this whole near death ordeal has left her more shaken than she’d realized, just as it had him.

She should pull away, and almost does after a few seconds, her mouth thin with indecision; she does not pull away. She cannot seem to force herself.

Finally, it is him that draws away, only to help her back into bed.

“You shouldn’t be moving yet,” he tells her, hushed, and if anyone were looking at them from the outside, she wouldn’t be able to deny the intimacy of him tucking her under the bed covers. A moment, a pause, before he says, “You have no idea how close you came to dying, Chani.”

She has some idea.

“The girl,” Chani says, “the one who stabbed me. I killed her, didn’t I?”

“You did.”

She nods. She didn’t think she had imagined that, but she hadn’t been entirely sure. “Was she working alone?”

“From all reports at this time,” Paul answers, “most likely.”

A pause, as Chani swallows. The girl was — young. Practically a child.

He strokes her hand lightly, tiny sweeps of his thumb tracing the bones and tendon, his touch warming in this artificially cool air that always seems to permeate his palace. She should pull away, but it is harder now, harder than eleven days ago (which only feels like yesterday to her); it is harder than it needs to be because she had to go and nearly lay with him again, had nearly let him back into her body as much as he had made a permanent space within her heart.

She knows the look of intensity in his eyes without once meeting his gaze, and he is testing the waters, pushing it beyond the limits she had so carefully constructed before. Testing how much she will let him touch her.

“How are you feeling?” he asks carefully, after a long pause.

“Much better than to be expected considering I was gutted.”

He gets that faraway look that he does sometimes, like when he has a vision. But Chani does not think it is his prescience working this time. She thinks it is only a haunting memory.

“Alia had many things to say to me,” Chani informs, instead, hoping to ease the tension in the air. “She says the Fremen are fracturing.”

“Perhaps,” Paul admits.

His instincts on these things always seem to be precise, almost too clever. “What are you thinking?”

A pause. “That the girl or even the Fremen are not our only threats, not by a longshot. The Delegation stands on the precipice of declaring ongoing war with House Atreides, and we need this peace treaty if we are to have any hope of saving countless lives. And you—”

Here, he cuts himself off.

“What about me?” she asks.

He does not answer.

“Why am I here in your personal quarters, Paul?”

“Because they are my personal quarters,” he answers, simply. “The Emperor’s personal quarters are the safest rooms in the entire palace.”

“My old room was just down the corridor.”

“And still, it was not the safest room. This room has hidden escape routes—” he points to a wall beside the bed, a small inseam in the smooth plaster. “My guards are posted outside. It has the advantage of a hidden cupboard full of an arsenal just beneath the bed.” Here, he lets go of her hand long enough to pull open the drawer, pull out her crysknife, polished and cleaned and with none of that girl’s blood on it. He hands it to her, and she cannot deny she feels better, stronger, when the handle fits back into her palm. “You have access to anything you need from there. It is all within an arm’s reach.”

Chani slips the knife underneath her pillow, and waits. “And where will you be sleeping while I occupy your bed?”

“On the floor, or outside in the hallway for all I care,” he returns. “This isn’t a tactic to seduce you, Chani. I care only for your welfare.”

“And where will your wife be sleeping?”

Paul meets her gaze evenly. “I care even less about that than I do my own arrangements. You know this.”

Chani looks away. “It is not that easy.”

“It doesn’t need to be that complicated either.”

“You are the Emperor,” she replies, harshly. “Married to the daughter of the former Emperor. I know I come from a people of sand, but we are not ignorant to rules or their rulers.”

“It is not unheard of for arranged marriages such as mine, that they remain a cold marriage bed.”

“You mean Emperors have their concubines,” Chani offers, into the void, filling in the blanks. “I suppose history is filled with them.”

Paul does not say anything to this, but she can hear everything he leaves unsaid. His mother was a concubine, and no less of a wife to Paul’s father. Even with Chani’s distaste for the word, she cannot deny him that singular truth.

Paul does not look away, only reaches out to brush a strand of hair away from Chani’s eyes, but this time she flinches, pulling back, and his hand falls away short of its destination. “I don’t know if it would make me a better man or a weaker man to stop loving you. I just know that I am neither.”

Alia is right. He is arrogant, insufferable, and cruel.

Possessive, too.

But he is her Paul too, and that hurts most of all. He isn’t the only one that could be accused of being possessive. Chani has her faults as much as anyone else. She hates that she shares that same vulnerability, that same inelegant thirst.

It would be so easy for her to nod, just slightly, give him a look that would grant him permission to close the distance between them again. He is already gazing at her mouth softly, a conspicuous thing that belies his clear longing. It would take so little to command his mouth graze hers. Then it would be so easy to trip down another mistake, return to the impulse of that night that feels like only yesterday to her; catch his lip between hers, invite him into his own bed. She can taste the phantom touch of his kisses already, the smell of his sweat, the earned familiarity of his body.

“What happened between us the other night—”

Paul stops her. “I won’t— I don’t have any expectations from you.”

She glares at him. “A lie.”

He shakes his head. “I told you once already, if you want to leave, I will move mountains to make that happen. I will let you go, Chani, as soon as it is safe to do so. But do not ask me to mask my feelings for you. That, I cannot do. That is too plain a truth to deny. But it does not mean my feelings for you come with expectations of reciprocal obligations. I am not a brute, even if I am a ruler.”

“A dictator,” she cuts in, correcting, remembering her dream filled with too many bodies desiccated and dying. “A man who has ordered men to die for him by the thousands already.”

A clench of his jaw, and no denial. “Yes, but I will submit to your commands in this bedroom.”

She swallows.

She remembers more of her dreams. The weight of her belly, swollen with his child. A love insistent and unrelenting, a desire for him forged in fire. Fucking on his throne.

And — a twist of her stomach, she remembers, too, the familiar feel of her crysknife in her palm as she’d driven it through his body. She remembers gutting him while he looked at her with nothing but adoration in his eyes.

She remembers a son.

He seems to misread her wavering expression, or at least the inspiration behind it. “If you do not want my touch, I will not touch you. If you do not want my presence, I will leave. I cannot force you to love me, Chani. I would not want that even if I could.”

A pause, where she admits to herself one damning thing. He does not need to force her to do that. She, the fool, does that freely enough. She cannot seem to pull away, she cannot seem to get enough of how he feels, a comforting presence interspersed with blazing desire. It is a toxic heedy cocktail, and already she wonders if she is strong enough to resist it again. He tastes like he belongs to her. It's in his every touch and look.

“You should grab some spare blankets and pillows,” she only offers him, tightly. “It gets cold at night behind these frigid palace walls of yours, and you’ll be sleeping on the floor.”

He expels a breath, but not in frustration, but as if in relief — as if she has offered him a comfort. “Happily.”

The rest of the evening is surreal. Dinner is brought to them, and she insists on sitting at the seated table just off to the side, even if the journey is taxing. Dinner is a quiet affair, and mostly Paul watches her carefully, seeming to count how many bites she forces herself to consume. The day has been short for her, but already it has drained her of all her energy. When she finishes, when she rises to lay down on the mattress again, Paul follows her, pulling down the coverlet, watching her as she settles in as if she could slip and fall and hurt herself in a bed as large and as soft as this one.

“I am not going to break,” she snaps, more than a little flustered under his gaze.

He blinks, and nods, looking away briefly while he rubs the back of his neck, sheepish. As if she had caught him in a look that meant something other than worry. Then she realizes it — perhaps he had not been watching her in strict concern. The white shirt she wears has the top one or two buttons undone, and while it does not expose a scandalous amount of skin, it has fallen off one shoulder entirely. Paul has always had a weakness for the sight of her skin, her delicate shoulders, a peek of her chest. All men seem to have a fascination in a woman's chest, and Paul is no exception.

“Get some rest,” Paul says, recovering.

“Are you going to watch over me all night long?”

“I will keep my distance,” he promises. “I will sleep on the floor.”

He had not answered her question.

The bed is almost comically large, and too soft for her tastes. She’s slept on sand, on hard floors, and on practical bedrolls nearly all her life. These Great Houses all seem to prefer a far softer bedding, and it reminds her of something Paul once said about his homeworld, Caladan, a rich paradise that Chani can hardly imagine. The price we paid was the price men have always paid for achieving a paradise in this life— we went soft, we lost our edge. Chani had agreed, silently, at the time. But she wonders — she wonders if she stays here long enough, too long, if she will not go soft too.

“Go to sleep, Chani,” he murmurs, then. His gaze, thoughtful and inscrutable, on her.

Thoughts are becoming more difficult, she realizes, the longer she fights her body’s need for rest. And he makes everything more complicated, more difficult, for her. “Promise me,” she says, determination burning brighter with every word she speaks, “you promise me that you will let me go when I ask.”

“Once it is safe,” he tells her.

“Swear it,” she insists.

“By my love of you, Chani, I swear I will let you go when it is prudent to do so.”

She narrows her eyes, tries to dissect his meaning of prudent, but Paul’s face is open and too earnest. She believes him. Besides, if he tries to keep her by force after she’s determined a sufficiently safe time and opportunity to leave, then she will make him keep his promise whether he likes it or not. This — this truce between them is tenuous at best, and filled with too much tension. Too much emotion. It will be up to her to maintain the distance, to maintain the course.

She lies down, turns carefully on her side, away from him. “Sleep well, Paul.”

“You, as well,” he says, soothing.

She hears him retreat to the place where he has spread his bedroll, and she finds it almost amusing how the expectations have flipped. Her, a common Fremen, in a royal bed, and him, the Emperor, in a bedroll on the floor. She closes her eyes, and she must be tired indeed, because she has hardly closed them before sleep pulls her under like a beggar bagging a coin. But just before sleep claims her, she finds herself wondering if she’ll dream again. In fact, there is a fissure of fear in the thought.

Fear, the type of which she has never known before.

Chapter Text

She would have been a fool to think maintaining the course with Paul would be easy, but she is still startled to realize how hard it becomes. The next few days, every inch between them seems to shrink in size, a diminishing compromise that shivers with unspoken things, everything from her anger to his devotion to the nameless in between. He spends more time in his bedrooms than she suspects he would do, otherwise. She does not have much else to do besides recuperate, and though the first few days she’d sent him off to deal with whatever daily concerns weighed on an Emperor, by the fourth day her restlessness has overtaken her senses.

She permits him to join her for lunch and dinners, sequestered in his quarters. He tries to downplay his interest, but as much as it is obvious, a physical awareness of him that seems to make his proximity a thing that tips her off balance, she gets the sense that he is lonely. As lonely as her, or perhaps even moreso. She understands that he has not had many people to talk to, equal to equal. She gets the sense he’s kept his prescience thoughts bound up and tangled in his head, unwilling to unleash them on even the few who may understand such things like his mother. He speaks to Chani with none of these reservations, it seems. In fact he seems starved for her conversation, and she finds herself permitting it.

She thinks of a mouse caught in quicksand. She thinks of the ignorant bliss it must entertain before the reality of its fate becomes apparent.

She thinks she understands that bliss more than she understands the reality.

Two nights before the Delegation is set to return, he does not waste time on small talk of weather or her daily gains in recovery. He brings up politics — his concerns for the Empire, his dealings with the Fremen, his plans for the Delegation. He actively seeks out her advice, in such a direct way that she cannot help but think it would be better directed towards his wife. The princess has the breeding and upbringing to foster a knowledge for politics, an instinct Chani distinctly lacks. Still, she knows better than to presume he’s gone to Irulan on any of these matters. More and more, his disdain for his wife becomes apparent. More and more, Chani finds herself feeling guilty for all the things she hordes away from Irulan, things that should by right belong only to a wife.

“When Fenring returns,” Paul is saying, that evening, “the negotiations will continue at their tedious pace, and he will think he’s had an advantage with the delay. I’ll have to wine and dine the delegation all over again to soothe their sense of mistreatment.”

Chani says nothing to this. Men of Great Houses seem to have such delicate sensibilities.

“What do you think I should do?” Paul asks her.

It is a direct question, and Chani is still inclined to keep her opinions to herself. “You do not want my advice, Paul Atreides. It comes from a Fedaykin, not a politician.”

“And how would a Fedaykin handle negotiations?”

“A challenge,” she tells him, simply. But he already knows this. “Invoke the Amtal Rule, and issue the Tahaddi Challenge. A fight, man to man. The winner gains his terms. The loser suffers his losses.”

“Fenring is a great warrior, but he is not as hot headed as the Harkonnens. He would not risk the entire delegation’s terms on a fight he cannot guarantee the outcome from. He is too sensible for that, and his instincts are— killer.”

Chani pauses, for the first time truly concerned. “You do not think you could take him in a fight?”

“I think I would be a fool to underestimate him.”

Chani frowns. “Then make him underestimate you,” she tells him. “Make him overconfident, overplay his hand.”

Paul says nothing to this, but she knows he takes her advice to stew over. She can tell when she has said something that sticks with him. He seems to disappear into a void for a while, long enough that she wonders where his mind goes when he disappears like that. If he is seeing some path forward, the possibilities laid out at his feet. She hesitates for only a moment before her hand slips across the space between them and places it on his own to bring him back to the present. He jolts at the contact, looking at her, and she realizes with a flush that this is the first time she’s reached out to him. Always he seems to gravitate towards her, but she keeps so tightly to herself that sometimes it feels like her muscles will lock up and freeze.

When she withdraws her hand, he reaches out quickly and snatches it back, holding it in his palm. “Chani,” he says, somewhat urgently. “We need to talk about my plans to take the Water of Life.”

Immediately she pulls her hand free as if burned. “Do we? I thought I made myself clear that I would not help you again with that.”

“That was before an assassin tried to kill you. Before I failed to foresee—”

“Not everything needs to be foreseen, Paul Atreides. You do not need to become a God.”

He pauses. “I wish it were that simple. The path forward that I presently see — there is one way, potentially, but it requires sacrifice.”

“What sacrifice?”

Paul does not answer this. “I know you’ve been recovering these last few days, but I cannot delay the decision to take the Water of Life for much longer. Is there anything I could do to change your mind?”

No, there isn’t, but surely he must know that. Surely she has made her mind on such matters clear. It occurs to her that perhaps she’s blurred the lines in the last few days enough for him to feel this may not be the case anymore, but then he is mistaken. She may be a victim to her weakening resolve, this tug and pull that seems to yank at her heartstrings between them, but her mind remains as resolved as ever. When it comes to Paul’s self-appointed role as the Messiah, a savior to her people who will likely only bring death and fanaticism, she is opposed.

She has spent her entire life under the yolk of cruelty from foreign rulers.

Funny how she fell in love with one.

She does not know a thing in the world more stubborn or foolish than the heart.

“What will you do?” Chani asks.

“Take the Water of Life before the delegation arrives,” he answers, simply. “And hope this time I can metabolize the poison on my own.”

A chill runs down her spine, and she says nothing.

The rest of the evening is subdued.

That night, she gets less sleep than usual and she is aware of Paul restlessly turning in his bedroll not too far off from her. It is a bitter night filled with too many wrought emotions, too many conflicting thoughts. She knows she is doing the right thing; she knows it. It is a maddening thing to still feel the hooks of doubt and discord sink into her skin, to be haunted by the possibility that she is making a mistake.

A fatal mistake, for Paul.

Come morning, it is a red dawn.

The worry is like a festering thing. It gnaws at her insides. It decays and rots.

So while he dresses for the day in his Emperor’s uniform, a suit that almost matches everyone else in his House except for small added adornments — an Emperor’s crest to the front of his jacket, a hint of gold piping along the cuffs and collar — she stands, defenseless, watching him don it on. He appears to assemble this uniform like it's a piece of armor, one that almost fits like a lie. She much prefers him in a stillsuit.

So, when he says, “Let me spend this last day with you,” a soft utterance, he meets her eyes through the mirror, aware she has been watching him the entire time.

Tomorrow, the Delegation arrives, and she cannot ignore the concern that he will take the Water of Life in the hours before their arrival.

It feels like they are running out of time.

So, she nods — and he appears relieved, pleased. “Good,” he says, clearing his throat. “I’ll be back in a few hours. I just have to wrap up a few things for tomorrow, but then I’ll be— I’ll be all yours.”

Chani can’t help but think —there is quicksand beneath her feet, and she is the mouse.

Come mid-afternoon, the Suk Doctor evaluates her once again and determines her gains are better than expected. She has healed enough for the stitches to have been removed, and the wound is nothing more than a neat thin line that bisects her stomach on one side. The Doctor gives her express instructions to take a bath in the evening, with an added murky serum to help with healing and circulation. Chani does not say anything to this. A bath is still an alien concept to her, too daunting and opulent.

The Doctor seems to read her anxiety. “It is for your healing,” he insists. “I can have someone come to assist you in the bath. The faster you recover your full strength, the faster you may be able to leave this place.”

She stares at him.

“It is no secret that you want to leave,” the Suk Doctor says. “Even the Emperor knows this. He has charged me with making sure you recover as quickly as possible.”

Chani nods, reluctantly. “I’ll take the bath.”

“Good, good.”

But when it comes time for the bath, she stands in the washroom facilities, in a robe made of more indulgent silks, in front of a warm bath already prepped for her. There is no servant nearby, though.

Instead, there is Paul standing in the open doorway. “Let me help,” he says.

She hesitates, staring. She watches him for a moment, eyes searching his, noting the familiar lines in his body as he holds himself stiff, waiting for her permission. He is all slippery lines and sharp angles, and he can never just present himself in an uncomplicated manner like everybody else she’s ever known. There is a bottle of the foreign serum in his hands, the same one the Doctor had provided, and her eyes reach up to connect with his keen gaze, searching for — something. She is not sure what. Something incriminating. This prospect is only too enticing for all the wrong reasons, all the madness that she knows better than to pursue. This is bold of him, certainly. Daring, she thinks. Even as the trespass beyond their established holding pattern is undeniable, she remembers his courtship with her — how he had always been certain with her, even when he was deferential.

She hesitates — but in the end, she nods, just the faintest dip of her chin. Triumph burns hot in his eyes, and she knows this smallest permission has sealed her fate for the evening.

At first, it is a series of practical steps as he preps the bath. As he adds in the serum, as he tests the temperature and adjusts the water to some suitable standard. Chani watches this all immobile because all too quickly, Paul’s attention turns back to her. He looks at her in silent invitation, and she stares back, her heart pounding so loud she wonders if he can hear it.

But then he’s approaching her, slow measured footsteps that give her plenty of time to change her mind.

When he reaches her, eyes locked on hers and unflinching, his hand slips to her waist, reaching for the cord tying off her robe and slips it free, unraveling it like he does her senses, an undone spool. The robe falls open in the front, hanging there like two curtains parted, a partition that makes it well known she wears nothing underneath. He pauses, fingering the folds of her robe, letting the partition widen just slightly, a peek at her skin underneath, her sex.

“You can tell me to stop at any time,” he murmurs, softly.

But she doesn’t.

And then he is touching her. One hand slipping beneath the robe, on the hot skin of her hips, the other cupping her face in a splayed open palm, their bodies so close and drifting closer, so close they could almost be kissing. For one hot-blooded second, he tips his forehead to rest against hers, his breath mingling with her own, and it's more intimate than a kiss. His hands on her body, his mouth near enough to her own that she can feel herself trembling with anticipation, with naked want.

Instead, he pulls himself away with a groan, a determined clench of his jaw.

Instead, he circles around her and pulls off her robe, letting it fall to the ground. She stands there naked as the day she was born, and his eyes darken as he takes her in. Beneath his gaze, Chani goes very still, the way an animal might still when in the sights of a predator.

“I want to see you in the water,” he tells her, a soft demand, but a demand nonetheless.

A shiver runs through her.

She does not deny him.

He guides her into the water, one of her smaller hands in his palm, the other at her waist as she steps into the bathtub. The sink down to the bottom of the tub is — it's divine, it’s sinful, it’s too many competing things for Chani to pick out just one. He kneels beside the bathtub, his coat off, the sleeves of his white shirt rolled up to his elbows exposing the familiar veins on his forearms up through his slender fingers. She understands why Paul wants to see her like this, so naked, so vulnerable, because there is something keenly sensual about it, her body submerged in precious life-affirming water. It is a heedy, reckless desire; a seduction nearly intoxicating.

“Will you turn away from me again in the morning?” he asks her, softly.

She closes her eyes, and she cannot answer him.

In the morning, she doesn't know how she will rationalize this. Most likely, shame will come with the sunrise, but she cannot sweep this away as another Spice-induced mistake. She cannot keep doing this and claiming it to be a misstep, a mistake. It is not fair to either of them to do that.

“Whatever you decide,” he tells her, “thank you for letting this be an image I have of you. It is a gift.”

She cannot think of a thing to say to that, so she says nothing. He begins to lather up and rub the soap into her skin. She melts as he works, his long fingers working down to the slopes of her arms, across her shoulder blades, running his touch over the familiar traverse of her body. The slopes of her humble breasts, the peaks of her nipples. She tips her head back to rest against the lip of the tub, determined to let this take its course, to enjoy it and remember the damning consequences later. Shoulders relaxing, eyes slipping shut. There is no good reason for letting him do this, no benign excuse she can conjure up. It is the pleasure of having him touch her, it is a sin she should deny both him and herself.

But—but she is the one pushing forward, pressing her mouth to his. He responds immediately, kissing her back, wet fingers tangling through her hair and digging into her skull, a possessive demanding touch. His mouth is wet and hot and shocking, opening up hers, a kiss rife with desire. His hands are everywhere, clutching with gentle insistent force at her sides, fisting so tightly in her hair that it should hurt a little, and it does. This entire thing is a live bruise, a blemish on her body, a blister to her soul. She knows this is more than just lust, a sense of losing herself to a relief he could only give her.

This is wrong, he is married, but it does not stop Chani from doing it.

Daring, he murmurs against her lips, “Can I touch you?”

As if he has not already been doing that.

But she knows what he means, implicitly. She nods. His fingers slip beneath the water, traveling down to the junction between her thighs which she parts easily. She feels his fingers dance across her folds, before seeking the right spot, the perfect spot, finding it almost immediately. Chani is too worked up to find much patience in her, her fingers immediately joining his, guiding him to find the right rhythm against her, the right cadence and beat. Her body floods with bliss as his thumb circles with intuition, experience, and her guiding hand. When he slips two fingers inside of her, quickly joined by a third, she gasps, mouth falling open. Her fingers atop his fall away as pleasure builds, when he adopts the perfect tease against her clit, synchronous with the pumping of his fingers tucked inside her.

She feels her breath stutter, her chest falling and rising with uneven breathing; the muscles of her stomach flex beneath the hold of his arm; his lips, at her neck, licking up the drips of water with the flat of his tongue and then sucking a bruise into her throat that she will have to cover up later.

She comes so easily, so quickly, it is almost embarrassing.

(He makes her come two more times, long enough in the tub for her skin to prune.)

Afterwards, he cleans her up and dries her off.

Afterwards, he does not let her return the favor, only stepping away from her wandering hands, a quiet laugh caught in his throat. “No, this wasn’t about me,” he says, smiling, pressing into the heat of her mouth in a quick indulgent kiss. “I just wanted to make you feel good.”

“And you get nothing in return?” she teases.

It is euphoric, this post-orgasmic moment. It leaves her loose and giddy, and remembering why she fell in love with this man in the first place, the way he takes care of her, tends to her needs above his own.

His voice is low, huskier than she’s ever heard it, and with just the slightest hint of pride. “I wouldn’t say that. The image of you in that water will stay with me for the rest of my life. Like I said, a gift.”

The words have a sobering effect.

She stares at him, understanding. “Do not take the Water of Life, Usul. Do not do it.”

He shakes his head, steps back, and says nothing. His eyes bleed with that same recrimination she had seen in him last, over two years ago, right before he declared himself an emperor and took another’s hand in marriage. She can feel that same wall erecting between them now, the same pillar made of a decision she cannot abide or condone. And suddenly, it is over. Their little tryst. Over, as suddenly as it started. She cannot help but feel like they are doing a type of sandwalk she does not recognize — one step forward, a sliding sideways shuffle, and two steps back.

And this time, it is him that pulls away.

When she emerges back out in the bedroom fully dressed, Paul is gone.

She stands in recriminating silence, in nearly claustrophobic silence. Nothing feels right. Nothing feels settled. She paces the length of the bedroom over and over again, ripe with concern. There is a terrible feeling rising in her chest — that Paul will take the Water of Life again, that he will force the issue of whether she will help or not. And Chani comes to understand something about herself she would rather not know; she is not only weak when it comes to Paul, but perhaps she is also easily corruptible. There is little denying it. There is no other explanation for her crumbling resolve in the face of Paul’s inherent ultimatum. If she does not help him, he will die.

She cannot understand how this will all come down to her. He has proven himself a tyrant, has ordered the deaths of countless of her people for a war in his name, has demonstrated a calculated way of looking at the world that leaves her chilled. And still, she cannot fully turn away from him. Still, she cannot deny him.

She tried. She left him. For two long brutal years, she had refused him.

And still her path found its way back to him.

The only way that denies him is the one she saw in her dreams, her spice-induced visions. The only way she could truly deny him is to fight him, to stand against him; the memory of her stabbing him through with her crysknife is more chilling than anything else she can imagine. She cannot—

And somewhere in the distance, an explosion goes off.

Chani comes to, coughing, having been thrown to the floor; the entire palace seems to quake with the ricocheting blast. It is a singular explosion, but large enough that when she gets to her feet, her first thoughts run to her greatest concern — Paul. It is this self-governing concern that propels Chani to the door, to greet the guards stationed outside the Emperor’s personal quarters and push past them.

“You cannot leave,” one guard insists, grabbing her by the arm; she is hurt, perhaps, she feels her vision blur but it does not matter. “We have orders—”

“Let me through,” she demands. “Where is Paul?”

“Ma’am, we cannot let you leave, especially not now.”

“There was an explosion,” she hisses.

“All the more reason for us to protect you,” the guard replies. “We have our strict orders from the Emperor. Your safety is—”

Chani pushes past him.

They try to detain her, but that is easily overruled when she twists out of their hold and slams one guard’s face to the wall. They are at a disadvantage, ordered to protect her and not harm her. Chani has no such reservations. When it becomes clear they cannot stop her without physically hurting her, they are left to follow like children chasing after a bird. Chani makes it down two more corridors before she bodily collides with another person— Irulan, the princess, Paul’s wife, coming out of her quarters.

She has not seen Irulan in weeks, since before transgressing past so many boundaries with Paul that Chani does not even know where to start the list.

Irulan, for her part, looks just as surprised to see Chani as Chani feels, but she quickly schools her face into impassivity. “What is going on?” she demands of the guards.

“We don’t know, Your Grace,” they answer, and Chani slinks back further into the shadows.

They answer to Irulan in a way they do not to Chani, because Irulan is a princess, the Emperor’s wife.

Chani is just Chani.

“Wait, wait!” a voice comes from down the corridor, hollering. Gurney, rushing to catch up with them. “Everyone, inside now,” he barks. “The palace is not secure—”

“What happened?” Chani demands.

“Initial reports appear to be a Stone Burner,” Gurney grunts, skidding to a halt in front of them. “We’re still checking it out.”

Irulan gave him a sharp look. “What about Paul?”

“He’s my priority,” Gurney hisses, angrily. “Which I can only do if I don’t have to worry about you two. Stay put. Guards, put them in a room and lock them tight! No one goes in or out!”

He’s down the hall before he’s even finished barking the orders, and Chani has half a mind to chase after him. Concern over Paul weighing against the logic barked out by Gurney. He knows this palace better than Chani could ever hope to, knows the weaknesses and strengths. An attack on the palace can only mean the danger lurking around every corner has finally found them, and she only knows a little of Stone Burners, a particularly destructive weapon that dissolves eye tissue and creates a general mass destruction of anything within its vicinity. Concern over Paul intensifies.

As Chani is pushed into some brightly decorated room (is this Irulan’s personal quarters?), she is locked inside with company neither woman would prefer.

Chani stares at the princess, at a loss for words, discomforted in her own skin.

“Well,” Irulan says, looking away, eyes filled with flint. “We should settle in. It could be a while before we get any word. In the meantime, maybe we should take this opportunity to talk? Woman to woman.”

“Talk?” Chani repeats, like the word itself is offensive.

“Yes,” Irulan replies, tartly. “I figure it’s hightime I have a conversation with the woman my husband is fucking.”

Chapter Text

Chani has never been one to do imprudent things, never rushed into situations that others would qualify as foolhardy or nonsensical. She has always had a good head on her shoulders, careful with her judgements as she is with the slices of her crysknife. So, for the life of her, Chani cannot understand how she finds herself presently in this complicated and messy situation.

Having tea with her lover’s wife.

“You haven’t even taken a sip,” Irulan notes.

The tea sits untouched, scolding hot, just as Irulan had placed it moments ago. There is some script Chani is failing to follow when she does not reach for it, failing some highborn etiquette no doubt. It’s even worse than that, though. To refuse an offer of water is the highest form of insult in Fremen society. Chani cannot bring herself to take the offered drink, though. She is too on guard.

Irulan sighs, and sets her own cup down. “Perhaps I began this with too much acidic overtones, but this doesn’t need to be a confrontation. I do not want to be your enemy. I just want to have a conversation with the woman the entire court acknowledges as my husband’s concubine.”

Chani flinches. “I am not— I am not—”

“You may have objections to the word, but it still applies. Can you deny it?”

Color rises swiftly to her cheeks, and she hates, hates, hates this implication. That’s she allowed herself to be weak enough to let Paul touch her, to give her pleasure, when she always knew what else it would bring. The Fremen believe in the fidelity of marriage above all else. They hold to the standards that nothing is stronger than the bond between a man and a woman, equals, but in marriage. She has never seen herself as the other woman, a concubine. Those are foreigner names from people in High Courts, acknowledgments of relationships that the Fremen see as inherently illicit.

But what she has been doing with Paul goes outside the bonds of marriage. It goes against it, in fact.

“My mother was a Bene Gesserit, like me,” Irulan says. “I am not in the position to judge the word, if that is your concern. I am simply here to work out the logistics of this arrangement you have with Paul, as it affects me too. As it affects us all.”

“There is no arrangement,” Chani hisses, disquieted.

Because there isn’t, there hasn’t been.

She has never agreed to be Paul’s anything. Every time he’s touched her, every time she’s allowed him to touch her, it has been an unthinking act, a foolish endeavor to feel instead of think.

“Perhaps that is the problem?” Irulan says, insufferably calm and collected. “Paul doesn’t want to scare you off with reality, but he does you a disservice with that. If you’re to stay at his side, you need to understand the reality of what that entails.”

“And what is that?”

Irulan takes a soft breath, and declares, “The place beside his throne is for me, not you. And it will be our children, Paul’s and mine, that will be the royal line of succession.”

Affront assaults her senses with a vicious upswing. “I believe Paul has made himself clear on those terms already. Or would you have me believe that he’s shared your bed?”

A tightening of Irulan’s jaw, a small clench. “You offer Paul comfort, I offer him legitimacy.”

“You offer him nothing, from what I’ve heard.”

Irulan shakes her head, looks away and returns focus immediately in the blink of an eye. “Have you noticed he wears a ring in public?”

“His father’s Ducal ring.”

“No, the other one.”

Chani’s brow furrows in confusion.

“The gold band,” Irulan offers, instructive. “On his left hand.”

Now that Irulan has mentioned it, she does recall a few occasions where Paul has worn such a ring. She hadn’t noted it with much concern, nothing to mark the ring as significant or special. His Ducal ring always took up more attention.

But he had worn a gold ring. Several times, all of them in the public’s eye.

Irulan must see the awareness land. “He wears that ring as a symbol of our marriage. He may be your – what is it your people affectionately call him? Usul. He may be your Usul, but he is my husband.”

Chani’s mouth presses into such a thin line, her lips must go bloodless. “He may be your husband, but he is not yours.”

Irulan stares, seemingly unflinching, but Chani recognizes it now. The entire poised countenance is an act, a carefully constructed one. This bedroom is Irulan’s domain, the conversation using language that comes from her foreign land, speaking of rings and empires and arrangements. None of that changes the simple truths.

Paul does not love Irulan.

Paul does not belong to Irulan.

Irulan recovers, though there’s hardly anything to mark the recovery. “Paul and I may have our differences—”

“You mean when you tried to drug and take advantage of him?” Chani cuts in, through playing mute and with fickle denials. A small flinch, this time, breaking through Irulan’s facade, barely even a wince. “He told me what you did to him. What you tried to do to make him give you an heir.”

A pause. “I did not go through with it,” Irulan says, quietly. Shamefaced. Good. She deserves to feel shame for that. “I stopped myself before anything happened.”

“You should not have attempted it in the first place.”

A defensive shift in the princess’s shoulders. “If you only knew what the Bene Gesserit—”

“You cannot use your upbringing to wipe this away. Those women are cold and calculating, I know, but you let them use you. Do not look at me as the reason your marriage is so cold. I am but one of many reasons, I suspect.”

The other woman shakes her head, a dim and dismal denial. “You are the main reason, though. No one can deny that. Since the day he staged his coup and overtook my father’s throne, my biggest threat has not been Paul’s warmongering ways, or the vicious nature of this Court, or even the leagues of enemies and assassins at our throats. It has always been you, Chani. My father had many concubines, and each time he brought a new one in, my mother would send me off to spy on them. A concubine’s position can threaten even the Empress of an Empire, and Paul has never given me another title other than my birthright as a princess. You are the reason why.”

The tonality of her voice is so serious, so genuine, Chani has no retort. She wonders if Irulan’s voice in general is the kind of voice that draws a person in, soothes them with such civility and neutrality even while discussing hostile things. Chani has always thought Paul commanded the most attention in any room, the most authority, but she had never overlooked Jessica either. Here, now, there is a different flavor of authority in Irulan’s voice, not in the same league as the other larger personalities she has seen at Paul’s High Court, but it is authoritative in its own right.

Despite the brutal beginning, she senses Irulan has withdrawn her claws and seems intent on having what could be a civil conversation.

“There is a place for you and I both at Court,” Irulan says. “It’s been an established thing for more generations than I can count.”

Irulan, his wife.

Chani, his concubine.

Chani feels discomfort drench itself down her spine, a subtle physical reaction, and she stares out at the other woman. Because there is a wisp of something she can barely acknowledge, a truth that Chani is coming to understand as something inflexible even under the most hostile circumstances.

And Irulan must see it, because she asks, “Do you still love him?”

And Chani flinches, because there is no other answer that she could give to that but the painful truth. “Sometimes I wish I didn’t.”

Irulan offers a small exhale, almost a sympathetic laugh but for the pain in it. “You are in dangerous waters, Chani. Perhaps you do not realize it fully because you’ve never been swimming, but there’s an animal in the oceans where I come from. It’s called a shark, a primordial predator far more brutal than all the foxes and serpents in your sands. They sense blood in the water from miles away. They attack without pity. Where I come from, I learnt to swim with the sharks at a young age. You must learn that too if you want to stay by Paul’s side.”

“Are you offering me advice?” Incredulous, here; it’s the only emotion Chani can muster.

“I am offering you a truce,” Irulan says. “I’ve told you, I do not want to be your enemy.”

Chani stares, assessing. There should be, perhaps, some tiny amount of regret in Chani, another upswing of remorse and guilt, signaling that she understands the significance of what she is doing with Paul. How much it must cost his wife — but all Chani can feel is this growing sense of unease, aimed outwards rather than in. She does not want Irulan humiliated in her court. She does not want the other woman to suffer, and she does not want to be her enemy either.

But she cannot trust Irulan, either.

“Where I come from,” Chani replies, “you have your friends and your enemies. A friend is someone you break bread with. An enemy is one you strike down.”

Irulan gestures to the tea in front of them. “Which one am I offering?”

But the threat to the princess’s popularity among the Court is a dangerous thing, and Chani knows, by instinct and a slight bout of dawning comprehension, what this entire conversation truly is. “The first day I arrived here, Jessica warned me of your world, too,” Chani continues, softly. “How assassins here will smile at you as they deliver a dagger to your heart. I may be new to this empire and its politics, but I can sense — what did you call it? Blood in the water.”

Chani hopes for surprise to bloom on the Princess’s face, hopes for an acknowledgement, some response, only appropriate to such a declaration. Instead, Irulan only stares, looking only faintly impressed by the response, as if Irulan hadn’t thought Chani would be clever enough to figure this out. Chani has the impression that she’s caught Irulan off guard several times tonight.

Irulan straightens, the obvious rejection of a truce washing away any emotions on her face like a storm. She can almost see the calculations in Irulan’s eyes. “Very well,” Irulan offers. “Do not say I never tried to be reasonable.”

Reasonability has never been an option, Chani thinks.

Not in these circumstances.

It is a long brutal evening, after that. With neither woman in agreement on anything, it is a stalemate. Chani supposes she should be happy enough it did not come to a physical fight. Irulan is a Bene Gesserit, probably trained in the same fierce fighting style as Jessica. While she is certain she could hold her own, Chani is thankful it has not come to that.

Still she is almost relieved when the door opens many hours later, and Gurney comes through. Except the look on his face drains Chani of any hint of relief.

“Come,” Gurney tells Chani. “He’s asking for you.”

“Is Paul all right?” Irulan asks, standing up.

Gurney’s face is pale, though, and he does not answer. He only leads both women back through the corridors, to the long empty halls filled with more guards than Chani has ever seen before. The entire palace is on lockdown. It is a tense moment when they pass by the place of the explosion where the Stone Burner went off, a chaotic gutted corridor full of debris and wreckage. Chani has only fleeting seconds to look before Gurney moves them along quickly, and before long they arrive at some wing that serves as the Suk Doctor’s facilities.

When both women proceed to enter, Gurney stops the Princess in her tracks. “I’m sorry, Your Highness. He only asked for Chani. You can speak with him later.”

The insult lands on Irulan’s face, cheeks reddening, but she says nothing, stepping back, head lifted high.

Chani pushes through the doors. For a moment, there is only silence and stillness, the room smelling of strong antiseptics and chemicals. She can see a bed tucked far away in the corner, and a figure lying underneath the covers. Her steps are slow, though — slow to move, the fear of something unknown gripping her in her tracks. She moves as if moving under the weight of crushing sand, quietly towards the bed where Paul is revealed. His naked torso, a mesh of stitches and bindings, his face burnt on one side, and — his eyes, wrapped completely in bandages.

She sucks in a gasp, rushing to his bedside. “Paul—”

“I am fine,” he says, reaching for her hands, grasping them in reassurance. “Chani, I am fine.”

“You’re hurt,” she points out, throat tight.

She breathes heavily, remembering the purpose of a Stone Burning, how it dissolves eye tissue – and she stares at the bandages covering his eyes completely.

He shakes his head, as if pushing away exhaustion or delirium. “Forgive me, they have me on heavy medication now. It’s making it hard to focus.”

She grabs his hand tight, perhaps painfully tight. “Paul, your eyes—”

He looks up — or, she should say, his head tilts up to follow the sound of her voice, and she knows. She knows without him even confirming it. The horrible truth, and it is like a cascade of thoughts, of horrible revelations unspooling before her in this static, sanitized room. She feels a type of terror she has never known before, a full shuddering terror running through her entire body, down her spine and through every vein and artery.

His visions, his eyes. How he’d always stared at her as if he couldn’t look away. He watches you most closely, even her Naib had noted. Him, staring at her in the dunes, following her every footstep in the sands. Chani had felt haunted by his gaze, hunted by it. Paul, staring at her as she’d entered his Great Hall, eyes riveted on her in her pale foreign dress. A constant shadow, a constant presence — his eyes. He never looked away, not once. Everyone had noted it, even the girl with the scar sent to kill Chani — you should be happy with the way he looks at you. Him, drunk on Spice with a confession on his lips, I’ll miss your face when I can no longer look upon it. Even her own visions conjured up by the Spice had shown her the truth: Paul’s eyes a milky white, dead and useless. The path forward that I presently see, he’d told her, hadn’t he? There is one way, potentially, but it requires sacrifice. Sacrifice. How he’d been desperate to see Chani in the bath, an image he’d said would stay with him for the rest of his life. A gift, he’d called it.

And then how he’d quietly turned away from her so shortly after, as if in resignation, as if abandoned to some bitter fate. She’d thought it was him resigning himself to the fate of drinking the Water of Life, but no. It was not that.

Her face collapses with the flooding thoughts, and her eyes fill to the brim. She can barely remain standing, but she does, as she forces herself to look upon his face, his bandages. “You knew, didn’t you?” she manages, a trembling breath, voice working over a sob. “You knew this was going to happen?”

He doesn’t bother denying it. “Why do you think I could never look away? I knew I only had precious few moments left with the sight of you.”

And Chani cries out — with sobbing tears, an undignified expulsion of precious water, a gasp.

For once, she thinks, the tears cannot be a waste.

Chapter Text

They give him Spice.

A great deal of it. Perhaps even more than Chani had ingested when she had suffered her own fatal injury only weeks back. That much had already been enough to put Chani through the wringer, make her susceptible to visions and hallucinations. Now, she watches as keenly as a hawk as Paul submerges under the blanket of Spice, his visions overtaking him, his body an overwhelmed thing wracked with too much stimulus. He twists in his sheets. His muscles twitch, his limbs flex and unfurl, his body contorts in the bed in such uncomfortable ways that Chani and the Suk Doctor have to hold him down at certain points to get him to gentle.

When he recovers, in those brief moments, he tells Chani, “Do not fear. I may be blind, but I can still see. I saw the clipboard in the Doctor’s hands, just as I read the handwriting. I can see the servant girl’s prayer beads that she left for you in the corner of the bedside table. I can see the artificial light reflecting off your skin, and I can see the concern in your eyes. I am blind, but I am not lessened.”

“How?” she marvels, as she stares at the prayer beads resting only an arm’s reach away.

“The same way I do everything else,” he tells her. “I am a freak of nature. I am—”

She presses a finger to his lips, gentle but firm. “You are not a freak, Paul.”

“Oh, but I am,” he says, quietly, rageful. “The Mahdi, or a false prophet. Either way I am a freak.”

She imagines he does not voice these thoughts anymore to others, not even his mother. These doubts, these concerns — she is the sole source he relinquishes it to.

“And is that all you think of yourself? What else are you?”

“Damned,” he determines. Then after a pause, he gentles. “Yours,” he whispers.

Chani can say nothing to the dejection in his voice in the first part, the quiet building anger, nor does she dissuade him from the earnestness of the second. He has lived with these demons since he was a child, a Duke’s son, a Bene Gesserit’s son. It is his to feel, these feelings — his right. Just like it is his right to say who he belongs to, body and soul.

She keeps watch over him for the next few hours. When he sleeps, it is with his hand held in hers. Chani is left both relieved and furious. Overwhelmed. Too burdened by thought and emotions to fully grasp everything unfolding. She does not rest at his bedside, only stepping outside the claustrophobic sterile room to catch her breath in the middle of the night.

Instead of an empty room, she finds Irulan waiting anxiously in the medical wing, hands wringing together in futility. “How is he? I heard — his eyes. Is he— how is he?”

The fear in Irulan’s voice is one she does not think is feigned. There is no artifice, or facade. Chani has seen the princess enough to see when she is putting on a face. The fear seems genuine.

And it occurs to her, another revelation, barely an exhale on her lips. “You love him, don’t you?” Chani asks, somehow shocked, somehow not.

Irulan straightens, then swallows tightly.

Irulan does not need to answer. Chani knows; she recognizes it. Chani may not be familiar with the indignity of loving a man who does not love her back, but she knows how love can hollow out any sense or reason, overrule any protest. She knows the futility of fighting love once it has sunk its maker-hooks into tender flesh. Irulan and Chani are not so different in this regard.

She lets the woman have her time with Paul, but Chani keeps watch; watches as Irulan invades the space that she understands is not hers; stares at the woman as the mess of bandages covering Paul’s slumbering form make themselves known; watches as emotions flitter across the princess’s face too close to the surface, a myriad of shock and horror. It is only minutes before Irulan is once again determined to leave, having barely arrived. Perhaps the shock of it is too much, but Chani does not suspect the other woman is faint of heart.

“The Delegation should have arrived already,” Irulan says, in the hallway outside. “The fact that they did not is concerning.”

“You think they are behind the attack?” Chani asks.

“I think we have many enemies,” Irulan notes. “I think they all smell blood in the water now.”

Chani says nothing to this.

Irulan looks briefly indecisive, before she sighs. “The Great Houses must be amassing an armada to come finish off the Atreides line, once and for all. You should warn Jessica. My counsel is not wanted among Paul’s inner circle, but tell her that Count Fenring is a patient man. I know him, how he thinks. He will not rush the killing blow. He will be precise, and he will bring the entire military force of the Great Houses down upon Arrakis. She should ready the family atomics.”

Chani pauses, disquieted.

She stares at Irulan, and the distrust must be apparent.

“I am on Paul’s side,” Irulan says heatedly, almost angrily, to Chani’s look. “Whatever you may think of me, my survival depends on the survival of the Atreides Empire. It is in my best interests that he stays alive. With Paul weak—”

“He is not weak,” Chani says, fists at her sides tightening. “Paul is many things, but never weak.”

The Princess’s lips part slightly, a soft exhale. “He will not win a fight against Fenring, not in this condition. Fenring will want to be the one to claim Paul’s head. It’s the only way Fenring can secure his own seat at the Emperor’s throne. I’ve lived through enough coups and assassination plans to know this. He will come to claim Paul’s head personally.”

I am blind, but I am not lessened.

And she remembers — Chani remembers the advice that she had given Paul only the other day. Then make him underestimate you. Make him overconfident, overplay his hand. And she knows that Paul took her advice to heart, that he now maneuvers the Count into a position of weakness because he perceives vulnerability.

“Then let him come,” Chani determines, eyes made of poison. “Let these foreigners see the might of desert power, of a little desert mouse.”

His mother comes, his little sister. Paul listens and says little as they make their plans, their preparations, with the full council of Gurney and Stilgar. It is a federation of wise counsel, and Chani only interrupts briefly to add her voice. A quiet rageful storm brews inside her the entire time, and Chani recognizes that she is playing too wildly now, driven by passion when she has not yet set comfortably in any role. Still, she knows her place is here now somehow, at Paul’s bedside.

Afterwards, she stays when the others leave, while Paul falls asleep once again. She watches as the Doctor changes the bandages — Paul’s eyes a scarred husk. “He does not feel any pain in the eyes,” the Suk Doctor tells her, perhaps meant as solace. “The nerve endings have all been burned away. It’s the rest of his body that feels the pain, and the rest of the body we can heal.”

The Spice will do its work, but it will take days.

Days, Chani knows, they probably do not have.

Her jaw clenches, feeling to all the world like a trapped animal. She releases a breath and stays in the seat beside Paul’s bed, unspeaking, but the entire time her mind is awhirl. Paul’s blindness was caused by a wreckage of an attack he had anticipated, but accepted. He’d walked into the trap willingly. How is she to deal with that? To deal with the guilt and recrimination that seems to sit heavily on her shoulders in the aftermath? He had not said as much, but Chani knows, she understands — he sacrificed this much because he sought a path forward with Chani at his side.

And that’s the problem, isn’t it?

He plays a game of life and death, a gamble of millions and billions, all because he relies on his visions. It is a forsaken thing that she loves a man who is too headstrong to see the folly of this. Men should not have such power — perhaps that is why no man before him had ever had such a gift of prophecy. Paul never reacts how she expects, unpredictable more than any other person she’s ever known, remarkable for how calm and composed he puts himself out to be.

“You are thinking too loudly,” Paul says, head resting idly on his pillow. He does not stir as he says, “I can hear your mind from all the way here.”

“And what is it,” Chani asks, “that you think I am thinking?”

“That I am more dangerous now than ever before,” he answers. “That a wounded animal is a feral animal. That I am too stubborn, too calculated, too craven. That I seek a war that will only kill more of your people, and you cannot understand why you love me at all. But you do, Chani. You do love me.”

She cannot deny that. She has never been able to deny this unforgivable weakness. The true tragedy of this all is that the love has always been there, but it does not change much at all. It does not save anyone, it does not redeem anyone. There are too many forces working in this world, this Empire.

That does not lessen the significance of this love, but it does not embolden Chani’s spirit either.

He shudders in his bed, and swallows thickly, and Chani recognizes that he is briefly lost to another vision. “What is it, Usul?” she asks, reaching for his hands, clasping them tight. His fingers are cold to the touch, too cold. “What is it that you dream about?”

“Grief,” he tells her, lips pressed into a thin bloodless line. “The thick taste of grief in my throat, constantly choking. I mourn what I have lost, what I have still yet to lose, what could have been, what I cannot protect. I see it all, I taste it all. It’s choking.”

She stares at him, and her heart cracks apart at the seams. She has already lost him once to this fate, to this prescience that seems to work against them. This time, she wants a different hand to play. She puts a name to it, for naming it gives her ownership over it — but it is a longing too deep in her. A longing that gives him too much power over her, perhaps. They could dance this same dance of avoidance she’s done with him for the last few weeks, the last few years, ignoring or denying the connection between them, the bond that went right down to her soul. She could do it all over again — walk away.

But this feeling of estrangement and heartache and loss is already too much.

The longing will only grow the more she fights it.

She does not know if she is strong enough to leave him when he is at his weakest, when he needs her the most. She looks at him, and remembers the pale boy stumbling in the sands that she first met, the one who looked at her like she hung the stars and moons in the sky. She looks at him, and sees the man he is but also the boy he was. She looks at him, and sees Paul Atreides, Muad'Dib, Usul, Lisan al Gaib, his familiar face with his many vexing names — and she loves them all despite herself.

She looks at him, and makes her decision.

It is as quick as an indrawn breath, a small reach forward to brush her lips against his. An acknowledgement, this kiss, a firm press that lingers. He is still beneath her lips for only a brief moment, but then he moves, grazing his mouth against hers, catching her with a hand cupped firmly around her neck, as if to keep her pressed to him and unable to pull away; she feels him shudder again, this time in a different emotion other than grief gripping him, a shiver that passes through him as he nips her lower lip between his own. For he must recognize it, he must see it the way he sees everything else. Fools. The pair of them are both fools, but they belong to each other and no one else. She will be his Chani again, as he is her Paul; she will be his Sihaya, as he is her Usul.

She pulls back gently, takes his hand in hers, admiring the subtle beauty of his long fingers, the graceful lines.

He is hers.

“Sleep,” she tells him, promising, “I will be here when you awake.”

“Sihaya,” the Fremen servant girl calls, Radiqa.

Chani lifts her head. She had fallen asleep at Paul’s bedside, and she blinks her bleary eyes open to focus on the dark-skinned girl in front of her, face pinched with worry.

“Sihaya,” she calls gently, careful not to wake Paul. “You must come quickly. There is trouble.” Chani frowns, but lifts obligingly to her feet. She follows the servant out of the room, into the corridors, where the girl speaks in hushed but harried tones. “There are Fremen gathering in the palace,” she tells Chani. “They are calling for the Tahaddi Challenge against the Mahdi. It is the man I warned you about. Taliq, the Naib from the Makab Sietch.”

Chani takes a deep breath in, nostrils flaring. As much as she is confident in Paul’s fighting skills, as much as she is buoyed by his declaration that he can see even when blind, he is in no condition to fight. Not yet. Not with his body still in need of so much healing, not when the Spice is still working its way through his addled body.

Before she can say anything further, Chani comes upon the scene of it all. Dozens of Fremen gathered in the corridor outside the Great Hall, waiting in restless energy for their right to place a challenge against the ruler of an Empire. Jessica should be there attempting to calm down the fevered masses, the words of a Reverend Mother all too revered, but she only sees little Alia and her Fremen minder. The little girl seems intent on taking center stage, making a nuisance of herself as usual, her small face screwed up in a ball of anger and facing off against a man that is twice the size of any other here.

Taliq, Chani immediately determines.

He has the stance of a man who has never heard a denial to any of his requests; the build of a man who could take down someone like Stilgar in sheer size alone.

Despite his size, he has no shame in pushing Alia back, sneering, “Witch child,” he says. “Abomination! You should be silenced where you stand—”

Chani is there between one breath and the next, standing a shield in front of Alia, pushing the larger man back with a hard shove. “Do not—” she hisses, a warning, “touch her.”

Alia gathers behind Chani, lifted into the arms of her minder. Chani senses others arrive in the corridor — Jessica, Stilgar, others too. She is not sure. Chani only stares forward at the man. He is a muscular brute, his left hand heavily tattooed with a scorpion and its stinging tail.

“Peace,” Stilgar says, advancing. “You do not know what you provoke, Taliq.”

“I seek to challenge Muad’dib,” he returns, teeth bared. “It is my right as a Naib. I issue the challenge of Tahaddi. Produce him, so that he may forfeit his life.”

Stilgar grows unnaturally still. “You fool. He is the Mahdi.”

“False prophet,” Taliq declares in Chakobsa. “We have all heard it. He is blind. A blind man is a dead man. I would send him out to the desert to die an honorable death, but he will find one just the same under my blade.”

“Gutter rat,” Stilgar hisses back vulgarly in Chakobsa. “May God mangle your genitals.”

“Heel,” Taliq warns. “I am within my rights. Either Muad’dib accepts my challenge, or we all know him to be a coward—”

“I will fight you,” Chani speaks up, declaring — cutting off both men. “On behalf of Muad’dib.”

A hush, a shuffle of many feet.

Taliq stares at her, affronted. “Who are you?”

“His woman,” Chani declares. “And as such, I can accept a challenge on his behalf.”

The others stare at her, and it is true, it is permissible under Fremen society, but it is very rarely done. “Sihaya?” Taliq says, mocking. “His woman, is it? I did not come here for his Fremen woman.”

“Either you accept my challenge,” Chani warns, “or we all know you to be a coward.”

His face darkens, the challenge to his reputation something he could not abide. He snarls, a mouthful of sharp teeth, and he nods. “Very well, woman. I will deal with you first.”

It is declared, and it is immediate.

The group clears space for them in the Great Hall, and Chani retrieves her crysknife. “Chani,” Stilgar says, hushed, concerned. “You are still recovering.”

“I have recovered enough,” Chani determines, staring at the brute of a man prowling across from her.

It is not entirely true. She has lost mobility since her injury, and she has not been training these few weeks. But this is not the time or place to bring such disadvantages to full light. Stilgar seems disquieted, but he does not protest further. He stares at her and nods, and retreats to stand beside the others. Jessica gives her a look from across the crowd, holding Alia in her arms, and it is not so much as a nod but a heat in her eyes made of steel. Chani nods back, understanding.

“You came here for a challenge,” Chani sneers, at Taliq. “Issue it.”

“Thallamaka al-lahu wa-natharaka,” the man grunts. May God split you and scatter you all over.

She attacks.

He blocks her strike easily and he seems pleased with himself. Quickly, she twists underneath him and shifts positions, his knife clashing with hers, and instantly she’s slashing underneath his arm, intending a killing blow to the artery beneath his armpit. Quick, effective. But he vaults back, out of the way, and then advances like an animal. His next ferocious hit nearly dislodges Chani at the feet, not yet fully adjusting her stance to account for his sheer dimensions.

Immediately, she is put on the backfoot.

They stare across at one another, and Chani reassesses him. His size and power cannot be understated. Try as she might, she cannot hope to overcome it directly. She lacks the strength to, and very nearly the agility. Her speed has always been her strength, but already with the first few blows she realizes Taliq is fast as well as strong.

This time, she waits for his attack, an offensive move that has her immediately ducking under a wild swing. But when she strikes out, it has her hitting a wall again, impenetrable; she is shoved back and skids across the slippery tiled floors of this foreign palace. She recovers, because she has no time for doubt. A series of swift hits and brutal maneuvers, fast as lightning, strikes that blur with her vision when she takes a hit to the side of her face that makes her cheek go numb.

“Patience,” Stilgar hollers, above the dim ruckus of the others shouting.

When Taliq attacks next, she is swift to rebuff. The only real advantage she has is one the others would think a disadvantage. Her size. She can strike and recede back two steps in the same space it takes him one. He has his physical dominance, but she sidesteps several of his attacks, which seems to vex him. Patience, she realizes, in opposition to his anger. Already Taliq has proven himself vain and hotheaded.

“You think you can defeat the Mahdi?” she taunts. “You can’t even defeat his woman.”

“False prophet,” he sneers. “But you know that, don’t you? The rumors out there of you. You do not believe in the stories anymore than I do.”

Their blades clash. She pushes back and lets him come to her.

She’ll let him tire himself out like this, waiting for her break.

“Go on, Sihaya,” he mocks. “Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me you are a faithful disciple of the Mahdi. If that is so, where were you these last few years when he was relentlessly fucking that cunt of a princess—”

She drives forward, patience be damned.

She barely registers the movement of the knife in her hand, only taking him by surprise with a swift slice of the blade across his wielding arm and another just at his ribcage, warm blood already soaking her knife. The blade slips in like it has made a home in his body, through his stillsuit and sternum, just at his beating heart.

She tugs up and in with her blade, making sure of the killing wound, a guttural awful wet sound.

Taliq falls to the floor like a felled giant.

In the aftermath, there is silence.

And then, while Chani recovers her breath, winded, still not fully registering the victory other than the thrill of adrenaline rushing through her veins, a voice calls out. Feminine, but loud. “Sihaya,” Radiqa calls, sounding awed — that faithful ardor full of reverence, and growing in fever-pitch. “Sihaya! It is as written! Muad’dib’s woman, his Desert Spring has saved him again! Sihaya!”

Slowly the others in the Fremen crowd take up the chant of her name, like it is a thing of holy utterance. By rights, in defeating Taliq she has taken his spoils at Makab Sietch, but this is not about the loyalty of new men that owe their allegiance to her by the rules of a Tahaddi challenge. Even Stilgar joins in, sounding joyed and zealot as only he can sound — and after a fashion, after a calculated look about the crowd, so do Jessica and Alia.

“Sihaya. Sihaya. Sihaya.”

And Chani can only stand there, panting and disjointed, as the chant grows.

Chapter Text

She wakes up in slow pieces of fragments, the first awareness of something urgent the body pressed against her, a heated familiarity — a warm hand over her stomach, fingers twitching, a groan in her ear — how often awaking just like this would lead to a bout of lovemaking in their old lives. But it’s a level below that, that the tidbits of wrongness register — Paul is breathing too hard, a labored staccato of air sucked in and out, the sweat on his skin, his closed eyelids twitching in agitation. His face is screwed up in a look of almost anguish.

Paul, having another one of his dreams.

She wakes him slowly, hand pressed to his face, her voice gentle in his ears. “Paul, Paul, wake up. You’re having a dream.”

As has happened every night for the last week, he finally awakes, but when his eyelids flutter open, it is not the lovely Eyes of Ibad that stare back at her, a swirl of mesmerizing blue, but the stark whiteness of a blind man.

Still, when Paul looks at her, she feels seen.

“You’re okay, you’re okay,” she tells him, soothingly, a hand full of comfort running down his arms, a repetitive seance that works its magic. His breath evens, his body shuddering as it registers the present. “That’s every night this week,” she laments, after a beat.

He grunts, nodding, collapsing back to the mattress. The blanket rides low on his hips, and he does not allow any space between them to widen. His bed is the bed of Kings, of an Emperor, with enough space to accommodate twice their numbers if not thrice, but Paul does not care for space. He is greedy for the feel of her skin pressed against his, and she has not been able to refuse him a single time, certainly not in the privacy of his bedchambers where the slant of moonlight that splashes across the room through his window paints him in such lovely colors.

Still, tonight, she feels the same sense of concern that has only grown every day since his injury. “What is it that you see?”

He never answers, but she knows. It is her. His nightmares always seem to involve Chani somehow. She may not be the focus, she may just be one of many things he sees, but she is always there in his nightmares. She can tell by the thick taste of grief in his mouth when he kisses her. Lisan al Gaib and his dreams. She wishes she could vanquish every one of these so-called prophetic dreams, every single vision. Everyone dies, but no one should be forced to foresee the infinite ways their loved ones would perish. It is a curse.

After a while, his breathing is normal. “You okay?” she asks.

He nods. It is a lie, but she lets him keep it.

“Sorry,” he mutters, after a while, voice soft. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”

She twists in the sheets to face him, whispering into the dark, “You have barely slept more than a handful of hours each night, Paul.”

“My body has rested enough,” he says, somewhat in futility.

She says nothing to this.

Since the first night returning to this bedroom, when the door had whined on its hinges and his silhouette stood in the gap of the doorstep, waiting to be let back in, silently asking her permission for more than just permittance into his own bedroom — she knew. This was crossing a threshold. Each night, the distance has lessened between them while his body recovered. The Spice has worked its wonders. The scars on his body have healed, a smattering of puckered skin with raised abrasions, a constellation of the abuses he has endured. Even the scarring around his eyes has lessened into little more than thin fissures of crows feet that stick out around the milky whiteness of his eyes. He is still beautiful, because he is her Paul, but he is a man with more scars than any other she has ever known.

Another man, a lesser man, would have died in the explosion that had claimed Paul’s eyes. She lives with this reminder every day, the constant presence a dwelling burning thing inside her chest.

When she can feel his mind chasing the dreams again, see him stumbling back down that awful path, she decides enough is enough.

She does what she knows will anchor him to her, the same way every woman knows how to touch her man. She sculpts her body around him, her head pillowed on his chest, her ankle notched securely between his, one arm draped over his abdomen. She drags her hand across his naked chest — he sleeps shirtless now, and it was not always so — and a single fingertip traces the outline of her name against the heat of his skin, as if she could brand it into his flesh, a faint possessive tattoo.

Immediately, the change in him becomes apparent, as if the very hairs on his skin register the shift. He has always been so responsive to her touch, so attuned to every switch in her moods. She lays beside him, and his hand slips into the gap between her sleepshirt and her shorts, a pair of pants that barely reach her mid thighs, and Chani is acutely aware of what little separates them. His hand is bold, but pauses a long beat in that region between homeland and risk — and he lifts his face as if to watch her, as if to see her. Sense her muscles jump under his touch, feel the tension shift in the air, a schism between hope and desire.

“Is there anything I can do,” she asks, a small tilt of her lips, “to take your mind off your worries?”

The tease is meant to provoke, but he crosses the space between them so startlingly fast, so single minded and focused, it’s almost jarring. In less than a heartbeat, just like a fingersnap, like he’s only been waiting, his mouth fastening over hers. She reels backwards but he follows the line of her body to press her flat to the mattress, his lips unyielding, and she can taste more than just the lingering haunting of his dreams in his kiss. There is something provoking and urgent in his touch, his grip at her hips an aching strength, as if he cannot stop himself from clutching her so hard she may bruise.

“In my dreams,” he tells her, between sips of kisses, “you’re wearing blue. Tell me you’ll wear blue for me again.”

She does not answer.

He does not give her the room or the air to breathe a single word, not even one in agreement.

He kisses her like she will vanish like smoke. His lips are persistent, dizzying, almost terrifying in their demand. When she nips at his lower lip, he lets out a little sound at that, a sort of desperate moan that makes her wonder if perhaps he needs more than just an outlet. Her thighs spread to accommodate his weight between her splayed legs and there is not a point between them that is not touching, so she can feel him hardening against her as it happens. Her body suffuses with warmth, with heat, with this imbibed sense of power and ownership, a lick full of lust crawling deliciously up her throat.

He’d been dreaming of death, she knows that much—of hers, almost certainly. He’d woken in the thick of it, and he can’t settle; moves his body for friction against hers, but it only chafes and inspires the need for more, his obvious grief-stricken desire to blot out what he’d seen overwhelming him to move quickly. His long fingers, between her legs, fumbling underneath the waistband of her shorts, sneaking inside, finding her so wet that he groans again and pulls away suddenly.

He swallows as he presses his forehead against her shoulder, pants a ragged breath as he reorients himself and determines some course of action. The grip on her waist tightens.

He rolls them over, so she’s straddling his waist. “Climb on top of me,” he says, a hint of desperation battling with command. She blinks at him, because she is already on top, but he simply repeats, “On top of me, Chani. I want to drink from you.”

She flushes all over, realizing and nodding in the same breath, too eagerly, shirking off her bottoms and underclothing in a shuffle that only seems to work up her agitation more. She shifts up his body, and it is an undignified shuffle of limbs and pointed joints before she is framing her thighs around his ears and he is lapping at the center of her like a man dying of thirst, lapping up precious life-saving water.

Fuck, he’s good at this. Almost maddeningly good.

His mouth works her in such a way that it almost makes it impossible for Chani to stay still; she fights the urge to squirm on top of him, almost certainly threatens his supply of oxygen when her thighs tremble and clamp down about his face, but that only seems to make him suck harder, his lips around her glistening folds, making him more determined to lick and flick at her clit with his tongue until she’s a trembling mess. When she tries to draw away he seizes her hips, pinning it down to his face greedily, at such an angle that pulling away out of some last bid of concern for him only makes her ride his tongue in this see-saw manner, like he’s letting her fuck him with his tongue.

She comes, so swiftly and shatteringly her vision dims for long moments afterwards.

It is — it is as close to a holy experience as she will allow herself to admit to with this man so many call their prophet. He is not her savior, he is not a being above her, but this is as close as she comes to finding religion with him.

Afterwards, she collapses into a graceless heap, and it is him catching her slack body, him maneuvering it around to his satisfaction and ordinance. “Chani,” he breathes desperately, notching himself at her entrance. “Chani, can I—”

“Yes, yes,” she murmurs, before he’s even finished asking.

The first breach of him is sudden, bracing and invasive. Despite how well he’s worked her up, it takes a moment for her body to remember how to fit him inside her, how to reshape with the familiar contours of him fucking into her and opening her up. It burns, but it’s a blissful sting that brings a moan to her lips in the same breath that it brings a pleasurable groan to his.

He keeps touching her, because he can, because he’s been granted the permission now and seems incapable of stopping. His fingers, underneath her shirt, bunching it up to reach her nipples, her humble breasts. A groan, as he cups a handful and bends down to worship them with his tongue, his mouth a wet scolding heat around each nipple, one after the other, a small hint of teeth grazing after every lick. She arches underneath him, and he fucks back into her body with another heavy thrust.

She can’t stop touching him either; hands reaching for him, grasping at the back of his shoulders, hips rising to meet his, rotating and grinding against his thrusts. They move together, a united desire, in opposition and tandem, a single pair; they move as one.

Chani is used to reading Paul as something as easily as an open book, to look into his familiar blue eyes and meet with the familiarity of a man devoted to her. This time, she is overwhelmed by it. The immaculate mask he wears for everyone else melting away, and his eyes hold none of the familiar color but all of the same reverence, like he can’t believe he’s doing this with her again, after all this time, after all that’s conspired to drive them apart — even his own actions. This should not be happening. In another world, it wouldn’t; he’s married to another, he is leader of a cause she does not believe in. But none of that matters in comparison to the mounting tension spreading through her body, a wildfire, a wave of desire and—

“I love you,” she gasps, unable to stop herself, unable to stop it even if the world was burning around them.

His hips stutter, his face angling towards hers. The bangs of his messy hair hang over his face and he searches her expression for something, before he says, “Again,” on another stiff thrust in. “Say it again.”

“I–I love you,” she gasps, and repeats it on the next three hard thrusts that follow in quick succession. I love you, I love you, I love you, as if the words cast a spell on him, as if they ensnare him and beguile him and he cannot get his fill of it.

“You’ve been with me,” he grunts, a low grit to his voice. “You’ve been with me this entire time, even when we were apart. I could not escape you. I did not want to – Chani, my Chani. You are mine.”

She cannot deny it.

She will never deny it again.

“I’m— fuck, I’m coming,” she tells him.

“C’mon, then,” he grunts, encouragingly, his pace speeding up. He looks desperate to feel her come again, he looks greedy for it. His thumb finds her clit, and it is only a few swipes before she is falling over again, undone on a soft broken cry, as he chants, “Chani, Chani, yes, like that. Just like that. Feel so good coming around me—”

His praise in her ears, in such a choked voice, is a tone no other will ever hear. Especially not his wife.

Afterwards, the rhythm changes, no less intense but Paul seems to find a different motivation now. His eyes are a hazy white, but it feels like his vision clears. The intensity of their lovemaking is still startling, but he rocks with her slowly now, blistering and swollen inside of her. She reaches up to wrap her arms around the nape of his neck, anchoring him to her; they move in tandem — slow, harsh grinding movements that leave her gripping at him in the aftershocks of her pleasure.

Paul makes a choked sound, and then he’s stiffening, a broken rhythm in his thrusts, bucking short and coming in her in a hefty jerk. Chani wraps her legs around his waist and draws him flush to her, keeping his spend from spilling out, from wasting it.

The nightmares do not chase him the rest of the night. She wakes up twice more, and he takes her both times. The first time, with her on top, riding his hips to a slow cadence that reestablishes a familiar rhythm between them. How many nights had she spent just like this? Staring down at the love in his eyes, at the open reverence? It's like a sandstorm building, unstoppable in its momentum. She can't see beyond the storm. There's no point when it is just him and her in this overly large bed. All she can do is weather it, hunker down and ride it out, this insatiable need that will not be satisfied unless he’s inside her.

“Are you sore?” he asks her, the third time.

She is, but she does not care; he is gentle, though, taking her from behind, fingertips framing the handles of her hips. It’s an addiction, the fevered feel of each other’s skin, the sheer relief of finally being able to touch and kiss and find pleasure in one another again. Her skin is peppered with tender bruises and teeth marks, and she leaves her bite marks on him too, far more prettier than the litany of scars riddled on his body. She does not need to learn the maps of his body; she knows it, but she reacquaints herself with his every scar and ridge, her lips a fervent mapmaker.

The night ends with her taking him in her mouth, swallowing his seed so she doesn’t spill a single drop.

Fremen know not to waste something so precious as that.

In the morning, she pulls it free from his possessions, his single rucksack that he keeps with all his vital Fremen supplies — her blue scarf. She plaits her hair back, a single practical braid, and wraps the vibrant blue Nezhon material around her crown proudly.

The way he looks at her in the morning light, the joy and pride in his face — it is as miraculous a thing to her as a blind man seeing.

Chapter Text

The overabundance of silverware is still bewildering, but Chani is getting better. They sit in a small group spread out over a too long table, and Chani wishes she could taste the familiar spicy foods of her people more often because the blandness of these foreign meals are starting to vex her.

“You look lovely,” Jessica says to her, when Paul leaves briefly to hear more reports.

“I look the same as any other day,” Chani returns.

But she knows what Jessica is saying.

Everyone has noted the blue in her scarf.

Everyone knows what it means.

Across from her, Alia sits in Jessica’s lap, a smug smile on her lips. “I knew you’d take him back. It was just a matter of time.”

Chani gives her a lift of an eyebrow, challenging, but she cannot deny it either. “You think you know everything,” she returns, teasing.

“Then tell me something I don’t already know.”

“What the view is like from above anyone else’s head,” Chani says. “You can barely reach my knees.”

Alia’s eyes narrow, a twinkle in them. “I’ve ridden a Grandfather, sister. I know what the tallest of views look like.”

Chani never knows what to say to Alia. What response would be appropriate? There is none.

Paul eventually returns, this time with Gurney in tow, and both of them look concerned to the point of looking grave. “The reports are coming in,” Paul tells her, when she gives him an inquiring slant. “It was a Fremen that planted the Stone Burner.”

Chani stills, unnerved.

She had suspected the Count and his Great Houses, but no, it was her own people — and somehow that is worse.

“We will find the traitor,” Gurney promises, vehemently. “We’ll bring them to justice.”

“It will be handled,” Jessica says in the same way she decrees everything, with confidence that feels somehow final.

But Chani knows how complicated this can get. Dissidents among the Fremen is not a new concept, but it was always the fundamentalists that were the unpredictable ones. The rebels, the secular sects, had always seemed so much more rational to Chani, so much more reliable.

“Come,” Jessica says, to Paul. “Eat. The problems will be there after dinner. Gurney, you’re more than welcome to join us.”

“Thank you, My Lady, but I cannot stay,” Gurney replies, with a small tilt of his head. “We’ve only just received this report, and I need to act on it before the trail runs cold.” He turns to Paul. “I will not let you down again.”

“You have not let me down a first time,” Paul returns.

Gurney flinches, staring at the milky whiteness of Paul’s eyes. “That isn’t true, Your Grace, but I’ll be damned if I let it happen again.”

Paul sighs. “Go, Gurney. Do what you feel you must, but you have no lost honor you need to regain with me.”

Gurney seems to fortify himself in the words, for everyone knows Paul does not give out false flattery. He holds the loyalties of those closest to him not because of any religious fervor, but because he inspires this sense of fidelity that even Chani has fallen victim to. She cannot blame Gurney for glowing under the praise of Paul; she succumbs to the whims of his devotion more than any other.

When Paul sits, it is at her side. “You do look lovely,” he tells her, a soft whisper in her ear.

She doesn’t know how he overheard Jessica’s comment. He wasn’t even in the room when she’d made it, but Chani slants him a hushing look, meant to quell his teasing, but the tilt of his pleased expression only sharpens more. He is still so painfully earnest, so sincere, her Usul. He is still the most beautiful man she has ever known, scars and all.

Across from them, Alia snorts in laughter. “They are sickening, aren’t they?”

The days pass.

There are satellites that orbit Arrakis now. It was not always so, Chani knows. The Fremen used to bribe the Spice Guild to keep their skies clear. Fremen prized their isolation and secrecy enough to pay handsomely, but now Paul has put satellites in orbit and that is how they come to know the expected arrival of the enemy’s fleet days in advance. Only twenty days. An estimated twenty days for the full might of the Great Houses to stand against them.

On the thirteenth day, Chani is passing through the corridors when she overhears Irulan making an audio-log transcription in the library. “Imperial Diary. Year 10,193. Third comment. Reports of the Great Houses have only grown more disturbing as their approaching armada makes its way across the galaxy towards us. Initial estimations indicate it may be an armada three times larger than any other ever gathered around a single planet. Darkness descends upon Arrakis, and Paul Muad’dib must once again rely on the fervent ardor of his Fremen supporters if he wishes us all to survive beyond a single attack from this enemy fleet.”

Chani should not be listening to this. She knows this. Despite the clinical nature of this recording, she can tell this is a deeply personal thing for Irulan. She should not be listening, and yet—

“Of course,” Irulan continues, somberly, “Paul’s own call has been sent out for the Sarduakar fleet to return, now manned with his faithful Fedaykin. They left this homeworld only two years ago. Two years ago, when the fleet had first arrived on this desert planet answering to the rule of my father.”

A pause here, where Irulan takes a breath, as if to brace herself.

“In two years time, the Fremen have carried the name of their Lisan Al Gaib across the known galaxy. The Holy War has only grown in its momentum. In two years, they have done more to expand his empire’s hold than any other Imperial Army would have done in two decades. Their confidence and strength is still a thing that brings a strange sense of awe to me. They have such faith. It seems unshakable. But I cannot help but wonder if the Count and the Great Houses will arrive first and make quick work of a coup — well before the Sarduakar fleet with its Fedaykin soldiers have a chance to return and defend this planet. Will it be another massacre in the night? Much like the one that allowed the Harkonnens to prevail against Duke Leto Atreides? I fear the answer is more than unfavorable to us.”

On that grim determination, Chani shuffles back on her feet, unable to listen to more, and retreats silently through the hallway.

But the words haunt her nonetheless.

On the thirteenth day, Chani is restless.

She’s taken to long walks at random hours of the day, both inside and outside of the palace. She learns more of the palace life, the layout, the hidden depths, the hustle and bustle of the average Fremen in this city life (so different and yet not so dissimilar to the Fedeykin life out in the sands and sietches). The others acknowledge her with this growing reverence that is either inspired by her budding reputation as Sihaya or the fact that these last few days the whispers of her status beside Paul has become indisputably more pronounced. She wears blue daily. Even the foreign guards now answer to her with a deferential treatment that makes her think Paul had a talk with them about her status among the Court.

She does not ask him, because she knows neither wants to explicitly acknowledge the word concubine. It still feels like an illicit word, full of shame. The Fremen do not treat her like a concubine. They treat her like Paul’s woman.

Still, she cannot escape the word forever.

It is on her walks that she comes across Radiqa, the servant girl, handing out glassfuls of water. The beggars stand in a long line that stretches back at least a block from the palace walls, and Chani stares, astonished. “It happens every day,” Radiqa tells her. “Every meal. The old Duke implemented it when he first arrived. When the Atreides family dines, every person is welcome to two full glasses of water. It was a decree that the Emperor reinstituted when he took back the city from the Harkonnens.”

The old Duke, Chani thinks. Paul’s father, Leto Atreides. She’s always known he was a good man, an honorable man, just from the way Paul talks about him. Even Jessica, normally so poised and in control of herself, falters with emotion whenever the late Duke is brought up.

“When the Harkonnens ruled,” the servant girl tells her, in a hushed voice as if to convey a secret, “they would wash their hands in cloths and then let the beggars fight over the wet rags in the streets. The Duke was only a ruler for a short period of time here, but he inspired more trust in the people than the Harkonnens had inspired in the decades before. Cruelty is its own master, but the Duke did not let it rule his reign.”

Chani pauses. “And what do you think of the Duke’s son?”

Radiqa pauses, and Chani chides herself.

As if a servant would answer truthfully if it was a negative thought.

But Radiqa only says, smiling, “When it was the Duke, we gave out one glass of water. Under Lisan Al Gaib, we give out two.”

Chani can think of nothing to say to that, but a feeling blooms over her chest, full of solace and pride and this spark of heat. It may be a small thing to an Emperor, but two glasses of water is precious riches to a Fremen beggar. She takes to walking back into the palace then, avoiding her escorts, soldiers assigned to protect her who she manages to evade five times out of seven. When she makes it back to the isolated wing of the palace where Paul conducts his business, she finds him surrounded by his council. Paul seems to sense her immediately, lifting up his head to acknowledge her in the middle of scholared and collared men full of medals, older men who advise him on the daily concerns. They are all men the same age as Gurney or even older. Sometimes Jessica sits in on the council, sometimes even Irulan.

Chani has not attended, though — and she does not want to start today.

Paul seems to sense her discomfort at her disruption, for he dismisses the others immediately. Perhaps they were wrapping things up, perhaps not. She rather thinks Paul would have dismissed them either way.

“What is it?” Paul asks her, concerned. “You came in with a sense of urgency. You have a look on your face.”

“A look? And tell me, what look does a blind man see?”

“All of them, when it comes to you.”

She rewards him with a smile, then rewards him double when she pushes him back into a chair and mounts him. The shift in the air is immediate, frizzling with heat. She traces the scars around his eyes with her fingertips and feels his breath catch in his chest, feels the way his hands find the purchase of her hips and holds her steady as she straddles his waist.

When she kisses him, he melts underneath her touch like butter. The needy sound that escapes her throat as his tongue pushes into her mouth might have embarrassed her at one time or another, but the only thought running through her head is — he is a good man. When she tilts his chin up with her finger, the graceful lines of his elegant throat expose themselves and Chani licks a long line up that has him shuddering underneath her.

“Tell me what you want,” he says hoarsely. “I want to hear you say it.”

“I want you,” she tells him. “I want you inside me, Usul. Right here, right now.”

“Who am I to deny you anything?”

To be fair, the changes in them are none too drastic. They have always been passionate lovers from the start, entwined in each other in the cover of darkness every chance they got. It was just usually in places and times when such things could be expected in a budding growing romance between a man and a woman. But in the last few weeks, Chani has grown greedy. Paul’s recovery and the idle wait of an encroaching insidious threat has made him more available to her in terms of both time and proximity. They are constantly in each other’s spaces, and Paul does not like the company of any other for much long, save her. Everyone stares at him and his scars, his white eyes. Stilgar had wept the first time he saw Paul.

But Chani does not weep anymore. She will save her water for the dead, not the living.

She does not pity Paul Atriedes, and he does not want her pity either.

Instead, she takes delight in the groan drawn from his lips as she unties his trousers, her intent clear as she grasps him in a firm grip. Instead, she takes pleasure when his fingers similarly delve down beneath the layers of her clothing to find the apex of her thighs, sticky and growing wet, nimble fingers that move with tight circles over the heat of her. Instead, they move against each other as equals, a grinding delicious heat that builds slowly and then quickly explodes with frantic hands that move urgently to disrobe, to take hold, to take in. She pushes him inside her with an impatience she does not demonstrate in many other things, in many other areas, but the feel of Paul’s skin beneath hers always leaves her wanting more. She does not like the religious fervor that surrounds him, but she will never grow weary of the worship he bestows upon her and her alone.

“Chani, my Chani,” he groans. “Will you come for me? Will you fall apart while you ride me? Please, I’ve been a wreck all day thinking about it.”

“We had each other this morning,” she points out, which loses some of its teasing because it comes out on a moan when he shifts his hips beneath her and hits her at a new angle, a delicious angle.

“What do you think kept me so preoccupied? The memory of waking up from sleep with your lips already wrapped around my—” she kisses him before he can say the word cock, because she heats at the brazen memory before they leave his lips, she cannot help herself. She’d woken up with inspiration that morning, and had taken him in her mouth as the sun rose over them. Sucked and let him fuck her mouth until he came down her throat, and then she’d only laughed at him later when he had the most stupid, blissed out look upon his face.

Her hips move over him now, her arms bracketed over his shoulders as she takes him in and out, a steady rhythm that only falters when his thumb finds her clit. She groans, her lips at his throat, her head buried in the waves of his hair.

“Come for me,” he urges, his thumb pressing down harder on another devious circuit. “Relax, I’ve got you, I’ve got you. Just take it, take what you need — c’mon, just like that. I want to feel you, I want to feel you—”

She sucks a bruise into his throat, all blunt teeth and wet lips.

He groans. “You’re going to kill me.”

She can barely breathe if she’s honest, which is the only thing preventing her from laughing, so she bites him again, sharply between her lips; his thumb briefly falters and then both of his hands are on her ass and guiding her to ride her harder, swifter, with all the urgency they both feel is cardinal and necessary as breathing. The feeling grows, tight between her thighs, powerful muscles moving in tandem.

By the time she comes, it's only seconds before he does, groaning sweetly into her ear.

Afterwards, she is uncomfortably sticky between the thighs, and she thinks they may have been too loud. There is no helping it now, but she likes not to think about what others must think of her.

“Stay,” she prompts Paul, when he starts to move.

He stills underneath her.

Caliphs and mjeeds, rakahs, rajas and bashars, kings and emperors, primitos and presidents — Paul has told her about all of them, these rulers from different parts of his vast galaxy; he’s studied them all, but he follows only Chani’s command. He stays put and moves on her whims only.

She will not lie, it is an imbibing thing to have such power over a powerful man.

But Paul is not just her lover, and there are some things he does that even he does not want to do.

Two days later, he comes to her somber and silent, and she can sense a shift approaching.

“The south,” he tells her, quietly. “We must go south.”

Chani understands in a growing breaking dawn, but she does not like it. In the last battle of Arrakis, their enemies had only had it too easy to take the north in a series of brunt offenses that utilized rudimentary artillery. In the south, though, they have the cover of sandstorms that can span across a thousand miles beyond the equator. In the south, there are Paul’s fundamentalists. The last two years he’s been developing his own foothold there, his own southern palace, a stronghold built in secret. It would be a good place to hide when the Great Houses came with their armada, a good place to stage an offensive attack. The foreigners would not be as easily able to navigate the planet if they had to invade starting from the south.

But the south only brings bad memories to Chani.

Of war, of a pivotal shift in her relationship with Paul, of fundamentalist ardor, of Paul’s eyes staring at her full of molten remorse just before he proposed to another woman and then declared himself an Emperor.

She does not want to go south.

They make two groups. The larger group, composed of the majority of people including Fremen and the Royal family; they make their way directly towards the south under armed escort on the long journey across the Worm Rider’s Pass. Jessica, Alia, and even Irulan dispatch in the night to ride a palankin, sequestered among a group of trusted guards, and Paul sees them off with a murmur of caution.

The other group, made of only a handful of people, sets out on an alternative route. “We must make a stop at Makab Sietch,” Paul informs her, in private. “The Fremen behind the Stone Burner is from Makab Sietch.”

Chani sucks in a breath. It has only been a few weeks since she killed Taliq in the Tahaddi Challenge, the Naib of Makab Sietch. By rights, the sietch should welcome her in. She has full privileges to be the new Naib, in fact. Certainly her place among the Southern Tribal Council is secured, where she will now be permitted to speak if she so desires because she has taken the life of one of the tribal leaders. There has not been time or opportunity for Chani to do much of anything with the potential unfolding bounties of her prize fight. From what she gathers, in her absence the Makab Sietch had elected a new interim Naib, but she knows she could easily decree herself the new Naib with little recourse for the people of the Makab Sietch to dispute it. The Tahaddi Challenge rules are sacred; it needs to be, because the sacrifice and risks involved are always of the highest order.

“How many do you expect to be part of this conspiracy?” Chani asks.

Paul’s jaw clenches. “We know of only one person, Taliq’s younger brother. He planted the Stone Burner. But the rumors are — there are many in the sietch that are not a fan of me. Dissidents. Potential rebels.”

That makes sense. Under the leadership of a man like Taliq, only discontent could grow.

Stilgar guides them through the desert. Paul and Chani, Gurney, and a select few other trusted men. It is a significantly smaller group than the one that had been sent off with Jessica, but Chani prefers it this way.

When they arrive, it seems like the entire sietch gathers to greet them. Paul makes his way towards the entrance in long, strong strides. He does not hide his white eyes, not even behind a pair of dark goggles that would prevent stares. In his walk, in his very gait, she sees Lisan Al Gaib emerge. There is a swagger to his steps, an assertiveness that emanates from his very posture. He leads the group and pushes through the gathering masses with an authority of self-possessed confidence, and then turns back to Chani, holding out his hand for her to take.

She puts her hand in his, and he draws her to the front.

Sihaya, some murmur.

Muad’dib, others whisper.

They mix in such ways as to mingle in the same breath.

Dinner is anticipated. Even among the Fremen, there are formalities and expectations. Chani lets it all unfold. Lets the sietch treat her and Paul with the expected hospitality, but they do not break bread. She can see the others watching Paul, looking for the expected weakness in a blind man, but Paul makes it difficult for them to find such fault. He moves with assurance; he moves with a certainty that is hard to explain coming from a blind man.

And sure enough, before they gather for dinner, Taliq’s brother makes himself known to be as impatient as his elder brother. Paul is passing through the hallway when the man attacks with a knife from the back of the crowd. Paul only takes three moves to deflect, disarm, and defend himself, leaving the other Fremen without weapons and kissing the dirt floor.

“No,” Stilgar says, before others can move. “Stay your hands. Lisan Al Gaib needs no help.”

“There is no such thing,” another hisses in confusion, in awe, a faint whisper in the crowd, “as a blind man who can see.”

“Lisan Al Gaib,” another murmurs, as if an answer.

Paul pulls the attacker to his feet. “I know your name, Hassan. I know you grew up in the shadows of your brother, that you followed Taliq everywhere. I know you would have died for him, and it was a grief you previously never felt before when Sihaya slayed him. That night you stayed far out on the dunes alone so that no one but the wind would hear your screams — but I heard them.”

Hassan bares his teeth, feral. “Save your words of prophecy, little mouse. I do not believe your lies.”

Paul presses closer, a challenge. “I know you bribed a servant to plant that Stone Burner in my palace, in the hopes a blind man would make an easy target for your brother.”

A gasp, from the crowd. The interim Naib is a man with a thick beard, a hesitant shift in his gait. “Muad’dib, if this is true, he worked alone.”

“But his whispers reached many ears,” Paul counters. “You all have been whispering many things in the Makab Sietch.”

Hassan struggles in Paul’s grip, jaw clenching. “What do you expect? Doubts fester in the forgotten places. It festers in darkness, in disease. You took some of our best men from us two years ago, and we have never seen them again.”

“Some of those men will return shortly,” Paul replies, as he shoves the man back into Gurney’s arms. Gurney only looks more than happy to take over the capture of the man. “Some have been martyred,” Paul continues, “but you? Your death will be forgotten.”

“Let them forget,” Hassan hisses. “But the doubt will only grow. They will see the false prophet for what he is. Lisan Al Gaib must be one of our own, one of the Fremen. It will not be a foreigner with pale skin and paler eyes. He will have the Eyes of Ibad. He will be of our blood!”

Chani shifts, suddenly uncomfortable. She has never believed in any prophecy, in any coming of a savior, but in her deepest moments of fancy she has thought these thoughts more than once. Hoped for salvation from a person that would be born of this world, be raised in the ways of the Fremen; that such a man would move to lead this world out of the suffering it feels at the hands of so many foreigners.

Hassan looks up and stares at Chani, at the killer of his own brother, and there is fire in his eyes. “This prophecy is how they enslave us! This is how they dominate us—”

He is silenced when Gurney strikes him across the face.

But Chani remembers these words. She shouted them at the group of gathering Fremen in the south, inside that circle where she had no prior privilege to speak. She stands now in oppressive silence, feeling the chill of his words echo hers from so long ago, and she cannot find her voice. She cannot fully appreciate how far she has drifted from that woman so sure of her path, of how Paul had lost himself.

Now, others appear to have taken up the words of defiance, of her defiance.

If Paul senses the growing malcontent in the crowd, the stirrings from Hassan’s words, Paul only answers it with his own fervor. “I am the one pointing the way,” he hisses, to the gathered Fremen – challenging, voice rising. “I am the one your parent’s grandparents dreamt about, and their grandparents, and theirs before that. I have been a moment coming for ten thousand years. You still do not see? Are you so blind? I see.”

Shifting shuffling feet, others looking away.

“Shall I show you the way?” Paul challenges. “Shall I lead you out of darkness? Shall I hold back the fleet of the enemy, the rest of the entire universe?” He pauses, turns to Chani, affixes her with a stare and then turns away. “Shall I bring you salvation from certain defeat?”

“Yes!” a man from the crowd shouts, invigorated. “Yes, Muad’dib, bring us victory! Show us the way!”

Paul’s face shows no emotion except fury, except promised wrath. “I shall show you the way.”

“Muad’dib! Muad’dib! Muad’dib!”

Eventually, Stilgar moves to the other side, whispering into Paul’s ear, “There is a way we deal with vermin like Hassan, Muad’dib. How to deal with traitors. The Maker is the way.”

So, the man is tied to a poll fixed deep into the sands, immobile. A thumper set in the ground, the vibrations brought to summon the sandworm. Chani pretends there is no shake in her hands as she stares at the sacrifice, but there is a shake, and it is not because of the encroaching Shai-Hulud. There is only reverence and silence when a Grandfather approaches. There is only a hush as the man stands in the center before the sands beneath his feet shift, before the thumper gives way and the man falls with a rising scream into a growing cavern, into the widening mouth of a soaring Shai-Hulud.

The man is taken by the Maker, shown no mercy.

“It is the way,” Stilgar says.

And Chani says nothing.

Chapter Text

They arrive at the southern citadel sometime before sunset, and it is a sight ten times more arresting than any offered in Arrakeen. In the two years since Paul commissioned and started construction of this stronghold, it has grown tall by leaps and bounds. Taller than any other structure she has seen mar the surface of the planet, save for a Grandfather reaching for the skies. The place is monstrously large, and nothing is larger than the throne room. The scale of it is almost ridiculous, so long and wide as to seem to recede into the horizon, a ceiling that stood better than twenty men high. In the center, the Emperor’s seat, a throne made of obsidian obelisk that spoke of absolute power.

With a start, Chani had the uncomfortable revelation that she had seen this throne before. In her visions, the ones she’d seen in her Spice-induced haze after she’d been stabbed. She’d seen herself writhing on top of Paul on it, both naked and unabashed, caught up in each other’s moans as they’d fucked each other with abandon. The memory of it brings a fierce blush to Chani’s face, and she cannot explain how she’d known this place, how she had so clearly seen the dimensions and details of this throne in her dreams.

It — scares her.

Because if that part of her visions were true, seductive and appealing though it is, what other parts are true? She’d already come to see the vision of Paul’s blindness come to pass.

What, then, of the vision she saw of herself stabbing Paul?

Her, killing Paul.

That night, she pulls on Paul’s sleepshirt before falling into bed, just to have a piece of him to hold while he is still out amongst the masses of his followers, sowing fanaticism and loyalty with every word uttered. Chani has no patience for it, so she retreats as soon as she is reasonably able to. The rest she sought is far out of reach, though. Sleep elusive. She tosses and turns in the bedroom bequeathed to her and Paul.

“You have been distant since we left Makab Sietch,” Paul says, when he finally joins her in bed. He can be silent as a mouse when he wants to be, unobtrusive but never unwelcomed. “Will you share your thoughts with me?”

“Don’t you already know them? You seem to know everyone else's.”

Paul pauses, and he does not respond one way or another, just as she had deflected in her answer. He settles more firmly behind her, an arm braced across her stomach, lying side-by-side. “What’s wrong, Chani?”

She sighs. “I have a fear, Usul. It only seems to grow. That no matter what we do, you and I will not be together at the end of it all. I feel like our parting has only been delayed, not thwarted.”

His grip on her tightens around her hips briefly, before he softens. “There are so many paths where I lose you. I do not think this is one of them.”

She looks at him. “How can you be sure?”

“I can’t,” he admits. “You’ve made it clear that you do not want me to take the Water of Life again, so I haven’t. But I think I have done what I can to keep you with me, beside me. There is only one final test for us, and it will all take place tomorrow.”

She says nothing to this, her conflicting thoughts clear enough on her face. The Water of Life is not the answer to everything, but the upcoming confrontation with Count Fenring and the Great Houses is a daunting enough task that it almost makes Chani reconsider. Almost. The Sarduakar fleet is still days away, but the best estimates put Count Fenring’s commanding ship to arrive in orbit within the next day.

“If Fenring takes up my challenge to fight tomorrow,” Paul continues, “it will all come down to a single fight. He has no reason to risk it, other than the false belief that I am handicapped by my blindness. Still, I will need extra incentive to force his hand and have him meet with me on the ground.”

“What do you have in mind?”

“A horrific ultimatum, perhaps. My use of the atomics.”

Chani shudders. “You will not have to use it, hopefully. It will be a fight, and you can take him.”

“Can I?” Paul asks, conflicted, almost resigned. “I barely survived challenging Feyd-Rautha.”

She remembers that match all too well. It is a horror that she revists in her nightmares frequently. A moment, as Chani goes through the chilling memory of it, and then she says, “If you fight Fenring tomorrow, do not look for me in the crowds. You spent too much of your match with Feyd distracted by my presence. So much so that he noticed — everyone noticed. Do not look for me in the crowds. Stay focused on Fenring, on your enemy.”

“You were a source of motivation.”

Chani shakes her head. “I was a distraction. Promise me you will not let yourself be distracted like that again.”

He sighs, and nods. “No matter what happens tomorrow,” Paul says, a hand over her stomach, “Promise me you will tell our son that I did my best to make a better world for him. I have been impeded by too many obstacles, but I have tried.”

A long pause, and then the heavy weight of his hand over her stomach feels significant in a way it had not been just a few seconds before. She realizes, only then, that his hand is over her womb, and the talk of a son may not be just some hypothetical of a distant future. She stutters as she realizes his meaning, her hand flying to cover his, her eyes searching him for the truth.

“Usul,” she exhales out, softly. “Do you mean to say— am I—”

“Yes,” he admits, beaming down at her. “Several weeks along, if I am correct.”

She gasps, flinging herself to him in a moment of unbridled surprise. She is— pregnant. A boy, if Paul is to be believed. The revelation is yet another thing to tip her entirely off balance, but this one is made of pure joy and exhilaration. They had not been trying. It was not even a thing she had thought about. Yet the bloom in her heart is too loud to deny, Paul’s answering grin to her happiness only multiplying the factor of joy a dozenfold.

They are going to have a child.

He kisses her, and there is wetness on her lips from tears — from him or her, she cannot tell and it does not matter.

“How long have you known?” she demands, giddy.

“Since almost conception,” he tells her, adorably sheepish. “But I did not want to say anything until I knew you could know for sure. Go to the healers tomorrow, they will confirm it for you. You carry my firstborn child, Chani. You will carry all my children.”

A sobering thought, then. “A concubine’s child.”

Paul lifts her chin with his thumb, forces her to meet his gaze. “I am a concubine’s son, too. I have never considered my family anything less than others. Our child is blessed with the same fidelity, except he will be born from two parents who brought him into this world not out of machinations or politics, but out of something much more pure.”

Love.

There is no denying it.

“Then make love to me again, Usul,” she tells him. “Remind me, so that I may never forget.”

He kisses her, and they never separate. Chani keeps him close by the back of his head, hands strumming through his hair, strands far too overgrown, hair curling at the edges. She forces him to deepen the embrace, and he returns the attention by demanding less and less clothing between them, until she’s clinging to him breathless, naked, and every thought in her head is wiped clean except for the push of him inside her. Aching, and bruising, and hers.

The next morning, the sun rises and Chani emerges from their rooms feeling more optimistic than she has in — so long, she cannot even remember. The sense of jubilation is quickly subdued, however, when she walks to the main hall and sees Irulan standing in full regal dress, a flowing white gown and cape, an elaborate golden headdress to complete the look. In comparison, Chani only wears her stillsuit.

“The Delegation is arriving,” Alia says, appearing at Chani’s side. “Paul is about to make an announcement.”

Chani looks across to Stilgar and Gurney, who are gathered at his side, his most trusted counsel. “Paul’s Sarduakar fleet hasn't arrived, has it?”

“No,” Alia says, somberly. “Not yet.”

A cold terror crawls up Chani’s spine.

She finds Paul in the back, watching monitors of the Great House’s fleet arrive. There are more than three to four dozen ships, more than enough to blow apart Arrakis several times over.

“What do you mean to do?” Irulan’s voice, behind Chani. It startles her, and both Paul and Chani turn to the other woman. “You have to answer their hail, or they’ll attack. Fenring will not waste this advantage, and there’s no point in aiming your atomics at his fleet. There are too many ships.”

“I know,” Paul hisses, glaring at Irulan for pointing out the obvious. “I have things well under control.”

“How?” Chani asks, because she, too, is curious. “We do not have the manpower to fight them.”

Paul’s voice softens when it addresses Chani, but he refuses to meet her gaze. “We do not need to fight them off. We just need to hold them back by threatening that which they hold most dear.”

A beat, where she considers it. Spice.

She frowns. Even if he threatened to blow up every reserve, depot, and holding of Spice on the planet, that would not stop the Great Houses from invading. Not if they could take control of the planet by the end of the day. Lost Spice could be recovered. Lost Spice could be exploited another day. Chani turns this information over in her head, and she realizes the way Paul won’t meet her gaze is more telling than anything else. The way he’d left her in bed that morning comes to mind, how he’d pressed his face into the junction of her shoulder and neck, breathed her scent in so deeply that she had almost teased him about it, an admonishing laugh. “I’m not going to disappear on you.” But he hadn’t shared her mirth, and had only looked at her with a heated continence that still somehow had no warmth.

Her stomach shrinks, suddenly.

She remembers him saying to her once, "He who can destroy a thing, can control a thing."

“Where will you be aiming your atomics,” Chani asks, carefully, “if not at the enemy’s fleet?”

Paul’s jaw clenches, and still, he does not look at her. “The breeding grounds.”

Chani is shocked to numbed silence by the blasphemy pouring from his lips. Spreading death among the little makers, killing a vector of the life cycle that includes the spice and the makers. They had only journeyed to the breeding grounds weeks back, their ill-fated journey to capture a younglin. He knew what he was doing by targeting it. The atomics would purge life not only for this cycle, but for several future generations. The atomics are strong enough that it could even be a peril to the citizens of Arrakeen, who stood off to the east of it.

That was why Paul had them evacuate to the south.

So he could safely detonate his atomics from a distance, if need be. Keep his loved ones safe, and sacrifice the rest. Countless others. Including the next generations of Shai-Huluds.

So that Arrakis would become a true desolation—without spice or maker.

"He who can destroy a thing, can control a thing."

“You cannot,” she exhales, harshly.

Paul finally turns towards her. “It is the only way, Chani. The future’s becoming as muddled for them as it is for me. The lines of vision are narrowing. Everything focuses here where the spice is, where they’ve dared not interfere before — because to interfere was to lose what they must have. But now they’re desperate. All paths lead into darkness.”

She steps back, retreats in horror. She almost collides with Irulan as she does so, and the other woman steadies her. “This is— this is madness, Paul. You will kill the planet. You will kill the makers.”

“It is the only way I see forward, Chani—”

She does not stay to hear the rest. His explanation is already too horrific.

She leaves, moves through the crowds on unsteady feet. No one stops her, and Paul does not call her back. He knows better. He knows what this would mean to her. Only a foreigner would make a decision like this. A Fremen, someone born of this world, would never dare sacrifice this much for the sake of winning a war, and Paul does not do idle threats. He does not make false promises or trumped-up threats. Paul Atreides doesn’t bluff. If pushed to it, he would use the atomics as he threatened and let the world be ruined for it.

At that moment, Paul Atreides is no better than any other foreigner to come and rule this planet with his cruelty and malice.

In fact, he is worse.

The threat must’ve worked. The Delegation sends only a single ship to land in the south, and Chani knows even from a distance that it is Count Fenring’s ship. She watches the entourage unload from among the thousands gathered to watch. Fenring, alongside his beautiful wife, Margot. There are other Bene Gesserit, too. That old crone of a Reverend Mother, the one Paul once confessed to her had forced him to take the Gom Jabbar test. A dozen and one other soldiers, some with faces covered in chrome-like dome masks. Guild Members. The entourage is as impressive and self-involved as the first one she had ever witnessed. These foreigners and their ceremony.

Chani stands one among the countless numbers, a faceless figure in the crowds gathered to watch. Up front, Paul stands with Irulan by his side — and it is for the best. The Houses only negotiate with him because Paul comes from a Duke’s line, because he managed to win the Princess’s hand in a coup. They respect him for the legitimacy he brings, and they would not respect him for having a dirty little Fremen woman at his side. Chani knows this, and the sting of it doesn’t matter anymore.

But despite her anger, despite her horror at his actions, she cannot still her anxiety when the expected outcome unfolds. A challenge issued between Paul and the Count. A final determination with a victor on who will rule Arrakis come nightfall. She may have anger in her heart at Paul’s actions, but she cannot deny the lurch in her throat at the thought of him losing.

When he takes his stance across the Count, readying himself with his crysknife, he looks briefly out at the crowds. In search of her, Chani knows. She wills him to pay attention to his foe, to not be distracted as he’d promised her the night before. She is angry with him, but she does not want him distracted. Distraction means he will lose. Distraction means he will die — and a hand over her womb, she determines a child deserves a father, if nothing else.

The fight begins. The audience lurches and gasps with each strike and parry. Chani is crushed amongst the numbers, all who are too eager to catch every move. It is not like Paul’s last fight with Feyd, a hushed reverence in the crowd. This audience is like a mob, shouting and crying out for Muad’dib with each slice of a knife through the air. Chani does not even witness the first hit; just hears the grunt, the gasp from the crowd, as Paul comes away with a long slash across his forearm, blood dripping like splattered paint across the floor.

Her stomach lurches, and Chani feels like throwing up.

This is all wrong. It’s all wrong.

“Hello there, little one,” a voice in Chani’s ear; Lady Margot Fenring with her lips practically pressed to her throat. “What are you doing out here among the destitute? Your place is beside the Emperor, is it not?”

Chani does not need to move to see or feel the blade digging into her back.

“Forgive me for the interruption,” Margot says — eloquently, each syllable perfectly enunciated. “I know we would both like to see which one of our men is the victor, but I do believe it’s vital we girls can have a chance to talk amongst ourselves. Let the men play with their blades. You and I have important matters to discuss.”

“I’m not going anywhere with you,” Chani hisses.

A smile felt pressed against her ear. And then: “Follow me,” the Bene Gesserit Voice, deep and thrumming.

A command Chani cannot help but obey.

Chapter Text

The walk down the maze of corridors is done in stinging silence, a strong contrast to the roar of the mob outside witnessing the match between Paul and Fenring. Much of the southern citadel is underground and cavernous, and the lower they go into the depths of the fortress, the cooler the air gets. The staircase descends in a winding, lazy spiral. Lady Margot walks slowly in front down the steps, her graceful footsteps echoing in the empty chambers. Everytime she looks back at Chani, all Chani can see is the black regal headdress pulled high above her head or the filigree of delicate black lace that creates an enigmatic prism over her eyes and graceful features.

Chani doesn't know how long the walk is; there is no real sense of time or distance. She is trapped in this Bene Gesserit trick, this hold over her mind.

“You are exactly what I expected,” Margot says, conversationally, on the long walk. “So many outrageous rumors running around about the Emperor’s concubine — a wild exotic thing, an unruly spirit. They say you can seduce a man with only your eyes; they say you must have quite the alluring powers to have enraptured the most powerful man in the universe so thoroughly.”

Margot turns, briefly, to glance back at Chani, as if to assess the effect her words have on Chani.

Chani says nothing.

She is being forced to follow, forced to obey. The Bene Gesserit Voice and a herald of something else, some power that Chani cannot even define. Her limbs do not answer to Chani. Her body and mind have betrayed her. Yet there is a certain freedom granted in the words she can speak, and so Chani refuses the lady whatever little is in her control.

“But I think,” Margot continues, a coy smile, “Irulan had it right with her very first impression of you. Earnest, straightforward. But for all the dignity and intelligence you hold, you fail to see the larger role you have in this world and many others, Chani of the Fremen. You underestimate your power, your influence.”

Everyone always assumes she holds some sort of dominion over Paul — as if she wouldn’t have prevented so many atrocities, so much massacring of her people, if she had been able to sway him as thoroughly as others supposed. Lady Margot will likely learn this lesson soon enough; Chani is certain she is being marched to some secluded place as ransom, as blackmail. She doesn’t know what Paul will do if she’s under a Bene Gesserit threat, but she doubts that he will be as predictable or foolish as to give them all what they want.

No, Chani cannot control Paul or his actions, but she takes a vicious sense of pride in the fact that no one else can either.

At the threshold of some large ornate door deep in the bowels of the citadel, Lady Margot stops. She turns towards Chani, and her voice drops to a hush, as if departing a secret. “You do have such an interesting love story,” Margot whispers into her ear. “The Prophet and the Non-Believer. But I fear you may have wandered into waters too deep for you to tread. Some advice, from a woman married to a eunuch — to another woman in an equally complicated mess. You may be a concubine, but you should take every advantage you can get, my dear. You will need it.”

After that, she leads Chani into a dark room only lit by a large gathering of candlelight, so deep in the fortress where no sunlight can reach. At first, all Chani sees is a hub of candles all clustered near a small oblong table and a single chair, and then the Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother comes into view. Gaius Helen Mohiam standing in her full black garb, a specter of death and ominous danger.

“Well,” Mohiam says, severely. “Bring the girl here.”

“Kneel,” Lady Margot says, in her Voice.

Chani is forced to the ground with a grunt, on bended knees. She glares up at the Reverend Mother with as much venom as she could muster.

“What do you want?” Chani demands.

“All this fuss,” Mohiam says, sneering, “for a Fremen girl with no known origins. That foolish boy spoils so much with the likes of you.”

“Respectfully, Reverend Mother,” Margot adds, “perhaps she has something in her blood that is respectable. She was able to convert the Water of Life for her lover. That does speak to a certain amount of discipline and control.”

Mohiam’s lips flatten into a straight line. “She was trained in her youth to be the next Reverend Mother to the Northern Fremen tribe. She refused early on in her adolescence. Any potential she may have had as a Bene Gesserit, she squandered away with her stubborn refusal.”

And Chani knows, there is little the Bene Gesserit abide about rebellion. Her rejection of the training certainly smarts Gaius Helen Mohiam, the old crone. The thought brings a vicious sort of satisfaction to Chani, even as she recognizes the inherent danger of being deemed a threat to these women and their quest for — what had Paul once called it? The title he usurped from the Bene Gesserit’s meticulous crossing of bloodlines. The Kwisatz Haderach.

“Shadows,” Mohiam says. “We’ve operated from a place of shadows for hundreds of years, carefully dedicating our resources and cultivating the bloodlines. What bloodline can you bring to the future of the House Atreides? We’ve spent centuries cultivating the children of each and every Great House, and you come along like a slithering snake.”

She might as well have called Chani’s blood filth.

“Perhaps you should have stepped out into the sun once in a while,” Chani bites out, viciously. “It would have done you some good.”

“A Fremen’s response, through and through.” Mohiam glowers. “You think we’re defeated, girl? There are plans within plans, things set into motion for centuries. You think one foolish boy will thwart that? Even if your precious Muad’dib wins the battle out there against Fenring, we have half a dozen failsafe plans.”

“I know Paul has been more than a thorn in your side,” Chani taunts. “You never predicted him or anything he’s done.”

“Of course we did,” Mohiam sneers. “We played the hand we were dealt, just as we planted seeds of doubt into the Fremen. Just as we stoked discord into his followers.”

Chani’s mouth thins. It isn’t unexpected, hearing the Bene Gesserit’s hands were in play at the doubt festering among certain factions of the Fremen against Paul’s ascendancy. Taliq, the entire Makab Sietch, is likely just the beginning of a problem.

“Whatever you want from me,” Chani says, “you won’t get it, so just kill me and be done with it.”

If anything, Mohiam’s smile widens. “Irulan was right here, too. You lack imagination.”

Chani’s eyes narrow, as Mohiam nods at Margot for something. Something shifts in the air, some plan unfolding that Chani cannot discern. A moment later, Margot is stepping back into her line of sight, this time carrying a clear pitcher of some liquid — vibrant blue water. Chani’s entire body straightens as she realizes — the Water of Life. Margot sets the pitcher down carefully on the table beside Chani, and steps back into the shadows.

Chani looks from the Water of Life to the Reverend Mother, confused and alarmed. “What are you doing?”

“Testing a theory,” Mohiam says. “Whether you are a threat or a tool.”

Chani flinches. “I’ll never let you use me.”

Mohiam chuckles. “Is that right? Your doubt in your own lover’s prophecy is well known. Do you believe he is Lisan Al Gaib? It’s been widely reported that you may be his biggest disbeliever, his closest critic.”

“Sihaya,” Margo offers, from the back. “They chant your name, too. Some say it in reverence because you are the Muad’dib’s Desert Spring. But others? Others whisper it because you may be the only one close enough to stop him.”

Chani says nothing, feeling anxiety drench itself down her spine, a full physical reaction. Because there is a wisp of something she can barely recognize as truth among the throng of manipulation. The Fremen have been whispering her name. Even among the Makab Sietch, she had sensed some of the doubt aimed towards Paul had turned into something else when its aim had turned towards Chani. An uncomfortable ethereal understanding that she had gained infamy among the secular people. That a hope rested with her, perhaps.

“A rebellion’s hope,” Mohiam says, as if reading Chani’s mind. And perhaps she is, perhaps this is another Bene Gesserit talent, reading minds. “For a leader capable of fighting the great Muad’dib.”

Chani flinches, and avows, “Never.”

But even as she says it, even as she feels the repulsion rush through her veins, through her entire body from head to toe — Chani remembers her Spice visions. The feel of the crysknife in her hands as it slid into Paul’s body. Chani feels the specter of that crawl up her throat and take residency there, but she breathes heavily through her nostrils, staring down the Reverend Mother with heated mutiny and concealed horror.

“You will drink the Water of Life,” Mohiam commands. “And I shall see what is in store for your future.”

Chani shakes her head. “No—”

“Drink,” her old Bene Gesserit Voice commands, thrumming and deep.

Chani wants to resist, but resistance is not an option. She does not even realize she is reaching for the pitcher of blue water until the poisonous liquid is already passing her lips, down her throat, a quench of thirst that only makes her throat run dry. It is unthinking, and unnamable, the sensation that washes over her next. A flustered heat, a haze falling over her eyes.

Death would be a mercy, by comparison.

Dreams while waking are such dangerous omens.

Chani sees the danger.

A planet set on fire, a drought unimaginable even to a Fremen. Death and decay, thousands of her people dying. Millions. A sharp blast of the Atreides family atomics as it spreads like a mushroom, outwards, filled with the promise of carnage — blisters and boils on flesh, skin falling off the bone from radiation poisoning.

Children crying out in pain, falling to the sands like heaps of carcasses piled high to the sky.

The death of Shai-Huluds, behemoth decaying husks in the sand.

The death of everything and her people alike. No makers, no spice. A globe of disease and devastation. A planet of corpses.

“Your lover is a man who does not bluff,” Mohiam’s voice comes to her, in the vision.

Chani can sense the old woman in her mind. It’s the same way she was once told, as a child, that she could expect to happen when it came time for Chani to take on the mantle of the Reverend Mother. Stories and memories and visions passed on from one generation to the next, a history that would build upon the propagation of knowledge and wisdom.

But Mohiam’s presence here is an invasion, an assault.

“Let’s see more,” the old crone says. “Let’s see what is in store for you.”

More death, more destruction.

The sheer breadth and width of it is so overwhelming, Chani sacrifices water to the knowledge. Feels tears gather at the brim of her lashes and fall; senses, in a distorted sort of way, the moment the tears are gathered by Lady Margot, but it is a disconnected sensation, disjointed and outside of herself. She is too overwhelmed by the sheer potency of the visions. It is unlike anything she has ever felt before, unlike anything she could possibly imagine.

“A child,” Mohiam hisses, affronted. “You’re pregnant, girl. You should have told us!”

Chani senses that too, in this disjointed way. The life inside of her, just beginning. A barely awake whisper, a burgeoning sentient being brought to full awareness in a storm. By the maker, it is cruel. It is brutality to do this to something so new, so fragile.

“A boy,” Mohiam says, dripping with disdain. “You will lose it, surely. If it had been a girl, perhaps it would have survived — but a boy? They are the weaker sex. Be grateful, Fremen. The world does not need another abomination like its abhorrent aunt’s existence.”

Chani can do nothing but gasp, and reach in rebellion for the small voice coming awake inside her. Mama, a voice calls, frail and too faint. It sounds like a man’s voice, not a child’s, not a babe’s, but Chani somehow recognizes it. It is familiar in a way she cannot describe, and she puts a name to it without thinking, the name bleeding into her consciousness. Leto. Her son’s name is Leto. She knows this somehow, sees it in the future as certain as if she’s already lived it.

Leto, with the dark skin of his mother and the Eyes of Ibad, and Paul’s gentle smile.

Then her mind is cast back, like a reel of a line thrown, maker hook’s landing in the past. She connects with Gaius Helen Mohiam’s mind the same way she must connect with Chani’s, and the visions come pouring in. She sees the girl the Reverend Mother once was, a beauty. She sees the training she underwent under the Bene Gesserit; she sees the lovers she took, the deaths she dealt — she sees. Oh, Chani sees things she shouldn’t, things she doesn’t want to. We are connected, Leto’s voice in her head, realizing it at the same moment that Chani understands. She is my Great-Grandmother.

Chani becomes aware, the violation committed against Mohiam by the former Baron of House Harkonnen ages ago. She is Jessica’s mother, Chani realizes. And Jessica and Paul do not even know it.

“That is not for you to know!” The old woman crows, angrily and spiteful.

It is too late. It is outside of either of their controls. There is a give and take with this Water of Life, even if all Chani can feel is that it takes.

It takes, and it takes, and it takes.

Nothing is in control.

The past, the present, the future — it mixes in a whirlwind, the greatest sandstorm imaginable. Chani is lost to its current. Paul at the center of it all, his blue-on-blue eyes turned white with blindness, his stance a pillar in the center of the storm. He is so beautiful even in her visions of horror. Lisan Al Gaib, his stature invincible, his hands bloody. So much blood at his hands, so much death.

She sees the horrors of the future, only death and decay.

And the infringements of the past are no better. Shishakli, her mind grasps. Her oldest friend, her greatest confidant. Chani sees it, the mystery of her disappearance now a horror for her to know. Shiskalki, sacrificed in the great siege of the North. Forced to kneel even in her defiance, in front of the pale Harkonnen heir, Feyd-Rautha. You killed nine of my men with one single blade. The quiver of her friend’s chin as her fate is sealed, the whirl of a deathstill starting up, the promise of a painful death bled dry of water, her last gasping breaths. Only pleasure remains.

Horrors.

Chani sees only horrors.

Stay strong, Mama, Leto’s voice comforts. My Great-Grandmother is leading you to only horrors. There is much she denies you to see.

“Quiet,” Mohiam hisses, a warning. “You know nothing, boy.”

Oh, Reverend Mother, he replies. I already know so much.

Chani wishes she could say the same, but she is too lost to the currents of so much knowledge. Too much death—

It warps again, and there is a knife in Chani’s hands, and it is buried in Paul’s gut. There is a crysknife with Paul’s blood all over it, and she is the one wielding it. “Chani,” he breathes, gasping. “It’s okay, my love.” And she is crying but she has still done this, still stabbed him, still spilled his water watching him fall to his knees. She crumbles to the floor with him. “It needed to be done,” she tells him, crying. “I told you,” he only returns. “I will love you until my last breath.” And he does, this holds true, nothing but affection in his eyes as he takes that last breath, nothing but love in response to this betrayal, nothing but—

Chani gasps, and lets the warm embrace of death wrap around itself, cocooning her in its heat.

Mama, Leto calls, alarmed. Hold strong! Keep fighting—

“This is too dangerous,” Irulan’s voice, distant and fading. “Why was I not told about this? You could kill her.”

“She is strong enough,” Margot refutes. “Look how she’s fighting the poison.”

“If she dies, she dies,” Mohiam, here. “This is a test. Either she will be a force against Paul Atreides or she dies. Either way will suit our needs. Her visions will show her the path.”

“You cannot imagine Paul’s response if she dies,” Irulan hisses. “You’re miscalculating his wrath. He will destroy all of us for her. He will destroy everything—”

“Enough,” Mohiam snaps. “You’ve been a disappointment enough, Irulan. Two years and you could not even seduce your own husband. You are not a sex object, have never been a sex object, cannot be a sex object. An unacceptable failure from my most apt pupil."

No response, this time, from Irulan, rendered mute in her humiliation.

“Leave us,” Mohiam says, dismissing Irulan. “I cannot be divided in my attentions. The Fremen girl needs—”

Death.

So much death.

Chani suffocates with it.

And Paul is at the center of it all. Paul is the one to dole out so much of it — death, all death. Lisan Al Gaib. How could he do it? How could he kill so many? How could he send so many to die in his name? Muad’dib. Muad’dib. Muad’dib. It is a name chanted in the far reaches of the universe, a death chant. A call to arms.

But—

Sihaya, another calls.

Screams, cries, a woman crying, “Sihaya!” like a battlecry.

Another call to arms, Fremen fighting Fremen. Chani sees it unfold. She sees it all. The Southern Tribe called to a meeting, a gathered circle of honored men and women. And Chani is speaking at the center of the Great Temple, screaming at them. He is not your savior! He only brings death to us. Do you not think I wanted him to lead us to paradise? He is the father of my child! But it is all a false promise. He brings only death! Men shouting at her, others defending her. She is Sihaya. She is his Desert Spring. If she does not believe him, what does that mean? Some call her traitor, others call her the only hope for standing against him. Listen to her! A man cries. No, it is blasphemous, another sneers.

“It doesn’t take a mind of a Bene Gesserit,” Mohiam says, idly, “to discern you are his greatest weakness. The thing he would never strike down. The thing he would not defend himself against.”

And Chani sees it.

She understands the ruthless effectiveness because Mohiam is right. Paul would not let any other best him. He would always outmaneuver and exploit any enemy’s weakness.

Except Chani.

He would not rise against Chani, even if she rose against him.

Sihaya, some Fremen chant, while others curse her name. Sihaya, Sihaya, Sihaya.

She will save us from death, Radiqa’s voice shouts. She will save us!

She is a traitor! She is Muad’dib’s enemy! Kill her!

The rebellion has a leader.

The rebellion is hers.

Mohiam screams.

Chani does not understand it.

Chani does not know what is going on, only that Mohiam screams as if cut, as if locked in sudden pain. It brings no satisfactions to Chani because she cannot know the source of it, cannot understand the place of it in her field of vision where past and present and future all commingle. Chani’s heart drops into her stomach, and she realizes, despite no outward signs of frustration or anger, Chani still senses a larger crack in Mohiam’s façade.

But then the visions ebb and flow to a halt.

There is a strange dark calmness, a void of everything else. No death, no life – just a void.

“Chani,” Paul’s voice, in the distance. “My Chani, I am here. I am here.”

Paul, she gasps, crying. Usul.

“Take my hand,” he says. “I will lead you out of the darkness.”

She reaches for him.

A trickle here, of another path at her feet.

“You’re wearing blue.”

Children, Chani sees. She will have more children.

An Emperor’s twins, a Fedeykin’s twins.

A concubine’s twins.

The vision changes, warps, recedes, bleeds. It shifts like sand in an hourglass, and once again she does not know if she is in the past, present, or future. Or some other path. A globe of light up a flight of stairs, the gathered clouds above filtered through a black sun. Another planet, another sky full of unfamiliar stars. Then — yet another life, where she is old and gray and smiling at Paul with wrinkled blue eyes.

“There are many ways the future can unfold,” Paul says. “Mohiam only showed you one, and that is their folly. The Bene Gesserit, for all their power, only saw one path. A path where they led from the shadows. But there is more than one way. More than one future. That is why I am the Kwisatz Haderach. I see all paths.”

But Chani does not have this gift. She sees only what Paul shows her. It feels aimless.

Are you here, Usul? Are you with me?

“Always,” his voice, calm and distant.

How?

“It seems my wife is not as much of an enemy as I previously thought,” Paul answers.

But it is not as simple as that.

Chani sees it now. The complexity of Irulan. She contains multitudes. An ally, maybe a friend, but an enemy too. Irulan went to Paul, though, didn’t she? He won the fight against Fenring, one hand dropping his crysknife to his other, a switch that the Count did not anticipate, a switch that allowed Paul the cover to thrust his knife in a killing gouge. Irulan came to him afterwards, after the Fremen crowds had descended into mad celebration, after the Houses had capitulated, all bowing to him alone in a crowd so large it receded into the horizon. Chani understands — how Irulan betrayed her Bene Gesserit training by bringing Paul to Chani. To protect her, to save her against Mohiam’s terrible dealings.

But it is not so simple.

Because even while Irulan saves, she plots. Chani can see it. The future in which Irulan conspires against Chani, so many futures. Contraceptives — drugs deposited into bland tea. Chani sees it, even, in the past. The little chat they had with one another in her bedroom mere weeks back. Chani had not accepted the offered water then, the tea resting untouched in front of her. Even then, Irulan had been scheming to keep Chani barren.

Irulan is an enemy.

Irulan is a friend.

Irulan is neither, and both.

Chani understands, the birth of her twins will be her death.

The unintended favor Paul thinks is written in so many futures.

Death, always death.

Childbirth is Chani’s death.

Irulan is the cause, the reason it takes so many years for death to catch up with Chani. Is it possible to hate a woman so much? And owe her a great deal? This woman, this wife of her lover – Irulan is a contradiction, a multitude of things. The recrimination on her face, a look of unrest in her eyes, some expression that Chani cannot identify. And that’s the problem, isn’t it? Because Irulan will never be one thing. But — a mother, Leto says, a faint discovery, to my twin brother and sister. A mother to orphans. She is not evil. She will repent.

“Hello, Little One,” Paul says, sensing Leto’s presence with surprise. “You should not be seeing this.”

I see many things, Leto says. Many futures. Some, in fact, where I do not live long.

“Follow me, the both of you,” Paul insists. “Irulan is not a concern right now. Follow me. You do not want to drown in these waters.”

It bleeds, it blisters. So many futures. So much death. But Chani crashes underneath the weight of another path, larger than any other before it. She sees what Paul saw when he first drank the Water of Life, the visions that led him to declaring himself Emperor, Lisan Al Gaib. Because it is unavoidable, isn’t it, the death of so many? Chani sees it now, she understands. Any path will lead to death, to so much death, but if— if Paul sets things in motion, if Paul plays his hand right, perhaps humanity will not end.

Perhaps by sacrificing millions, he will save billions.

More visions.

Choices she will later dissect.

Paths that will forever haunt her.

She sees that any safe course will only lead downward into a spiral, a stagnation for humanity.

Oh, Paul, she breathes. There are no good choices, are there? Only bad ones. Only horrible ones.

“My Chani, if there was any other way, any path without death, I would have chosen it.”

Instead of ramping up the visions, she can feel Paul pulling them back. It is the strangest thing – how she can read his emotions so easily when he denies so many others everything. Paul loves her, and it is his only salvation.

Leto, Chani cries, next.

She sees his death, too, now.

“Chani,” Paul urges. “It is not written. It is not set.”

I’m scared, Chani thinks.

“Do not be. I have been in the dark before. I can lead you out.”

How do I follow you out?

She can feel Paul’s presence against her body, the dip of his head towards her—a kiss bestowed upon her lips, breathless and soft. He wants to bury himself in her until she forgets the horror she has seen, until this burden is no longer hers — but there is no undoing this. She knows now, she understands. That he loves her, he loves her more than anything, he loves— he is the reason for so much death, but he is also the reason for so much life. It is a necessary sacrifice. It is—

“Follow my voice,” Paul says, and then uses the Bene Gesserit Voice to command her. “Awake.”

Chani awakes — with tears on her lips, the Water of Life neutralized. The doubt and fear are slow to dissipate in her veins, but they degrade when she sees another devastating emotion in Paul’s features, too much grief held within, too much unspoken. He is a man haunted by his choices, perhaps by sins greater than any she could ever imagine. Even still, Chani can see the path forward, why he has made so many choices that she could never understand before. She understands it now. The future at peril. All of humanity. There is no future without death. There is always a threat.

“You surrendered to me,” she says, staring up at him in shock, in understanding. “You let me slide the knife into your stomach.”

Paul does not deny it. “If that is my fate, then so be it. But I do not think it is our path. I still have hope for us, my Chani. It is the only hope I have left.”

Chapter Text

Chani feels like delicate gold filigree, so fragile to the touch she could crumble. She has never had need of such useless ornate things, but the tender care that Paul treats her with afterwards is with this strange sort of reverence — of too careful regard. She will not crumble; Chani cannot. Not even after something that should have broken her has left her weak and bent at the waist like a broken doll, she will not break. Chani fights. It is what she does. Chani is a fighter. It is who she is.

Still, the hours afterwards are a daze.

Paul does not leave her side, not even for a moment, not even as his empire demands careful management. They retreat back to his cavernous bedchambers in the southern citadel, where the Suk Doctor and a Fremen midwife are both summoned.

She is tended to, fussed over, examined and prodded, while Paul cannot keep himself still, cannot keep his hands to himself. After the examination, he sits beside her and absently runs his hands up and down her thigh, coming to rest on her knee, a reassuring gesture. Reassurance for him or her, she cannot tell.

“The child is strong,” the Suk Doctor determines.

“Take rest,” the Fremen midwife encourages.

Chani only nods, and says nothing in return.

“We will need to decide what to do with Mohiam and Lady Margot,” Jessica says. There is a clinical detachment to the conversation, to the way she discusses it. “A threat against Chani must be treated as a threat against the Atreides Empire. She carries the heir.”

In the back, Irulan stands — tall and regal, head held high.

It is an act.

Chani can see the fear of the unknown threatening to submerge the Princess. She is in uncharted lands, her gambit to save Chani from her own order now leaving her with — what had Irulan called them? Sharks in the water.

But it has earned her a place inside Paul’s inner circle, his war council.

“We should kill them both,” Alia determines, startlingly ruthless. “No trial, no witnesses. A private execution, nothing more.”

Irulan’s composure cracks. “You make an enemy of an entire order. Chani just told you the Reverend Mother is your Grandmother.”

“And Paul killed our Grandfather,” Alia says, acutely amused. “It is a fitting end to that entire side — no offense, Mother.”

Jessica turns to her, firm. “Alia,” she hisses, a reprimand.

The conversation continues, but Chani tunes it out.

She doesn’t mean to, there is just too much happening. Too much for any one thing to focus upon. The Water of Life leaves its stained residue.

In the back, Gurney is whispering to Paul, sounding urgent but deferential, “We need to put our people in play immediately. The Great Houses are kneeling now. We cannot let the moment lapse.”

Paul only replies, “I trust you to handle the Great Houses, Gurney. Seek my mother’s council. Act in my stead to manage the capitulation and terms of their surrender.”

Gurney glances at Chani briefly, and she would not blame him for feeling the burn of frustration. She is a distraction for Paul, and no one — not even Chani — can claim otherwise. She knows a little of the decisions needed to be made now, and knows some of it is already decided. With Count Fenring dead, control of Caladan will fall to Gurney as Governor. Similarly, Stilgar will likely be named Governor of Arrakis, an honorary title that will secure his place to rule if Paul ever needs to leave the planet. There are so many things to work out, so many contingencies, so many plans to unfold, but instead of the dissatisfaction she expects to see in Gurney’s gaze at her distracting presence, she sees something else instead.

When she finds focus again, Gurney is standing in front of her. Perhaps he has been there for some time, she cannot tell. It is hard to concentrate.

“I’m sorry,” Gurney says. “I wasn’t there to protect you.”

Paul is once again in the back, conversing this time with Stilgar over the arrival of his impending Sarduakar fleet, but Chani knows he is aware of their whispers just as he is aware of everything else. His focus is never far from Chani.

“Is the— is the child all right?” Gurney asks, gruffly.

Chani understands, then. Gurney doesn’t seem to know how to convey his concern or sympathy in a way that wouldn’t come off pedantic or too grizzled, but she carries the future heir of the Atreides House now. She supposes that makes them family, in a certain way.

Tell him I am fine, Leto says, from inside her.

Chani jolts.

The voice inside her is both a comfort and a blaring alarm.

Are you with me, Leto?

He answers immediately, a faint voice. Yes, Mama.

I – I do not know how to navigate this. I do not know how to take care of you.

It will come to you, Mama. You need not worry. This will work out.

But she has seen the visions. She has seen the many paths forward where nothing works out, where only tragedy remains. You sound so certain.

You are the one constant, Leto tells her. Why do you think Paul sacrifices so much to keep you with him? He knows the value of you. He sees your judgment as pure. Sincere.

You call him Paul? Why not Father? Or Abu?

I will, in time. But he has so many names already. He will not miss it if I call him something familiar for now. We will have time to come to know each other — later. For now, one owes to their mother three times more love and obedience than that owed to one’s father. Paradise lies at the feet of one’s mother, after all.

Chani recognizes the words. They are Fremen scriptures, older than time itself. And already, Chani understands — Leto will have his allegiance to her over his father. It is a certain thing, as certain as breathing comes naturally.

I must rest, Mama, Leto tells her. It is tiring in this new body. I must sleep.

Sleep, then. Rest. I will keep you safe.

I know you will.

Later, Jessica says, “It will take some getting used to, that voice inside you now belonging to another. The Water of Life does different things to different people, but your child will be like mine. Like Alia. It will take some — adaptation.”

“Have you gotten used to it?” Chani asks her, pointedly.

Jessica looks across the room and stares at the precocious toddler with more intelligence, more acidic wit, and more capability of manipulation than any three other Bene Gesserit ladies combined.

Jessica says nothing, and it is a damning omission.

It is finally night, blessedly.

The southern heat is slow to disperse but it is the first thing she does when she is certain she is alone with Paul. “Please—”

He kisses her so intensely her head hits the back of the door with a thud, but neither of them seem to notice. She is too distracted — too driven by need, by his presence, his touch, the visions like pillars of sand crumbling down to drown her. She feels overcome – burning for it, really, so much her skin almost feels like it’s on fire.

She has never begged for his touch, never had the need to. No, she has never begged for his touch but that night she comes close, reduced to little more than panting breaths and broken pleas. Her hands urgent on his scalp, his on top of her crumpled dress drawing them higher up her thighs. Please, softly uttered, and he responds before the word has even finished passing her lips, kissing her mound with such focus and dedication that she cannot think; his lips blot out the world, his fingers moving inside her smears the lines of her visions, his groans blemish the haunting voices in her head. Everything else loses meaning when Paul is with her.

“Look at me while I make you come, Chani. Look at me.”

A delighted shiver goes through her as she obeys.

He’s so attentive to her, every swipe of his fingers drawing a gasp, every shift in her hips drawing his lips eagerly forward to chase. He drinks from the well of her like a dying man, takes so long to pleasure her with his mouth that she peaks several times and feels her body collapse afterwards each time, softened by the day’s brutality.

“Are you with me, Usul?”

“Always,” he answers, as he joins their bodies as one.

He licks the curve of her ear, breathing hotly against her shoulder as he presses into her again and again. Presses her into the mattress with forceful thrusts, picking up a possessive pace as soon as her body adjusts around him, gives him enough of a nod to let him know she can take it, she wants it; lets him work himself up into frenzy, lets him go off leash, and she can feel it in every one of his aching thrusts — this frantic fear and frenzied desperation in his staccato rhythm, a grinding push and pull.

He forces her upward with every bruising thrust, a strength hidden in his slender hips, thrusts so hard she isn't sure she can hold off for long before falling into an obliterating peak.

He can make her feel so loved, so cherished; he can make her feel so defenseless, so trapped — reduced to something receptive and accepting of things she should not abide. This love is a ruination, it is a salvation. She is a vessel, she is not her own self. She is his, and he is hers, and it is both of it damned. When he presses the pad of his thumb against her clit, it's like a spell, her undoing, a harsh command the same as if he used his Bene Gesserit Voice to make her come.

By the time he follows her into oblivion, she is in a complete disarray across the mattress, boneless, weak, and he holds onto her hips with a persistent obsessive touch, reverence in the sweeps of his hands across her damp skin.

Once upon a time, in a lifetime different from this, their days would be numbered. Their coupling only a herald of doom. In this lifetime, after seeing what she’s seen, being through everything she has been through, it only makes Chani cling harder to him, more desperate, more urgent. She sees everything she can lose now; she sees everything she can gain. All she wants is Paul at her side, her family, her child, her children. A blurring ache of possibilities that burn away the hauntings of other more ill-begotten fates.

Afterwards, Paul holds her carefully in their too large bed. He doesn’t sleep, and for a blind man he certainly cannot take his eyes off her. The silence should be a lull of comfort, but Chani can feel so much in the space surrounding them and what little space is between them.

She sees so much more than she did yesterday.

She knows so much more.

Paul has done the best he can with the choices he has been given, she knows this now. Sees the path he has taken, the avenues he has avoided that would have resulted in even more death and carnage. There is no safe option, no good ones. He has been so alone through all of it, even when she was there. She cannot imagine the isolation, the weight on his shoulders. She does not want to add to it any further, either.

Still, “I need time,” she tells him. “I cannot— I need time.”

Paul, his hand gently on the curve of her cheek, drawing her gaze up to him, a wealth of understanding in his continence. “I know. You can leave whenever you desire, Chani. I promised you this.”

It will all work out eventually, she tells herself.

This is not goodbye.

This is — simply a time to seek understanding and acceptance.

The next morning, the Sarduakar fleet arrive.

Chani uses the cover of their landing, the jubilation that spreads through the south into outright comotion. Thunderous drums beating through the south as a welcome home, announcing the fleet’s arrival with deafening celebration and a large crowd. The Fedeykin returned home after two years abroad are welcomed as heroes. Even several Shai-Huluds make appearances in the distance, their breaches over the sands seen as a sign of good fortune and fate. The citadel rests on solid bedrock, the few secure outposts in the south, but even still she can feel the quiver and shake of the drums and the Shai-Huluds roaring in concert, in tandem. It is a homecoming that even Chani can delight in, but for her it is a distant celebration.

Instead, there are preparations to be made.

The midwife insists on a Palanquin. “It is not safe for a mother-to-be to drift on a Shai-Hulud with maker hooks,” she chides Chani, when Chani resists.

Chani has been an expert sandrider since she was a child, and now to be treated like an invalid— the Palanquin is used to take elderly and children far distances, people who could not ride the backs of a sandworm themselves and needed to be carted along like belongings. Chani has ridden the backs of Great-Grandfathers for nearly three-fourths of her life, she will not—

“You have more than yourself to think of, now,” the midwife scolds.

Truer words have never been spoken.

Still, she stares mutely in mutiny as she is taken to a large delicately weaved cart, the covers affixed closed with rope and wrapped around with loose cloth. Radiqa spends several minutes padding the bottom with thick linen, and Chani realizes she has a minder now. Echoes of visions hit her in the way she imagines it sometimes does to Paul — she sees Radiqa through the years, a faithful follower, a figure who would never betray or abandon Chani. It is perhaps the same zeal that Stilgar displays in his reverence to Paul, and Chani is not at all comfortable with it. But it is foolish to deny it — she does want companionship. They will come to be friends, Radiqa and Chani. It is not the same as what she shared with Shishakli, but it is true. It is faithful.

Behind her, there are familiar footsteps. “The Palanquin is just while you are pregnant,” Paul tells her, reading the stiff lines of her body with plain humor. His eyes crinkle like they used to, crows feet of amusement, and she softens just at the sight of that. “You will be hooking your maker-hooks into a sandworm in exactly a year. You will teach our son to ride, one day.”

“So certain, Usul? You will not teach him yourself?”

“You’re the better rider,” he offers.

She kisses him once, on the lips; lets the Fedaykin surrounding them witness it, lets the midwife and women whisper in their pleased gossip. Then she kisses him a second time, this time to the bruised knuckles on his left hand, a faint injury sustained in his fight with the Count.

It doesn’t feel real. She survived the Bene Gesserit trap. He survived the fight against Fenring.

Still, the day after, they are parting.

“I will see you soon,” he tells her in a hushed voice, and before she can ask, he adds: “Every night, I will see you in my dreams.”

“Pleasant ones, I hope,” she tells him. But Paul does not respond, so she finds herself stepping closer, offering reassurance. “You need not persist on such little. You will see me again beyond dreams, Paul Atreides. I promise you that.”

Makab Sietch is familiar and yet foreign.

They look at her like she is an outsider, but already they have made space for her to take on the mantle of Naib. The men bow their heads at her when she passes through the halls, but she can sense the reservations, the questions, the doubt. She may have bested Taliq in the Tahaddi Challenge, may have claimed all he held by rights, but she is still an unknown factor to these Fedaykin. Yet no one can challenge her, not while she is pregnant. To fight a pregnant woman, even a Fedaykin, would be a dishonor. So her role as Naib is secure, at least until her son is born.

“Why are you here, Sihaya?” a woman asks.

“I need to know the people under my protection.”

The elderly woman nods. “And can we expect you to stay for a while?”

“At least until the birth,” Chani determines. “It is important I have a Fremen child, in the Freman way.”

There is a measure of understanding in the woman’s nod, a measure of approval. “The plants that grow in the desert must have deep roots to reach water. It must have deep roots.”

Chani nods. She says nothing more than this when others ask. Only gives this one simple answer until people stop asking. Curiosity follows her around like a loyal pet, but Chani does the only thing she can do. Let her actions speak for herself, let the people come to their own judgment. It will be a slow-going thing, to earn these people’s trust, but important things like this take time. They take effort.

Chani has never done things any other way.

“Be careful not to look at deformed animals,” that same old woman warns her, many times. “It is a bad omen for an expectant mother.”

There are so many superstitions surrounding pregnancy, the birthbed oftentimes a deathbed for a Fremen woman.

But it will not be this childbirth that may claim Chani’s life.

The birds come every once in a while to deliver their messages. A longstanding way of communication between sietches. Stilgar sends his regards, alongside a message. “The Fedaykin from the ships are having growing pains returning to the desert. Tell me of any trouble you hear. I will visit shortly.”

That is all. That is all the message says.

There are a few from the Sarduakar fleet who have returned to Makab Sietch. They tell wild stories, feral stories of other worlds and other people and other battles. Umma tamut wa-umma tanbut, they say. One nation dies and another is born. All under the banner of Lisan Al Gaib. There is a distance in their eyes sometimes, a faraway look that makes Chani feel as if they are seeing horrors past and present, future and imagined, just as she does. Chani understands that more than most, but the first few times she asks them, they deny it. They speak to her as if she is an extension of the Mahdi, deep and reverential, and she hates that.

“It is as if they see djinn behind closed eyelids,” Stilgar says, when he visits. “It is something they cannot outrun.”

He looks at her as he says this, and Chani frowns. “I am not outrunning anything.”

Stilgar hums. “Then why are you here?”

She is tired of answering this question. “My people are here.”

“Your people, yes, but not your family.”

Paul is her family, the words left unspoken.

She does not bother denying it anymore.

“A bird flies away every day,” Stilgar says. “But it knows its true home. Come home, little bird, when you finally accept it.”

Every night, she dreams.

Death, the many paths shown to her, the many ways it will all descend into madness. She still sees it, haunted by it — the way the crysknife feels in her hand, the death grip she has on the handle, as it slides into Paul’s body. The memory of a thing yet to come has her gasping awake in terror most nights.

That is only one way, one path, but there are others.

Another, where she births twins.

Another, where she is by Paul’s side until they are old and gray.

So many, where she dies in childbirth. So many, where she does not raise her twins. So many, where Paul wanders into the desert right after her body is laid to rest, a man filled with grief and without hope, no longer an Emperor or Muad’dib or Usul or even Lisan Al Gaib. A wanderer, blind and nameless.

A few, where even little Leto dies.

Do not worry, Mama, Leto assures her. Already those paths are narrowing. It will not be so easy to kill me now.

Her son is a comfort, she finds — most of the time.

We must take care to avoid Irulan, he says, another time. The Princess will protect her interest, first and foremost.

“She will be faithful only after my death,” Chani agrees.

My brother and sister will have only good things to say about her. They do love her dearly.

“They don’t yet exist,” Chani replies.

But they have voices. I see them, I hear them. They tell me not to judge Irulan by her worst actions, it does a disservice to her.

Chani says nothing to this.

“Where I come from,” Chani had once told Irulan, “you have your friends and your enemies.”

Irulan, it turns out, is a third unnamable thing, but she tries not to think of her lover’s wife too much. It is never a thing she completely manages, but Chani tries it nonetheless.

Four months into her stay at Makab Sietch, Radiqa comes to her. “There are some— they have questions about the Mahdi. They wish to speak to you about them.”

Doubts, she knows.

Probably valid doubts, Leto thinks.

She nods at Radiqa. “Gather them. I will address these questions.”

That afternoon, there is an assembly of men and women larger than she anticipates. She sits on the floor, cross-legged, poised and prepared, while a man she’s come to see as a learned man, a kind man, says, “He is a foreigner. He is not of this world, and will never be of this world. How can we trust a foreigner to protect our fate?”

Chani takes a deep breath, and says, “You cannot.”

A murmur of shock through the crowd. They had not expected her to say this.

She continues, “You cannot trust Paul Atreides to hold the fate of the Fremen above everything else. He is more than just a ruler of Arrakis. He is the Emperor of the entire known universe, and he will balance that which happens to the universe against that which happens to us. Sometimes, we will be outweighed.”

Discomfort rippling through the crowds, anxiety notching higher.

“But,” Chani says, carefully, “he will always protect us where he can. He will always be faithful to us if he can manage it.”

“You speak highly of fidelity from a man married to another woman.”

“So you know I know this from experience,” Chani tells him. “Emperor Paul Atriedes played politics when he married a Princess, but Muad’dib stayed faithful and true to me. I carry his firstborn, a Fremen, in my womb. I carry his heir, and the heir to the entire Empire.”

Looks exchanged, understanding passing, whispers of approval growing.

Paul Atreides may be a foreigner, but his son will not be.

He comes to visit her not long after. As if her assembly had been a summons, in fact. She is busy when he arrives, but she hears her name shouted, the children waving their hands to catch her attention. “You must come, Naib! He is here! He is here!” She hears the comotion from corridors away as she follows the whispers. The veneration and the news reaches her ears even faster than the noise should be able to travel. Muad’dib has arrived, someone tells her, as she hurries past. He looks most eager to see his Sihaya.

She tries not to rush. She tries to maintain some modicum of grace as she marches through the halls to find him with her head held high in dignity, but her footsteps betray her and she ignores the knowing teasing looks of those she passes by. She is starting to finally show now, the roundness of her belly only starting to fill out. It does not make her any slower, but she feels eyes on her as she ambles her way through the familiar halls. She has gained familiarity here; most have come to respect her, and her place of acceptance is easing with only a few exceptions here and there. Still, the teasing is something new, something that belies more fondness than she had expected.

The atmosphere itself is charged when she enters the room they host him in.

He’s sitting cross-legged on a rug, dressed in his familiar stillsuit, a warm brown woolen coat speckled with sand. The murmurs cease at the gust of wind that comes in with her sudden entrance, and everyone stares from one to another, but all she sees, all she has eyes for is the singular man sitting near the wall, a humble figure while the others stand up and hover.

“Muad’dib,” the others say, pressing warm hands to him as they depart to leave these two alone.

“What are you doing here?” Chani asks, when it is just the two of them.

He opens his mouth as he rises to his feet, stares at her with wide eyes as if he has forgotten the meaning of words. She is draped in a long gray linen, and it occurs to her that he is staring at her stomach, at the small swell of life there, proof for all to see that she is his.

Finally, he manages, “I missed you.”

It is so endearing, so honest, so unexpectedly frank, she laughs. She practically sprints towards him. His arms are around her at once, his hand cradling her jaw to inspect her, and instantly she feels like a piece of her has returned to her body, a part of her soul. That feeling of salvation washes over her at his touch, a soft warmth as she leans into him, then looks up, inspecting him in return. In the dimmed lightning, he looks exhausted, older than he’s ever looked before.

“Usul,” she breathes, her heart aching as she takes note of the sheer inexplicable devotion in his expression. Her hand caresses his jaw, resting against the sharp curves as her eyes search out his once again, blue meeting white, an endless exchange of longing replacing loneliness. “ My Usul, you look tired.”

“I find myself feeling renewed again,” he rasps against her lips, just before he kisses her.

He tastes of tea, mint, and longing — and all she wants is to pull all that loneliness out of his chest. It isn’t long before the kiss turns famished, her voice dissolving into a broken gasp as he circles the base of her throat with his free hand, his thumb on her pulsepoint; he must find her heart as rapid as the wings of a hummingbird. His mouth leaves a trail of soft kisses, and she melts into him.

“My Usul,” she breathes. “I am here.”

How long will he be here? Leto asks.

As long as he can afford, Chani tells him.

Leto hums. Tell him hello. Tell him I look forward to our talks when I am older.

Your talks?

We will have many in the future. Not yet, not now. Now is my time with you, Mama. His will come later.

She keeps him for several days.

The first day, she is selfish with his time — dinner eaten alone in her quarters, her door closed and unwelcoming to intruders. She is soft, and wet, and burning for him in her bed, and he has no complaints when she wakes him in the middle of the night to take him inside her again. Her pregnancy hormones have been running amok unchecked, and now she finally finds some release. She takes shameless advantage when she can.

“You can come back with me,” he offers, that first night, lips pressed against her throat, a faint whisper against sweat soaked skin. “I have made a nursery in the Imperial Wing.”

A foreign thing to do. Her son will sleep beside her for the first few months, she is certain.

She shakes her head. “I will have my son here in the desert. I will give birth to a Fremen.”

Paul does not protest. “And how is little Leto?”

Strangely and blessedly absent, when they are in the bedroom. “He says he looks forward to your talks.”

“As do I,” Paul hums, knowingly.

They spend a great deal of their time having sex, but it’s also the first time they can just be together without the fear of a crumbling empire. He can lay with her for as long as they want — until the first flourish of the sunrise has turned into blazing afternoon heat.

But the third day, she must share him with others. Gurney greets her at dinner, and she had not even realized he’d come along. “Yeah,” he mutters, wryly, knowingly. “You two seemed preoccupied. Can’t imagine with what.”

She refuses to acknowledge the blush crawling up her neck.

“How has he been?” she asks Gurney. “He hasn’t said much, but he looks tired.”

“The Great Houses have needed a reminder or two of their defeat,” he tells her, but dismisses the concern quickly. “But he is handling it, as he handles everything else. Like he was born to rule.”

The fourth day, the elders and the children take up his time. The elders talk his ear off about the war, about his next determinations for the Fedaykin. The children rescue him when the talks run in circles, and he is ushered from one place to the next, an impromptu tour, all the children eager for his attention. They laugh as he plays with the littlest one, a baby barely older than one, and he glances up at Chani every so often as the thought is exchanged — they will have a little one of their own soon enough. The sight of him with a babe in his arms does something rather obscene to her, and she ends up pulling him away for another private meal in her quarters where they barely make it through the door before they are on one another. He takes her against the wall, quick and desperate and urgent.

The fifth day, she knows is the last.

“Come with me,” he asks, and to his credit this is only the second time he has asked. “I miss you, Chani, more than I can breathe.”

“I miss you too, but it is not yet my time. I will come to you when it is.” She softens the words with a smile, and a counteroffer. “You can come here anytime you wish, though.”

“Is that right? Makab Sietch is welcoming to Lisan Al Gaib now?”

“Him, maybe. But certainly to my Usul.”

He must be a lonely man indeed, because he visits her several times during her pregnancy. Once, even, showing up in the dead of night, alone — no guards, no Gurney, no escort whatsoever. He looks disheveled and haunted, and she knows the look of him when he is in the midst of his spiraling visions. He stares at her like how a dying man looks at a glass of water just outside his reach, flustered and upset, a larger crack in his façade than he would ever dare show others. She has the impression that several things have caught him off guard lately. He is not one to be so easily rattled, but by instinct alone she can read his emotions so easily when his features deny everything to everyone else.

“I am here, Usul. I am with you.”

She takes him back to her quarters, offers him what comfort she can with her body and soul.

But she has a dream that night, too, and it feels like a vision instead. Not one of the hundred and one visions she’d seen when drowning in the Water of Life, but something else. Something more subtle, more elusive. A lonesome man cast in shadows, a glass of liquor held loosely in his hand. His expensive black silk shirt is unbuttoned at the collar, revealing the bob of his throat as he swallows down the bitter alcohol, and he looks devastated. She has never seen Paul look as grief-stricken as this image presents her, not in all the days she’s known him.

As if caught looking, the figure turns and looks at Chani, one ghost sensing another. As if she is looking into the future, and he looking into the past.

She wakes with a gasp, a cold tremor down her spine. Beside her, Paul is still asleep, blissfully unaware of the despondent image burned into her dreams. Her head turns, and she imagines it is poetic — this turnabout, a reversal of their usual roles. Perhaps it is her rapid breathing, perhaps it is her beating heart, but something shifts enough that Paul awakens. His head lifts, eyebrows raised as he takes in her disheveled state, and it’s then she realizes she has been crying.

“What is it?” he asks, instantly concerned, rising to reach for her. He hovers over her still in his loose pants and bare feet, nothing at all like the broken Emperor in her dreams; nothing at all and somehow exactly alike.

“Why must we be haunted by these possibilities?” she asks him, tears gathered and falling from the brim of her lashes. “Why must we be burdened with it? I wish I did not know this. I wish I had never learned it.”

“I know, I know,” he soothes her. “I wish I could take this burden from you forever.” But he can only comfort her in the dark, let her release her water with little judgment. “I cannot lose you,” he tells her. “I will not, Chani.”

“We will find a way,” she promises him, in return. “We will find the narrow path forward. One where I will not die in childbirth, one where Leto will grow up tall and strong. We will be a family.”

“I know, I see us giving each other love in the quiet between storms. It’s what we’re meant to do.”

Perhaps, she knows, this is all that they have. Moments of peace between periods of violence. But so long as she never needs to know the feel of a blade in her hands, sinking into Paul’s stomach, she will fight tooth and nail for any brighter future. Already by seeing it, she wills herself to change it. It is not written. It is not set in stone.

“You’re the strong one, Chani,” he breathes, cupping her face, bringing her eyes to him. “You’ve always been the strong one. Stay with me.”

“Always.”

The next time he comes, he brings a Suk Doctor with him.

“We have midwives here,” she chides him. “Women know more than men when it comes to childbirth.”

“Just — humor me,” he tells her, and there is a faint desperation buried in his voice. “Let him examine you.”

She says nothing. Allows his doctor to take her vitals, to set his fingers on her body and examine her.

I am not the birth he needs to worry about, Leto says to her. He is letting his fear master him. Fear is the mindkiller.

“That is your grandmother speaking,” Chani chides. “No, this is something else.”

Later, Paul explains it to her. “There is a new method they are developing for troublesome births. They can— they can cut the womb open. They can take out the babes this way, if there is difficulty getting them out through the birth canal.”

“That sounds barbaric,” Chani gasps.

“They give the mother anesthesia,” Paul assures her, quickly. “You would feel nothing.”

A pause. “The twins,” she realizes.

Paul nods. “We have — we have to wait. It will be many years before they can work out how to do it safely, but I am having the doctors learn all they can in the meantime. I am having the best flown in, Chani. I will find one who can—”

“I know,” she cuts him. “I trust you.”

A cesarean delivery, Leto says in approval, humming. Perhaps, yes. Tell him I approve.

She laughs softly under her breath. “Leto is impressed.”

Paul offers the closest he’s come to a smile this entire visit. “I’m glad.”

The next visit, he comes with supplies.

It is a Fremen tradition that a man gifts his woman many things upon the eve of delivery. Clothing and finery, jewelry, water rings, household items, and toys and clothes for the unborn child. But the sietches are stuffed to bursting these days, resources limited. It has been many generations since a man brought his woman as much as Paul has brought her, but none of that is as important as the last item he brings to her, the final one.

It is also a tradition that the man forge the crib of his firstborn himself, and this requires harvesting the bark. A difficult thing in the desert, which only proves the vitality and capabilities of one providing for his new family. She knows Paul could have easily ordered the materials, Emperor of an entire universe as he is, but she knows he didn’t. He honors the Fremen traditions, and comes to her nearly sunburnt after spending a week in the dunes by himself. He must have spent days looking for the corespsidon bush and the other small desert trees, a place to harvest the bark. Honey mesquite, desert willow, these are in few supply, some too brittle and some too thin. He would’ve had to dig deep for the spruce roots, to cut and sew them together for the babe.

When he presents her with the crib, Chani is a little speechless but proud.

“I think the next time I come,” he tells her, “I stay until the birth.”

“Can you be gone from your empire for so long?”

He smiles at her, pleased with himself, if only because he has sensed that he has pleased her. “I think they can manage without me for some time.”

But a birth is no place for a man, Fremen say.

She is given a special room when her labor begins, away from the others in the sietch. Assisted by a few experienced women including her midwife and Radiqa. The labor is long hours, and she rests on a reed mat padded with blankets and too many pillows. Paul is not supposed to be present, but the man has forgotten the meaning of the word, no. He pushes his way in, orders the others to leave him be. The midwife sniffs in disdain, but can say nothing to the Mahdi. He is here by the grace of divinity itself, otherwise Chani is fairly sure the midwife would skin him alive.

“She doesn’t scare me,” Paul insists, and Chani raises her eyebrow at him. “Well, she does, a little, but not enough.”

The birth is a messy thing — painful.

I will be with you in a few hours, Leto says. But I will not be able to talk for some time. I will miss talking with you, Mama, but I think — yes, I think it is time I meet my father.

Leto is born under a night sky in the Fremen way, in blood and pain.

Chani labors for twenty-three hours, a fact that she grouses to her son about the entire time. Paul doesn’t leave her side for any of those long brutal hours. Her son’s umbilical cord is cut by his father, tied and a portion of it saved so that later it could be sewn into a piece of weathered sandworm skin, in a diamond shaped manner, hung on a hoop to ward off evil. But the first words uttered into a newborn’s ears, usually that of a Fremen prayer, are not spoken. The prayer usually speaks of Lisan Al Gaib and his coming paradise, and Chani does not expect Paul to utter these prayers into his son’s ears. She doesn't know what words are first spoken into her son’s ears by Paul, only that any fussing that the child had done immediately stops.

When Leto is placed in her arms, Chani feels at peace again— sweat stained, blood speckled, and all.

“Hello, Little One,” she greets him, softly.

And while Leto cannot speak yet, he does return to her a breathtaking smile.

Three months to the day of his birth, exactly one year since she left the southern citadel, Chani makes the journey to Arrakeen. Her farewells at Makab Sietch are heartfelt, but brief. Chani does not do goodbyes well. Her duties as the Naib are handed off to another she finds worthy, a practical exchange, and her belongings are minimal and easy to pack up, despite all the fuss a newborn requires.

What comes next, she knows, is inevitable.

When they arrive Paul is quickly drawn away by important matters, and she is left in the company of Alia and Jessica. “It is good to have you back, Chani,” Jessica greets.

It sounds genuine enough, but with Jessica — who knows?

“So, sister, let me look at the little one,” Alia says, as if she is not a little thing herself. She stands on her tiptoes to look over the cover of the bassinet to spy on her dark-skinned nephew. Leto cannot yet speak, but they stare at each other as if already conversing. “Yes, yes, I will make sure. Rest, little one. We can talk about this all later.”

Irulan stumbles upon them in the hallway, as they make their way towards Paul’s chambers. She looks briefly pale, looking at the bassinet which houses the heir denied to her – and then looks up at Chani, and nods. A nod of understanding, an equal exchange that Chani reciprocates back. Chani straightens, too, her faith in herself and her place clearing away the vulnerability like a storm. She can almost see the acknowledgement pass between them, shifting the air between them, as if they are both saying to each other a thousand words in a simple gesture. Insight, acceptance, threats, acknowledgements, warnings, the briefest tinge of respect, the lightest touch of animosity. Irulan quickly leaves without a word, barely marking her presence by footsteps that recede into silence, but Chani will remember this moment for years to come.

Alia sniffs in disdain, watching the other woman retreat. “I hate to say it, but one day that one will reek of trustworthiness. Not yet, though.”

No — not yet.

Her child’s Naming Day is announced like a celebration for the entire planet. It is too much for something that should be reserved for close family and friends, but some things Chani cannot fight. She bore Leto in the Fremen fashion, and now she must adapt to certain things in an Imperial Kingdom. She learns that there will be entertainment, and all about the special foreign dishes being served, including in-depth recommendations from Alia. It is all exhausting, and yet somehow she keeps listening because she knows this is important to the people.

It is Jessica that helps her with the selection of her wardrobe again, a thing that brings a memory to her mind of her first night in this palace. So much has changed since then, and yet not as much as she’d hoped. Chani is still out of her depth with the state of attire expected of her, now that she has accepted her role beside Paul. Imperial women from Great Houses all adorn themselves in waifs of dresses, in chiffons and silks and satins, all foreign materials still too delicate for Chani’s rough sun-stained fingers.

When Jessica pulls out the dress specifically tailored with Chani in mind, Chani is left speechless. It is a dress, not a stillsuit that Chani wears so much of her time. Light and airy, and more reminiscent of the clothing the Bene Gesserit wear than anything a Fedaykin would ever be seen in. Thankfully, there is no headdress, which is certainly for the best. The material clings tightly to her body, though it couldn't be called revealing. Shimmering and see through at the arms, a delicate open throat in a diamond-shaped patch, around a collar of gathered silk, all in the deepest and richest colors of blue Chani has ever seen outside of the Eyes of Ibad.

Blue, with shining patterns of gold stitching curving like curlicues all along her torso and hips. Blue, for her love for Paul.

“You look beautiful,” Jessica admires. “There will be few that will be able to take their eyes off you during the Naming Ceremony.”

“I’m sure,” Chani says, dripping with self-consciousness. “They will all be clamoring to see the exotic concubine that’s enthralled the Emperor. I’ve heard the rumors.”

“There are always rumors. Some of them help.”

A Bene Gesserit answer, through and through. “And what of his wife? Where will Irulan be during this entire ceremony?”

“Her place is not at his side, certainly not today.”

“But she will be at his side, other days. She is his wife. I am— I am just a concubine.”

Jessica must sense the wavering temerity, a beat, as she steps closer to Chani. “Is that what you think? You mark my words, and you mark them well. Think on it, Chani: the princess has his name, yet she'll live as less than a concubine — never to know a moment of tenderness from the man to whom she's bound.” A pause, as Jessica forces Chani to look at her. “While we, Chani, we who carry the name of concubine — history will call us wives.”

She does not know why, but Jessica’s words rattle in her mind so much that Chani does something unexpected. She seeks out Irulan, who sits in her quarters and will be unlikely to emerge during the entire night’s festivities. It strikes Chani as somehow cruel, this princess made a mockery of, isolated and vulnerable; even Jessica’s words, her whole demeanor against Irulan, has a level of mercilessness to it. Everyone seems to treat Irulan as an unwanted presence.

When she comes to Irulan’s door, Chani finds herself hesitant to knock. Despite that, the door opens as if to answer itself and she is brought face to face with Paul’s wife.

“Why are you here?” Irulan asks, after a moment of unsettled shock. “I did not take you as the type to gloat.”

Chani flinches. “I am not here to—to gloat. I came because…”

“Because?” Irulan prompts, a clipped defensive tone.

They will get nowhere by always being at each other’s throat, so Chani makes the first capitulation. “I never thanked you, did I? For interfering with Mohaim’s plans. You went against your order, risked much. I know you did it to gain Paul’s favor—”

“I did not do it for Paul,” she cuts in.

That stops Chani, cold. “You did not?”

A pause, where they both stare at each other across the threshold of Irulan’s bedchambers, Chani halted at the refusal of being let in, and Irulan impassive at the refusal to leave.

“I knew,” the other woman offers, tentatively, quietly. “I knew you were pregnant, or suspected it at the very least. I didn’t tell Mohaim because— well, it would have been another unacceptable failure to her, on my part. But if I’d told them, if I’d warned beforehand — I don’t know if she would have gone forward with her plans to drug you with the Water of Life. She fears few things as much as she fears abominations.”

Chani flinches again, this time in affront. “My son is not an abomination.”

Irulan seals her lips into a thin line. “Regardless, an unborn child didn’t deserve that.” A pause, and a far softer admittance: “Neither did you.”

A beat. “Thank you,” Chani only offers, again.

A glance away, then back to her. “I meant it when I said I did not want to be your enemy. I know we cannot be friends, but—” a laugh here, bitter and small. “I have no friends.”

It is a pitiful statement, and achingly true. Even Chani can see that, though she wonders why no one else does. Irulan plots and schemes, yes — Chani knows it, she has seen it. She has done unforgivable things, drugged not only Paul once with a concoction meant to disable him, but had also already attempted to drug Chani with a contraceptive the one time they brokered a conversation over tea. That says nothing of the actions Chani has seen in the future, her many years of manipulation. Irulan is dangerous.

Still, a part of her feels for the other woman, perhaps an unforgivable gap in her armor.

Everyone treats Irulan with such contempt — Paul, Jessica, Alia, even her own Bene Gesserit order — it is no wonder that she schemes for every inch of power she can wrestle. She has no alternative.

It is perhaps foolish, but Chani has always led from the heart.

She extends a hand towards Irulan, leaving it hanging for the other woman to take or dismiss. “Truce, then, if nothing else.”

Irulan eyes the hand, as if it is a trap.

Just as Chani is about to withdraw the idle hand, Irulan reaches out and takes it. “Truce,” she agrees.

But it is more than that, she suspects.

It is a start.

There is an old Fremen saying: name a thing, and you own a piece of it.

She gives her son two names. The first, the official one, is Leto Atreides II, the son of the Emperor, second of his name, the namesake of his paternal grandfather. Despite his dark skin and his round blue eyes, it is Jessica that says, “He reminds me of Paul’s father. Something about the kindness in his eyes.”

The second name is his secret name, his Fremen name. He will have an opportunity to choose another one when he is older, when he can decide for himself who he wants to be, but for now this second name is only for those close to him, those dearest. And so Chani chooses it, as she has come to know her son a great deal in these nine months of her pregnancy. She chooses the name carefully.

Sayf, the word for summer.

Not some mythical name to hang people’s hopes on, like Sihaya, and nothing disarming like the name of a small desert mouse. But summer, strong and prevalent on a planet that knows little else. He will be a force of nature, unstoppable, holding true.

Sunset levels the horizon, the sun’s last rays spilling into the Great Hall, and Chani is still agitated. An unusual state of affairs: she’s felt less nervous on the hunt or on the eve of battle. The Great Hall is too crowded. Faint sunshine filtering through the high glass windows and casting jagged shadows across the floor and stilled crowd. Beside her, Paul stands in his resplendent Emperor attire as if it is a natural second skin to him. She doesn’t know how he does it. She’s seen him take to stillsuits with all the instincts of a native born, but even here, too, he is at ease.

“Your dress tonight,” Paul whispers to her, stumbling a little clumsily over his words. “It is… pretty.”

Chani lifts an eyebrow back at him. “Only my dress?”

He flushes, then stares at her with a challenge. “You need only ask me to take off the dress, Chani, and ask me my opinion again.”

It is quite a thing that he can stumble one second, and stare her down the next. A walking contradiction, this man she loves. He is always a moving piece of a puzzle, one she may never figure out, but he is hers. That is the only certainty she needs, for now, as they make this way together.

“Ever since I was a boy,” he says to her, while they have a moment of privacy, “I’ve dreamt of you. I never dreamed I could have all this, though. Not the kingdom, not the riches. But — you, and our family. You’ve given more gifts than I could ever repay you for, Chani.”

“A gift requires no payment,” she returns to him. “I am yours, free of any price.”

She looks at him, curiously, and he looks back at her as if she is the sun. The warmth of his gaze prevents any need for Chani to cover up in this chilly palace of his, no need for any layers; she feels warmed, and pleased, side by side with him, this man she has sworn herself to, if not in matrimony than in an oath heavier than that, more laden. She will not lose herself, and she will not let him lose himself either. They will find their way together.

Chani just smiles at him reassuringly, her fingers lifting to brush back the dark locks of his hair that have fallen over his forehead.

Instead, she smiles and says: “I am here, Usul.”

fin.