Work Text:
Feyd-Rautha stumbled as Paul’s crysknife sunk deep into his chest. The sharp, bleeding pain remained lodged in his left lung, blood rising up his throat as he coughed out a garbled breath. Paul Atreides, the duke who never was. His eyes were old and dead, swarming with a hundred million lives deep within his blue-stained irises. All that was heard were the deep, heaving breaths of both Bene Gesserit champions, their winds intermingling as Feyd’s hand clutched the back of Paul’s head, pale lithe fingers tangled in dark, sandy curls.
Feyd had wanted to believe Muad’Dib was someone else. The Atreides heir was dead, his body left to the desert storms of Arrakis, fallen from an ornithopter and his skin devoured by the hundred legs of a starving centipede. A kangaroo mouse in the form of a wriggling rat, buried deep within the bowels of the Fremen’s idolized sand worm.
Instead, the pulsating waters inside Paul’s stillsuit growled with rumbling intent. Feyd heard The Voice in the swimming liquid even before it erupted from Paul’s mouth, the command squirming low in the Harkonnen’s gut and bursting forth with a twitch of his hairless brow.
Paul’s hand tightened around the knife. Feyd’s breathing slowed. Every muscle in his disciplined body tightened, and his mind scraped upon the memory of the box, the gom jabbar at his throat as the Lady Fenring urged him to kneel at her feet.
Desire. Humiliation. The pulsating intensity of pain and searing warmth burning through his nerves to reveal the clots underneath.
“You fought well, Atreides.” Feyd’s voice slipped through the cracks of his craving, gravely and hoarse.
Paul didn’t reply. His breathing faltered, stuttered as his eyelashes fluttered to cast gentle shadows upon his cheeks. It was everything Feyd ever wanted. A moment of truth unchained as the Baron’s body lay still for the earth and the bugs to swallow his atrocities whole. The Lisan al Gaib had seen every possible shift in the sands of time, the spice that drifted upward, inhaled through the nose and out the mouth. One twitch of his hand would remove the blade and slice through Feyd’s consciousness to dissect his soul from the soft tissue of his innards.
Feyd allowed his knees to bend, buckling under the weight of the sand worm’s teeth in his heart. Paul’s face was still, but his eyes were not. Lower, lower, Feyd sank, his gaze never leaving Paul’s. His own hand replaced the one holding his chest together. Full, pouting lips, the Harkonnen genetic marker, bowed before the Duke Atreides, pressing against the tip of Paul’s dusty boot.
Silence from the onlookers. The echoing sound of golden dust against ashen dirt. Feyd’s tongue lolled out of his mouth, slow and purposeful, laving into the ridges of Fremen-made fabric.
Feyd was still alive, his blood thrumming as the Reverend Mother murmured eternal curses upon his afterlife. Paul shifted, neck bent downward, a puff of understanding leaving his lips. Remove the knife, and Feyd would fall into oblivion. Allow his fervent disciples to step forward and coax Feyd’s water back into his body, and well, he’d seen that future too. Heard Chani’s sharp gasp and seen the metal of Princess Irulan’s headdress glint and reflect the setting sun as she calculated Paul’s every decision.
Paul’s foot nudged against Feyd’s wet chin, coaxing the shadow of his brow to look up, dark and effervescent. Feyd’s mouth hung open, blood dripping down his jaw to leave crimson raindrops on the ground.
The ocean roared in Feyd’s ears, only to be left with ringing quiet when Paul lifted his foot to press it against the crux of his thighs. The metal upon Irulan’s head twinkled like wind chimes during a Caladan thunderstorm. Usul’s pet let out a strangled gasp, hushed in a moment by the strong hand of the Lisan al Gaib’s greatest believer. Paul’s ankle repositioned itself an inch to the right, twisting and pushing with a crushing weight against Feyd.
Blood splattered onto the ground, Feyd’s lungs contracting with an inclination to masochism. His uncle was rotting. His mother had too. He would let the Fremen saviour grind him to a pulp as long as it had him here, at his knees, pleasure granted to him with a dying cost.
“Do it.” It was the expression of a boy. “Now.” It was The Voice of a ruler of a thousand generations, birthed at the measure behest by the yearning of a thousand mothers.
Feyd-Rautha came apart in front of everything he had once controlled and wished for, curling into himself as he drove the knife deeper, hips rutting like the wild animal he held deep inside. His blood was cooler than the life he was forced to expel, a sharp groan punching its way out of his full lips that was more impactful than the scar that would soon intertwine his flesh over his heart.
The corner of Paul’s mouth twitched, Harkonnen beauty and Atreides justice etched upon the siren-like features he shared with his mother.
“Were you created for this?” Paul’s question was quiet, an intimate interrogation shared with an audience of perturbed spectators.
Feyd’s mouth was dry. He had never contemplated the evaporating heat of Arrakis and the hidden desire that came with it. “I was created to serve the Emperor.”
“And what is it like, knowing that will no longer be yourself?” Paul’s foot pushed further into stained fabric.
Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen did not stutter. He always told the truth and shied away from nothing. Irrespective of the desperate humiliation gifted to him by Paul Atreides. “It brings me horrific dread and even greater desire.”
The Fremen bubbled with seething words Feyd could not understand after he spoke, indignant chattering that chewed on the stillness of the room. Paul’s raised hand silenced them in an instant.
“What do you desire, Baron?” The title was scathing, a shove against the crysknife to cement further humiliation in Feyd.
“Nothing more than to be where I am.” The grittiness of Feyd’s tone faltered as submission rose in his voice.
Paul crouched down in front of Feyd and tapped the knife in his chest with a finger, the Harkonnen drawing his bottom lip into his mouth with a heaving breath.
“Then you will live, Feyd-Rautha, if only to be at my feet when the Holy War ends in the death of the Great Houses.” Paul replied in an instant, sorting through hundreds of possibilities in his mind before picking the words that would ensure his statement to be true.
The Fremen surged forward as soon as the words left Paul’s mouth, gloved hands prodding against Feyd’s heated skin and stabilizing the shift of the knife’s deadly cut.
In a millennium of carefully crossed bloodlines, Feyd-Rautha would always end up here. At the feet of the Lisan al Gaib he would never become.