Chapter Text
Paul falls flat on his ass on the training mats, and it isn’t long before Duncan’s pinned him. Paul wriggles and squirms, fighting for leverage, a foothold, a knee, but Duncan’s weight is too full across him. Paul’s grown up, even if he’d only grown into the willowy sinew of his mother’s inheritance, so Duncan doesn’t hold back against him. Paul feels more than sees when his shield lights up red.
Paul drops his head back against the mat and goes limp while Duncan climbs off of him.
“What’s wrong, my boy? I taught you better than that,” Duncan means it to tease, but Paul knows him enough to hear the frown in his tone.
Paul breathes out the snappish reaction that boils inside him. He remembers the last time Gurney made him fight just because he wasn’t ‘in the mood’.
“Nothing,” Paul says, “Just tired.”
Paul hauls himself up without Duncan’s hand, so readily offered. He flicks his shields back on.
“Again.”
They clash again, Paul struggling to use his agility against Duncan’s greater strength and speed. He hops over the weapons table, forcing Duncan to waste time going around. He darts in and out of reach. He mostly plays keep-away, too leery of getting within Duncan’s reach after his nasty fall last bout.
“Quit fighting like a mouse,” Duncan gloats. He sounds amused, but his words brace with the roughness of command. Paul feels bitter, but refuses to let it manifest.
Paul gets himself trapped. He barely realizes it until he’s backed into a corner. He can feel the walls on either side, converging sharply behind him. Not a bad place to be on the defensive, with only enemies ahead to worry about, but a last-resort in a fight.
Duncan fences him tighter in until he has nowhere left to run and the walls at his back turn against him. The endgame lasts less than half a minute.
Duncan arches one thick eyebrow.
“You wanna tell me why you just slipped up like you haven’t since your preteens?” He asks.
Paul ducks under his arm and takes his stance in the training room center.
“Again,” He calls.
Duncan obliges. Duncan handles a blade like it’s part of himself. His ease with it is anything but lazy. Still, he reminds Paul of a lion as he attacks slowly this round. Paul holds back, tense, and calculates how to get under his guard.
His mistake this round is particularly careless, and Duncan catches him around the neck with one huge arm, the flat of his blade coming to rest on Paul’s side.
Paul kicks, then, exactly where an honorless child would, and Duncan goes off balance to avoid it. They both fall to the mat, then, Paul on top of Duncan. Their shields buzz angrily at the electromagnetic contact.
Paul tries to gather momentum to stand, but Duncan holds him down.
“Paul,” He says. Paul looks down to his face, where a crescent-shaped wrinkle has formed a frown between his eyes. “This is not like you.”
Paul glares from where he’s sprawled overtop Duncan.
“Nothing,” He snaps, “I’m just tired. But maybe it’s the fault of my teacher.”
His face immediately falls when he realizes he’s been harsh with Duncan. His mother, he can snap at. They are two snarling beasts, alike in their savage cunning, and they test their teeth against each other. Gurney, he can snap at. Gurney the soldier has a thick skin, and Gurney the artist is used enough to sullenness. Even his father, the brave matador, can usually redirect Paul’s frustrations on their rare appearances.
But Duncan is special to him. Duncan is his friend, or his mentor, or– something. He isn’t quite sure these days, when Duncan appears in both his dreams and nightmares. Hell, Duncan even appears in his waking mind at night.
Paul slips off of Duncan and onto the floor beside him.
“I’m sorry,” Paul breathes. “I didn’t mean it. I’ve been… distracted, lately.”
“Distracted, how?” Duncan asks.
Paul turns his head to look at Duncan on the floor next to him, and suddenly, he can’t breathe. Duncan’s eyes stare wide at nothing, left open to the sands of time. They’re blue around the edges, the whites not irises, the unnatural blue of melange. His dark skin has paled and his face locked into a painful rictus. Blood soaks the hot orange sands around his lovely hair, and it drinks it up, monster that it is, miracle that it is. The sand is thirsty, it’s starving and parched, and it will drink its fill of blood, an unquenchable fire rages across the desert, a thousand footsteps echoing his name–
“--aul? Paul!” Duncan’s voice breaks up the vision, the sandstorm of voices chanting his name, though it still echoes in his ears.
Slowly, like sand falling away through an hourglass, the training room comes back to him. He’s on Caladan. The Castle walls rise around him, gray and protective as the cliff face, and the room is blue-gray from the cloudy light through the window.
Duncan leans over him, very much alive.
He must see the lucidity return to Paul’s eyes because some of his panic washes away.
“Paul,” He asks, “Are you alright?”
Duncan flicks his shield off, then Paul’s, and pats him down hurriedly, his tender hands checking to make sure Paul lacks any wounds.
“I’m alright, Idaho,” Paul says. He sighs.
Duncan eases back, a worried look still pinching his face.
Paul weighs his words carefully.
“I see things. At night, usually, in my dreams, but sometimes–”
Paul lays back. He raises his hand straight up in the air and moves his wrist to make his hand form a wave.
“Sometimes during the day.”
“And these– dreams…” Duncan starts hesitantly. “What do you see?”
Paul stares resolutely at the ceiling where stone hatches into stone.
“I see the desert. I see the sand. I see a woman… she may hurt me, or she will deliver me. I hear a thousand soldiers calling my name. I hear the call to prayer.”
Paul rests his hand back on his stomach. He can’t look at Duncan. He’s never told anyone of this, except for his mother and Dr. Yueh.
“Strange, but not too strange for dreams,” Duncan reasons. Paul listens for the edge of judgment in his tone, but is both relieved and disappointed when he finds none.
“It’s more than that,” Paul says stubbornly. “I see ants scavenging a body. I see a pool of blood in the burning sand.”
Paul glances quickly up to Duncan, who watches him with intent.
“I see you dead on the ground.”
Duncan’s face shutters for a fraction of a second. If he’s fearful of Paul, he does a good job not showing it.
“It’s just a dream, my boy,” He says, “Or a day dream. It’d take a lot more than some sand just to take me down.”
Paul answers in silence, letting it linger noncommittally.
“Who else knows that you… see things?” Duncan asks carefully.
Paul knows he’s being open, as open as anyone could be. He can’t help the angry loneliness that tears a gash in him. He knows how it sounds, how disastrous it could be– a child of the noble House Atreides, the only son and heir, losing time in the middle of the day, suffering visions and seeing things. He knows how it would sound to insist they were real, no matter how fiercely he knows it in his thin, birdlike bones.
He hates it sometimes, how his mother made him. He grew up with no friends, no one his age in the palace, just his family and his Father’s council. His mother made him a freak on top of that.
Paul throws his arm over his eyes.
“My mother. Dr. Yueh. I get a sleeping pill every night.”
Paul can feel Duncan’s frown where it radiates from his face. For all his subtlety, Duncan is still a helplessly honest man.
“This is a Bene Gesserit thing,” He concludes.
Paul ignores the troubled way his voice rasps over the words. He knows the way Duncan hates the Bene Gesserit, how he distrusts them openly. He’s never been overly fond of Paul’s mother, although it would take anyone years to notice. He didn’t trust their weirding ways and any potential schemes harbored against House Atreides.
Paul wondered if Duncan’s apprehension extends towards Paul, too.
“Maybe,” Paul offers ambivalently.
Duncan lays silent beside him. Paul rests in the cool darkness of his elbow where it shields his eyes. He couldn’t take it if Duncan were to reject him now. He’d grown up running three steps for Duncan’s one just to stay at his side. Paul wasn’t sure when his view had changed of the man. One day, he’d looked at Duncan, and his heart caught in his throat. It wasn’t anything special, just another day. Duncan had offered his hand to Paul to help him up after a fight. Paul felt the imprint of his hand for the rest of the day.
Paul hated it. He knew Duncan could never feel the same. For starters, Duncan was fifteen years his senior, and a loyal knight to his father. He would never betray his oath on Paul’s behalf. Fealty aside, Duncan was quite the ladies’ man. He’d heard rumors of Duncan’s romances– he was chivalrous, engaging, respectful, and wild in a way the palace maids adored.
So Paul never entertained a serious hope that Duncan– strong, elegant, charming Duncan– would find favor in slight, fey-boned, fundamentally strange Paul.
“Paul?” Duncan asks again.
Paul lifts his arm from his eyes to glare moodily. Duncan smiles.
“I thought I’d lost you again,” He says, and Paul can taste the relief.
It turns to sour guilt in his mouth.
“It’s just weird dreams,” He says.
Duncan nods carefully.
“If you say,” He agrees. “Just know you can talk to me. I’m always here for you, my boy. Whatever you need.”
“Thanks,” Paul says.
Duncan drags himself to his feet.
“I hope you had a nice break,” He says, “C’mon, my boy, on your feet.”
*
The dreams get worse over the coming weeks. Paul knows better than to run off telling anybody. Talking of visions and strange dreams would more likely result in a visit from Dr. Yueh or another, more foreign doctor than anything useful. Paul had resigned not to confide in his mother, either. Even if she listened, she wasn’t the most supportive. It didn’t seem to matter, anyway– she always knew the worst days. She liked to push him harder, then. She’d cancel his other lessons with a wave of her elegant hand and they’d practice Bene Gesserit exercises for hours.
Paul couldn’t tell if she was trying to shore up his defenses, take his mind off those dreams, or kick him when he was down.
So far, the only person he’d confided in was Duncan, and he’d been sent off-world on a short-term mission to play bodyguard.
Paul tenses his muscles one by one and calls them by name. It’s an old trick of waiting Dr. Yueh taught him. When that fails, he calls on the Bene Gesserit stillness his mother instilled in him. Heavy, wet night reigns outside the hangar, but the glowglobes fill the covered space with a soft, yellowy gloom. Duncan isn’t supposed to arrive til the timeless lull of the early-morning-late-night; Paul had checked the flight listings a hundred times today, and still, it hadn’t changed.
He didn’t have to wait up for Duncan. He knew Duncan probably wouldn’t want him to. But he always waited up for Duncan, ever since he was a child, and Duncan would whirl him off the ground and throw him into weightless orbit for one heartstopping second. Besides, Paul hasn’t been sleeping well as of late.
He shudders at the memory of last night’s mirage. He remembers a future of a burning sun and the sense-memory of the force in his hand of a knife pushing through flesh. He is haunted by the phantom or long, braided hair matted in the blood-sodden sand.
Paul checks the flight listing again. He frowns. His own internal clock is military-sharp, honed with the keen sense of a Mentat, and he trusts Thufir and Gurney enough to doubt Duncan Idaho just this once. Duncan is late.
A shaky tendril of anxiety begins to grow root in Paul.
I must not fear , he reminds himself. Fear is the mind-killer .
He repeats the mantra to himself until the anxiety settles inside him from the comfort of habit alone. The prayer is like a well-worn stone from the riverbed, now, smoothed over by the endless repetition of water over time.
Paul grows muzzy with the prayer in his mind. Only I will remain .
The overwhelming noise of the ship and the rush of beating wind are barely strong enough to pull him out of the winding paths his mind has begun to take. Paul startles awake. He checks the markings on the ship, and his gut clenches in anxiety and relief to see it’s Duncan’s charter.
The rest of the crew climbs off first, and Paul counts their faces hurriedly. He compares them to the list of deployed and crew. He pushes the image of a scavenged body out of sight and mind.
Finally, a tall man steps off the ship. Paul doesn’t have to see his face to know it’s Duncan. The broad shoulders, his swordsman’s gait, and his hair pulled back are enough to know. Relief like cool rain washes over and through Paul, and before he realizes, he’s up off the bench and running full-tilt towards Duncan.
“Duncan!” Paul calls, his only warning before he launches himself straight into Duncan’s arms.
“Ah, my boy!” Duncan laughs. He lifts Paul off the ground and twirls him like a child. Duncan holds him close even as he sets Paul down. Paul makes a subtle appraisal of Duncan’s state. His face is
rugged
fine, his body
perfect
intact, and he seems no worse for wear.
Paul glances back up to Duncan’s face. He keeps a careful hold on the strings of his emotion the way his mother taught him. Duncan stares down at him, eyes focused, as if trying to parse something new from Paul.
“Why are you awake?” He asks.
Paul takes that for the concern it is instead of the rejection it could be. Duncan, still in his flight suit, is obviously fresh from a mission, which means stale on creature comforts and human niceties. Paul breathes in and finds Duncan distinctly smells like man.
“At 0300 hours?”
Paul steps back minutely.
“You’re late,” He reminds Duncan. He smiles before Duncan can take him too seriously. “But I don’t mind. I always come to greet you. I would’ve stayed awake anyways.”
Duncan’s face softens as he looks down at Paul. Paul realizes again Duncan’s physiological advantage over him, and it feels like the sudden jolt of falling when he’s about to drift to sleep.
“You couldn’t sleep,” Duncan says. There’s no judgment in it, no pity or condemnation. Just the easy realization.
Paul keeps Duncan’s gaze where Duncan’s caught him, but doesn’t affirm or deny. He holds deathly still as an animal sensing the eyes of a hunter.
Duncan sighs, the first to give ground in a battle of wills.
“C’mon,” He says, “I’m dead on my feet.”
Duncan settles his arm over Paul’s waist, his hand at the small of Paul’s back, and guides him out the towering hangar doors. Moonlight laps gently at the walls of Castle Caladan through the arabesque windows. The glowglobes disrupt the misty gloom. Their restless hum and the quiet click of boots from the nightwatch and returning crew are the only sounds in the sleeping night.
Paul turns towards the hallway that leads back to his rooms in the royal wing. He looks back over his shoulder to wish Duncan goodnight, but the man grabs his elbow and keeps him in place.
“Paul,” He says. Paul shivers at the sound of his own name on Duncan’s full lips and pretends it's just the draft from the sea. Paul hesitates. He turns his luminous eyes up to Duncan’s, hanging on the shadows he finds there.
Duncan reaches up to cup Paul’s face; he brushes a thumb over Paul’s cheek. He tilt’s Paul’s face this way and that.
“You look like you never sleep.”
Paul can barely breathe. He doesn’t know what to say. He hasn’t slept, not well anyway, since at least before Duncan had gone. He wakes up early or in fits in the night, and he can never escape those strange dreams. The dreams burrow into him. They’re getting harder to shake during the day.
Duncan’s hand drops away. He steps decidedly out of Paul’s space.
“You can stay with me,” Duncan offers. “Anytime you need. Tonight, if you want. If it will help you sleep. I find I always sleep better with someone I trust at my back.”
Paul smiles brokenly. Everything in him aches for it. He wants to say yes and follow Duncan to his room. He wants to see what will happen from there, if Duncan will hold Paul’s face the way he just had and maybe kiss him besides. He knows the answer is no.
“Thanks,” Paul says, “But I’m alright.”
It’s a credit to his mother’s training the words come out light but sure. Perfect .
Duncan nods and steps back again.
“Goodnight, my boy.”
Duncan turns to leave. Paul searches for the outline of his broad shoulders in the moonlight.
“Duncan–” He calls softly in the night.
Duncan turns over his shoulder.
“Thank you,” Paul said, “For the offer. And– I’m glad you’re home safe.”
Duncan nods, then carries on down the hallway into the dark.
Pauls goes to his room and lays down in his bed, but he lies awake til morning.