Chapter Text
Duncan Idaho understands how to care for wounded things. This is no preparation at all for the taking of a new lover.
Scree chatters its rock gossip under his boots as he drops to his haunches near the base of the mountain. Though he is accustomed, the damp in the air is cloying, lapping at his exposed throat, finding purchase in the apertures of his coat and tunic beneath. He teases the stems of the cluster upright, snicks his small hunting blade carefully so as not to impede new growth. The flowers, fresh with dew, fall into the satchel strapped at his waist. As he straightens, more pebbles shift beneath his feet, cascading down the slope. He wants to head to the river fording off the outcropping, sink his unshod toes into the liquid brace of that water, but he turns instead towards home. It is a long walk, and he has brought nothing that might speed the journey. He wants to do this, in the breath between endless meetings and summons and surveillances. He wants to walk and gather and plan things that do not end in corpses, for a change. For a small moment in time, in that space between wars that resembles silence but is actually anything but.
Peace teems with sound. Now, right now, he thinks as he skirts the talus taking him over the lip of the range, choosing the path made clearest by the progression of this year’s storms, you can hear it. On a good day like this, you can stand on a height and listen to everything that breathes.
Gurney, of course, thinks he is being sentimental. Duncan turns last night’s conversation with his old friend over in his mind as he walks, grinding the rough edges of everything the other man has so far said between his teeth. Mm, Gurney had grunted noncommittally, head bent but eyes sharp as the kindjal flashed between his palms, turning over and over for the whetstone’s pass. So this is what love’s made of you, getting up in the dew, the piss of the morning, to commit acts of wilful botany.
Oh Gurney, he’d replied, feeling his bisected eyebrow raise, you poet.
He comprehends his friend’s concern, for that is what it is, no matter what Gurney says offhandedly while they repair arms and ready the barracks for the next inevitable sortie. There is always another batch of fresh-faced men still sleepy-lidded with their mothers’ milk to begin training, always the rhythm of rising before dawn to take men into the field, thrust a fistful of steel at them and say here, this is an extension of your grip. Think of it as wedded to you. Gurney understands him well enough in these circumstances. He does not know about Duncan’s mettle in love, and who could blame him for that? Duncan scarcely knows it himself.
Except that it seems to tend to wilful botany in the piss of the morning. It could be worse. He could be attempting to write romantic verses and declaim them as a prelude to carnal acts. That might be the swiftest way for him to lose the lover he’s just earned, he thinks, and grins at the notion. Because it feels impossible to lose on that front. He’s lived long enough and through strange enough times to know he can’t vouchsafe anything, but this time he feels certain. This time, he thinks, it is possible to keep one thing safe.
Foolish in love indeed, Duncan tips his shaggy head up to the sky, laughs for a moment at the raw pleasure of it, and hurries onward home.
*
A few days shy of Paul Atreides’ seventh birthday, he woke up in the unformed spine of the morning, howled blue-gilled murder, stripped the bedsheets from his clammy limbs, and promptly vanished, with all the insistence of someone who refused to be found. Lady Jessica turned her considerable powers of observation to the task, but the frustration of her thwarted mission echoed through the drear halls. His Duke had been sombrely ineffectual, trailing the Lady down empty corridors and up parapets, their voices hushed and confiding, whispers with no heat but laced nonetheless with a dripping and thready kind of worry. Very much like a loom that knows it’s about to be snapped. To make himself useful, Duncan had applied his wits to the search, forsaking a morning into night of field reports, but not stopping to remove his outdoor kit. What he wore to hunt for Paul seemed inconsequential. The only value was in the finding, in keeping the loom weaving threads that made sense. Duncan was no great sewist, but even then he had reckoned with a basic knowledge of the shaping of the Known Universe. He had a small sense, yet a callow young conscript to the House, of what might happen if you split the fabric of things before their given and ordained time. So he didn’t stop to strip off his pilot’s gloves, nor did he spare a thought for the heaviness of his boots. He avoided the serpentine crescent of Bene Gesserit who alighted to lend the Lady their flinty-eyed counsel, and he took up his own search for his charge.
Two tenets while tracking still serve him well, and they are these. When pursuing any prey, it becomes increasingly important to work with, not against the light. To find what you seek, you must not believe you can understand it: that way lies pity at its plight, and that will never do. A fool would pity Paul Atreides, and a worse fool would look for him against the darkness. This is what the Bene Gesserit, their muscles taut and uncompromising beneath the rigours of prana-bindu, could not make accommodation for on their search for the most remarkable of seven-year-olds. Paul’s will was not subject to any superior force but his own. It defied even the most stunning acts of corporeal submission. Ten years hence, when Duncan learns that Paul’s hand has been surrendered to a nerve induction device that agonizes his little lord with pain, he is unsurprised to hear that, for all his spasming horrors, Paul never cried out. The knowledge stills Duncan’s desire to seize the Box and grind it into fine dust, but only barely.
He finds Paul in the winter library, alone. When he crosses the threshold, Duncan is surprised at the warmth in the cavernous rooms. Though it never becomes unbearably cold even this late into the standard year, the library walls are heated to the touch, transmitting a kind of bookish fever through Duncan’s layered gloves. The air is still and expectant, and somehow sweet, as if large quantities of grapes had been eaten on silver trays only moments before his entry, and the ghosts of their winey sugar wafted in that quiet place. Primitive books and primordial fruit, and one wild boy allowing himself to be found, after all.
“Little Lord,” Duncan tchts, dropping to his haunches before the giant librarian’s desk, peering beneath its cobwebbed claw legs. He brushes the dust curtains aside, and meets Paul’s mutinous, level gaze with his own. The boy sits, spindly knees drawn up to his jutting chin, elbows hugging his sides, perfectly still save for the telltale sea swell of his narrow chest, rising up and down, up and down, unceasing. His formal tunics are creased and vaguely begrimed, and he has long since abandoned his boots; Agamemnon only knows in which spidery corner of the sanctum they’ve been kicked. Duncan extends a hand; Paul staunchly refuses it, protruding his lower lip deliberately in a hallmark move. Duke Leto might well say the dukeling is above such behaviours now, but almost seven is still an awfully young age to feel Everything so keenly. Duncan was no special or uncommonly gifted child, but he has spent all his years in the House caring for one. When it comes to Paul, Everything might not be nearly enough.
“You worry your mother,” Duncan offers in conciliatory fashion, ducking his head beneath the table, stilling when Paul scrambles back a little, his eyelashes spiked with wetness he has tried to grubbily dash away. The tiny teardrops sparkle on his pale cheeks like miniature, weary stars.
“She’s wise enough to know I’m still alive,” Paul grouses, though Duncan bites back a sigh of relief to see that the lad does not yet scramble away further. Any more distance and he would slam his back right up against the wall, and send to scattering the ancient books he has piled around his person, like a pre-civilization fort from which it is impossible to be routed. Duncan feels his forked eyebrow rise, and shakes his head, chancing a small scoot beneath the table in earnest. His quarry, he observes, does not balk, but tilts his head as if fascinated by his guardian’s bulky ingress. Duncan can see Paul’s mental wheels creating a new circuit way, inventorying the knowledge to his vast storehouses: here is something else Swordsman Idaho is willing to do for me.
Good, Duncan thinks. Let the ledger of that reckoning never know its fill.
“Alive is variable,” he tells his diminutive charge, watching Paul’s viridian eyes fleck skeptically, “one can be breathing but barely living, or on death’s threshold but convicted of the will to live, that it carries you forth despite mortality.” Duncan has seen this time and again on the battlefields of his youth, and knows Paul will not take it as a lie, or worse, as a platitude. “Shall we convince the Lady Jessica of the wellness of your life, my Little Lord? Surely she deserves as much, and your father the Duke besides.” The youngest Atreides wrinkles his nose at that, but mulishly assents, sliding forward til he is a hairsbreadth from Duncan’s arms. It is a feeling without easy designation, then, when Paul lurches into Duncan’s chest, knocking some proto-books asunder. The child shivers against him, tremors racking his frame from crown to bare, curling toes. Duncan does what he can, easing them both from beneath the old draughting table and onto the polished floor, gathering Paul in his embrace. He tries to give him comfort, to soothe what he can only nominally understand. The Everything that swirls around Paul is beyond him, leagues away from his rudimentary intelligences, his sturdy yet peasant deductions.
“I…dream,” Paul manages, his teeth chattering against Duncan’s exposed throat. His small hands come up to clasp the swordsman’s neck, his body hot to the touch, as tense as a gaze hound about to ravage its conquest by night. But a little closer, and Duncan would be bitten.
“I dream,” Paul whimpers again. By his tone, he would as lief be saying: I die. I die.
“I know,” Duncan says, making his whole self a shield. “But you also fight,” he adds, feeling Paul’s fingers make fists in the thick worsted of his overcoat. “You reason. You race. You soar,” he hauls the boy up in his grasp, spins him in the still air of the library, feeling the laughter peal from Paul’s throat, falling onto his face like grapes cut from celestial vine, each orb a sweet, sweet sound. “You fly!” he crows as Paul giggles, throwing his ducal head back to let his dark curls bob, and so Duncan repeats it for as long as Paul will accept it, sailing his little lord around like the veriest ornithopter princeling. In three more days, when the Duke-in-Waiting turns seven, Duncan will do what he is promising, here in this solemn unstudied place where a child comes, knowing he won’t be found when he needs to cry. Duncan will take his charge by the hand, suit him up with every anticipation of a safe landing, then carry him into the skies.
*
The lamps are already burning when he ascends the steps of the great hall, his satchel of herbs still fragrant after the long walk back. He has been gone later than he planned, but there is nothing to rival on-foot reconnaissance. One can only defend what one knows, and he desires an intimacy with each footpath, every estuary, dale, stream and fastness, the better to protect the House to which he is forsworn, the better to keep its inhabitants from harm: the threats that can be perceived at a vantage, and the ones that might slither beneath the accepted surface of things. However danger comes, it will not boast at finding Duncan Idaho unworthy of it, or unfamiliar with the multiple permutations of its names.
He turns a corner, bound for his quarters and the certainty of a bracing shower, when a hand snakes around his wrist, commanding him into the darkness. Sweetness floods him, thick and insistent in his lungs, as his lover takes him by the jaw, tugging his face down for an openmouthed kiss, the satchel of herbs crushing pleasantly between their bodies, as any corporeal herbarium being anointed by some human sweat. Duncan has not been innocent for some time, but his knees tremble as he surrenders to the claim placed on him, following the source of his need. Wanting courses through him, pulsing as Paul, seventeen and sharp-mawed, takes what he needs from Duncan, winding his fingers in the swordsman’s loose hair, green eyes catching the dying light as he half-soothes, half-growls, “Soldier. Lover. You were away from me so very long.”