Chapter Text
Feyd-Rautha is by no means a stranger to spice.
There is the faintest mention of such a substance in the beginnings of his youth, a concept as abstract as the swirling nebulas of the universe. Something so transcendental, nonetheless vital for continued existence all the same, sifting through his consciousness like grains of sand.
His first encounter with the actuality occurs when a loosely-bound pouch is delivered to his chambers after dinner.
Feyd finds said package idling at the foot of his obsidian doorway. Notably without a single messenger in sight. The hallway is empty--he knows before even checking, the ample windows betraying only his reflection back at him; a pale wraith flanked by the night.
It amuses him more than anything, signaling the start of a chase. Feyd’s lips press into a smile. He’s bound to pry the information out of who’s responsible later. Stamped with the Harkonnen coat of arms, the offering appears alongside a scrap of epistle paper, which is crumpled into resembling a square.
Feyd deigns to retrieve both, confident in the door sliding shut behind him as he weighs the pouch in one hand and ponders the feel. The silky material shifts in clumps each way he tips his wrist, reminiscent of a fistful of salt. He wonders mirthlessly if some half-witted servant had forgotten the location of the palace kitchens.
An admirer, perhaps, the insinuation of a girl trying to win his favor. It’s a pity he doesn’t take cowards to bed.
The novelty of it all persuades him to unfold the makeshift letter, his eyes narrowing the farther they roam across the page.
A total of one sentence. Barely, not even ten words.
Feyd is familiar with the sloppy scrawl, the haphazard, crowded tilt of the letters, and he clenches his jaw so tight that he fully expects a tooth to succumb and splinter beneath the pressure.
Fury licks up his spine blazing-hot, simmering blood to near fever pitch in his body. His exhale warps into a seething hiss as he tears quietly at the paper, producing neat little shreds. Mustering control in mastering destruction.
He is acutely aware of the remnants spilling out from between his fingers, miniscule flakes of white stirred into an aimless frenzy. Obscured by the shadow of his body, the fragments melt into the ash ubiquitous across Giedi Prime.
A trick of the light.
Seeping from his mind; bleeding lines of war paint smeared across skin, spills the source of his misery. It is regrettably common knowledge that as the youngest, Feyd is not yet primed to inherit the stewardship of Arrakis.
He’d assumed he was capable of sustaining appearances until then: keeping his intentions tucked away, sheathing his blade up his sleeve and feeling the hilt nudge his warm pulse. The fine edge resting flat against his veins.
But wrestling details of the bestowal ceremony from the servants, spying in his mind’s eye what his real ones cannot--a brush of the Baron’s fingertips against his brother’s face, the briefest joining of flesh--has Feyd sinking his knife into another nameless spare, screaming himself hoarse in the gladiator ring.
Feyd won the games, as he always did, although with his stance still low, pacing circles around the corpses when he should’ve raised his arms to the sky and announced his victory. The cheering of the audience rang out early that day; raucous, thunderous applause echoing in his ears.
The notion of dawdling in the dark and crushing the windpipes of drugged slaves, forever nipping at his uncle’s ankles for a chance makes him want to gouge his carotid out. Rabban’s sneer, faraway from the balconies, froths bile in his throat. He’ll have his brother’s tongue for this cheap taunt. Better yet, Feyd decides, chest heaving, he’ll keep the purse as a souvenir to house the trophy in.
Feyd sinks to his knees alone in his room.
Arrakis.
Everything else he’d gleaned from his studies suggested that it was nothing more than a vortex of heat and dust. Only a vapid imitation of a planet, the entire southern region pure poison to the body. Plagued with droves of fanatics hailing a fictitious messiah and worms infesting the terrain.
Exotic, speak the filmbooks, when Feyd glances over snippets of data and reports left by previous officers. Rumors of primitive dance as a form of travel, devices which siphon away all moisture, others designed to alert the primal; the goliath. Were it up to Feyd, there would be no fitter service to the systems of the Great Houses than to rid the galaxy of such blight. Gladly losing the tall tales he reads before bed to the sands of time.
But what purpose serves the infinite starline without interstellar travel?
Feyd seizes the pouch in his hand and hurls it directly at the wall closest to him.
It explodes upon contact, the fabric collapsing flat within itself like a fallen sun. He stares at the bag sliding down the wall, an avalanche of powdery bronze in its wake. The drawstring slackens and its contents billow free as dark glittering clouds.
He’s left inhaling sharply, leaning forwards to brace his hands against the ground, the line of his shoulders rising and falling with the immense gravity of each breath.
The air reeks of a rich flavor.
Strangely intimate yet enigmatic to Feyd’s nose, heady when he flattens his tongue to the roof of his mouth, struggles to place it.
Perhaps one he tasted before in another lifetime.
In this timeline it’s the intangible he grasps at in the early dawn, the very thread spooling together his dreams and the material world. The certain scent drifting on the air before his eyes open and he is again entrenched in the variables of reality. Not in the slightest reminiscent of the paltry seasoning Harkonnen merchants smuggle to the palace with the cycle of the moons, nor the fumes stifling city streets. Nothing so simple, so rudimentary.
Rather, a tantalizing haze that floods his skull and coaxes it lower. He doesn’t know precisely when his eyes slide shut. Though across the darkness stretches the ripples of melange incense, thick and befuddling. There, sparks resonance, an ancient precondition met with the curve of his tendons, the curl of his muscles; a map of flesh and bone steeped in fate. Feyd’s surroundings have never revealed more truth in his life.
He can see black tile littering the floor; the maw of some massive beast parting the desert before him. The abyss, the end all and be all, threatening to gnaw away at the very particles binding his form together. Feyd thinks he hears thumping in his ears: millions of harmonies rising, overlapping, coalescing, into a siren’s hymn. Something rhythmic; base and visceral in intensity.
Drawing him ever so closer.
Try stomaching this like the rats here do, brother.
Feyd wets his lips.
Head dipping, thumb palming the thin slit where wall and floor meet, he hovers. Then drags his tongue across the mound of spice. Slow. Intentional. It sticks easily, clinging to moisture, tasting more potent than he’d expected--a citric, sour tang. He swallows. He’s riding on the precipice of a chasm, shockingly bitter undertone doing nothing to dull the fire.
Feyd presses his forehead firmly against the wall and the chill is akin to plunging into icy-deep waters. Some basin so immense his feet cannot touch the ground (the waves break, he reaches out to smooth dark curls over damp skin), belonging to a place that delivers monsoons in the summers (raindrops flecking the lashes of verdant eyes), harbors endless rolling fields (his thumb parts pillowy lips amidst the grasslands).
All a mirage that dissolves in an instant; flashes of possibility quick to become syrupy from heat.
He grovels on all fours now, feverish, brought to heel by the delirium of the dunes. Feyd’s hands grasp at the wall, feeling the grooves underneath his fingertips. These notches chipped into the raw material that he had been blind to before. Incalculable, infinitesimal, he smells the traces of spice still lingering hot, imprinted upon the wall surface. Chalk scatterings--an illusory provocation--the horizons of his mind blowing far apart.
His consciousness wanes like sand in a sieve.
Feyd dreams that night. Vivid, impalpable images, igniting bright in the space behind his eyelids and fading to cinders just as quickly.
He envisions the slight taper of someone’s waist, their exposed back; feels the faintest tug, vertigo in the pit of his stomach. Pale skin, a desert expanse stretching over their shoulders (eyes blue upon blue, an angelic veil of curls). They never remain in totality for long, elusive how they flit in and out of constancy. Temporary. A cantrip candle.
Feyd’s fingers combing through the sand, individual grains digging harsh into his knees, transfixed by the slip of a figure who emerges from the desolation before him. His mouth grows drier at the sight of them, a parched man dying of thirst mere fractions away from his oasis. Scripture in its purest form, the kind of revelation only able to stop haunting a man once he bares its gravitas onto parchment.
His skin scorches raw in this plane of existence, weevils writhing underneath the span of his blood vessels, and Feyd can visualize his carcass picked clean, laid on the sietch (somewhere he cannot place) blatantly outspread. Their hand fills his vision, contouring symbols: I know you. No, he wants to respond, for how could a mortal know the divine?
Their fingers, twin scorpion tails, tremor; offering the slightest suggestion of closing the fissure between them. Feyd’s higher reasoning dissipates, perhaps from sunlight beaming torrid down the nape of his neck. His face feels numb to the point where Feyd wonders if their forms had touched after all, and so he suffers from neurotoxin. They shake their head, almost as though his thoughts are etched clean across his visage.
Feyd knows it is a foolish conclusion. His body seems so painfully pristine, intact to a fault. He yearns to be marred. Intermittent glimpses--their palm cupping his cheek, singing an invisible trail across his collarbone, the heat of a supernova concentrates on his skin (sacrificial lamb sheared, draped)--transient absolution. The desert around Feyd shifts, crashing tides of quicksand against his silhouette, an hourglass swinging.
He lunges, delayed.
Feyd starts awake and his chin is sticky with saliva. A waste of water.
The world is tilted sideways. But solid. Spots dance in his vision, goosebumps having risen over his skin. His head an over-soaked sponge, lolling parallel on the ground, heavy with the weight of reverence. Feyd takes in a breath, feeling his chest rise and fall. His eyes travel from the blurry profile of his nose to the leftover melange strewn about.
It glints in the morning light, a tease, and Feyd flinches as if burned.