Chapter Text
He has nice hands.
She has the thought, sitting idly in camp one day. Then she realizes she’s had the thought and thinks, Huh.
He’s not doing anything special, just sitting in the big tent with one knee tucked up against his chest, cleaning one of the lasguns. Someone is always cleaning the lasguns, because the lasguns hate sand and love malfunctioning if you so much as look at them sideways. They’re also heavy as shit and have to be disassembled for transport. Which makes stealing them from the Harkonnens a real pain in the ass. So they try to keep the ones they have working as long as possible.
Cleaning the lasguns is everyone’s job in rotation, just like any other task in the camp, but Paul is particularly good at putting them back together. Said one of his old teachers showed him how. Something about If your life depends on it, you should know how to fix it. So now he’s reassembling all the little fiddly pieces of the converter after wiping them down with an oiled rag, his long fingers moving deftly and his stupid floppy hair falling in his face.
His hands should be soft, the hands of a duke who spends his whole life letting other people labor for him. But they look like they have been taught to hold a weapon: clever and strong, gun oil and sand ground under his nails, a fading sword callus on his right palm.
He should be soft, by every expectation, but he’s not.
You can come with us, and you can scout and spot and help with the camp. No fighting until we know you can keep up. That had been the deal, and he’d agreed to it without protest. Because she already knows he can fight, but she needs to know if he can handle marching all night and hauling their gear up dunes and sleeping in the sand and living off the bars of pressed dried food they carry and whatever they can hunt or forage along the way. She needs to know if he is in this for sport or glory, or for real.
He still struggles on the steepest dunes, and his rock climbing is shit, and she can tell by his footsteps that he’s tired by the end of a long night of traveling. But he never complains, not once. He doesn’t complain when it’s his turn to dig the latrine or carry the lasgun battery pack or check the beetle traps. Doesn’t complain about eating the beetles either, which are perfectly fine when fried up with some seasoning, although he washes the first bite down with a very long gulp from his stillsuit tube.
Fine, then. He fights well. The bare minimum for respect as far as she’s concerned. He can hold his own in the desert, mostly keeping up with those of them who were born to this life, which is more than she expected. He is not too stubborn to learn or too proud to do tasks he has probably had servants for all his life.
And so, she allows herself to start noticing things. His strange gray-green outworlder eyes, and the way they have flecks of brown and gold in them when they catch the light. His infectious laugh when he gets a joke in Chakobsa without having it translated for him. His stupid fucking hair that he absolutely refuses to tie back or braid up, letting the wind snarl it into knots and blow it across his face, and maybe sometimes she does want to sink her fingers into it, okay? Not now. But when it’s clean. It looks soft then.
And his hands. Apparently. So maybe she does want them on her after all.
“You’re gonna be fighting on sand, so we practice on sand.”
They’re on the flat plain outside the sietch as the first pale blue light of dawn spreads over the horizon. Just enough light to train by without getting hurt. They have maybe an hour before the sun crests the dune to their east and being outside becomes a waste of water.
She tosses him one of the resin-bladed training knives they give to kids, close enough in weight to the real thing but not sharp enough to cut. He holds it wrong.
“You’re used to fighting with a sword, I can tell.” She takes the knife out of his hand and flips it around to the proper grip, with the blade pointing behind him. “We don’t fight like that.”
He tests the weight of the knife in his hand, getting used to the grip. “The blocks you’re used to, most of those will still work for a blade coming at you. So we’ll focus on attacks. Watch me and copy.”
She walks him through the basic strikes they all drill as children. Downward from above, aiming for where the neck meets the shoulder, letting gravity help you along. Inward into the guts of your enemy, using your hips for power to drive the knife in and pull it back out. Outward to catch someone beside or behind you. Whipping the knife in close to brace the hilt against your torso, letting your enemy impale themselves with their own momentum. She can still see him slowing the blade at the last moment, the habit of shield-fighters, but he picks up the basics fast, and after a few drills he’s moving fluidly. She’ll make him stab some bush melons later, the way little kids do to practice committing to their strikes.
“All right. Let’s spar.” She’s been itching to, honestly, ever since she first saw him fight. Because he was well-trained, but that wasn’t what had caught her eye. It was that flicker of something she’d seen, right at the end, a wildness that was there under the surface of him, waiting to come out. She wants to see it again.
“You get a kill strike in, that’s one point. Five points wins.” She settles into a fighting stance, and he does too, but there’s hesitation in the lines of his body.
“Used to doing this with shields,” he says after a second.
“You and everyone else in the known universe.” His gaze flicks up and down her body. “You’re not gonna hurt me,” she says, and something on his face tells her she’s read his fear correctly. “We’re the same size, and I’m better with the knife.” She darts in low and quick, wraps her left arm around his waist and lifts him a few inches off the ground, just to prove that she can. It startles a bright sharp laugh out of him, and when she draws back, there’s the briefest flash of that wild light in his eyes.
“Come on, outworlder.” She bounces on the balls of her feet, and oh, he’s grinning now, and she’s grinning too. “Show me what you’ve got.”
When he moves he is fast; he swings too wide but she still barely gets the block up in time. She gets a point in almost instantly, slipping under his guard to rest the knife under the hinge of his jaw. “One,” she says, meeting his eyes from a knife’s length away, and using the half-second freeze in which he’s just staring at her to dart out of range.
She lands two more strikes in quick succession after that (he has a bad habit of not guarding his left side) but it only seems to spur him on, and a few moves later he gets her knife arm in a lock she can’t immediately get out of and the blunt tip of his blade is against her ribs, the lightest possible pressure against her stillsuit but enough to feel it. “One,” he says like a challenge and back away.
She still wins, five to one, but he makes her work hard enough for those last two points that by the time she gets in a lucky leg sweep and brings him to the ground, landing on top of him with her knife poised over his heart, she’s breathing hard. He is too, lying there under her with a stupid grin on his face.
“Not bad, for a first try,” she says before levering off him and getting to her feet. She offers him a hand up and then backs just out of range. “Again?”
He lunges in answer, eyes bright as she dodges—but just barely—and oh, that’s what she was after.
They stop counting points after a while. Being bested only seems to make him work harder, and the more she pushes the less he holds back. Every time she gets faster, meaner, more physical, he matches her, both of them panting and swearing and laughing when the other does something clever they didn’t expect. He learns so fast it’s eerie, sometimes repeating her own moves back to her just minutes later without needing to be taught. Other times he’ll call time out after she gets the upper hand, take a minute to catch his breath and then demand, “Show me that.”
It's been years since she had a partner like this, close enough in height and strength and skill to be a mirror of herself. Close enough that teaching him is like testing her own body, just with a slight adjustment to the center of gravity. Shishakli can still reliably match her hand to hand, but you can only spar with your friend for so long before you start learning all their patterns. Paul is new, and he’s unpredictable, and he’s good at this, and it’s nice to work her body to the limit for play and not grim survival.
The sun is up. They both have sweat dripping into the collars of their stillsuits, and they should have gone inside by now, but they’re still going.
On the next round, she is just a hair too slow, and he gets her with the takedown she’d taught him not ten minutes ago. He hasn’t mastered the art of not getting pulled to the ground with her, but he does manage to stay on top, and before she can flip them over he’s got her knife hand pinned and his arm across her chest, his blade under her chin.
The moment freezes. He’s right on top of her, the full weight of his body pressing her into the sand, every detail vivid in the morning sun. Sweat-damp hair and blazing eyes and mouth slightly open as he works to catch his breath. The very slightest pressure of the blunt knife edge against her jaw, perfectly controlled but present, not actually tilting her head back to expose her throat but a reminder that he could.
She’s already figured out how to get out of this position, but she wants to see what he does next.
She catches it, the moment when his gaze flicks to her lips, and for a second she thinks he’s going to go for it. She would let him, too.
Instead he rolls off her and gets to his feet, not quite smoothly, and reaches a hand down to help her up.
“Sun’s getting high.” There’s color on his cheeks, and she doesn’t think it’s from the heat.
“Yeah, we should…yeah. Go inside.” She doesn’t know where to look, suddenly, because every time she sneaks a glance at him he’s staring at her. “Good work,” she offers awkwardly.
He shrugs with all the appearance of nonchalance. He’s still blushing, though. “Good teacher.”
She’d fully intended to invite him into her tent if he survived the battle. And he had not only survived but impressed her.
(She’s still thinking about it, the raw delight on his face as they raced for the edge of the dune, the giant burning wreck of a war machine crashing down behind them. She was laughing, and he was grinning, and for a moment it felt like they could do anything together.)
They’d sat next to each other in the big tent late into the night, knees brushing from time to time, and she’d caught him sneaking so many glances at her, and hadn’t been shy about letting him catch her doing the same. The low light had been doing interesting things to the planes of his face, and when their hands had landed next to each other on the sand he hadn’t pulled away. And yet somehow the night had burned down to embers and she hadn’t said anything. And now she’s lying in her tent, alone, buzzing with lingering battle adrenaline and frustration.
This isn’t a problem she has. They’re all in and out of each other’s tents all the time out here. It’s only natural when you’re fighting side by side with death right over your shoulder. If she wants to fuck someone she simply asks them, and usually they say yes, because why be coy when you could all be worm food tomorrow?
(She’s still thinking about it, the weight and the heat of him on top of her as he put his own body between her and a spray of bullets. She’ll have to talk to him about that. He cannot value her over any other fighter. It wasn’t even necessary; she knows how to stay out of the line of fire. It still makes something strange and jagged catch in her chest.)
This isn’t a problem she has, and yet with his new name in her mouth she had found herself nervous, an embrace she would give any one of her comrades feeling suddenly charged, hyper-aware of his breath on her cheek and his hands on her back, lightly, as if maybe he was nervous too and oh no does she like him? Does she have a crush? Mortifying.
She doesn’t do this. There are people she would run into battle beside without question, and there are people she likes to fuck sometimes. Sometimes those categories overlap and sometimes they don't, but thinking beyond that is useless. That’s not what her life is for. She’s known that for a long time.
Clearly she just has to fuck him about it. Maybe he’ll be a shitty lay and the bubble of fascination will burst. Or maybe he’ll be decent at it and they’ll feel good together for a little while and her curiosity will be sated. All right. She has a plan of attack now. Simple. Easy. No problem.
It still takes her way too long to fall asleep, and she thinks about his stupid fucking hands the whole time.
He’s awake before she is, sitting on the crest of a dune at sunrise, the hour when the desert is lit up golden and the air is still cool enough to feel pleasant. He smiles at her as she sits down next to him, and he looks…content. He looks happy here.
He doesn’t have to be doing this. She was born on the front lines, and she’ll be in this fight until they win or someone kills her. He could have gotten off-world by now, gone to live a safe life somewhere else. But he’s here, beside her.
“It’s breathtaking,” he says, looking out at the blush-gold ripples of sand stretching out to the horizon. And it is. It’s the kind of morning that makes you remember that the world is beautiful and worth fighting for.
When he kisses her, she thinks maybe he feels the same way.