#shishakli x chani x paul ot3 but its mostly just chani shishakli LOL bc paul post water of life is batty as fuck

[sophluorescentmusing]

DUNE II.

Shishakli bathes in the flames. That is both how it ends, and how it begins. 

Chani lies naked beneath the skylight in the gardens, and imagines that with the sear of the sun, her flesh peels from her bones, eyes melt in her sockets, and ashes catch in the wind. She skates blunt finger-nails down throat and sternum, down the valley between the ribs and the flat, muscled plain of her stomach. Shishakli bathes in the flames, but Chani burns in them. 

Her fingertips scrape through the hair at her mound—index twisting the curls around her fingers. She is moist with memory, sweating beneath the heat of it and the sun. Eventually, she ventures further—slips her nimble fingers (calloused by years handling the blade) against her sex. Her chest spasms: a half-breath. Her lips part. Her eyelids squeeze shut.

Shishakli tongues at her in memories tinged ruddy with spice. Her hands grip Chani’s thighs, thumbs digging into her skin, and she splays her open with force Chani would allow no other to have. She slings Chani’s legs over her shoulders (in her waking state, Chani only crooks her knees, plants her heels to the blanket she’d laid across the cool, stone, palace path) and mouths at her core. Her nose brushes Chani’s clit, her tongue presses into Chani’s slit, and she groans to fill Chani’s pleasured quiet.

A door opens, the sound of it distant.

The memory searing her eyelids flickers, wanes with her changing attention.

Her forefingers slip across her clit, dip into her body, and she quakes beneath her own ministrations.

A voice begins, ends.

“Chani—” An inhalation, a breath.

Her eyes slit open. Her movements still. “Outworlder.” Witch. Anger blazes through her (she sees Shishakli keel over and scream) and passes from her. Chani’s fingers slide from her body; she sits up, propping herself on her hands and ignoring how her chest heaves with the pleasure taken from her so coldly. “Be gone.” 

“You always come here when you hurt.” Irulan has never mastered her tones, her emotions. The masks worn by Jessica Atriedes and her son are impervious, well-mastered, and make Irulan’s attempts look pale and unseemly. Chani feels contempt for the woman, and also pity; she understands the yearnings of the heart, even if how she loves Paul will always be different from the silver-witch’s.

“I find peace in the quiet.” Her womb feels knotted and twisted and choked of life. She’d sloughed out a child that never breathed, and with it her water, her blood. Paul Muad’dib does not offer much comfort when it happens. She knows him, and knows what relief looks like, even when etched among the grief. She knows Paul Muad’dib had seen, and still, had allowed to happen. It is when her desert mouse fails to offer her the comfort she so needs that she steps away, wades into the memories, and seeks out Shishakli’s hawk-eyes and firm hands.

Irulan sits.

Her pale limbs fold like the fabric of her dress.

She looks small sat upon the stone.

A woman of her breeding would be unaccustomed to anything less than a throne.

I told you be gone, but the words do not find voice. Chani wades in the unknown, wishing she had her lover’s prescience or Shishakli’s conviction. In the time since Muad’dib became Lisan al Gaib, she thinks she has lost conviction—was convinced back too easily, and now sits in this fog, this cloud of will-she-won’t-she. “Why are you here?” She asks instead. She picks up the slip-dress she had worn into this humid abode and drapes it over her lap. 

Irulan’s gaze follows the movement. “You don’t go to your husband.”

“Muad’dib and I have our own ways.”

“He does not come to me when you leave him.”

“Do you expect him to?” She doubts many things of Paul, but his faithfulness to her is the easiest of covenants he can keep. It no longer impresses her, though she had thought it more paramount when she were younger. He would have her, wholly and totally, if he could prove his faithfulness to other covenants—but his faith lies in his Path, of which she has not the prescience to see and to know. It divides them as clearly as the Shield Wall separates the city from the worms.

“I wish he would.”

“You wish on an impossibility.” She has felt and thought many things of Irulan, rarely kind. Now, pity sits on her tongue with the weight of stone—unignorable. “Find another lover.”

Irulan scoffs, an unpretty sound. Chani flickers back to the memories. Shishakli had liked to scoff at her, too. The sound was less impervious, more kindly exasperated. But Irulan still creates nostalgia. “The Emperor would rejoice to remove me from my position, and adultery would only allow him the impetus. A man can have a concubine, but not a woman.”

“You think yourself unequal; this is Arrakis.” She waves a hand frivolously. Her sticky, moistened fingers catch the sunlight. Privately, she is of the belief that Paul could not flay a woman for being in love, for seeking affection wherever it could be had. So much of him had drowned in the worm-water and the ensuing storm, but there is still a shadow of the boy he was, the boy that emulated his father (he who they say ruled with his heart). “Do you expect my intercession?”

“No. I would not ask it of you.” Irulan falls quiet at her own admission. She has thoughtful eyes—large, wide, white. The Eyes of Ibad have not yet developed—and may never, considering how the woman keeps from the culture of her husband and her people and it makes her more telling than Chani believes she would want herself to be. “I apologize for my interruption. I wondered if you would be alone, if he sought you out after your partings.” 

“He does not.” Her body feels awash with cold. The breeze filters through the palace always, guided by careful architectural choices. Only now does it seem to touch her skin and chase away the searing touch of sunfire. “I come here to be with my memories. Nothing more.”

She stands then, drags her dress over her head. “Stop looking for love in Paul Muad’dib, Princess.” She gathers her blanket in her arms. “You people stripped him of his heart, put him on his Path. You will find yourself disappointed at every turn.”

With that, Chani leaves Irulan with her ghosts.