Leto II and Ghanima as twins is an absolute tragedy.
Here is Leto and his sister. They were born together. They share the same ancestral memories. The only other person like them, their aunt, is being driven insane by her own ancestral memories, and she is trying to make them both end up like her. Their mother is dead, their father is gone, and their grandmother left the planet before they were born and does not return to see her grandchildren until they are nine years old.
They grow up together. They talk together in dead languages.
They are trapped together. They are raised as the children of an Emperor father who walked out on them the day they were born. Their carer, Stilgar, occasionally contemplates killing them because he is afraid of what they are. Their grandmother's people want to force them to marry each other and have children together, and they are horrified by this. They love each other, but not that - never that.
The sister of their father's wife - the wife he never loved, the wife who is not their mother but committed herself to raising them - plots to have them killed. They know the only way to survive is to separate.
They have never been apart before.
By the time they reunite a year later, their father has just been murdered. Their aunt immediately kills herself in front of them. Leto Atreides II, aged ten, is the Emperor of most of the universe, and he is no longer human. He will never be alike to his sister again. He will live for thousands of years. He is fond of children - he will never have children of his own.
He runs until he exhausts himself and then he puts his head in his sister's lap and asks her to find a way for him to die.
Ghanima dies first. Spice extends her lifespan, but she dies two centuries later.
Leto will live another 3,300 years without his twin.
3,500 years into Leto's reign, Ghanima's descendant steals Leto's Journals and finds between the pages a strand of Ghanima's hair, a pressed flower that Ghanima once gave Leto, and a poem that Leto wrote when he was told that Ghanima had died.
Siona, descendant of Ghanima, realises how much Leto Atreides II loved his sister, and views it only as a weakness to be exploited.
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