Shishakli-Modun

The woman had large eyes awash in dark blue and a defiant set to her jaw.  Dried blood streaked down her face and over her lips. 

Slowly, Feyd-Rautha approached.  “You killed nine of my men with one single blade.”

It wasn’t a question, but he did hope for some kind of reaction.  Some evidence of a fierce warrior hiding beneath the surface.

With each measured step, the weight of his side blade shifted in his armor.  Machines are not warriors.  His hand flexed over her weapon and his eyes roamed over her form, calculating.  Weighing her as an opponent.    

She leaned increasingly away as he advanced, almost against her will.  Maybe a deep-rooted survival instinct, creating space between herself and a predator.  A familiar warmth hummed up his spine. 

He waited, looking down on this fighter, her knees biting into the hard floor of the cave.  She was grossly outnumbered and there was nothing in her posture to suggest she would launch an attack.  And yet, she did not cower under the weight of his gaze.

Fire burned in her eyes as she met his stare, arching her neck up from where she had been thrown on the ground.  Blackened, charred birds encircled her. 

Had this desert rat really killed nine?  A rising ache to fight pulsed through him, up and down his arms and legs.  His thoughts raced with possibilities.  What if he kept her?  He could have her thrown in the brig of the ship.  Take her back to Geidi Prime, maybe get a training session or two out of her.  Maybe he could even put her in the arena.  The crowds would go wild over a female opponent, especially one who could fight back properly. 

She held his gaze and boldly raised her chin.  Feyd-Rautha stared down into those hard eyes and knew.  Saw the lethal hatred harbored there.  Truly, it excited him.  But this was not a filthy desert rat or sacred winged bird.  She was a viper.  And she’d kill them all if she got the chance. 

No, he couldn’t keep her.  There was no time and he could not lose focus.  Battle momentum was a crucial military tactic.  He had to burn her. 

“She won’t talk.”  A deputy to her right said, shifting forward. 

Feyd-Rautha glanced at the deputy, taking in the blood staining his underarm.  Likely her work.  The ache to combat her intensified.  But he internally sighed, resigned. 

“Tell her that’s fine.”  Feyd-Rautha handed her blade over to another deputy.  It was a shame he wouldn’t get to test her fighting skill for himself before she was dispatched, but at least she would suffer at his hand for the death of his men.  “I know everything I need to know.” 

He held out his hand for the torch handle and for the first time her proud chin faltered.  The corner of his mouth twitched, “Pleasure is all that remains.” 

Her dark eyes watered and the hatred in them intensified. 

His finger rested over the handle trigger as he directed the spout end towards her, “Does the desert rat have a name?” 

Oddly, this is what made her finally speak up. 

“What difference does it make to you!”  A furious snarl erupted between her teeth and she started climbing to her feet. 

Three deputies lunged forward to force her back down, but he held a hand aloft to stop them. 

He smiled, black teeth gleaming at her.  “None.” 

Standing now, she tipped her chin and glowered.  The woman was taller than he expected, lithe.  Balanced forward on her feet.  Surely she moved with rapid efficiency in hand-to-hand. 

Feyd-Rautha tilted his head, waiting.  “Nothing else?” 

He shrugged, raising the torch once more. 

“I am Shishakli.”  The dried blood cracked over lips as she spoke. 

Feyd-Rautha paused, fixated on the specks of red.  Shishakli.  Shishakli. 

With renewed determination, the woman stood to her full height.

“Shishakli Modun of Sietch Tabr.  A child of the Zensunni Tribe.  And we will not be defeated by you,” she growled. 

Then she reared back her head and spit right at him.  He watched it land on his boots. 

“Shishakli Modun,” he narrowed his eyes at her now, “… of Sietch Tabr.  Prepare for death.” 

Suddenly, a blast sounded from outside and the mountain shook.  Dust and sand vibrated in the air around them, creating a cloud. 

Feyd-Rautha glowered as his commanders scrambled to run outside.  The woman though, he held her eyes and she smiled. 

_________________________________________________________

He likes it the way one likes a string of barbs under the tongue, the sting proving some part of him is still awake. No man she accuses— as if that ever dignified the word.

He cups the idea as if it were a hot glass, letting it burn callus into his palm.

“Animal, then,” there is no flinch. The word is as easy as breath, as self-evident as the gravity that keeps the sietch rubble from rising into its own millenias’s-old rite of ending. The word is as easy as breath, and still the word is insufficient. There are, after all, entire orders of creation between beast and human, and none of them are mutually exclusive. “Better to be an animal. More honest.”

A na-Baron looms over her, boots planted in the graveyard sand of victory. If he is an animal, he is the apex, and she the rare specimen worth mounting behind glass. Even now, caught in the loose net of his mercy, she looks at him with a mixture of hatred and something more difficult— older, the sort of hatred that falls down, down, down into the core of Arrakis. Her face is smeared with ash and her own sweat, but her eyes are so open, so awake, it makes him want to grind his boot against that spark, just to see if it could ever go out.

Feyd flicks his tongue against his teeth, a private signal. The perimeter men surge, impersonal as glandular response, collars and krimskell fiber at the ready. There is no room for Fremen poetry here— only the efficient wrapping of wrists and throat, the bite of restraints made for things much stronger than the narrow frame they close around. They have learned not underestimate these desert things, even in ruin; a twitch from her could still be a death sentence.

It won't be the last.

The humiliation he offers is time, is life, is something. She will take the offered hand and bite it when the time is right. She, too, has teeth.

"Your water is rotten, Harkonnen. I don't want it."

Defiance is big brother to foolishness, as a saying of her people goes. For all the ways a Fremen child must grow up fast, there is a speck of childishness preserved in the wide-eyed resistance the na-Baron tastes in the sheen of her eyes.

Dark desert eyes that all Fremen are born to, and none of them die with.

Krimskell knots so tight she knows better than to move her wrists once they are bound behind her back, or turn her head once the knot sits over her trachea. But they are fools for dragging her out of the cave without tying her ankles too because it means she's on her own two feet, and as long as she's upright like that, she is still lethal.

Four Harkonnen foot soldiers she can match, even with her hands tied behind her back. She let herself fall back into the one behind her, pounces on the one in front with her feet in the middle of his back. The double-layered polymer webbing of his off-world stillsuit saves him from a concussed spine.

She uses this one as a springboard for a third, and this time feels the throat-rope tighten with unforgiving strength but it's worth it. To bring her thighs over his shoulders and feel the moment his neck snaps with a jerk of her sandwalk legs.

DUNE PART TWO (2024) dir. Denis Villeneuve

Only pleasure remains

Which gave rise to this smutty masterpiece of @houserautha which I have reread too often to dare to admit, even on this smut friendly platform:

just me out here rare pair shipping Shishakli & Feyd-Rautha

Harkonnen tactics scorch every cache, every womb of semi-peace.

The sietch is ruined. Torn asunder by flame and clever acids, all of the intricate carving reduced to ruin. He walks through it without reverence, but his tongue catalogs the ghosts of Fremen glory— how mildly he basks in the desecration.

Feyd-Rautha circles her, slow, precise, predation with a little choreography. The Harkonnen soldiery— his soldiery— fan outwards in a perimeter, their riot-gear like beetle carapace, lasguns idle but eager. The air stinks of scorched alk, boiled stillsuit metabolites, and the slack, meaty perfume of loss. Some of them watch. Most do not. Generals understand the need for punctuation, for spectacle. They turn their gaze so he may write the story on her bones.

There is almost a surgical melancholy to the way he examines her: height, reach, the slick efficiency of her musculature, the peculiar devotion in those ice-flame eyes. He sees, already, the runes he would carve.

“Kill you?” Tick-tick-tick into a twitch, minute, the corner of his lips. “That would be a waste.”

There is something so unkind about the way the Fremen do not die, even when everything around them has been killed.

And tick-tick-tick goes her pulse, sluggish in the wake of a moment that terrorizes the fear out of her. She's beyond that now, seeks barzakh for the soul and the ground for her water. It's a pity, that, to lose the sietch that water – but she'd rather it go to the sandtrouts than to the Harkonnen locusts.

She's ready, then.

And has it snatched from her.

In the binarist trap of life-or-death, there is no room for a third space.

In the binarist trop of life-or-death, she knows where to locate the picture he paints, this Harkonnen lordling with the black hand of madness writ all over him.

Shishakli had a plan – to leave the world smiling would have seemed, to her, like a last defiant act in the face of ruination. Now, her smile falters, falls, becomes a skull-grimace she cannot control.

Tick-tick-tick goes her pulse, shocked out of a shutdown reversed. She can taste a ferrous sheen of blood at the back of her throat, a noticeable layering on top of the sharp, earthy warmth of the melange that's always present.

He likes it the way one likes a string of barbs under the tongue, the sting proving some part of him is still awake. No man she accuses— as if that ever dignified the word.

He cups the idea as if it were a hot glass, letting it burn callus into his palm.

“Animal, then,” there is no flinch. The word is as easy as breath, as self-evident as the gravity that keeps the sietch rubble from rising into its own millenias’s-old rite of ending. The word is as easy as breath, and still the word is insufficient. There are, after all, entire orders of creation between beast and human, and none of them are mutually exclusive. “Better to be an animal. More honest.”

A na-Baron looms over her, boots planted in the graveyard sand of victory. If he is an animal, he is the apex, and she the rare specimen worth mounting behind glass. Even now, caught in the loose net of his mercy, she looks at him with a mixture of hatred and something more difficult— older, the sort of hatred that falls down, down, down into the core of Arrakis. Her face is smeared with ash and her own sweat, but her eyes are so open, so awake, it makes him want to grind his boot against that spark, just to see if it could ever go out.

Feyd flicks his tongue against his teeth, a private signal. The perimeter men surge, impersonal as glandular response, collars and krimskell fiber at the ready. There is no room for Fremen poetry here— only the efficient wrapping of wrists and throat, the bite of restraints made for things much stronger than the narrow frame they close around. They have learned not underestimate these desert things, even in ruin; a twitch from her could still be a death sentence.

It won't be the last.

The humiliation he offers is time, is life, is something. She will take the offered hand and bite it when the time is right. She, too, has teeth.

"Your water is rotten, Harkonnen. I don't want it."

Defiance is big brother to foolishness, as a saying of her people goes. For all the ways a Fremen child must grow up fast, there is a speck of childishness preserved in the wide-eyed resistance the na-Baron tastes in the sheen of her eyes.

Dark desert eyes that all Fremen are born to, and none of them die with.

Krimskell knots so tight she knows better than to move her wrists once they are bound behind her back, or turn her head once the knot sits over her trachea. But they are fools for dragging her out of the cave without tying her ankles too because it means she's on her own two feet, and as long as she's upright like that, she is still lethal.

Four Harkonnen foot soldiers she can match, even with her hands tied behind her back. She let herself fall back into the one behind her, pounces on the one in front with her feet in the middle of his back. The double-layered polymer webbing of his off-world stillsuit saves him from a concussed spine.

She uses this one as a springboard for a third, and this time feels the throat-rope tighten with unforgiving strength but it's worth it. To bring her thighs over his shoulders and feel the moment his neck snaps with a jerk of her sandwalk legs.

Harkonnen tactics scorch every cache, every womb of semi-peace.

The sietch is ruined. Torn asunder by flame and clever acids, all of the intricate carving reduced to ruin. He walks through it without reverence, but his tongue catalogs the ghosts of Fremen glory— how mildly he basks in the desecration.

Feyd-Rautha circles her, slow, precise, predation with a little choreography. The Harkonnen soldiery— his soldiery— fan outwards in a perimeter, their riot-gear like beetle carapace, lasguns idle but eager. The air stinks of scorched alk, boiled stillsuit metabolites, and the slack, meaty perfume of loss. Some of them watch. Most do not. Generals understand the need for punctuation, for spectacle. They turn their gaze so he may write the story on her bones.

There is almost a surgical melancholy to the way he examines her: height, reach, the slick efficiency of her musculature, the peculiar devotion in those ice-flame eyes. He sees, already, the runes he would carve.

“Kill you?” Tick-tick-tick into a twitch, minute, the corner of his lips. “That would be a waste.”

There is something so unkind about the way the Fremen do not die, even when everything around them has been killed.