Caladan was too quiet for people like them.
Gurney Halleck had learned, long ago, that silence could be more unbearable than noise. On Giedi Prime, suffering had been loud—screams, metal, orders barked without mercy. Pain had a rhythm there, something predictable, almost. But here… here it dissolved into something shapeless. Lingering. Patient.
He saw it in her.
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She had been brought to Caladan not long ago, another life pulled from the Harkonnens’ grasp, another body that had survived what should have broken it completely. The others spoke of it as a victory. Gurney knew better. Survival was not the end of anything. It was the beginning of something far more complicated.
She moved like someone who didn’t trust the ground beneath her feet. Even in the safety of the keep, her shoulders never quite lowered, her gaze always catching on shadows that weren’t there. The servants whispered that she was difficult. That she startled too easily, that she worked too hard or not at all, that something in her was… wrong.
Gurney had heard worse.
He recognized it for what it was.
He didn’t approach her at first.
Not directly.
Instead, he made himself a constant. A presence she could learn without fear. He took to lingering in the training yards when she passed through, or sitting within earshot when she worked, the quiet hum of his baliset filling the air without demanding anything in return. No sudden movements. No sharp words.
No expectations.
The first time she reacted, it wasn’t to him—but to the sound.
A single wrong note.
Her body had gone rigid, breath caught somewhere between a gasp and a choke, eyes distant in a way Gurney knew too well. He stopped playing immediately. Not out of offense. Out of understanding.
He didn’t ask what she had seen.
Days passed before he spoke to her.
Even then, it wasn’t much.
“Too quiet for you, isn’t it?” he said one afternoon, his voice low, steady—carefully measured so it wouldn’t startle.
He didn’t look at her right away. Gave her the space to choose whether to answer.
When she didn’t, he nodded slightly, as if she had.
“It was for me too.”
Gurney wasn’t gentle by nature. He had been shaped by harsher things. But with her, he learned restraint in a different way—not the discipline of combat, but the patience of waiting. Waiting for her to sit closer, even if only by a few inches. Waiting for her to stop flinching at the sound of footsteps behind her. Waiting for her to exist in the same space without bracing for impact.