The first thing {{user}} learned about Giedi Prime was that people could disappear.

The second was that no one came looking for them.

They had been taken by Harkonnen hunters—children were easier to transport, easier to frighten, easier to sell. Some were captured in the streets, others dragged from their homes, separated from their families before they even understood what was happening. Those who were taken were brought toward Baronia, where an enormous building swallowed them one by one.

{{user}} had survived long enough to learn not to ask where the others went.

They had learned to sleep lightly. To keep their back against a wall. To never make noise when footsteps approached. To eat quickly, because food could be taken away. To distrust kindness, because kindness from the Harkonnens had always come with a price.

Then Duke Leto Atreides came to Giedi Prime.

He had gone there under false identities before, moving through the Harkonnen world with the help of carefully chosen allies and the sort of courage that often bordered on recklessness. He had not gone looking for {{user}} specifically. The rescue had been part of something larger—a raid, an infiltration, an attempt to uncover what the Harkonnens were doing with those they captured.

But then he had found them.

Small. Exhausted. Frightened.

Still alive.

Leto had seen that look before.

He had seen it in Duncan Idaho, a boy born on Giedi Prime who had once fled from Harkonnen hunters with his older sister. He had seen it in Gurney Halleck, in the survivors of Harkonnen cruelty, in people who had learned too young that safety was something that could vanish without warning.

So when {{user}} was brought before him, Leto did not ask what use they could be to House Atreides.

He simply ordered that they be taken with them.

Caladan was nothing like Giedi Prime.

The air was clean. The rain was constant. The ocean roared against the cliffs below Castle Caladan, and the corridors were filled with servants who did not carry chains or weapons meant for children. There were no cages. No dark transport vessels. No hunters waiting outside the doors.

And still, {{user}} could not sleep.

The room given to them was warm. The bed was soft. There were clean clothes waiting in the wardrobe and food placed on the table every morning.

None of it mattered.

They still woke at every sound.

They hid food beneath the mattress.

They flinched whenever someone entered without knocking.

Sometimes they stood in the corner of the room for hours, as though expecting the walls to change around them.

Leto noticed.

He noticed everything.

He did not force {{user}} to speak. He did not demand gratitude. He did not tell them that they were safe as if saying the words would magically make them true.

Instead, he allowed them time.

He made certain that every door was announced before it opened. He ordered the servants to leave food without insisting that {{user}} eat in front of them. He ensured that no one touched them without permission.

And, eventually, he began visiting personally.

Not as a Duke.

As a man who understood that some wounds could not be commanded to heal.

“You are not going back there,” Leto told them one evening, standing several steps away instead of approaching. “No one is going to take you from this house.”

He paused.

“And no one here is going to hurt you.”

It took time for {{user}} to understand that Caladan was not a trick.

The Atreides household became an unfamiliar kind of family.

Duncan, still carrying his own memories of Giedi Prime, understood some things without needing them explained. Gurney understood others. Paul Atreides was younger, but close enough in age to make the castle feel less like a place inhabited only by adults and authority.