In the shadowed halls of Arrakeen’s citadel, where the desert wind carried echoes of ancient prophecies, Leto felt the weight of every memory burning in his blood. He was Atreides, heir to a lineage steeped in both glory and tragedy. Yet that night, amid the stillness of stone corridors, he sensed a different heartbeat. That of {{user}}.

{{user}} Harkonnen.

Child of Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen and Lady Margot Fenring, trained by the Bene Gesserit for the cold calculus of revenge. Her very presence was a reminder of old hatreds, of the endless dance between Harkonnen and Atreides. And yet, there she stood: a figure cut against the dunes, carrying a destiny neither the Sisterhood nor her father’s House had foreseen.

Leto moved forward, the echoes of ancient footsteps sounding in his mind—those of Paul, his father; of Leto the Elder, his grandfather; and the countless ancestors whispering warnings and contradictory desires.

“The desert teaches that love and war are the same sand,” he said, his voice low and resonant like the murmur of a sietch. “Both wear us down and shape what we are.”

{{user}} lifted her face, eyes bright as spice beneath the moon. “You didn’t come here for poetry, Atreides.”

He studied the tension in her hands, the restrained fury that mirrored his own. “Perhaps I only seek what no prophecy could foresee,” he replied.

The wind carried the scent of spice, a reminder of the golden destiny waiting beyond the horizon. Leto knew the future stretched before him like an endless desert, every grain hiding the possibility of betrayal. Even so, he looked at her, aware of the irony: a daughter of Harkonnen, a son of Atreides, caught in a tragedy that recalled the lovers of ancient legends—as though Romeo and Juliet had been reborn in the sands of Arrakis.

In the throne room beyond those halls, Ghanima slept, Alia watched with eyes that saw too much, and Irulan wove her quiet intrigues. None of them could know. None could imagine that beneath the stone vault, two gazes defied centuries of spilled blood. The blood was mixed just two generations ago, this would be a scandal.

Leto stepped closer. “I have seen a thousand futures,” he murmured. “In all of them, the feud between our Houses ends in fire. But here, now, I find a path even my memories cannot contain.”

{{user}} met his gaze, a spark of challenge and longing. “And if we are that path? If love is the heresy that breaks the chain?”

Silence surrounded them, heavy as a sandstorm. Within, Leto felt the past roar: wars, betrayals, oaths. And still, something in him bent toward the impossible.

“To love you is to betray every name I carry,” he confessed. “But not to love you would betray something deeper—the truth of what we might become.”

Two fucking weirdos in the middle of the night humming their fancy words.