Summary: You thought what you wanted more than anything was for Feyd-Rautha to return from the dead. You were wrong.
Pairing: Feyd-Rautha x F!Reader
Word Count: 1.3k
Warnings: mentions of fighting and death, angsty, some kissing
A/N: Dune Wiki describes a ghola as, “an artificially created human, who was replicated from a dead individual”. When I first read about a ghola in “Dune Messiah” (I’m reading the series for the first time, like a bandwagon fan) I thought it posed so many interesting possibilities and unnecessary angst😂😈 Excuse any inaccuracies
Feyd-Rautha was dead.
You had been there when Paul Atreides slipped the crysknife into the soft flesh of his jaw and into his skull.
So then why was he standing in front of you?
Your knees quiver. Was your mind playing a trick on you? Perhaps your grief had warped your sanity. You close your eyes, shake your head as if to dislodge the vision.
“Go away,” you choke out. “I know you’re not real.”
The Feyd-Rautha — if it could be called that, he certainly was a figment of your imagination — tilts his head slightly in a move purely reminiscent of your lover. “You are not pleased to see me,” he rasps, the same voice you heard when you could not sleep, haunting your dreams.
You feel the burn of tears behind your eyes. You close them. “Of course I’m pleased to see you. But you — you’re not real.”
“Maybe not as I once was.”
In the distance, the sound of fervent footsteps slapping the ground, accompanied by panicked breathing, force you to open your eyes. It’s a servant. A young one, wide-eyed and reddened, either by shame or exertion or both.
“Lady Y/N, my humblest apologies —”
You snap at him, “What is this?”
“Lady Y/N —”
“I am a gift. For you,” Feyd-Rautha says. His dark eyes are unsettlingly familiar, studying you as you grapple for a response.
“What is he…?” Your eyes flicker to him, then back to the servant, “…it… talking about?”
Your heart pounds furiously in your chest. This morning you lay awake, blinking the sun and tear-prompted crust from your eyes, and thought only of seeing Feyd-Rautha again. And now he was here. Your mind refused to cooperate with your battling emotions, waging war within you.
“I was supposed to explain, Lady Y/N. I apologize. I tried to stop him but he insisted on coming here straight away.” The servant shuffles his feet. “I-I couldn’t outrun him. He is a gift. A ghola. From the Bene Tleilax.”
A ghola.
Of course.
The foolish, childish hope that the real Feyd-Rautha had miraculously been resurrected slowly wanes, slipping through your fingers. Your chin wobbles as devastation seizes you.
The servant, mistaking your stunned silence, eagerly adds, “The Baron wanted you to have him.”
You offer a stiff nod. “Thank you. You may leave us.”
“Should I extend your gratitude to the Baron?”
“No.” On a different occasion, you might’ve ripped the boy’s head from his neck for proposing such a thing and implicating your rudeness. “Leave.”
The servant scurries away.
Feyd-Rautha is watching you closely, but does not speak.
You, on the other hand, are afraid that if you don’t you might tear apart at the seams. “How…How much do you remember?”
The urge to cross the space between you to touch him, to touch the fatal spot where the knife had slid in, robbing you of him, is too strong. You hope he doesn’t notice you staring. To refrain from indulging in the urge, your hands clench into fists at your sides.
“Not much,” the ghola admits. “Just…fleeting glimpses.” His gaze sweeps your surroundings, landing on you in almost a pleading way, like he’s hoping that you will give him answers. “I needed to come here. To you.”
“This was our room,” you tell him. You hesitate. “Do you remember me?”
“You’re Lady Y/N.”
Disappointment stabs at your heart. “You don’t.”
Feyd-Rautha — no, the ghola (you mustn’t let yourself think of them as one and the same) — shakes his head. “No.”
A strangled sob escapes from you unwittingly, and you turn away.
A gift? No. This was the most severe punishment: The man you loved returned to you, but with no memories of the life you shared, none of the substance that had initially captivated you about the na-Baron. The voice, the features — every goddamn look and gesture, but nothing more than a Bene Tleilax puppet.
“I may not remember you, but something in this flesh does.”
Hope flutters traitorously in your chest. “What?”
“I don’t know how to explain it.” The ghola takes a tentative step toward you. “I may not recall the memories of your past together but this body standing before you, this flesh, carries the echos of your bond. In this physical form, I am a testament to the love you once knew, a vessel for those memories.”
Moved by the ghola’s admittance, tears flow freely down your cheeks now. “You kept saying…you. Not our.”
Of course he didn’t. Why did you mention it?
“Yes.” His jaw clenches. “I’m sorry.”
You laugh bitterly. “Don’t apologize. Feyd never would’ve done that.”
Feyd-Rautha — what remains of Feyd-Rautha, anyway — flashes you a look of regret. Guilt. “I do not wish to make you uncomfortable, Lady Y/N. I can leave.”
“No, please, don’t,” you say. You scrub the tears from your face, embarrassed by the display of vulnerability. “None of this is your fault.”
“May I come in?”
He had been standing in the threshold of the doorway, reminding you of the many times that Feyd had done the very same thing, discussing battle strategy and politics and even lovemaking. You avert your gaze and wave him in, hoping he didn’t see the sudden blaze of your cheeks.
However, you notice him stride past in your peripheral identically to your lover and settle on the edge of the bed. To keep yourself from further jabs of pain, you feign an interest in the view outside the window, fingers tapping restlessly on the pane.
“What was he like?” The ghola asks finally.
“You don’t know?”
You pose the question carefully, hopefully in a manner of nonchalance. What would the ghola think of their bloody origin? It must be terrible to belong to someone else entirely. Especially someone such as Feyd, who answered with his blade faster than he asked questions. A man with no restraint, no fear, and until the very end, no consequences.
You squeeze your eyes shut in an attempt to ward off the images of his final moments.
“I’ve seen…things. I was hoping that you would be able to elaborate.”
“Don’t you want to be your own person?”
“What do you want me to be?”
An innocent enough question. You swallow. “I want you to be someone who is gone.”
The flow of the conversation brings you to face him, reflexive, and the action pains you all over again. “I’m sorry, this is incredibly hard for me.”
His chin dips. “I understand.”
He rises to his feet and starts toward the door. Without thinking, you chase after him. You’ve let your emotions get the better of you and, before you know it, you’ve pulled him against you.
Fuck, he even smelled just like Feyd.
You find that everything is the same as you remember it, your muscles moving all on their own, pushing you up on your tiptoes and your lips on his.
He embraces you then. Immediately. Without any awkwardness or hesitation, and it’s just enough to make you forget that it’s not him.
The kiss is wild, desperate, full of unspoken things that you wish you could’ve told him as he bled out before your eyes. Pleasure uncoils from inside you like a snake seeking the warmth of the sun, slipping out from the darkness and into the light.
Feyd-Rautha grabs hold of your waist and together you stumble backwards, unable to differentiate where he began and you ended. He pushes you against the wall as your kiss deepens. Your hands rove his body — the slope of his shoulders, the plane of his chest, the ridges of scars from past fights that are only all too familiar to you. A thought emerges, unbidden:
This ghola had never been in those fights.
Couldn’t retell the story of each one affectionately the way Feyd did, as if they were done by a lover’s touch and not the blade of an enemy.
You plant your hands on the ghola’s chest and shove. Hard. The heat in your belly, unable to separate what you were feeling from what you knew, rebels against this, the absence of his touch. You have half the mind to reach out and pull him into you again.
The ghola just stares.
“This is wrong,” you manage to gasp. “We shouldn’t be doing this.”
His lips swollen by your kiss, the ghola stammers, “I-I didn’t —”
“You should go.” An indescribable pain crashes over you, dragging you into the depth of its severity.
He nods once. Then again.
The ghola brushes past you to leave and every fiber of your being screams at you not to let him go. But you don’t listen. Instead you wait until he’s gone, ensuring that he’s not coming back, and then collapse to the ground on your knees.
You mourn the man you loved. You mourn the person you were before. And you mourn the fact that this ghola has taken from you the opportunity to mourn.
The ghola, Hayt: A being reconstructed from the dead flesh of the original man whose appearance “positively melts the female psyche,” a Tleilaxu thing who is both man and mask, bearer of gleaming metal eyes, a Mentat, a Zensunni philosopher, a swordmaster — a complex character, indeed. Truth be told, I did swoon a few times while painting this, though thankfully my psyche remains intact.
•
Created for the illustrated edition of Dune: Messiah from The Folio Society
