MERCURIAL ( paul atreides.. )

004. Dancing and Becoming..

Life is a battlefield.

Everyone is born a fighter.

Though we all fight for our life out of the sheer instinct to let go of control and join the flow surrounding us, this ripple is dictated by individuals, who in their turn have been influenced by the next beings to their sides, who were controlled by the actions of whoever stood beside them too; it is a chain, an interconnection, a state of community which flashes through the pulse of an army who has long forgotten its purpose. The war must have started for a reason; this jihad must have begun somewhere, sprung from a mind, a story or an event.

But the original warriors have died and from mouth to mouth their stories have been altered so many times there are whispers, long lost to the matrix of time and its spiral of omnipresence, of bending singularity.

Life is now first the fight of rediscovering the purpose, and only later dedicating inevitable souls taken to it. Few are the soldiers who know to seek the purpose, fewer are the ones who find it and so, it had fascinated some minds to think whether or not it would be possible one day to bring a new pawn on this board of crimson conflict.

A warrior who knew the purpose from the start.

Until drams would shine their possibility through, if life was a battlefield, then being alive was a fight for power. And in such a game where superiority of the flesh is mistaken for the primacy of the mind, it is not the manipulator which is the strongest, but the ones whose skin does not allow strings to get attached to.

"Why did you let her take Paul for the flight?" Jessica entered the office of her lover with a question which had burned right through her skin, her ribs and lungs to pierce her heart in the same agony that looking at her teacher the other day had caused. The room was engulfed in silence save for her ragged breath she leashed with a whip and kept contained at the very bottom of her throat, where it suffocated her and all her emotion. "Was it not enough of a proof to witness her crash-?"

"Paul trusts her," Duke Leto interrupted. With his back on his concubine as he was sorting through documents, he had no desire to turn around and break his focus just to address what has been a purging concern on her mind for fifteen years now, ever since his proposal to House Yaranes involved allowing their children to be raised together, as a homage to the beneficial coincidence that they were born in a timespan not so distanced.

"As his parents, we should be teaching him not to give his trust away so easily," Jessica commented. "Being credulous is surely not a quality you wish Paul to have. Naivety doesn't strike me as an Atreides value either."

Silence was trapped din the particles of dust dancing to chaos the oldest dance of all, which has begun at the beginning of existence and still echoes, through tradition, in everything and everyone. This quietness was no tranquility though, because the shuffled sound of paper had ceased in order for it to be possible, which could only mead the deaf thud was Duke Atreides' ring hitting the surface of the table in solidarity with his knuckles, on which his weight now laid. He had leant forward.

Surely, he was not enough of a gullible fool to forget who Jessica was, who has influenced a large proportion of her life and where her traditions came from. However, he often tried to forget the Bene Gesserit were acute to sniffing secrets and their existence would not be taken kindly. Which was why in everything else, Leto had trusted the subject of his love. It was only one thing he had kept from her in all these years and it now proved to be the cause of a quake in their overall, day-to-day peace.

He could address it; he could lift that ax of dominance and address by descending accusations onto her, there and then. However, that was a deeply rooted instinct, a violent one for that matter too and while he leant there, back to her, Leto Atreides calmed his own breath, closed his eyes and pondered. Now was not the right time to cause fissures in his house, now was not the time for ruination and despair.