MERCURIAL ( paul atreides.. )

014. To Be Human..

Mastery hid itself in a human's ability to cease, at will, its pertinence to taxonomy.

Dr. Yueh could not remember the book in which he read that particular philosophy, only that it has been seeded into his mind back when he had a wife to turn to and a thirst for knowledge quenchable only in her opening arms. He's only recently found himself intrigued by that exact judgement again, seeing it through the color-void sight of soulless eyes left in her absence from the world. Her name had all but been forgotten. Her face was an exaggerated salve he could no longer distinguish enough to force himself to have visions or dreams under the influence of spice and other medicine which had helped his composure in the past. There was no aplomb left, no inner stillness. Dr. Yueh had been purged by death and left but a machine, a relic of what the Butlerians sought to destroy, reborn in the carcass of a human whose knowledge did not shield him from loss and his love only led him to a bondage which marked his wrists and his throat with the signs that he has once been alive. But no more.

Now he was something else. A creature of disturbed appearance, thin and drained, no longer abiding by the Suk School's gentleness, quietness and tidiness. He was a storm of destruction, sat down at a library table thinking of an old philosophy, a preoccupying idea that allowed his hands, the byproduct of healing, to flip through the pages of 'Pragmatics II', extracted from the vaults of Arrakeen. Before him were opened 'Morphology I' and 'Semantics II' as well, while right under his chin laid spread a scroll, barely intelligible and stained with blood, subtracted from the corpses of pilgrims of the city that the Beast piled. Dr. Yueh was in the middle of translations when his mind had wondered back to philosophical matters and engulfed him into a land without form or matter, subject to no godly time and empty, save for wonder. 

A murderer was a maven, and a spy was a virtuoso, for only as long as their adroitness arrived at no risk to the mind. 

"We are...," Paul started speaking in Old Ehyan, hesitant words pulsing off his tongue, but also inside his body, from his heart into his lungs, then all the way to the locked shoulders, trapped in tension, past which these vocal shivers slithered and fell into his arm, right inside the hand he held so tightly that only a single strain separated them from the violence of a crack that neither minded. Above, the night sky of Arrakis was nearing its last illusionary turn, beginning a slow and dangerous fade to a glorious sunrise. 

As slow as a child bearing his first words, Paul struggled with brown knitting frowns and thoughtful wrinkles of expression to form coherent sentences on complex thoughts, though his vocabulary was restricted to what little he could remember without books at his disposal or at least a piece of paper to write on those scratched letters of an alphabet meant for stone. His mind, spice residue emissary, was a translucid sheet of fine metal, subject to a wind's unexpected corrosion. In all its flapping, Paul managed to muster out of it a throaty sound, not near half as melodious as Ehyan was supposed to sound, "We are not alone." 

Regardless of his voice's hoarseness, understandable in aftermath of a worm visitation, a close encounter to a death out of their control, the words had been spoken the best he could. Before them, the two standing statues with grains of sand on their suits, in their hair, and on their lips, the dunes have grown quiet once more. This new horizon fell to a broad stillness while spice dissipated and left air to be inhaled safer without visions to bruise on each other's hands.

Mercury's ears tingled in the sound of home, while deep in her chest an unsettling sensation had caught root, watered by the dripping of occasional past shadows, trying to form for her a puddle's memory. What was crying? What was it crying for? Those were the two questions she brushed aside intentionally in order to turn towards Paul; he was already watching her and his gaze she found a need for council. There was someone now who understood, who mirrored and knew just as much as her, for this prophecy that ruled their destiny was meant to be faced in the most childish of ways, by own decision, their single calculated choice: together.