TM prompt 244: "That's something I think is growing on me as I get older: happy endings."

Happy endings?

What are those?

...Do you think I jest?

Our mother died birthing my twin and I, and we awoke to consciousness before even that moment, knowing the memories of all our ancestors back beyond recorded time.

Our father, God and Emperor, walked into the desert a simple blind Fremen, only to return to us and die by treachery before I could even see him for myself, though Leto held him as he died.

Our Aunt, our Regent, dear Alia... They call her St. Alia-of-the-Knife, now, for her final burst of sanity... but where is the happiness in knowing she was herself at her death, when I would rather have had her be herself in life?

And my twin... my Leto... I will die in my appointed span of years, and he refuses to allow me to send cells to the Tleilaxu so that I could return to him as ghola. He will be alone, for so many thousand years, live all those long centuries in service to the cause of freeing humanity from the curse of prescience--and they will all hate and fear him for what they cannot understand.

Happy endings. Child's fables.

TM prompt 245: What's the first thing you remember?

The first thing I remember?

Everything.

I remember Miriam singing in triumph on the bank of the reed sea, and I remember the news that Earth was gone in nuclear fire, homeland lost forever. I remember eighteen-hour days in near-dark textile mills and the screaming of artillery shells as they raced overhead. I remember countless triumphs, and tragedies to outnumber them by far. Exodus after exodus, flight after flight from persecution after persecution, safety found only to have it lost again...

Languages dead for millennia echo in my ears within the halls of my Other Memory, and books that fell to dust before man first took stumbling steps into space whisper as their pages turn.

Moments of passion between even my most distant ancestresses and the men they chose or had chosen for them, moments of wracking grief and bitter rage over wars and pains gone away so many centuries ago fill my memories.

As they have since the moment my twin and I became self-aware within our mother's womb.