Work Text:
When Jake enters the family marui to see Neytiri holding Spider to her chest instead of Pril, he feels so left-footed that it almost makes him sick. While small compared to a Na’vi, Spider is large for a human, six feet and change and broad with strength and muscle, and yet he looks child-like and tiny, Tuk’s size, wrapped up in Neytiri’s arms. She tries to shield him from Jake, hissing and baring her teeth with something distinctly alarmed sparking like kindling in her eyes, her fangs little more than a defensive show. Spider burrows further into her hold, pressing his face into her chest, and though Jake can see nothing of him but his shoulders and his tangled dreadlocks wrapped in Neytiri’s fingers, he can tell that Spider is crying. These terrible hitching sobs, hiccupping through tears as his shoulders shake and his lungs jerk, his rasping breaths juddering out of him. Jake can smell the salt of his tears.
Neytiri asks him to leave, so he does. He is thinking so many terrible and confounding things that it makes him dizzy, as he stumbles like a blind man across the shore. He drags his feet, his toes catching in the sand, and it’s only sheer willpower that keeps him standing. He can’t make sense of it – of Spider crying so hard and so forcefully that it was as if Neytiri’s arms were the only thing holding him together. Has Jake ever seen Spider cry? He’s seen him hold back tears as a young boy after he’d been jerked awake by a nightmare, had held him while he wailed as Norm set his broken arm after he’d fallen from a tree trying to chase Neteyam and Kiri, but Jake has never seen him sob like that.
He tries to think. From what little Jake could see of him, he didn’t seem wounded, and if he had been, Neytiri would’ve been caring for him. He hadn’t heard of anything terrible happening lately, and as far as he’s aware, Spider’s nightmares have been few and far between recently, a small blessing. He doesn’t know what could’ve brought that on. He has no idea, and that scares him more than he’s willing to admit.
But luckily, he knows someone who will know, two people who have always known everything about Spider, even things that Spider wished they didn’t know – all he has to do is find them.
It’s easy to find Lo’ak. He spends as much time with Tsireya these days as he spends with his own family, and Jake finds his feet already turning in that direction before his mind has come up with a plan, stumbling like a drunkard across the uneven sands to reach the marui. Other villages greet him kindly, inclining their heads and waving, but Jake can barely muster any response, managing a slight smile and a nod as he hurries to his destination.
He can hear their voices from the marui as he approaches, and he stops before the entrance, ducking down and listening. It’s a breach of privacy that he would otherwise try to avoid, but they sound serious, voices low and conspiratorial, and it makes his guts twist with anxiety. So he hunches down, cranes his head to peer into the marui without being seen, and listens.
It’s Kiri and Tsireya, Lo’ak and Aonung, Pril and Tuk, a full house. While Lo’ak holds Pril in his arms, wrapped in a bundle that is distinctly Neytiri’s handiwork, Tuk is asleep over Aonung’s shoulder, her arms draped around his neck and her tail wrapped around his forearm where he holds her to his chest, one hand resting securely on her back. Pril gurgles a waking noise, and Lo’ak bounces and rocks in a tentative, unsure motion until she settles back down. The sight, though sweet, does nothing to dissuade Jake’s anxiety, because the expressions on their faces are distinctly discouraging.
“A machine?” Tsireya asks. “What kind of machine?”
“I don’t know,” Kiri says. “He says they put him in it to try and read his thoughts.”
“But he resisted. He wouldn’t tell them anything,” Lo’ak adds hurriedly, as if there was ever any doubt. He paces up and down the marui, and Jake can’t tell if it’s to soothe Pril or himself. “So, he was punished. The machine hurt his brain, and that’s why he gets the headaches and the nosebleeds.”
“And the scars,” Aonung says, curious. “All from this… machine?”
“Yes,” Kiri says. “He says it was like someone cracked open his skull and stabbed into his brain looking for something he wouldn’t give them.”
“What did they want?” Tsireya has made her way to Lo’ak’s side, and their elbows brush each time he passes her on his relentless march, like magnets. “He is just a boy. What could he possibly know that they needed so badly?”
Kiri and Lo’ak exchange a look, brows pulled down, ears pressed back, tails held at attention. Jake closes his eyes, resigned, and thunks his head against the marui as quietly as he can. He has a terrible sinking feeling that he already knows where this is going. “The Sky People are obsessed with our dad, because he used to be one, and he chose our mother and our people over them,” Kiri says. “That’s why they came here, why they were looking for us, why they took Spider. He knows everything about us, like where we lived, how to find us. They’ll do anything to get their hands on our dad.”
“Yeah,” Lo’ak scoffs bitterly. “Like torturing an innocent kid.”
And that’s exactly what it was – torture. When Jake had first arrived on Pandora, the NeruoSect had been little more than a blueprint and an idea, a way to extract information from unwilling subjects, but he had never seen it function, had barely ever seen it conceptualised, and with so much going on and his life changing so drastically, he had put the thought of it entirely out of his mind. It hadn't involved him, and he hadn't wanted anything to do with it. But now Jake can’t stop thinking of it. Spider, all alone in the RDA base surrounded by enemies, was shoved into a machine that tortured him and violated him all to gather information on Jake. Information that, apparently, he never gave them, even in the face of incredible pain and possible long-lasting effects. Jake’s no scientist or doctor or tsahìk, but he knows that bloody noses and headaches relating to brain trauma aren’t the kind of thing that just goes away over time.
“If he did not give them what they wanted, how did he make them stop?” Aonung asks, the mind of a tactician, the son of the olo’ektan through and through. “You say he was with them for many months.”
“Eight months,” Kiri corrects redundantly. To Aonung, the exact amount of time doesn't matter, but to Kiri, to Lo'ak, to Jake, it means everything. “They stopped because his dad - Quaritch - made them stop. Because he felt sorry for him, or something. I don’t know.”
“The demon,” Aonung says simply. Lo’ak bares his fangs automatically, still rocking Pril.
“Yes,” Kiri’s voice is quiet. Wary. “The demon.”
“You cannot call him his father, because it is not true,” Aonung explains, his voice a little bit gentler than it had been mere moments ago. “I only mean that if he really were his father, he would not allow such a terrible thing to happen to him in the first place. He would have stopped the pain before it could have ever begun, not when it was too late and the damage was done.”
Tisreya steps forward, places a hand on Lo’ak’s shoulder, and he tilts his head towards her as she frowns at him. “He left in such a hurry. I hope we didn't upset him. Is he alright now?”
Sighing through his nose, Lo’ak gently hands Pril to Tsireya and runs a heavy hand through his hair. “I don’t know. He says he is, but he’s never been the kind of person to tell the truth about that sort of stuff. He says he’s tired. Really tired. And I can’t blame him. I’d be tired too if I spent eight months with the Sky People and my father was the worst demon to ever live.”
“Lo’ak,” Kiri chides quietly, wincing.
“What? If Spider were here, he’d say the same thing,” Lo’ak waves his arms, impatient. “I think he's going to be fine. He’s with our mum right now. She wouldn’t let us stay, so.”
“Will you tell Jake and Neytiri?” Aonung asks.
“No,” Kiri responds. “Spider asked us not to, so we won’t. It’s not our place.”
It is a very likely thing that Jake and Neytiri will never know the full story, that the only people who will ever know what Spider really went through are Lo’ak, Kiri, and Spider himself. He feels terrible, hiding here, listening in. It’s not his place. They’ve made it abundantly clear that they won’t share Spider’s story, and Jake respects them so much for it that it makes him feel lightheaded with pride. Because it would be so easy for them to confess. For them to pull Jake or Neytiri aside and inform them of what’s been going on, but they won’t, because they care about Spider too much to go behind his back.
There is a small, cowardly part of him that wants to let this go. A part that wants to walk away and go about his day and pretend like he never heard any of this. But he thinks about Spider crying in Neytiri’s arms, thinks about Neteyam lying in a spreading pool of his own blood on the rocks, thinks about his mates screams and his children’s sobs and his brain chugging to a halt, thinks about the mantle he gave up and the home he left behind, thinks about Quaritch and his satisfied grin as he finally got Jake in that cage like a dog, thinks about that terrible place and how Spider was left there with a man he had been raised to hate and was treated as less than because of his love for Pandora and the Na'vi, and how all of it, every single little bit of it, was Jake’s fault.
He knew that Spider would never give them up, not unless he’d had no other choice, not unless they literally tortured him to get that information, and they did, yet he still didn’t give them up. Jake had been so scared, so uncertain, so lost, that he hadn’t known what to do other than to put one foot in front of the other and focus on keeping his family safe. But Spider had always been his family, even if Jake had never been able to admit it. He should’ve come up with a plan to get Spider back when Quaritch had first taken him. With the children safe with Neytiri, he could’ve taken his ikran and flown after them, taken Spider from the RECOMs before they’d reached the base, could’ve done a hundred other things to protect him, but he didn’t. He didn’t do anything. Jake has failed, again and again and again, and so many people that he loves have gotten hurt in the process.
Jake thinks about the taste of Eywa’s prayer on his tongue, thinks about Spider’s tiny human body kneeling in the ground at Jake’s feet, tears falling down his cheeks and his panicked breaths going shallow and jagged, his small shoulder trembling beneath Jake’s grasp, the knife tip wavering as Jake tries so hard to go through with what he believes needs to be done, for Spider’s sake and the sake of the Na’vi. He thinks about dad, he thinks about it’s okay, I know I have to go to Eywa now, he thinks about do you still love me?
His feet move before his brain becomes conscious of it, his thoughts stuck on the feeling of Spider’s small body curled into Jake’s chest, the knife discarded, and his hand curled into Spider’s hair as he held him ever closer.
All discussion falls to a sudden silence as Jake steps up into the marui. Lo’ak and Kiri look to Jake with wide eyes, and even Aonung and Tsireya, arms burdened with children, take steps back at whatever they must see in his eyes, shooting the Sully children startled looks at the backs of their heads.
“Dad,” Lo’ak says weakly. “How much of that did you hear?”
“Enough,” Jake states. He tries not to shout, to keep all the frustration and worry and rage out of his voice – none of it is directed at his children, but he fears that anything he says will come across as cracked and raw and bleeding, like a seeping wound. “I heard enough.”
“Dad,” Kiri’s voice is faint with uncertainty. “You can’t... you can’t tell Spider that you know. You can’t. We promised him that we wouldn’t tell you.”
“You didn’t tell me,” Jake says. “You told Aonung and Tsireya. I only overheard. It’s different.”
Lo’ak shakes his head hard enough that the beads in his hair clack and jangle together. “It’s not. You know that Spider won’t see it that way.’
It’s true. Spider will hear that Jake knows about it and will never confide in Lo’ak or Kiri again. Unfortunately, he got his stubbornness from three people – Jake, Neytiri, and Quaritch. He lets air out of his nose like an angry bull. “Fine,” he allows, trying not to think about anything at all except for these children in front of him, looking at him like he’s a thanator about to pounce. He forces himself to soften. “Fine, I won’t tell him. But you have to understand – I’m his father. He’s my son. I need to know what happened.”
“No,” Aonung says, and Jake feels a flare of rage – how dare this outsider speak up in matters of Jake’s family? – but at the sight of Tuk still sleeping soundly on Aonung’s shoulder, his ire flees from him immediately. “You do not. What has happened has already happened, long ago. Knowing now will only make it worse.”
“Aonung,” Jake sighs. “I appreciate it, I do, but - ”
Tsireya places a hand on Lo’ak’s elbow, and she looks at him, even as she addresses Jake. “Family is hard. Sometimes, it is our best intentions that only make things worse.” Lo’ak looks away. Jake wishes that he knew what that meant.
His hands curl into fists at his side. “How am I supposed to help him if I don’t know what’s wrong?”
Kiri moves closer, approaching Jake with short yet sure strides, and rests one of her hands on Jake’s arm. They’re Jake’s hands – four-fingered, too human, demon-blooded. Beautiful, from her ten toes to her ten fingers and the eyebrows on her face. “There’s nothing you or anyone else can do about what happened when he was with the Sky People,” she says gently, imploringly. She’s probably already talked herself into believing the same thing and is just waiting for Jake to catch up. “But he’s here now. He’s hurting now. You don’t need to know what happened to him then to help him heal now.”
How the hell is Jake supposed to help him if he doesn’t even know what he’s healing from? But Kiri is right – she usually is. And Aonung and Tsireya seem to understand more than Jake does. And Lo’ak… well, he understands Spider on a level that Jake has never allowed himself to reach. Even Tuk has been closer to Spider in recent years than Jake has. He hasn’t allowed himself to get to know him, has never permitted himself to get close to him. He’s cared about Spider for so long, has always included him among his children, even if he has never claimed him as such. But Spider is a Sully, now. He’s Jake’s son. He needs to do better, not just by Spider, but by all his children. He needs to put in the work – right now.
Sighing slowly, he shuts his eyes and forces himself to breathe. “Is there anything?” he asks helplessly, desperately, a last-ditch effort. “Anything that you can tell me that isn’t going to break your promise to him?”
Lo’ak and Kiri exchange a knowing look. “Not really,” Kiri says eventually. “He’s got scars on the back of his neck – Tsireya and Aonung found them. From when he was with the RDA.”
“And you know how he gets headaches and nosebleeds?” Lo’ak adds. Jake nods – many a time he’s returned to the marui to find Spider curled up on a pallet with his head burrowed in his hands and blood on his fingers. “They’re from the same thing. The RDA did it.”
“I sensed a scar on his mind. Like a speck of something withered,” Tsireya says quietly, uncertain if she ought to speak up. She bounces Pril similarly to how Lo'ak did, her fingers brushing soothingly down her sister's cheeks. “I felt it while I was treating him. I don’t know what that’s from.”
“There are many other scars and old wounds,” Aonung says, almost flippantly, looking away. “I have noticed them while sparring, fishing, and repairing nets with him. But I do not believe that is relevant.”
“It’s all relevant,” Jake inclines his head to him. “Thank you, thank you both.”
“Dad,” Lo’ak breaks away from Tsireya, though it looks like it physically pains him to do so, and comes to stand on Jake’s other side, resting his hand on Jake’s other arm, looking up at him imploringly and mirroring Kiri in every way. They’re Jake’s hands – four-fingered, too human, demon-blooded. Beautiful, from his ten toes to his ten fingers and the eyebrows on his face. “You gotta… you've got to do this right, okay? You need to step lightly. Because you know Spider. If he thinks for a second that we’re worried about him, he’ll act like he’s perfectly fine again, and we’ll never be able to talk to him about any of it ever again, because he’ll lock it all up and shove it away, and that’ll be the end of this whole thing. So, you’ve just… you need to watch where you step.”
Just when Jake thought it was impossible to love his children any more than he already does, they prove him wrong yet again, and he feels his heart grow three sizes. He shakes them from his arms so he can cup his hands around the backs of their skulls and drag them in to hug them against his body, tucked beneath his arms. “You kids are so good,” Jake hums to them. “Sometimes I don’t even believe that you’re my kids because there’s so much goodness in you that it’s insane.”
“Ugh, Dad,” Lo’ak bemoans, but he doesn’t pull away.
Eventually, when Jake has gotten his fill, and he can tell his children are getting a bit antsy, he lets them go. He crouches down so he can stare into their eyes, so they can see how deathly serious he is. “I might put my foot in it, but I promise that I’ll try not to make it worse. He’ll be okay. He’s a tough kid.”
Kiri offers him a wry smile as she prods him out of the marui. “I think that’s part of the problem, Dad.”
He spends the walk back to the Sullys' marui in a daze. He wonders if he should call Norm and Max for this, just like he called them for Kiri’s seizure. He wonders how damaged Spider’s brain must be if Tsireya can sense it through her ministrations without knowing the source. He wonders if Neytiri knows anything, but he shakes the thought away immediately, knowing the answer is certainly no. He wonders how much he can push and prod before Spider shuts down, and he can’t get anything else from him. He wonders how Quaritch could watch his own son get tortured and wouldn’t or couldn’t do anything to help him until the damage had already been done. He wonders how he felt as he dragged Spider out of the NeuroSect and had to come face to face with what he had done, what never would’ve happened if he had just left Spider and Jake’s children alone and let him go home with his family. He hopes he blames himself. He hopes he died hating what he did.
The marui is quiet, almost silent, unlike what it was when he arrived, a lifetime and an hour and a second ago. He peeks his head inside, cautious of Neytiri’s ire, and finds the two of them curled up against the wall. Spider isn’t crying anymore and seems to have fallen asleep in Neytiri’s arms, mentally, emotionally, and physically exhausted. Neytiri is staring at the far wall, unseeing, rocking Spider in gentle motions just like she’s done for all their children over the years, humming something absently under her breath, a wordless lullaby. She doesn’t react as Jake creeps in.
“Baby,” Jake crouches down in front of her, and she blinks as if seeing him for the first time. She holds Spider tighter against her, protectively, more securely, before she realises it’s him and relaxes again. “Baby, it’s me, it’s okay.”
She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t have to. She just adjusts the way she’s holding Spider so she can tilt his head forward gently and lift his hair and his kuru off the back of his neck. For the first time, Jake can see the scars he’s heard about, can see the evidence of the NeuroSect and the RDA’s treatment and those eight months away under Quaritch’s so-called care. Jagged, knotted, twisted pale wounds long healed, evidence of a procedure done in haste and without regard for the subject, the teeth of the NeuroSect biting into Spider’s neck, tasting his tender flesh as the machine invaded his mind like a tongue wriggling into his brain through the ear, more inhumane and monstrous than the alien Na'vi ever could be.
“Look,” she hisses lowly. “Look at what they did to him.”
He wants to tell her, wants to tell her where they came from, but can’t. He’s made promises, and the last thing he ever wants to do is let Spider down – again. “They look old,” he says instead, bringing up a big hand to gently brush his fingers over the scars. Spider shivers but doesn’t wake. “He didn’t get hurt today. He’s okay.”
“No,” Neytiri grips Spider and adjusts her hold on him to pull him up against her again. Jake's fingers fall away to dangle helplessly between them. “He is tired. He... he...” She struggles to find the words because she doesn’t know, not really, what he is. Just what she can see, what she can feel, what she knows as a mother of five. She shakes her head, at a loss.
Sitting beside her, Jake crosses his legs and keeps Spider between them. He rests one of his hands on Spider’s hip – so large in comparison that he can cup his whole side and could crush his whole pelvis in a single squeeze. “What do you want to do?”
“I want,” Neytiri seethes, fangs bared in wrath. “To kill them all. Every last one, ma Jake, until Spider is the very last pinkskin on our land.”
Jake knows she isn’t thinking about Norm, Max, and the other scientists. He knows that she’s keenly aware that she cannot just storm Bridgehead and take out the whole invading force. But he also knows that she is scared, and she is angry, and she doesn’t know what else to do other than what she’s been doing for years and years.
“We will,” he promises her. “But there’s nothing we can do about it right now. That’s a long-game problem. It’ll take us years. But here, right now,” he tilts his head down towards Spider, where he sleeps soundly in Neytiri’s arms and sprawled out in Jake’s direction, as if sensing that he’s enclosed between them. “What do you want to do?”
Sighing shakily, Neytiri brings her hand up to gently card her fingers through Spider’s hair, brushing his locs off his face and behind his ear. Spider makes a soft, sleepy sound and shifts so he can press his head up into her hand, seeking her touch even in his sleep, and her expression crumples like wet paper. “Nothing,” she whispers, brushing a finger down the crust of dried tears on his face. “Just this. Only this. For as long as we can. Until they try and take it from us again.”
Heart in his throat, Jake looks down at Spider. Tall and broad, aggressive as a nawkx and strong as an angtsìk, sprawled across Neytiri with his long limbs inching out towards Jake, he looks so small, so fragile, and more than anything else, so tired. Jake brings his hand up so he can rest it on his side and feel the rise and fall of his body as he breathes. Any number of ways he could’ve been taken from them. Jake could’ve lost another son and not even known what was taken from him until it was too late.
“Okay, baby, okay,” Jake tries to clear his throat to rid the tears from his voice, but Neytiri must hear them anyway, because she makes a soft, sad sound in the back of her throat and tilts sideways to lean her weight against Jake’s side. “We can stay here with him. We’ll stay.”
I’m not going anywhere, Jake thinks as Spider sighs in his slumber, his breath ghosting out heavy and hot on Jake’s arm. They’ll have to drag me out of here by the tail, kicking and screaming, for me to leave for a single moment.
Spider rolls over slightly, eyes roving beneath his lids in deep sleep, and his limp hand falls across Jake’s wrist, fingers flexing slightly as if instinctually trying to cling to him, fingers against his pulse point.
Baby boy, Jake thinks as he hunches over and ducks his head down low to gently rest his forehead against Spider’s tangled dreadlocks, breathes in the loamy, earthen smell of him, the salt of tears and stress-sweat, feels the alive warmth of him, concentrates and listens to the steady pound of his heartbeat beneath his chest. Despite all odds, alive, alive, alive. Oh, my baby boy.