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Tui smiles in relief as the last of the harsher afternoon light diffuses into the air, leaving everything illuminated but a bit more bearable. When he was younger he could run around in the sun forever, fixing roofs and weaving baskets and gazing out into the ocean’s glare to his heart’s content. But now as his eyes begin to fail him he finds himself more inclined towards the soothing sight of shade. The muscles around his eyes relax, leading the charge for the rest of him to follow suit, and he leans further onto the post he is sitting against.
The baby in his arms rubs at an eye, smiling, also pleased for the change in light. Tui looks down and smooths a wisp of hair.
He can’t resist resting a finger up against her open palm, just to feel her little hand wrap around it. It’s a reflex, and he knows this, but that doesn’t stop him beaming anyway when the fingers inevitably curl, like she knows he’s happy to see her, like she’s glad to have him around.
His first grandchild. Where did the time go.
A familiar silhouette casts a large shadow into the chief’s fale, and Tui smiles.
“Maui.”
“Knock knock, Chief,” he says, carrying some sort of pack on his back filled with a blanket and some extra pieces of tapa. “Sina said you might need some more diapers, just in case.”
“Heh. Where were you half an hour ago,” Tui says. “I have no idea where it’s all coming from.”
Maui chuckles. “All clean, then?”
“Clean as I can get her,” Tui says. “Come, she’s awake. She’ll be glad to see you.”
He makes his way over to them with a grace that always surprises Tui. For a man that size, you wouldn’t expect him to be that quick or quiet while crossing a space. But then anyway he wasn’t a man, and he had to have earned his trickster reputation somehow. Regardless, Maui, hook and all, somehow manages to make no noise, even as he settles in to sit down next to the two of them, his green lavalava almost bright against the floor mat.
He shrugs off the pack and sets its contents in a sort of order on the mat, right near the sleeping basket, all ready for the next little accident. It’s all apparently second nature; he doesn’t even need to look. The whole time his eyes are on the baby, and his chest is swelling with what looks like the barely suppressed need to squeal.
Manawa smiles at the sight of him.
And Maui comes undone.
“Hey, kiddo,” he coos, his voice at least an octave higher than normal. “You miss your Uncle Maui? Uncle missed you, too!”
Tui raises an eyebrow. “You saw her four hours ago when Moana had her.”
“And what a long four hours it was!” he says, tickling her on the stomach. Manawa gurgles in silent laughter, and he might as well be in front of an adoring crowd of thousands for all he just lights up in response. “Why do I even bother going out? Honestly. Why do I ever leave the baby?”
Tui chuckles. “Because she has parents, and they want to see her sometimes.”
Maui rolls his eyes. “Parents,” he sniffs. “I could trick parents. I tricked a goddess ten times into giving me sacred fire. I can totally trick two mortals into giving me one baby.”
Manawa gurgles again.
“See? She’s up for it.”
Tui shakes his head as he adjusts her position in his arms. He tries to roll an ache out of one of his shoulders, to some degree of success.
“You all right there, Chief?” Maui says, a glance at the beginnings of Tui’s slouch. “If that shoulder’s bugging you I could hold her for a while.”
Tui fixes him a look. “Yes, right after you bring up your plans for some sort of kidnapping adventure.”
The demigod’s laugh is loud and boisterous.
“Kidding! I was kidding! So serious!” Maui says. “Like Moana wouldn’t just track me down and make off with the baby before I could even board my boat.”
Tui smiles despite himself. “Yes,” he says, as he hands her over. “I suppose she would.”
The baby snuggles into Maui’s arms like he’s made of down feathers and the world’s finest, softest grass. If Tui wasn’t so sure Moana would kill him if anything happened to her he would worry Maui would crush her in excitement. But as it stands she’s safe, just like she’s always safe in Maui’s arms, and the look on the demigod’s face softens further once she settles in.
“I cannot never get over how quiet she is,” he says, wiggling one of his huge fingers in front of her face. “So we’re really sure she’s Moana’s?”
Tui heaves himself up and stretches his arms, gives his shoulders a few rolls forward and back.
“That’s from her dad’s side. Moana was never like that,” he says, revelling in the cracks down his spine before he settles back onto the floor. “Moana. Oh, that girl. Cried as soon as she came into this world and moved on to talking first chance she got. She hasn’t stopped since. And you’ve no idea how many times we found her climbing out of her sleeping basket in the middle of the night, or scrambling down the stairs and off into the woods.”
Maui smiles. “Yeah,” he says, his gaze far off as he lets himself picture it. “That sounds like her, all right.”
“When she was a baby,” Tui says, “I couldn’t wait for her to get older, you know. Quieter. So she would be less of a handful.”
He shakes his head at the foolishness of his younger self. “It was a simpler time.”
Maui chuckles. He always did love the baby stories. “Hey, I don’t blame you,” he says. “If she were my kid, I would’ve probably stopped at one, too.”
And that’s when something shifts.
All the mirth in the air dies a swift and silent death as Tui struggles to maintain his expression and try to laugh it off. However, his mother was always the one with the knack for theatrics, and she had the cruelty to make sure it was a gift that skipped a generation.
The afternoon light creeps further into the fale as Maui’s eyes widen with the realisation he probably said something he shouldn’t.
“Oh,” he says. “Oh, Chief, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have assumed—”
Tui waves it off. “It’s fine, Maui,” he says. “You wouldn’t have known.”
“So you really couldn’t have—? I always thought you just wanted an only child,” Maui says, and then backtracks. “My bad, my bad, sore subject for humans. Demigod curiosity, ruining things once again! Say the word, I’ll back off.”
Normally he would agree and drop the subject, but this time he considers.
Tui grew up with the stories of the demigod’s legendary curiosity, how it led him to find a passage into the Underworld and how it later drove him to put out all the fires in the mortal realm, just to see where it came from. It’s restrained now in the thousands of years since then, but barely, and Tui can feel it struggling to be let loose, feels it so tangibly he begins to feel it spilling over into him.
He wonders if this was how Maui managed to take fire that many times from Mahuika.
And he sighs.
It was so long ago. Maybe now it won’t hurt to talk about.
He gathers himself.
“There were others,” he says. “Before Moana. But most were lost before … their time.“
He allows himself a glance at his granddaughter, at one good, precious, amazing thing to come out of all the heartache and tears, before he continues.
“We decided to stop trying after Moana was born, after she’d lived a few days. See, she’d had a brother before that, Wakaroa, but after the first week … ”
He stops, and he can feel Maui’s breath stop in his chest.
“The council wanted more, but they got their heir, and I couldn’t put Sina through it all again,” Tui says, and his hands itch with the need to rearrange the tapa, fold the blanket again. “It started with the chiefly classes. No one could leave the island, so Motunui’s villages married into each other until it was just the one village. Eventually the royals almost stopped being able to have kids altogether. It only did so much to start branching marrying outside the ranks.”
Maui swallows, and he looks only at the baby snuggled in his arms.
“By my generation,” Tui says, “the whole village had trouble with it. We wondered if it was a food issue, or that we’d done something to upset the gods. But all the sacrifices and extra hours on the farms and most people still couldn’t … “
He stops, and lets the ache in his heart pass before he continues.
“Anyway,” he says. “It’s better now, been better the last ten years or so. Moana started showing maybe five months after the wedding, a couple of years ago someone had twins; it’s changing. We’re grateful. Our families are going back to the way they used to be.”
Maui frowns, and something about him grows heavier, like some sort of force has started pressing down on him. “Ten years,” he says. “The ten years since we restored the Heart.”
“Maui.”
His voice comes out in a horrified whisper. “The curse took your kids.”
“Maui, I never said that.”
“Didn’t you?” Maui says. “When Te Fiti lost her heart, you lost your fish, your animals died; who’s to say it’s not also why your people had so much trouble having children?”
“Maui,” Tui says. “It’s also been that long since we started marrying outside the village again.”
Tui remembers too late Maui was also the reason they couldn’t leave the island in the first place.
He lets the breath settle in him, and finds himself echoing those words Sina used to cope, so long ago.
“It’s in the past,” he says. “Don’t blame yourself. Nothing will bring them back.”
But Maui is off again, into that void Moana would describe him going into every now and then whenever someone brought up the effects of the curse. There’s going to be a talk with Moana tonight, he can tell, and going by the look on his face it’s going to be a long one.
It’s always so odd, Tui thinks, and so strangely humbling, to see the hero of his childhood stories caught in moments that show just how very human he could be.
Manawa wriggles her hands free of the blanket to grasp at a stray lock of her uncle’s hair, dangling just out of reach. Maui shakes out of his thoughts to gently bat her hands away before she can get his hair in her mouth.
“I’m sorry,” Maui says, the latest apology in the last decade’s string of apologies, just as sincere this time as he was the first. “There’s nothing to say that I haven’t already, I … Chief, I’m sorry. I had no idea.”
Tui waves it off again, and this time his hands lose their resolve and reach out to refold the spare blanket.
“Moana was alone but she was loved,” Tui says, smoothing the soft tapa onto the mat, and he smiles, despite everything. “Still loved. Probably more than she needs.”
Maui swallows. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, she is.”
They sit in silence for a while, Manawa continuing to reach up at Maui’s hair, followed by Maui gently redirecting her hands away. The tapa looks the same once folded and put back where he took it.
Maui sets Manawa belly down on a different part of the floor mat, where she immediately tries and fails to use her elbows to lift herself up higher than just her head, and then keeps trying regardless. She may not have her mother’s energy but she does have her stubbornness. It’s enough to make the silence a little more bearable.
“They grow up so fast, don’t they,” Maui says, and his gaze is far off again, lost in some sort of memory. “One minute you’re watching them open their eyes for the first time, the next … “
Tui leans back against the pole. “Grampa Tui.”
Maui chuckles. “Great-Grampa Maui.”
“Oh, yes, right,” Tui says. “You look so young. I keep forgetting you’re older than the village.”
“Try older than the island,” Maui says. “By the way, you’re welcome. Both this one and Motunui are my work.”
“Explains a lot,” he says. “I always thought they were a bit dramatic and exaggerated.”
“Funny, Chief.”
Tui allows himself a smirk.
“Y’know,” Maui says, “I was an uncle once. And a dad, a few times. I’m not sure where the descendants are but I’m definitely an ancestor at this point.”
Another fact that shouldn’t surprise Tui, and yet still does.
“They didn’t inherit my powers,” Maui says, the heaviness weighing him down again as he keeps his eyes on the baby. “Born human, y’see. The gods gave me my gifts. You can’t pass them down if they aren’t yours to give.”
Tui blinks. “So we’re not going to find any quarter-gods in our voyages?”
Maui shrugs. “I certainly didn’t have any.”
And now the curiosity has shifted hosts, and Tui feels it tugging at him until it’s nearly unbearable. How anyone was supposed to be able to keep this under control he has no idea.
“In a way I’m kinda jealous,” Maui says. “You got to stay with Moana, watch her grow up. All goes well, you leave this world before she does. You get to know you made a life that’ll be there when you’re gone.”
Manawa gives in to what little reserves of energy she has, and rests her head on the floor mat. There’s a sadness in Maui’s smile as he gently brushes back her hair, careful to avoid the more delicate parts of her head.
“I couldn’t be there for my kids most of the time,” Maui says. “Demigod stuff. The wives didn’t like it but they knew what they signed up for. But I loved them, even the troublemakers just like me. And I did my best to be there when I could, be the dad I didn’t have. Sing them to sleep, teach ‘em how to hunt, be there at their weddings. All the usual things.”
The smile fades.
“Probably not usual to bury them and all their kids, though,” he says. “That might just be me.”
One of Maui’s fingers brushes against Manawa’s hand, and she grips it almost like a reassurance. He’s startled before he looks like he’s about to cry.
“It’s hard to lose even one of them. But it’s always hardest when they’re gone before their time,” he says. “I’m sorry, I have no idea what it’s like to lose them before they’re even born. But I can guess.”
“What happened?”
Maui’s hand curls a little around Manawa’s, before he lets go.
“You know the eel I killed, the one I buried?”
Tui nods, slowly.
“That’s why I killed him,” Maui says, and there is a darkness in his voice that no longer belongs to the lovable demigod patron of Motunui, but to the Maui of myth, ancient and divine. “Rua and Rangi, two of my boys. They got their old man’s curiosity, but they didn’t get his powers. That thing ate them while their sisters watched, screaming. I found out after the fact.”
Tui swallows the acid rising up his throat, the sinking feeling of despair he felt the night Sina told him Moana had run away—the nightmares of finding her body washed up on shore, or bone by bone, or never turning up at all. He doesn’t know what he would’ve done if those fears came to life.
“I’m sorry,” he manages.
Maui shrugs.
“The eel gave us a bunch of things,” Maui says. “Coconuts, saltwater and freshwater eels, monsters for some reason… I just kept hacking away until all that was left were its guts.”
His hand wanders up to hold his other arm, and it’s like Maui is holding himself or nursing a phantom injury. “I found them in his stomach,” he says, and in the shade of the fale his eyes are glistening. “And you’re right. All the revenge and guilt, it didn’t bring them back.”
The afternoon breeze drifts in, cool and dry, rustling the tapa screens inside and the coconut trees in the distance.
Tui would never look at coconuts the same way again.
“Yeah,” Maui says. “The family kind of agreed to let the other versions of that story get more popular.”
Even in all the years he knew Maui, it still felt strange to touch him, even for something as necessary as a hongi. Tui always wondered if he was trespassing on some space reserved only for relatives and his closest friends. Which was ridiculous because the demigod was constantly hugging people and letting kids climb all over him. Clearly, the restrictions were just in Tui’s mind.
Which makes it all the more surprising when he finds his hand on Maui’s back, and his mouth devoid of all chiefly words of wisdom.
It’s just them now, two dads and their loss, and words just won’t do.
Maui smiles in appreciation before, impossibly, he starts laughing.
“This is a terrible thing to have in common.”
And just like the curiosity, the laughter spreads into Tui.
“Horrible,” he says, the hand dropping back into his lap.
“The worst,” Maui says. “We could’ve bonded over literally anything else. But no. Demigod curiosity, ruining things once again!”
Manawa lifts her head in confusion at the sudden increase of noise, blinking at the laughter from her uncle and grandfather. Tui picks her back up and snuggles her in his arms, and she relaxes in thanks, her hands reaching up to grab at grampa’s necklace.
She doesn’t look a thing like Moana, Tui notes, not for the first time. She takes more after her dad. But more than that, she also has Sina’s smile, and Tui’s frown, and that same restless need to learn that, while quieter and calmer in Manawa, burns with the same urgency that Moana’s did. And yet, it just doesn’t feel like enough to compare her to those who came before. This is a new life, a new person, full of possibility and hope, and that will never fail to amaze him.
After all the heartache, after everything they went through, she was just one of the many incredible things to show for it.
He offers a finger, and Manawa’s tiny hand closes around it like she knows what it means to hold someone in return.
“Despite everything,” Tui says, “it’s worth it, isn’t it. All the feedings, all the worry and pain … Even if you lose them, it never feels wasted. You’re glad to have had them at all.”
“Yeah,” Maui says, and there’s a smile in his voice. “Wouldn’t have given it up for the world.”