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Honestly, a part of Lo’ak felt stupid for being surprised at seeing Quaritch’s face. The man had come back from the dead once already, after all. It just posed the question of how exactly they were supposed to actually kill the man.
Along with how Lo’ak was supposed to escape, because it had been a decent amount of time since he woke up in Quaritch’s shack and he had made zero progress on that front. He had an escape route planned – the shack was almost identical to the ones the humans back home used, just bigger and filled with Pandoran air. The real problem was the cuffs that kept Lo’ak on the cot where he first awoke.
As the sun filled the shack, Lo’ak wondered if people were looking for him. They almost definitely were by now, which was pretty embarrassing. The whole situation was embarrassing. How did Lo’ak go and get himself kidnapped again? Literally weeks after Mom lectured them about not wondering alone at night!
By Eywa, she was going to be insufferable once he got home.
That is, if Quaritch didn’t get tired of waiting for them by the time his family got to the shack. The man kept pacing the length of the small building with his large gun, eyes focused on scanning the forest through the windows.
“Where are they, boy?” He barked, again.
“For the last time, I don’t know!” Lo’ak scowled. The first time Quaritch asked, Lo’ak told him to just use the communicator like he did last time.
“Won’t work,” Quaritch had said. “Set up a device so they won’t work. Your lot want to speak to me, they gotta face me.”
Lo’ak hated to admit it was clever strategy. This time, he asked, “Why so eager anyway? You’re outnumbered. None of your little friends survive the battle?”
Quaritch hissed. “They’ll be back. But I don’t want to wait to get my son back. You’ve poisoned him enough already.”
Lo’ak glared at the man who though he had any sort of claim over Spider. “He’s not your son. He is my brother.”
“Your brother’s a traitor, then.” Quaritch said. “He saved my life. You’re here because my son saved me.”
Spider would never. “Bullshit!”
“Yeah, you tell yourself that, but you said it yourself: all my people are dead. Who else would’ve pulled me out of that shit?”
Lo’ak refused to listen. Quaritch resumed his pacing. The sun had been up for a good couple hours before Quaritch suddenly stilled, eyes trained on something outside.
Then hit the floor when an arrow came sailing through the window, piercing the mattress above Lo’ak’s head. He looked to the fletching of the arrow and smiled.
Mom.
“Goddamn batshit woman,” Quaritch grumbled as he got to his feet, aiming his gun through the window.
“Quaritch!” Dad’s voice sailed through the air. “Give me my fucking son back!”
Yeah, Lo’ak could definitely get on board with that plan.
“You first, Sully!”
But not that one. Absolutely not that one.
From his spot restrained to the bunk, Lo’ak did not get a good vantage point on what was happening. At one point, Quaritch left the shack, leaving Lo’ak to try to strain his ears for the possibility of hearing what was going on, but all he heard were gunshots.
Lots of gunshots.
He hated the sound.
In the midst of feeling particularly useless, Lo’ak jumped when a tile of the ceiling fell to the floor. Then, a pale blonde thing followed.
Spider.
“Hey, bro,” Spider smiled cheekily as he rushed over to where Lo’ak laid. “How’s it hanging?”
“Get me out of here,” was Lo’ak’s only response. Skxawng.
Spider made quick work of the bindings. Lo’ak relished in the ability to stand, fully move his limbs, for the first time in hours.
“Go out the back,” Spider gestured towards the door opposite the one Quaritch left from. “Your ikran is waiting there.”
Lo’ak nodded, but noticed Spider turned to go out the door that Quaritch did. He grabbed the smaller boy’s arm, “Where are you going?”
“Look, this is my mess, I need to clean it up, okay?” Lo’ak’s heart felt weighted. Spider pointed back at the door. “Go!”
Lo’ak didn’t leave, though, staring at Spider.
“What are you doing, go!” Spider waved his hand at the door, glancing over his shoulder to look out the window.
“Spider, did you save Quaritch?” Lo’ak asked. At that, Spider turned to look Lo’ak in the eye.
There was a heavy pause, before Spider said, “Yes. I did.” Never breaking eye contact.
A twitchiness flooded Lo’ak at the words. “Why would you-?!”
But a battlefield wasn’t a time for conversations like this.
“Lo’ak, go!” Spider screamed as more gunfire rang through the air.
When Spider turned, though, Lo’ak grabbed him around the waist and bodily carried him through the back. “Lo’ak, what are you doing?!”
“Saving your life, Skxawng,” Lo’ak grumbled as he formed the connection with his ikran, putting Spider on first and then hoisting himself up. After all, Spider needed to be alive in order for Lo’ak to scream at him for saving Quaritch.
“Lo’ak!” But they were already in the air.
Lo’ak looked down at the battlefield. Dad and Quaritch circled each other, Mom nowhere in sight. She was there, Lo’ak was certain of it, the question was simply where.
“See!” Quaritch yelled at Dad, pointing at Lo’ak and Spider in the air. “Your boy is fine! I didn’t hurt him. I just want to trade.”
Lo’ak never thought of Quaritch as a particularly sane man, but he had not realized he was completely stupid either.
“And I want you dead,” Dad growled, making another move towards Quaritch.
“Why haven’t they just killed him already?” Lo’ak asked, mostly to himself. With Quaritch in this state, Mom and Dad should be able to take him down easily.
“He says he’s got mines around the shack. I was pretty sure he was lying, but they didn’t want to risk it,” Spider said. Which made a good amount of sense, except for one key component.
“So, what, they just let you go into an active minefield?”
“They might still not know I’m here, actually,” Spider said, looking down at the field to watch the fight. “I was supposed to go back with Kiri and Tuk.”
“Spider, what the fuck?!” Lo’ak exclaimed. “Why are you here then?”
“Well it wasn’t like your dad was getting his giant butt into the vents to break you out!”
“So instead you decided to disobey direct orders?!” They were now circling the clearing as they bickered, each keeping an eye on the scene below. Their lack of weaponry made it difficult to provide any assistance, though it did seem that Dad had it mostly under control.
“You know, I did just save your life!”
“That doesn’t make me feel particularly special in this moment.” Lo’ak looked pointedly at Quaritch, alive and well.
“…Okay, that is fair.” It was in that moment that two things happened simultaneously.
Dad went after Quaritch’s legs, knocking him to the ground.
An arrow pierced Quaritch’s forehead through his head, effectively pinning him to the ground.
The man didn’t even struggle as he laid there on the ground.
“It’s over,” Spider said, almost a whisper.
Lo’ak shook his head. “No. It isn’t.”
“What happened to go back to High Camp with your sisters?” Dad asked the second Lo’ak’s ikran landed in the cave. It was a deeply familiar tone of voice that, for once, was not being aimed at Lo’ak.
Spider blinked up at Dad. “Uh…”
“We didn’t even know you were there!” Dad exclaimed. “What if you had gotten hurt?!”
There was a small part of Lo’ak that relished not being on the receiving end of that tone, at least for a moment. He didn’t relish the panicked look on Spider’s face, though.
“I mean, he was the one that got me out,” Lo’ak said. “That’s worth something, right?”
“You’re right, that is something.” Dad said. Suddenly, all that energy was turned onto Lo’ak. Damn it. “Because he wouldn’t have been there at all if you hadn’t decided to leave the cave in the middle of the night.”
Yeah. Lo’ak probably should have seen that coming.
Before he could say anything in his weak defense, though, Mom was storming over from her ikran. She had flown in the opposite direction of High Camp when she saw Spider on Lo’ak’s ikran, but she seemed the same level of pissed as she was when Lo’ak last saw her. Usually, flying helped a little bit. They were extra doomed if it hadn’t calmed Mom down at all. The people who began to gather at their arrival quickly left.
“You two!” Mom’s finger waved between Spider and Lo’ak. “I am chaining you two to the tent poles! You are not leaving our home for a month- no, two months- No! Three months!”
Even Dad was side-eyeing Mom.
However, as soon as she got in arm’s length, the anger melted out of her. Mom’s hands cupped Lo’ak’s face as she gave him a quick once over, then looked into his eyes. “I’m glad you are okay.”
“I’m sorry,” Lo’ak said softly.
Mom just sighed and placed a kiss on his forehead. Then, she let go to look at Spider, grabbing his bicep and turning him around to check him over. “Do I even want to know how you got into the shack?”
“No, ma’am,” Spider said, with that fearful, wild animal look in his eye.
“Well, at the very least, Quaritch is dead,” Dad sighed as he began taking the tack off his ikran.
Yeah… “About that.”
“He could just be bluffing,” Dad said. He had shuffled them into the human shack to talk with the scientists about what Lo’ak gleaned from Quaritch’s words, talking about his friends being back soon and the like. “I mean, he has to be.”
Max didn’t seem convinced. “He came back once before. In a Na’vi body.”
When they asked Spider what he knew about that aspect, Spider just shook his head. “He just kept saying that they weren’t really the people they were before, but he wouldn’t explain it. Was worried I’d tell you guys if I managed to get away.”
In the end, it was Norm who figured it out, quite suddenly in that way the scientists did when they went quiet for a long period of time before figuring out the secrets of the entire universe. It was freaky. “Holy shit. They did it.”
“Did what?” Lo’ak asked.
“They’re clones,” Norm said, looking to Max.
“Holy shit,” Max stared at Norm. “You’re right. They figured it out.”
“Figured what out?” Mom’s gaze narrowed sharply. She could handle the scientists in small doses, but she tended to find them aggravating. Particularly when they found dangerous new elements interesting. Lo’ak couldn’t blame her.
Max did his best to explain it, the way that the link machines used in the Avatar Project came from a failed experiment to save people – their memories, their personalities, everything that made a person, as person – as a data file able to be uploaded seamlessly into another body. The perfect clone.
“After all, it all started as cloning tech,” Max said. “Going all the way back to Dolly the Sheep in the 20th century. Except billionaires don’t want a version of themselves to live forever. They want to live forever. It wasn’t lucrative and started a very uncomfortable philosophical debate in regard to the sanctity of the human consciousness and what it means-”
“All right, all right,” Dad interrupted. “What you’re saying is that Quaritch and the rest of his goons have been saved as some sort of file by the RDA and it doesn’t matter how many times we kill them, they’re still gonna come back?”
At that, Max sighed. “Maybe? I guess it depends on when they decide it’s not worth it anymore, right?”
“I was afraid you’d say that,” Dad rubbed at his face with one hand.
“It means we must fight,” Mom said.
Not this argument again. Lo’ak was way too tired. Mom must have picked up on it, because she quickly ushered him out of the shack, calling over her shoulder to tell Dad to make sure Spider went to bed as well. Unsurprisingly, Lo’ak went to sleep with his mother’s eyes on him and woke up the same way.
From the light of the world around him, Lo’ak couldn’t tell if it was very late in the day or very early in the morning. Mom was sat, watching him, with no one else in the tent.
“Where’s Dad?” Lo’ak asked, his voice soft in the silence.
“With Spider,” Mom said.
Lo’ak nodded. Silence stood for another moment before, “You knew, didn’t you?”
Mom said nothing.
“That he saved Quaritch,” Lo’ak pushed. “That’s what all these meetings have been about, haven’t they?”
“Partially,” Mom admitted. “The meetings have been largely about approaching the Sky People problem head on, as opposed to constantly being on the defense. We have not chosen a method, yet.”
“Method? What methods? We fight them and make them go home.” Seemed simple to Lo’ak.
Mom just chuckled, “It is a little more complicated than that, my boy. We are fighting a people who have nothing to lose. Nothing to return to. Spider has been helpful in explaining what he learned. What he observed during his time with them.”
“So that’s how he’s making up for betraying us.” Lo’ak was trying to be mature, but the words were bitter in his mouth. “Quaritch told me. I didn’t believe him. Then, Spider admitted it.”
Mom rolled her lips together, gathering her thoughts before speaking. “Spider went through a lot while he was being held. While I’m not happy that he did what he did, and neither is Spider, I can understand it. He was put in an awful position. However you feel about this, though, is completely up to you.”
Except, honestly, Lo’ak just felt tired. Very, very tired.
“I don’t want to be mad at you,” Lo’ak muttered, staring out at the horizon line with his legs dangling over the cliff. Spider was sitting beside him, tense as a bowstring, the same way he’d been since Lo’ak went to find and drag him out to the ledge to talk.
“But you are?” Spider asked, when Lo’ak didn’t say anything else.
Lo’ak shook his head. “I think I’m too tired to feel anything anymore. Like nothing could make me feel…strongly.”
Lo’ak wasn’t sure what he expected Spider to say to that. He knew Dad would start panicking, drag him to one of the scientists, and Mom would have some long lecture about finding meaning in Eywa or some shit. Kiri would tell him to go sit in the forest.
Neteyam…Neteyam would pretend to not understand and try to get out of the conversation as quickly as possible, because Lo’ak knew that Neteyam knew this feeling, even if he tried to pretend he didn’t. Can’t be the perfect little soldier with a broken head.
But Spider was always a bit of a wild card.
“I get it,” Spider said and, even without expectations, it caught Lo’ak by surprise. “I’ve felt that way, before.”
“Now?”
Spider shrugged. “A bit. Sometimes. Felt it a lot when I was a kid, though.”
“You still are a kid.”
“Am I? Are you?” Spider chuckled to himself, a dark, humorless sound. “Half the time I feel like even Tuk’s just pretending.”
“I don’t think I’ve been a kid since the Sky People came back.” Lo’ak couldn’t believe how honest the words were. He could pinpoint a shift somewhere between the night his parents came home early from date night and the day Dad taught him the vulnerable points on a human body. The night Mom gave him arrows designed to pierce the thick glass of the machines.
“I think I’ve always been more a stray cat than a kid.” Spider tried to pass it off as a joke, trying to lighten the mood, but the words just made Lo’ak feel sad.
“Nah,” Lo’ak brushed it off. Sitting around feeling sorry for themselves wouldn’t help. “You’ve always been my annoying little brother.”
“I am older than you.”
“Yeah. Still little.”
“I swear to Eywa-”
Lo’ak laughed, getting to his feet and running away as Spider started chasing him through the camp, to the annoyance of plenty of adults.
What could you do, though? Kids are annoying.