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"Please don't tell them." The boy asked of her, his voice so quiet and soft, a breeze that goes past her. He rips the box connected to his exo-pack away from her trembling hands, sending a cold chill through her body when their fingers touch.
The crazed thoughts that went through Neytiri's mind when she saw the rupture in Spider's exo-pack and hurried to him had quickened to a violent stop.
Spider looks at her children, holding each other and resting, and suddenly leans down and painfully heaves as if he's finally dying in front of her but takes a step back when Neyiri reaches towards him.
"Explain to me." Neytiri hissed and snapped her eyes to his, but she flinches in her skin. She hadn't noticed how pale he had gotten, worn out. She looks closer at him, squinting in the barely moonlit pod. She can't believe this is the boy who would play with her children twice his size. He looks dead, too different from before, and Neytiri hates changes. She's sick of them. They're killing her.
There was a silence; her children's sleeping breaths and Jake's snores were muffled as if far away.
"I died," Spider muttered simply, holding his broken exo-pack, the thing he needed to breathe. Spider should not be here. If, in the war, the boy's exo-pack container had been damaged, then he shouldn't be here right now. He should be buried with—
(How much more will the Great Mother take from her?)
None of this makes sense. Spider can't breathe the air because he's a demon, but yet—
Neytiri stops as she notices that Spider isn't breathing in the poisoned air. His scarred chest doesn't rise up and down. It stays deadly still.
(It reminds her of her oldest son, lifeless with a bullet near his heart.)
Tuktriey mutters, and Neytiri stops moving until she knows her youngest daughter is not awake.
"You're here." Neytiri knows that, somehow, it means nothing. "You should not be."
Neytiri turns to her family sleeping and then back at him. Something in her lungs builds up, and she can't breathe, and she can't understand, she can't help, and she can't comfort because she has never done that with Spider before. Only her children and Spider is not her child because he is a demon, and the demons have caused all of her pain. But Neytiri knows him. Spider has grown alongside her children, and now that means something.
It means everything in this moment.
"Yeah, I know." Spider huffed a weak laugh and pointed at his damaged lifeline of breathable air as if it was a sick joke, "I'm still here and—" His voice broke, and he sounded like the child in Neytiri's memories again. Spider squeezes his eyes tightly shut, and his lips quiver.
"The Great Mother does not want me."