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We waited by that lake, listening to Sa'ata’s sink her maw into the water and splash around as she drank. Spider was talking to her; he seemed relieved to have just been able to survive and that we could save Jake.
But something felt wrong, I couldn’t stop staring at the lake, at the hand full of water that slipped slowly dripping through the cracks in my fingers as I held them together like a cup. Jake and Neytiri were talking, standing away from us both, their backs turned.
Spider was disrobing from the awful RDA outfit and taking mouthfuls of water as well. It was only when everyone was stopped in the silence of the stream that he noticed what I had. I didn’t look at Spider, I was trying to hard to listen, my ears folded back towards the faint noise that was the soft voices of our parents. I couldn’t hear them, but I didn’t like it.
The aura that hung around them was conspiratorial, dangerous and shaken. They both looked shaken when I dared a glance behind me, Jake had his hand on Neytiri’s hip, and my eyes darted back to the river.
“C’mere” beckoned Jake’s voice
He was talking to Spider, and my eyes followed him as he walked away from the shore.
“What’s going on? What is it?” Spider asked the question we both wanted to know the answer to, I stayed crouched on the ground. Dropping the water from my hands I spun on my heels to face them now. The distance between children and adults had been broken and I allowed myself to join the tense environment
“Just come with me. C’mon let’s go” Jake looked at Neytiri, I couldn’t see her face. And then he looked at me. When he saw me he looked away so quickly, as if he couldn’t stand to let his eyes meet mine.
My open eyes followed them as they walked away into the forest, slipping away from the brighter edge into the darker depths of the forest.
‘What was going on?’
Neytiri and I are both stuck for a moment watching them leave. I consider turning back to the lake to wash off whatever paranoia has settled over me but when Neytiri crouches over at the lake she whines softly, the sound raising alarms in my head. Only to plunge her hands into the lake and spread the paint from her face into the water, the red and black dripping off of her skin.
She seemed so disgusted by it, I would have been disgusted too even if I had done it for the right reasons. Her nails scraped across the black skin slowly turning back to blue and I could see significant streaks on her face now. It wasn’t just the water flushing her face, they were tracks from the corners of her eyes down past her nose.
Something was happening right now. Spider and I were the only ones who didn’t know what.
The paranoia didn’t wear off, and the bad feeling in my gut only twisted around my lungs and my heart tighter. Before I could let Neytiri stop me I stood up and bolted as soon as she had taken another handful of water to her face. I was gone, running into the forest in the same direction I had seen Jake and Spider walk off to.
I ran, tearing through the forest, praying to Eywa to forgive me for disregarding her forest so lightly as leaves and branches fell around me as my hands ripped them out of my way. I had to find Spider, whatever Jake was doing I could feel it. It was the hard choice; it was the wrong choice.
They hadn’t gone far and it doesn’t take me long to break through the foliage and find Jake and Spider standing precariously in a clearing that in any other circumstance might have been so beautiful and serene. In that moment, when what I could see registered to my mind any, calm I had left melted into the ground and wilted the grass beneath my feet.
I took a running leap, bouncing off the front of my feet and lunge for Jake. Wrapping my arms around his neck and using all of my momentum to bring him off balance and down onto the ground, backwards and away from Spider. Any of the strength I had in my arms from flying my Ikran brought Jake down as I scrambled out of the way and lept to Spider. Hunching over him and pulling him into me tightly.
All instinct and no sense
Jake was back on his feet before long and I was ready, ready to strike out again. I pushed Spider down and stepped over him placing my body between his and Jake like a human shield, like we had both done for Jake hours before.
This man who had been my father since he had scooped my abandoned form off the forest floor had suddenly become my enemy in a singular moment.
I can’t hear Spider with all of the blood rushing through my ears so I panickily wrap my tail around him, the end still flicking wildly where it can’t find purchase around his body. I can feel him now, and I can feel how fast his heart is racing against the veins in my tail where my heart continues to beat hard.
Faintly I can hear Jake’s confused coughing as he stands up again in front of me and a snarl grows on my lips as they draw back from my teeth. The knife is still in his hand and when I see it I hiss.
That knife, the one that had been Neytiri’s in his hand, had been across Spiders neck, pressed against the veins in his neck known to be deadliest to any humanoid. Jake had taught us that himself, when teaching us how to stay safe if we ever encountered the Sky People in the wilds of Pandora where they didn’t belong.
He’d had a knife around Spider’s throat.
His own ears are curled back and his eyes are wide, but he doesn’t look shocked or angry. Just hurt, the type of hurt that comes from the inside.
Lo’ak’s face had looked like that for days. Kiri’s had looked like that for months when Spider was missing.
“Kid. I need you to-“
“I will not do anything for you”
“You don’t understand they-“
“They? You mean the RDA? How about you focus on what you were doing?”
“He’s a liability, they could have replicated what was keeping him alive”
“Shut your mouth, Kiri gave that to him as a gift, she saved him with it. No Sky Person could replicate that” I hiss at him when I watch as he tries to step forward
He puts his hands up a placating manor and drops the knife at his feet. I watch the knife fall and bounce softly on the dirt before looking back up at him, pupils still constricted and fangs still bared. Spiders heart beats hard against mine.
“What were you going to do? Bleed him out on this stone like a sacrificial animal? To leave him alone and afraid as his own life chokes him from the inside. Leaving him where only Eywa would know of his true death?”
“No I- I wouldn’t have…”
“Wouldn’t have what? You can’t even explain this to me with conviction! You would have lied” I say the last word in English, it s a foul one. One that Na’vi doesn’t have, something so greedy and selfish it could only be human.
“Kid-“
“As far as I’m concerned, I am no longer your ‘kid’. You cannot take Spider away from us. From me. From Kiri. We have already lost one brother you would have willingly taken another from this world!?” I let out a pained shriek, the same one Lo’ak does when he’s frustrated. I can’t describe it any other way than as of that of my brothers. I feel as though I carry the weight of my siblings and friends with me even if they don’t know it.
“You would not even have told us the truth would you?”
At this moment Neytiri comes barrelling through the forest calling out for Jake. I hiss at her too.
“Tell me right now, what would you have done if I had not followed you and you had come back to the water’s edge without Spider? What lie would you have spun for me? Would you have held me down kicking and screaming? Or am I a liability just like this boy who isn’t yours. I’m not yours either, not by blood, would I have been left too as a witness?”
“Son-“Neytiri starts as she stands next to Jake, she’s curled over and she looks tired next to him. They both look exhausted.
“Would you have even buried him?!” I scream at them both, they wouldn’t have even given him an honourable path to Eywa, they would have let his trail of blood act as his next steps to the Great Mother I can feel Spider grab onto my tail now, around the beads that I wear connected to my waistcloth. His fear and my fear are the same, but we are bound by it.
“Jake, we can find another way” Neytiri says, turning and stepping in front of him
Jake looks at her, as she blocks me from his view. The sorrow in his eyes is great, but it doesn’t make up for what he could have done in mere moments.
I can see past her head that his shoulders start to heave, and when he drops to the ground, she follows with her. His eyes are full of tears and it’s clear that the tears on her face never stopped. I still don’t move, and I don’t let Spider move either. But the emotional scene of the people I no longer trust as my parents’ forces tears into my eyes and I grit my teeth hard now to stop them from coming out.
“You’re right. I’m sorry…we failed that boy. We failed all our kids. I’m sorry”
He repeats it over and over again. And I wait for him to do anything else.
“We will find another way” Neytiri repeats herself too. Watching them be preoccupied in comforting to Spider I turn my back on them and face him. Really looking at him for the first time, I brush his hair aside and place my hands around his neck feeling for any wounds. I find nothing, and when I do my hands sink to his chest to feel his heartbeat properly. To know that even though there are no wounds he still lives.
“I’m ok. I’m ok” he breaths
“No you aren’t, no one would be ‘ok’ after that.”
I pulled him close, hugging him against my chest, not tightly but close enough that I can give him what love I have in my heart, so he knows that he is safe.
I will never, ever let anyone take Spider away from me. He is worth more and deserves more than any person I have ever known, and I will not let his life be cut so short when there is much good he can bring not only to our family but to Pandora herself. There is a reason Eywa helped Kiri to let him live and I’ll be damned if I won’t help protect him.
Never again will I let harm come to the human boy who walks the Na’vi way