Chapter Text
Prologue
‘Dad.’ Spider had said it only once. One time and never since.
Sometimes, in the quiet moments, his thoughts would wander and he’d remember the fear, the rapid pounding of his heart, the weight of Jake’s hand on his shoulder. When he spoke the word, it hadn’t been a term of endearment, but a desperate plea to belong. Uttered in a moment when everything he thought he had known was crumbling to dust and despair made him grasp for something that had always been just out of his reach. A last entreaty. It had felt natural and yet foreign. Like a bow that he had made for himself, but which he had yet to grow into.
Jake hadn’t done what he set out to do; instead he had hugged Spider to his chest, both of them trembling, and Spider had felt protected. Torn, hollow, but protected. Jake was probably the only person in the world who was able to make him feel this way, safe when just a heartbeat before he had been intent on ending Spider’s life. It wasn’t rational, he knew that, but he didn’t care.
After ‘the incident’, as Spider liked to call it in his mind, things had changed. Jake was different with him; warmer, more approachable. Neytiri had started smiling at him. The first few times it happened, he hadn’t even known how to react. It had been quite the terrifying sight; it had also loosened a knot inside his chest that he hadn’t even been aware was there.
Family life had shifted, had somehow become more than it was before, and it was everything he had ever hoped for. And yet, he had never said the word again. Jake was Jake and that’s the way things were. That’s how they would always be.