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Neytiri has been watching them for longer than she cares to admit.
Under the pretence of sweeping never-ending sand out of the family's marui, taking down the hammocks and shaking them out before rolling them back up to store for the day, making new garments for her children out of shells and mangrove leaves and seagrass, she watches her children on the shore. It is a quiet day for her, with Jake and the children out, Pril strapped to her chest as she goes about her daily tasks, sleeping while her family works.
Lo’ak and Kiri are sitting on the shore, with Spider squeezed between them. Tuk comes and goes, threads petals and seashells and other pretty things into his dreadlocks, adorns his kuru with leaves just like her own, and dashes off again to collect more trinkets. This, in itself, would not be unusual. Her children often spend time together – it's stranger to see them apart than it is to see them together, helping with the nets or hunting with the fishermen or splashing in the waves.
What is strange, so undeniably strange, that has a shiver running down Neytiri’s spine, is the worried looks that Kiri and Lo’ak share over Spider’s bowed head. His legs have been brought up to his chest, his chin resting on his knees, his arms wrapped around them, shoulders rounded. Looking smaller than he has in a very long time, since he was a child, like something has been sapped from him. Kiri has one of her hands rubbing soothingly up and down the bare skin of his back, and Lo’ak is curled forward, a hand on Spider’s knee, his eyes big and round and maybe a little scared. They keep looking at each other, but Spider keeps looking at the waves, lapping against his toes.
She squints, cursing the sunlight bouncing off the water – this has never been an issue in her forest – and thinks, maybe, that minute tremors run through his small human body like quakes in the earth, but she doesn’t know for sure, and she hates herself for that. If it had been Tuk or Lo’ak, Kiri or Neteyam, she would know. But Spider… she cannot tell.
But what she can tell, undeniably and unquestionably, is the concerned look on her children’s faces. The glimpses she catches of Lo’ak and Kiri’s expressions are not pleasant ones; their fathers’ eyebrows pulled low over their sad eyes, and their lips pinched tight. Tuk seems unfazed, unaware of the energy, but she returns less often with more gifts, as if ensuring that her every visit counts more than the last.
He is speaking, and Neytiri tries to read his lips, to follow his expressions, but she has always found him harder to read than the Na’vi, something about his human features and looking so much like the demon who sired him that makes it nearly impossible for her to truly look at him for long enough to make sense of his face. But she wants to know him now, wants to know every stretch of skin and every strand of hair and every tooth and every freckle and every scar. She wants to know what has put that expression on his face, that tightness to his jaw and the wetness to his eyes, the quaver to his lips, the redness to his cheeks. She wants to understand and hates that she does not.
The sound of Pril stirring against her chest forces Neytiri to turn from the sight, gathering up her weaving where she was sitting in the sunlight and returning inside. She promised Tonowari, Aonung and Tsireya that she will care for Pril while they are busy in the village, will tend to her and protect her the way a mother should, and she will not allow her worry for her own children to interfere with her word. She feeds the babe, cleans away the milky vomit, swaddles her once more against her chest and soothes her back to sleep with Ronal’s song. A request from Tonowari, her songcord reluctantly handed over in shaking hands so that Neytiri might learn it and share it, so Pril might know her mother, in any way that she can. Neytiri learnt it in mere days and returned it as soon as possible, and she sings it often to keep the song and the woman in her memory.
She glances up at the footsteps at the entrance, the spongy walkway giving way underfoot, and Lo’ak stands in the ingress. He does not look overly pleased that she is within, but he doesn’t look too surprised either. His face is decidedly unhappy, his entire body thrumming with a tension that she can’t explain – it’s in his shoulders, his jaw, his eyes. His hands clench and unclench at his side, as if wanting to throw a punch but having no worthy target for his wrath.
“Something is wrong,” Neytiri says. It isn’t a question; she knows it in her bones. She curls a hand around Pril’s tiny head.
Shaking out his limbs, trying to dispel the tension that has wired his body taut, Lo’ak manages a very fake smile, barely a twitch of his lips. “No. Nothing’s wrong.”
“You lie,” Neytiri accuses. “Something is wrong with Spider.”
Lo’ak flinches as if she has struck him, and she almost recoils as he hunches his shoulders and looks despondently away. “He’s fine. We were just talking. Nothing’s wrong.”
A mother knows many things, and two things she knows most intimately are when her child is hurting and when her child is lying. She wants to wrap her hands around Lo’ak’s shoulders and shake him until the truth tumbles out of him. But no – gentle, gentle. “Why do you keep this from me?” She asks. “Why will you not tell me? What is wrong with Spider?”
This time, Lo’ak does not try to lie, and she is grateful. He is a smart boy, her youngest son, even if it takes him a little longer than most to swallow his stubbornness, which he got from his mother. But Lo’ak still will not meet her eyes. He shrugs, staring down at Pril strapped to her chest instead. “Nothing,” He says again, but this time, it feels less like a deflection and more like an explanation. “Not anymore. Eight months is a long time, you know?”
Neytiri gapes at him, stunned. Of all the things she had expected him to say, his bringing up those eight months where the family had been forced to move from the forests to the reef, from the Omatikaya to the Metkayina and were separated from Spider, was never one of them. He still won’t look at her.
Behind his shoulder, on the shore, Neytiri can see Kiri heaving Spider to his feet, Tuk holding his hand as she guides them across the beach back towards their marui. They are getting closer. Every step is one less question Neytiri can ask, further away from her answer.
Stepping forward, Neytiri grips Lo’ak’s chin gently and forces him to look at her. “Speak plainly,” she demands. “Say what you mean.”
“I promised him I wouldn’t tell. So did Kiri, so don’t bother asking her, and Tuk doesn’t know,” Lo’ak shakes his head, his father’s five fingers coming up to rest gently on Neytiri’s wrist – not pulling back, just holding on. “And don’t ask Spider, either. He doesn’t want to talk about it.”
He told you, Neytiri thinks but does not say. She stares into her son's face and wonders how he got so old, so wary, so tired. Yesterday, he was just her little boy, and today, she barely knows him. She knows the words he speaks are honest and true, and yet the dread continues to fester, gnawing at the marrow of her aching bones. “It is bad. Something terrible has happened.”
“Yeah,” Lo’ak exhales a slow breath, expelling all the breath from his lungs. “It’s really bad.”
Voices behind them, and Lo’ak steps back from her, running a hand across his face, as Tuk drags Spider into the marui, Kiri following half a step behind them, her big eyes wide and worried. Neytiri pries her eyes from Lo’ak to see the sand caked on the drying tear tracks on Spider’s cheeks, his red and puffy eyes, the defeated set to his shoulders and unhappiness to his expression. Blood is crusted beneath his nose, stark against his skin, hastily wiped away and smeared across his upper lip. Tuk is unaware. She is laughing, delighted, as she pulls on Spider’s fingers and urges him forward. “Come on.” She giggles. “You’re so slow!”
Spider does not reply. Always so playful with Tuk, he can barely muster a weak smile at her antics. He looks rung out, like someone gripped onto his soul and shook out everything that makes him whole. He freezes at the sight of Neytiri, as if he had totally forgotten that she would be home, and his feet stall, and his body locks up even as Tuk continues to pull at him.
At his back, Kiri rests a hand on his shoulder and whispers something into his ear. She cuts her eyes over to Lo’ak, the two of them watching Spider intently, concern written into every line of their wary faces. Neytiri’s hackles rise, unease prowling down her spine like a thanator on the hunt, claw-tipped and vicious, unrelenting. She has been warned, but she needs to know.
Eight months. It’s what Lo’ak had said, blurted without consideration and almost immediately regretted, but it’s all that Neytiri can think now as she looks at Spider’s pale pink skin. Beneath the tan from the relentless reef sun, past the blue stripes he applies each day, see sees the scars. Puckered skin on his chest, white dots on the inside of his arms, a divot at the base of his spine, criss-crossing scars from incidents and accidents that Neytiri will never know, some old and some new. She will never know what happened during those eight months. He will never tell her, and she will never ask. But there is no way that it was anything less than horrific.
Her fingers twitch at her sides. Tuk gazes up at Spider with light and love in her eyes, and Spider rests his other hand on her head. Kiri and Lo’ak look at each other, look at Spider, and words unspoken pass between them in a language that Neytiri can never hope to speak, and they are weighed down by grief and knowledge and heartache. She feels her fingers curl into fists, her nails digging into her palm.
“Leave us,” Neytiri says in a voice little more than a whisper, the words refusing to pass her teeth.
They turn to look at her, everyone blinking in surprise. Kiri and Lo’ak jerk upright and stare at her. “Mother,” Kiri says, almost warningly, “He doesn't - "
Neytiri gently unties Pril from around her chest and hands the bundle to Lo’ak, who cradles her gently, uncertainly, in his arms. “Take Pril back to her family,” she tells them. “It is getting late. Tsireya waits for her.” It's barely midmorning.
“Mum,” Lo’ak shakes his head, stunned. “I just told you not to -”
She knows what he has said. Do not ask him. He will not tell you. He does not want to discuss it. And yet, she is a mother, Spider’s mother, and it is her duty to try. “Go,” Neytiri resists the urge to hiss the order. “Tuk, go with them.”
“But mama,” Tuk whines, still holding Spider’s hand. “I want to play with Spider. He promised.”
Frustration builds behind Neytiri’s ribcage. Kiri and Lo’ak remain, not wanting to leave Spider. Tuk looks up at her with big, hopeful eyes, not understanding her mother's command and not wanting to let go. “Tuk.”
With a smile, so unlike his usual smile, Spider crouches down. It’s unnecessary, but he does it anyway and looks up into Tuk’s eyes. “Hey,” he says, poking her in the chest. “I need you to find me something special, okay? It’s really important.”
Tuk’s eyes go wide. Kiri and Lo’ak are frowning over his head. “What is it?”
“I’m looking for a rock. A really cool rock. The best rock on the whole reef,” He raises his hands, fingers cupped apart. “About this big. It’s got to be smooth and round, and it’s got to make you feel happy. This is a very hard and very important job. Do you think you can manage it? If you don’t think you’re up to it, I can always ask Aonung…”
“No!” Tuk proclaims, offended at the very thought. “I can do it! Watch me.”
She darts out of the marui on her mission, and Neytiri looks expectantly at her other two children, who hover around Spider, like ghosts. They do not want to leave him, and Neytiri feels her very soul ache at their hesitation, even as Pril gurgles in Lo’ak’s arms. What could be so terrible that leaving his side is a fate that doesn’t bear imagining?
“Monkey Boy,” Kiri says, questioning, checking.
“I’m okay. You guys go,” Spider smiles at them – fake, fake, fake. “We’re good.”
Still, Lo’ak and Kiri don't look convinced, staring at the sharp line of Spider’s shoulders and the circles under his eyes and his fake smile. But Kiri presses a kiss to his forehead and departs, and Lo’ak squeezes his shoulder tightly before he follows her. And then Neytiri and Spider are – finally – alone in the marui. Like this, no longer surrounded by family, he looks even smaller, his head bowed and hair covering his face, shoulders rounded forward, arms wrapped around himself like warding off a chill.
Neytiri does not hesitate. She crosses the short distance between them, falls to her knees and peers past the curtain of his hair and up into his face, gripping his arms as if keeping him tethered to this place. “Spider,” she wants it to be strong, but it comes out barely a breath on the wind. “Something terrible has happened.”
He shakes his head like trying to shake water from his ears. Like warding off the words might somehow make them less true. “No,” he says, and she knows he is lying the way every mother knows. “Nothing has. I’m good.”
“Why do you lie?” She demands. She runs her thumbs over the tender skin of his arms, smooth and fragile, and feels raised scars beneath her fingertips. Eight months. “Why will you not tell me?”
“Neytiri,” Spider wraps his hands around her arms, a copy of her own hold. His fingers are so comically small compared to hers, not even wrapping all the way around her elbow to meet on the other side. “There’s nothing to tell.”
She does not understand why he keeps this from her. Doesn't understand why he would tell Lo’ak and Kiri and worry them so, while he refuses to share with her, when she knows it to be terrible enough to rattle her children, when she knows that eight months is a long time when anything can happen. But he is stubborn, like all her children, a trait he got from her. She will not break him. She doubts that anybody can.
“What is it?” She rasps, desperate to know, needing to understand. He cannot expect her to live the rest of her life in ignorance. She cannot do it. Not again, not anymore. “What is wrong?”
His eyes search her. Warm, brown, solemn. He looks so much like the demon, but his eyes… they must be his mother's. She wonders what he sees, if he finds what he is looking for. His grip on her arms is loose, comfort more than constriction, his fingers tapping idly across the skin of her forearm. She waits. She is patient. She can wait for him, as long as it takes.
Eventually, he shrugs. When he smiles, it is cynical, melancholy. “I’m just tired.”
The sound that escapes her is wrenched from her without her will, and she surges up to wrap him in her arms and cradle him to her chest. He makes a startled sound in the back of his throat, and his arms come up instinctively between them as she drags him down until her legs are folded beneath her and he is draped across her lap, his head and shoulders held in her arms, his legs folded between her own. Stiff, he blinks up at her, eyes wide with confusion. She has never held him like this. She has held Lo’ak and Neteyam, Tuk and Kiri countless times, but never Spider.
The closest she has come to an embrace is gripping his hair with an arm wrapped around his torso, a blade held to his throat, on the wreckage of the pinkskin ship, water lapping at their ankles, Sky Person blood drying on her skin. She curls a hand around his face, his head cupped in her palm. She can crush his skull with a single squeeze, brain matter and blood and viscera dripping out between her fingers. It would be so easy. But the thought fills her with revulsion, when not too long ago it once filled her with delight, and she eeks out a horrified sound as she holds him somehow tighter to her.
Her fingers find their way beneath his hair, crawling along his scalp in that way all her children tend to enjoy, and she feels him melt incrementally against her, his body going limp and his head leaning heavily into her hand as he starts to relax, giving in to the embrace. She should hug him more, she decides. She should hug him every morning and every night until he no longer balks at her touch and treats it as commonplace.
She hums as he rests more of his weight against her, holding him easily, and he swallows down a sob. She can feel it, feel the bob of his throat and the shudder of his breath, and she curls her fingers further into his hair, dragging her nails against his scalp, navigating down to the base of his neck so she can stretch her fingers upwards and –
At the back of his neck, hidden beneath his locs, Neytiri inches along his neck and feels the raised jagged bulges of scar tissue beneath her fingertips.
Spider flinches, tries to move away at the touch, a shiver running through him like being thrown into icy water, but Neytiri doesn’t allow it. She makes a noise, involuntary, and braces him tightly with one hand as she lifts his hair away with the other, and she sees the gnarled scars that crisscross across vulnerable skin, puckered and knotted and twisting once-smooth flesh into dips and valleys of ravaged tissue.
It tears a horrified sound from her, ripped from somewhere deep inside, as she glides her fingers over the scars, afraid to touch too hard. Spider huffs a shaky breath into her chest and burrows his face deeper, hiding as best he is able. She cannot see his expression, but can feel the wetness on his face, the way his breaths are trembling and shallow, his whole body hitching with the strain.
She cannot understand. Neytiri has been a mother four times over, and each of her children is precious, pieces of her heart and soul that make up her very being. The thought of inflicting pain on any of them makes her sick to her stomach. How could the demon allow anything so terrible to happen to his son? How could he stand aside and allow them to harm him?
“Oh,” Neytiri soothes, her hand through Spider’s hair, holds him closer still. He doesn’t cry, not really, but his hands fist in her top and cling to woven fabric and jangling beads. “Oh, oh, oh…”
The size of her grief is formless, but heavy, and she feels it though she doesn’t know why. Eight months. While Neytiri was feeling sorry for herself and grateful she didn’t have to see his Sky Person face every day, Spider was trapped with his father and enduring torment that Neytiri could never hope to know. She can do nothing. There is nothing she can protect him from, no retaliation she can deliver, no healing she can do to these old wounds that mended long before he returned to them.
“Baby,” says a voice from the entrance, and Neytiri snaps her head up to watch Jake peek his head in at the same time that Spider stiffens in her hold, but she doesn’t pull back. She refuses to let him go. “Do you know what Tuk’s up to? Something about finding a special rock for… Spider?”
Spider hiccups a breath into Neytiri’s chest, choking back his sobs. She understands. All her boys, Neteyam and Lo’ak and Spider, they all look up to Jake, all think of him as the greatest example of a warrior they can aspire to. Lo’ak doesn’t cry in front of his father, not if he can help it, and Neteyam never really did either, both preferring to crawl into their mothers' arms so their father couldn’t see them crumble. She knows her mate will never think of them as lesser for their tears, but that is a hard thing to convince a growing boy when their father is the great Toruk Makto. So Spider tries to swallow back his cries, and Neytiri wraps her arms tighter around him to shield his small body from view as much as she can, just as she has done for all her children, all her boys.
“Leave,” Neytiri flashes her fangs at Jake. A warning, a clear one. “Go, now.”
His eyes are fixed on what little of Spider he can see – the top of his head peaking from between her fingers, the tangle of his dreadlocks, the hitching shake of his shoulders. Jake’s face is twisted in an expression of concern, his brows drawn low over his eyes and his mouth opening to speak, but Neytiri knows that if he speaks now, it will be their undoing. Everything that she has worked towards to get to this point will be for nothing. She meets his eyes and implores him to listen.
Jake loved Spider long before Neytiri had learned to See him. He has been his son, in a different vein, for many, many years. He cares for him the same as he cares for all their children. But still, he meets Neytiri’s eyes, and he trusts her, so he ducks out of the marui and leaves them. They wait until his footsteps fade on the walkway, tense and silent, before Spider goes limp in her hold and muffles his tears in her chest.
She has never seen Spider cry. He doesn’t let her see, would rather turn his head and wipe his tears before she can catch them. She never cared, before, when he was nothing but a demon-blooded pinkskin who clung to her children like sap, but now, a mother to a son, she cares more and more and more. No child should ever cry this soundless, this motionless, like trying to wrestle his sadness into submission and bury it back down behind his ribcage. Spider’s wet breath ghosts across her collarbones, and tears drip down his face to pitter between their bodies, and Neytiri coos as he cries too quietly, and holds him as his pale skin pinkens.
“I’m tired,” he croaks after what feels like an eternity, his breaths shaky, his voice wet and cloying with tears. His face, smeared between them, is sticky with salt and spit and snot. More honest than he’s been in a dreadfully long time. She doesn't think for a second that he's talking about this moment right now. “I’m so tired.”
Eight months. Older than her other children, but not by much. A child, her child, so small in her arms where he trembles, so tired she can see it in the slumped line of his shoulders, the circles under his eyes, the weariness in his gaze. Fresh blood drips from his nose, and she wipes it away with a finger but leaves his tearstained cheeks. She bundles him close, tucks his head beneath her chin and frames his small body between her legs. She does not know what has happened to him, does not know what has put that worried furrow on Lo’ak and Kiri’s brows and that defeated slump to Spider’s exhausted shoulders, the scars and the blood and words left unsaid, and she knows, the way only a mother knows, that she will never know. It will always be a secret that alludes her, so close she could reach out and touch it, but she can never fully grasp it. Horrific, surely. She doesn’t need to know details to know that.
Curling her body over his so she can look down into his face, Neytiri looks at him, really looks at him, and feels her heart clench painfully in her chest. A child. Her child. Her son. A pinkskin, demon blood, but hers, and Eywa’s, who trembles and cries in Neytiri’s arms though he desperately tries not to, pressing his lips together and breathing harshly through his nose to keep his sounds at bay, but tears fall from his eyes to trail down his cheeks, dripping off his nose, his chin, and landing on her skin. Tired, yes. Tired and hurt and scared. She knows that she has done very little in recent years to help, has probably only made it worse, but still, she loves him. This Sky Person with a demon's face and a stranger’s eyes and a Na'vi soul in his chest.
He meets her gaze, his eyes swollen and red, his cheeks and nose ruddy, his breathing hitching and trembling as he reins in his emotion. She cups his face with a hand, and he shifts just enough to rest his head in her palm. So small, so young. Why has she never done this before? Why hasn’t she ever given him this?
“Then rest,” she tells him, bringing him ever closer, curving her whole body around him as if her body alone can protect him from the world, the Sky People, his father’s ire. She knows better, but she tries anyway. “Rest here. You are safe. You can rest.”
Spider blinks up at her, uncomprehending, surprised, but rests his head further against her chest and lets her card her fingers through his hair and rub circles into his hip and side. She holds him until his tears dry up and his body no longer hitches with breath and his breathing hiccups into a familiar cadence, and she continues to hold him, long after he has calmed and his eyes have dried. Lo’ak and Kiri have not come looking for them. Jake and Tuk have not returned. She could pull away, let him detangle himself from her grasp, but she doesn’t. And he doesn’t pull away. He just rests there, the weight of his body settled against her torso, weak and limp and empty from the force of his tears.
They stay there, long into the day, Spider resting within the circle of Neytiri’s arms, safer than anyone else on the reef.