Chapter Text
Spider didn’t particularly like their new home. It wasn’t that he necessarily missed all the water of the archipelago, or even the Metkayina; they had been tolerable, just as this cave and the scattered mountain clans were tolerable.
He missed the sun. He missed the heat. He even, on the coldest nights when he shivered under a mountain of furs and blankets, missed the scorching heat that drove him into the sweltering heat of their pod; he found that easier to bear than this constant discomfort, and having to wear proper clothes.
His skin had, over the last few months, lost its deep tan, leaving him paler than he could ever remember being.
His family, similarly, seemed to wilt without the constant sunlight; their stripes were starker, their skin almost cast grey, and even the bioluminescence of their markings was not enough to stave off the deep dark of their cave.
Spider couldn’t see how one cave would be different from any other, but he couldn’t deny that this one was distinctly more unfriendly than the Omaticaya’s High Camp, deep in the Hallelujah Mountains.
Technically, the mountains they inhabited now were of the same mountain range, except there was a small sea that separated them, and the air here was significantly colder. They were settled just on the fringes of the northern regions, where it wasn’t quite cold enough for the water to freeze but not warm enough for Spider to be comfortable.
The beasts here were mostly coated in fur, or feathers packed densely enough to serve as insulation, and the people all lived in smaller enclaves, usually just a few families, though they stretched over a more vast territory and communicated well enough that any threats to enter the region were swiftly dealt with.
Nobody complained when Toruk Makto came to stay. Nor did they complain about the small pack of humans he one day escorted in; they flew in with two of their own machines and a container supported between them, deposited the container in one of the caves, and then summarily left. The local Na’vi remained unaffected by whatever was in the container and so did not investigate.
Nobody complained, even, at the small human that sometimes ventured out of the cave where Turok Makto lived—apparently, with this human.
The Na’vi here liked their solitude. They knew everything about each of the families that resided in these mountains, and ignored everybody alike. They ignored the Sully family just the same.
Spider thought it was driving Neytiri mad. Her connection to the world around her was something she valued deeply; even among the Metkayina, she practised the spirituality of the forest that her mother taught her and her mother’s mother taught her. She was made to live within a community; here, she was lonely.
She didn’t complain, however. Spider supposed she hadn’t really complained in the last place, either. He didn’t like to think that you could become accustomed to uprooting your entire life and running, but he couldn’t deny the proof of his own eyes; such a thing would be true whether he thought about it or not.
Despite all of this, however, none of them really had much to complain of. They were safe. They had food and shelter and they had each other.
Spider was luckier; the scientists from High Camp had come and inspected the cave and built him a room within a crevasse that was filled with air that he could breathe. It recycled itself and was powered by the sun and the wind and he had no idea how they had done it; terraforming was not high on his list of interests. He was just grateful to finally be able to take off his exopack.
Outside, the sharp cry of an ikran echoed through the valley, and Spider leapt up to stoke the fire higher, then regarded the tanning rack set up next to it with ill-disguised dismay.
The whole family was gone today, out on their ikran. Jake and Lo’ak were gone to the West, scouting RDA along the deep valley that they seemed interested in for some as-yet-unknown reason, and Neytiri had flown with Tuktirey to the base of the mountains, teaching her how and what they could gather to eat. She was young to be learning it, but they lived in interesting times. Kiri had gone with them to try and hunt her own small game, as much as it pained her.
She had offered to bring Spider with her and he’d been sorely tempted. Then a vicious wind had picked up, howling through the valley outside, and Neytiri had stepped in with a stern set to her jaw, and Spider had to admit that, with the illness he had been battling for the better part of a week, now, traipsing through the wet undergrowth was likely not a good idea.
Neytiri had gone so far as to contact Norm. He had assured them that it was just Spider’s body adjusting to the colder climate, which it was unused to. He’d suggested that Spider might like to wear some clothes. Spider was unimpressed.
Nonetheless, Neytiri wanted leather for a new saddle for the ikran, and had decreed that she would sew him a coat or a cloak from it as well, so she had asked Spider to turn the cut hides on the tanning rack while she was gone, to make sure it dried properly.
The hide was still slimy with the brains that had been worked into it, and crusted with salt besides. Not to mention heavy; Neytiri and Jake had hunted the angtsik, and while they hadn’t bothered to bring its great hammerhead all the way up into the mountains, they had brought most of its hide, which measured dozens of square metres.
Neytiri had also insisted on its brain, the transport of which had been extremely delicate and very disgusting. The least of it was the viscera she had also cut out, which she had mixed with the brain and used to soak the hide. It had been a long and messy job and Spider had felt compelled to help where he could, despite his roiling stomach that he determinedly attributed to his week-long illness.
The ikran outside called again.
After a beat, it was answered by another, and another, then a fourth called out: a pack. Neytiri and Kiri could distinguish all of the ikran from one another, and Jake could recognise his own and Neytiri’s with ease, but to Spider they all sounded the same.
He did know the cry they made when they were returning home, though. These ikran were only hunting. Wild banshees, a flock of them—not his family returning.
Spider tried not to feel disappointed. He finished rotating the hides around, then returned to his room, where he could take off his mask and crawl under the blankets on his be d and take his pad from where it had been charging against a solar pack.
He turned it on, and there was a picture of him, only weeks old. He was small and pink and largely uninteresting.
He was in his father’s hands. Quaritch was looking down at him, not the camera; he didn’t even seem aware that somebody was pointing a camera at him. No: his face, such that you could see, was furrowed, in thought or consternation or anger or, possible, fear. He didn’t look happy. Quaritch never looked happy in any of the videos Spider had of him unless he was killing somebody, or discussing killing somebody.
Spider flicked to the next picture.
This one was of Grace, in her human skin, standing next to the sleeping form of her Avatar. She was smiling broadly. She looked almost young.
The photo had to be twenty, twenty-five years old at least. He didn’t know when or why it had been taken. He didn’t know any of the scientists in the background; he didn’t even really recognise where they were. It was one picture among thousands of others that he’d downloaded from the data banks of a cargo train running from Hell’s Gate to Bridgehead City.
Jake had promised him the opportunity to pick over the next train they hit before they’d even left the Metkayina, and Lo’ak had ferried him in and out of the action. He’d grabbed weapons, a new exopack, as much data as he could download in the time that they had, and human clothes, most of which he hadn’t touched.
Spider looked again at Grace, at her Avatar. That years-old longing tugged again at his chest. Even as a small child, all he’d wanted was to keep up with the young Na’vi that he played with, to run and hunt like they did. As he’d grown, the differences between them stretched further and further until they stood on opposing sides of a great canyon.
He’d become bitter with his deep longing for his own Avatar.
They didn’t have the technology to build him one, and likely never would. It was a difficult subject for the Na’vi; they could never get over that what they were essentially seeing was the soulless body of one of their own, piloted by a member of a species that was here without invitation, without welcome, that was increasingly aggressive.
Spider half-agreed with them; it was what eventually reconciled him to living and adapting in his human body. The Avatar program was an idea born from both desperation and greed, and without regard for ethics or morality.
Secretly, deep in his heart of hearts, Spider would never stop wishing that he had been born as something else, but he had stopped asking.
He looked at Grace again, then flicked away from her, and there was Earth; one of her grey cities. There were lots of pictures, most of which he’d never seen. He was sure if he asked Jake, he’d know and be able to tell him which city it was. Surely there was some reason these photos were here.
He looked at them and wondered how anybody could build such a place. He spent long minutes flicking through the series, vaguely curious, until the great crash of an ikran landing awkwardly at the mouth of their cave shook him from his reverie.
The commotion turned out to be Lo’ak, stepping out of the way so that his ikran could wing away. Then Jake was there, landing with significantly more grace, though his face was grim.
“Everything okay?” Spider asked them both. Lo’ak just shrugged.
“It is for now,” Jake answered him, “but they’re looking for something. I don’t know what the hell it is, but I know I won’t like it.” He came over and scrubbed his fingers through Spider’s hair, now long enough that it covered his ears and tickled his jaw, when it fell neatly.
Neytiri was making him brush it out; she’d convinced him by pointing out that, when it was long enough, he’d be able to braid it.
“Also,” Lo’ak added, because he never could keep his mouth shut, “dad says that when you die, I get your room, and I’m tired of sharing, so if you could hurry up and—”
He never got to finish his sentence, because Jake soundly cuffed the back of his head, not hard enough to hurt but enough that Spider heard the impact all the way from his spot by the fire.
“Enough of that” Jake told him. Lo’ak shot him a wounded look.
Spider didn’t say anything at all, suddenly tired. He sat down, cold again, and tried not to worry about Jake’s words, despite his gut feeling that whatever the RDA was after, it would spell worse news for him by the end.
“Hey,” Lo’ak said, breaking his thoughts, and sat down next to him. In his hands was a pelt he clearly had stolen from Spider’s room, and which he now draped cautiously around Spider’s shoulders. “You’re not gonna die.”
“It’s just a cold, Lo’ak,” Spider told him, derisive enough that it countered the intensely grateful look he shot his brother. “If a cold is what kills me, I don’t even want to go to Eywa.”
“We’ll just feed you to the ikran,” Lo’ak agreed, mock-seriously. “Don’t even worry.”
Spider looked back into the fire and didn’t say anything more. Behind him, he could hear Jake cursing quietly over the great spread of maps that had spawned in the corner of their cave—real physical ones that needed light to see by. One day, those problems would become his to bear.
For now, he leant against Lo’ak, who braced him carefully, and Spider knew that they were both thinking the same thing.
Interlude I
Quaritch returned to the RDA, mechanical. The smoke of Bridgehead City was like poison in his lungs after so long in the wilds of Pandora, and his ikran was in agreement. The beast argued with him all the way in, and crept sullenly into its hangar. When he left it, it was curled up miserably in one corner, refusing to touch the freshly-butchered meat it had been so generously served.
What followed were days of questioning, and explaining, and arguments, and justifying every move he’d made since setting out after Sully. He had a whole team of dead recombinants to answer for. Not to mention that Jake Sully was indisputably, gloriously alive.
The humans were like ants at his feet, and something wild in his gut howled for their blood.
It would unsettle him, except the same thing had howled back when he was a marine: twenty years old, boots black with mud and blood and filth, killing like it was a video game, fighting not for God and country but for the high score in the mess hall each night.
His fangs didn’t fit in his mouth. His tail thwacked against every doorway he ducked through. He drank coffee from his outsized mug and wondered when he stopped craving it. They fed him dehydrated rations and they were dirt, worse than dirt; they were ash. He choked them down like he choked everything down, these days. Wondered when he last ate Pandora’s fruits. Wondered if he ever had. Wondered why he hadn’t. Washed the ash down with more coffee.
He told the general everything he knew, everything he could think of, and she only squinted at him, unconvinced.
“You had the insurgent’s daughter in your hands,” she said slowly, clarifying. “Under your knife. You didn’t kill her.” This, too, was indisputable. He said something meaningless and she nodded, because she hadn’t even asked him a question.
They got hold of the footage, eventually. The recombinant’s bodies had been burnt by the savages: a waste. The ships at the bottom of the ocean had been left untouched, however, and carried metres upon metres of data storage, and it only took a small team to download and retrieve all of it. One of the other Avatar squads, human in their movements and the way that they looked down at him.
Quaritch hadn’t realised until he returned to civilisation just how little English he’d been speaking, those last few days. He and his squad had parroted Na’vi like they were natives. English felt like a leash.
More and more, he was thinking about snapping the leash.
They kept him at base for weeks, reprogramming. He began to feel more like himself. They were worried he’d gone too far. He’d lost the human boy and they worried he was sympathetic, just because the thing was his son.
Spider wasn’t his son. Spider was a pest who needed to be put down.
They swallowed that silently, when he told them.
They discussed a new team. The technology for growing and programming Avatars was practically commercial, now; if it wasn’t an affront to God, it might have been the viable alternative to terraforming Pandora.
He tried to imagine it. A million of the richest humans on Earth, coming here en masse, living in this grey prison and taking their Avatars out for a stroll, for a breath of fresh Pandoran air, dressed in pressed suits and treating the wilds like a zoo.
That thing inside of him howled again, more rabid. His teeth were probably a bit too sharp when he grinned at the joke of it.
Eventually, they found a use for him; an Avatar team had convinced the general that they should fly their own banshees. It was all discussed and worked out behind closed doors, and then he was given his orders.
The squad loaded into a carrier mounted with guns as big as a human. They were each armed with a stun gun, intending to knock the creatures into insensibility before they made their connection. They’d studied the neural connection in labs, as much as they could; Na’vi specimens and pieces of direhorses and tulkun, for the most part, though Quaritch hadn’t ventured very far inside. The way that the scientists eyed him, he’d been a little worried that, if he went too deep into these labs, they wouldn’t let him out again.
Regardless, they were heading into this with pretty much the same plan that Quaritch had—except they had far less practise traversing Pandora; they’d never been shown properly how to do so.
Quaritch couldn’t bring himself to care. They were all of them cocky, arrogant, young enough and spry enough that they’d be slow, but they’d live.
He flew his own ikran in front of the carrier, to the foothills of the Hallelujah Mountains, where the carrier’s instruments ceased to work and could not be relied upon to keep watch. From there they would go on foot. His ikran was surly with its long confinement, unhappy with the proximity of the carrier on its tail, and screamed like the devil when he dismounted. The connection snapped like a physical break when he released it.
His nose was bleeding, which he ignored in favour of eyeing each of the Avatar’s as they stepped out of the plane, eyeing the Hallelujah Mountains with undisguised greed. He wondered if that was how he had looked. How he did look now. He wondered, far away, how Jake Sully had looked, then banished that thought.
He led them into the terrain, his own footfalls silent, eyes on every shadow. There was never any telling when the Omaticaya would come up here themselves with their own party of young, looking to make warriors of them.
Behind him, the Avatars moved like children, scrambling over rock and tree like they were still human. They moved like they didn’t have a tail behind them for balance, like their sharp ears couldn’t hear the cacophony they were making.
Quaritch wondered, not for the first time, just what the hell he’d become, and then he had to grab the smallest of the group by his braid and drag him physically to his feet when he made to tumble over the side and to a very ignominious death, and when they were settled, his nose was bleeding again and the air was heavy and all he could think was of his mission, to reach the banshees.
“Everything alright with you?” the leader of them did think to ask, nodding at the blood that spattered his front.
“I have a jealous banshee,” he told her, wondering just where in the hell these words were coming from. So much of what he said these days didn’t seem to be him. Miles Quaritch. “He’s worried I’m coming up here for another ride.”
She laughed at that, though looked a little nervous, and he didn’t try to reassure her. She’d see for herself, what the connection was.
It took them most of the day to reach where the banshees lived. The team behind him were clearly exhausted, and he knew that even he and his had had an easier time of getting up there—Spider had been a rough taskmaster, though he knew what he’d been talking about, when he taught them about moving around Pandora.
Despite their weariness, the Avatars watched the banshees covetously, and gripped their stunners readily.
“Are you ready?” he asked them finally, the first words he’d said all day.
The leader frowned at him. “What?”
Quaritch eyed the gun in her hand. “You’re not really gonna need that,” he admitted, grudgingly, even having watched them drag the things all the way up here. “If you can’t take an ikran without it, you’re probably not gonna be able to fly it.” He turned back to the squalling, writhing mass of banshees, blood in his mouth, half overcome by the memory of the last time he’d been here.
“The fuck’s wrong with him?” Somebody behind him said, but the words were wrong. Ill-fitting. They didn’t belong up here.
“You know, Jake Sully did this with his bare hands,” he said, remembering. I did it even without the strap to shut the fucker’s mouth, he thought, but didn’t add. He’d intended to throw that at Sully, once, I’m better than you, but it seemed juvenile and he found he hadn’t really cared what Sully had to say about such a thing. The way that Miles had looked at him had been enough.
Miles. Spider.
“Sully?” a voice behind him asked, and then somebody touched his shoulder.
“Colonel,” a female voice said, calm, “you need to speak in English.”
He turned. A Na’vi was staring at him, her features pulled into a facsimile of concern.
She was nearly a Na’vi. Mostly a Na’vi. She wore human clothes and she was the right height, the right shape, the right colour—there were slight differences, but he couldn’t have counted them out now for all the money in the world.
Enemy, he thought. Fuck. A horrible hissing snarl tore out of his throat, unlike any noise he’d ever made, fury twisting his features. He bared his teeth like an animal, like a savage. Blood dripped into his mouth from somewhere. Right there in his head, something howled.
The Na’vi hadn’t moved, despite his warning, so he attacked, ignoring the foreign curses she spat. His teeth itched to sink into her throat, but something in him recoiled, something that remembered a cold sun and another planet, so he put his hands to her throat instead.
People were shouting at him, but it was in another language—but it was in English, so he couldn’t understand.
The alien was on the floor underneath him and his hands were around her throat. His hands were blue. Blue?
He remembered climbing up here with a pack of humans, and wondered where they’d gone. If they were safe. He’d give his life for theirs, if he had to; he was the ranking officer; that was his duty. Duty. The word was like a knife wound, shooting through him.
Then somebody shot him, and he looked down to see a short, black metal quarrel protruding from his chest. He sat back on his haunches and considered it. The fury that had stripped him before now receded. People were still speaking to him, and his ears twitched to catch their words, but he still couldn’t understand. It didn’t even sound like a language anymore. Far away, he picked one cry out of a chorus of shrieking.
“Sir,” somebody at his side said, and he sort of understood them. He knew what they meant to say. The word was clumsy in their mouth. He looked up anyway, and saw one of his people. “Sir,” they repeated, “stand down.”
He wasn’t sure was ‘his people’ were, anymore. Come to think of it, he didn’t know who this person was—he’d never seen them before. Had he?
“Who are you?” he asked them, and then, because he didn’t know, “who am I?”
That shriek came again. It was calling somebody, he knew. It was closer now. Something in his chest had been howling, and now it was singing, an ancient wail that had been sounding for days, now, though it was only here that he could really hear it for what it was.
The Na’vi shook its head. They didn’t understand.
“Quaritch,” the person below him, said, and he looked down to find them pulling his knife from the sheathe at his hip. He leapt away moments before their hand brought the blade down in a swipe that would have sliced his thigh open.
He faced them, this group of aliens. His body was strangely heavy. Behind him, the damned wailed in hell.
He’d been fighting all of his life, but now he knew that he had to run, despite all of the instincts it roared against. He turned and flung himself over the edge of the cliff, and his body knew what to do and how to move even if his brain froze. One of the screaming beasts came barrelling up from the mists and caught him, as it had always caught him before. He knew this beast, he realised, this banshee, this ikran; they shared a bond. He knew it and it knew him. Their hearts had beat together during a hundred hunts. He knew he had to connect with it now, to tell it where to fly, but he couldn’t remember how.
That didn’t matter anyway, as it levelled out and flew him into a sky that was quickly turning black. His body was so, so heavy; he laid his head down and he slept.