Chapter Text
Neteyam was dead.
Spider had watched the blood hush from a hole in his brother’s back for every grueling second they rode the waves in an attempt to find help. Had held onto him. Had listened to every pained sound that left his brother’s lips. Had attempted to hush and soothe him, praying to Eywa that some respite would come. Had shielded his brother’s wound from the salt of the sea with his own body. Had carried him as he went limp in their arms. Had illuminated the source of the bleeding. Had watched him still.
And a hesitant hand rested on Neteyam’s bicep, feeling him tremble and then still. His chest stopped puffing with pain gasps. His eyes stopped searching. He just went still. So hauntingly still. His blue skin had dulled, not just from the ending of the orange burst in the sky prior to eclipse or the smog that plumed from the burning ship. As the sky darkened, his tanhi did not begin to glow. He was dulled in a way that his brother had never been, not once.
His brother was dead.
His baby brother was dead.
Still kneeling by his side, Spider squeezes his brother’s arm tight in his warm palms. Fingers wrapping around his wiry limb. Tracing stripes and the arm band that matched the one on his own arm and the one on Lo’ak’s. Thumbing away rivulets of blood that had somehow made their way there, diluting in the sheen of brine on his skin.
The sounds around him bending and fluxing. Neytiri’s cries and wails as she rocks over Neteyam’s bloody chest, the flames and alarms just making it over the water to the rocks, whimpers from the Metkayina girl at Neteyam’s legs, the rasps of his exopack between his breaths.
Neteyam doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t react. His skin is already so cold. It feels like the ground is falling from beneath him. The jagged stone no longer biting at his knees, though he still worried about his brother’s back, about his head, wishing he could somehow cushion his aching— once-aching body from its cold, wet, razor edges.
Spider looks to his face again. His eyes are open. Staring at nothing. Amber filmed over by a lifeless grey tone.
He feels sick.
Neteyam went back for him. He didn’t have to do that. Not even in a self-deprecatory way. Spider would have been fine stuck with the crew a little while longer. He would have found a way. Neteyam never needed to risk it. Never needed to risk Lo’ak. He could have gotten himself off. He would have been fine.
And now his baby brother was dead and gone and cold and he had just wanted to go home and—
The softest sob leaves Spider’s chest. It’s a pathetic thing. He tries to stifle it before it hits the air. No one hears it. No one reacts anyway. He feels undeserving of airing his grief. Not in front of Neytiri, who clings to her son’s bloody chest.. He shakes his head. Looks to Lo’ak. He’s gagging. Blood on his hands. Jake’s… staring into nothing and everything all at once. The girl, Tsireya, if he caught it right, she’s crying too. She’s young. Lo’ak’s age. A baby. She shouldn’t be seeing this.
He sniffs. Forcing the tears away. It works for a second. Then more blink down his cheeks before he can realize. He wants to shut his brother’s eyes. That look of fear is stuck in them, and he doesn’t want him to be afraid. But he fears moving will be taken as insult. That he’ll shatter… this wasn’t peace, it was anything but. But he would break whatever this was into more jagged pieces. So he just holds Neteyam’s arm, rubbing his thumb in circles, as if an inch of warm flesh will bring back the pierced heart in his brother’s chest and he will rise and breathe and live once more.
He shakes his head again. It’s not stopping the tears. It’s not bringing him back. But maybe… maybe the next time, maybe the next time he challenges the pain in his chest, it’ll go away.
It doesn’t.
And then it does.
Later. Much later. But it does.
When he takes Jake back to the ship, his father on the other end of the comm threatening the girls, threatening Jake’s daughters, Spider’s sisters. Jake asks where they are. Spider knows. They’re on the ship. By the moonpool. Jake doesn’t know where that is— some marine, Spider thinks to himself —so he takes him. He was always going to follow, but now he’s going to lead. Leaving his brothers behind. He has to get the girls. He promised Neteyam, when his brother fretted about leaving them behind, he promised he’d get them.
So he leaves,
He takes Jake to them. And in the chaos, grenades and gunfire and explosions. Arrows coming from Neytiri’s bow. Screams and fury filled the air. A bullet his him. He doesn’t even see the gunman. Probably one of the soldiers shooting into the darkness at the mother whose anger and vengeance have come to punish them all.
But it hits him, right under the ribs, where his belly is soft and unguarded, his head spins a little too fast with adrenaline and panic, and a shocking numbness to think about what vital organ was likely hit.
It gushes in seconds. He presses a hand to it, mostly in an attempt to stop the searing burn over anything else, but it does little to help. His back twinges with that same piercing burn. Blood dribbles down his stomach, soaking the band of his loincloth, beading on his waytelem, seeping into the material of his life vest. He bites down his curses to not give his position away.
Spider is a lot of things, but he’s not stupid. He’s going to die.
It’s poetic, really.
He’d go out the same way as his brother. Rendering his death and sacrifice pointless before his body could even truly go cold. He wouldn’t get the girls off the ship, maybe Jake would, if Eywa was kind. But he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t even be able to keep his promise. And he’ll never get the chance to tell Lo’ak he loves him, that it wasn’t his fault, that it’ll be ok. All things there hadn’t been time for when Jake was tugging him along.
He tucks himself in a corner, the first he can find. He tries to keep pressure, he does. But what’s the point? There is none. So he just. Leans his head back. Prays his body finds it’s way to Eywa. and shuts his eyes. No one's coming for him, not now. Not with the gunfire and screams far from over. Not while the ship burns. Not with the girls cuffed to a rail. Even if someone did, there’s no saving him. Jake doesn’t need to see another boy bleed to death, neither does Neytiri—
he doesn’t know if they’d care. Truly care. The Sully Parriarchs and caring about him was a funny, complicated thing he could never come to understand. They weren’t monsters, far from it. They would… try. To help. To comfort. To soothe. Most likely. Jake would offer a false comfort that did not hold years of love and trust and care behind it that gave it soul, and try to stop the bleeding like a good soldier, and let a tear drop when he was gone. But only that, very likely. Spider was a stray. A nuisance. Being without him would not hold that much effect on him, as far as he understands.
And Neytiri. Spider does not know what she would do, in this state or in any other. Sometimes she was more tolerant, and maybe she would scold him for foolishly acquiring a wound, but attempt to mend it anyways. Or if her husband was already handling him, she would just watch. Maybe now, in her rightful fury, she would let him die, just seeing his demon flesh and moving on. But whatever the case, he would not judge her.
He knows they would not just walk away and let him die. But he cannot fathom what they would do.
But it doesn’t matter what they think of him. Seeing another boy bleed to death would only remind them of Neteyam. So he won’t cry for their pointless help
—So he shuts his eyes and makes peace with it. The pain ebbs and flows until it is nearly gone, and the only panic he feels is that of his heart fighting to pump blood that isn’t there to a desperate body. But he’s tired. He’s been tired. For months. Years really. But these last few months… he’s exhausted. And there’s so much pain held in a knot in his chest. And a crack in his skull that goes deeper than bones and flesh. And he doesn’t want to live with it anymore. Not now. Maybe that’s the blood loss and stomach-sinking grief talking. But he isn’t afraid. He’s… nearly grateful.
He breathes in. There’s smoke. It burns. The fire and floodlights flicker. It hurts his eyes. He breathes out. It hurts. Everything hurts. The blood is slick. The burn is getting deeper by the second. His hands shake, and bile rises in his throat. His skin tingles and his limbs go numb. He doesn’t find the strength to force his chest to fill once more. The world fades farther and farther into a black that is so much darker than just the backs of his lids. The pain in his chest leaves. And then—
.
.
.