Chapter Text
01.
Ever since being dragged back into the custody of the RDA, Spider had been unhappy every single day.
He hated hamburgers. He hated laboratories. He hated needles. But most of all, he hated his father.
Jake Sully had been rescued by his wife long ago, leaving Spider behind in RDA hands for what already felt like an eternity, and the research on him never ceased. The RDA laboratories were meticulously constructed vacuum tombs. Inside them, Spider spent his days enduring white-coated figures who tried to wring secrets of evolution and survival from his lung tissue and mucous membranes. They were desperate to know why this child, with Earth’s blood running through his veins, could breathe unharmed in the toxic exhalations of the Great Mother; but what they wanted most was to learn how to shorten the timeline of devouring Pandora whole. Sometimes the scans and live sampling went too far—so far that Spider screamed himself hoarse. Quaritch, standing off to the side, would occasionally find it unbearable to watch. He would wave a hand, perfunctorily, granting the child a few hours of “offline” time. And sometimes, he would simply haul Spider—collar and tracking band included, like an expensive piece of livestock—back to his own quarters.
Spider never appreciated it. To him, facing the researchers or facing Quaritch amounted to the same misery. He hurled whatever he could get his hands on at Quaritch, screamed every curse word he knew at that blue face, or else curled up in a corner and refused to make a sound at all. This was their usual father–son pastime. Quaritch never got angry. He made a point of keeping Spider and Varang on entirely separate schedules, ensuring that the two—who disliked each other anyway—would never meet.
On this particular day, when Varang arrived at Quaritch’s quarters, she was greeted by silence.
No one inside. No response over the radio. Quaritch had never ignored her summons before. Irritation crept in as she called him again and again, only to be answered by the hiss of static. The transmission crackle gnawed at her patience like carrion insects feeding on a signal. She checked the tracker. Quaritch was on the perimeter of the base. She mounted her Nightwraith and followed the signal straight to the kill zone beyond the compound—an area that also marked the outer edge of Mangkwan hunting grounds. She hadn’t seen him yet when the scent reached her first.
Blood.
The smell was a distillation of her entire life: thick, warm, greedy, spreading across the soil in wasteful abundance.
Quaritch lay collapsed in a pool of it.
Beside him was another, smaller figure—Air Breather, the most precious life Quaritch had ever possessed—sprawled over his body, face smeared with mud, both hands pressed against Quaritch’s abdomen. Dark red foam kept bubbling up between his fingers. An SN-9 lay nearby, its metal surface reflecting a hard, cold gleam. Varang approached without expression, each step crunching over dry branches. The sound reminded her of idle hours long ago, when she had piled crushed bones inside her tent just to step on them for amusement.
“What the hell is this?” Varang said.
She strolled toward the pair and shoved Spider aside without hesitation. The force sent him rolling in the dirt. She lifted Quaritch’s head and drew him into her arms, fingers pressed to his pulse. He was still breathing, body temperature dangerously low, blood bubbling rhythmically from his mouth where it pooled in his lungs. He had clearly been bleeding for some time. Varang’s gaze shifted to Spider.
“You shot him?”
Spider stared at her, breath ragged, hands drenched in blood, incapable of forming a sentence.
“You know a shot to the gut won’t kill someone, right?”
“What?”
Varang had never possessed much patience or mercy for children. She picked up the handgun from the ground and tossed it casually into Spider’s arms.
“You aim for the heart if you want him dead,” she said. “Try again.”
The air froze.
Spider blinked, trying to comprehend the Tsahìk’s words. He held his breath for a long time. The weight pressed down all at once—the blood tie and the hatred, the needles he saw every day, the endless hamburgers (why couldn’t this idiot understand that he hated hamburgers), how long it had been since he’d seen Kiri, the base, all the sky people, his blue father bleeding out, his father’s vicious girlfriend. He was furious at every single thing, and all that accumulated, nameless rage finally detonated.
“…What the hell is wrong with you?! Save him!”
“Why?” The Tsahìk remained unmoved. She was perfectly at ease, untroubled by fledglings swallowed by waves, indifferent to the disappearance of any sound in the world. She held the unconscious Quaritch tightly, as though the sky man had been born her possession. Under the child’s desperate gaze, she pressed a light kiss to the man’s cold forehead. His blood quickly soaked her thighs, dripping steadily, intoxicating her. Even now, this sky man continued to please her with everything he had.
“Is he my love? Yes. Do I want to keep him? Yes. And isn’t this ideal? Why are you angry, Air Breather?”
The Tsahìk’s eyes were a pair of ill-omened memories.
No tenderness.
No longing.
No joy.
To look at them was to feel pain, to verge on blindness.
“You’ve always wanted him dead.”
“Wanted him to die. Painfully. Cleanly.”
“Preferably somewhere that had nothing to do with you.”
“Your wish and mine have both been fulfilled.”
“So what, exactly, are you dissatisfied with?”
Spider said nothing.
His bewildered, earnest life had been surplus from the moment he first drew breath. He clung to the Sullys, loved Kiri fiercely, yearned for real connection—but outside that longing, his blood inevitably tethered him to this man. He had spent his entire life running from this void. His life was built on loss; it would not be made whole by receiving more love. Whatever love this man offered him was always excess. If this man died, wouldn’t his life finally be complete? Wouldn’t the guilt, the rage, the pain, the confusion all be resolved in this instant?
Spider couldn’t say it aloud.
As a toddler, his first words had been in English, his second in Na’vi. Now he wanted to speak neither. Varang merely watched him and smiled, never urging him on. Her eyes were clean and pure, sweeping over the plains, brimming with the malice of daylight. Her words dissolved into pale smoke, rising toward stars hidden by the sun. Pandora’s nightscape glittered brilliantly. Spider looked at her, then at the eclipsed sky, and for the first time in his life wished the stars would all fall down and die.
Then Quaritch coughed.
His eyes remained closed—it was only a reflex. A thick mouthful of blood splattered across Varang’s pale arm. Spider broke. With a low snarl, he scrambled back to Quaritch’s side, pressing his hands once more against the mangled gunshot wound, forcing out the last sound his throat could manage.
“…Save him.”
Varang stared at the blood-soaked hands with utter boredom.
Fragments of a childhood filled with fire and burial flickered through her mind.
Her dead mother.
A sister who never grew up.
The day she poisoned her father with her own hands.
She did not sing for her father, her mother, her sister.
Her twilight and her eclipses held no songs.
She no longer cried at eclipses, nor trembled in the dark.
She had never made beadwork.
There were no lives housed within her beads.
She kept trophies.
She did not mourn anyone.
Well. Killing one’s father, after all. She thought. What’s the fuss?
02.
Halfway through stopping the bleeding, the Tsahìk grew impatient again.
“Looks like he’s about to go,” she said. “Might as well cut it out while it’s fresh.”
“Wait—wait—wait—wait—no!”
“What? I’m not sharing. His heart and everything else are mine.”
“I don’t want it! Not even a dog would want it!” Spider was livid. “Don’t cut him open—he’s still alive!”
03.
When Quaritch opened his eyes, his first thought was that the body had finally failed him.
He couldn’t feel his limbs. He couldn’t hear anything. Vision remained, but only barely. What filled his sight was neither hellfire nor Pandora’s riotous bioluminescence—only the medical bay ceiling, its rigid grid of cold light dull and impersonal. He tried to draw a deep breath and found his chest unbearably heavy, his arms welded in place like they had been fused by industrial machinery. Even expanding his lungs took effort. He shifted his eyes with difficulty.
Varang on his left.
Spider on his right.
??
?????
His mind stalled.
A steady chill seeped into his left shoulder. Varang’s face was tucked into the hollow of his neck, her long hair brushing his collarbone, itching faintly. Her breathing rose and fell with mechanical regularity, tapping against his pores. One leg was thrown over him, hooked around his thigh. The right side was worse. Spider, small and knotted into himself, clung to Quaritch’s right arm with both hands and both legs, treating the blue limb like driftwood in open water. The tableau was wrong. Deeply wrong. Had he finally done enough terrible things to earn hell? His stomach tightened; nausea flickered. He turned his gaze to the ceiling and sifted through numb pain and broken memory, slowly reconstructing the accident.
The kid had complained that the lab made him uncomfortable, unhappy, restless—just miserable in every conceivable way—chattering endlessly in Quaritch’s ear until his resolve cracked. He took the little bastard out to the kill zone to let him breathe. Spider stole his gun. During the argument, Quaritch caught sight of movement in the underbrush—a Viperwolf. He had very bad memories of those. He didn’t think. He lunged toward Spider. Bang. Spider pulled the trigger in panic. His last clear memory was heat blooming in his abdomen, teeth clenched as he wrestled the weapon back and fired blindly into the trees until the wolf fled from the muzzle flash.
—And then, this.
Pinned to a medical bed, held on both sides, unable to move. He had no idea how long they’d slept like this; half his body had gone numb. Ironically, that numbness spared him any sensation from the hole his own son had put in his gut. He lay rigid. On his left, Varang’s cold body temperature—dryness and fire incarnate, a flower burning itself alive—her breath branding faint scorch marks into his neck. On his right, Spider’s uniquely human heat and anxiety, the unstable warmth of a child who changed from day to day, like a river forgetting its own current. That current flowed through blood and genes into Quaritch’s palm, only to slip away again. The two restless forces rose and fell against his body, vibrating his nerves into a low ache. He tried to shift his numbed arm, but any movement made Varang’s ears twitch or drew a muffled murmur from Spider’s sleep. He gave up, swallowing his irritation.
He endured. Tried distracting himself with memories of Nigeria, of Venezuela. None were worse than this. He endured longer. Finally reached his limit. The right arm Spider clung to had progressed from numbness to agony, as if ten thousand venomous ants were crawling through his veins. He jerked his shoulder impatiently, trying to reclaim sensation. The movement was too abrupt. Spider slid straight toward the edge of the bed.
“Fuck,” Quaritch muttered.
He tightened his left arm around Varang and reached out with his right, hauling Spider back onto the bed with unnecessary force. The effort sent white-hot pain tearing through his abdominal wound. He froze, breath held, and didn’t move again. Reduced to a stone effigy, he waited it out. Two full hours passed—long enough that even the ventilation system seemed to have learned to chant—before the two creatures in his arms finally woke.
Spider stirred first, sniffled, rubbed his eyes, and looked up at his blue father. Seeing Quaritch’s distinctly green-tinged face, he showed no particular emotion.
“…Wow. Your face looks like shit.”
“And whose fault is that?” Quaritch snapped. “Get up, tiger. My arm’s completely dead. Or do me a favor and amputate it.”
Varang woke at the same time. Her expression was blank, but deep fatigue sat behind her eyes. She hadn’t slept all night—had stayed awake watching over Quaritch. She assessed the two of them with a cold glance, said nothing, and made no move to leave. Instead, she climbed fully on top of him, flattening herself against his body. She rested her jaw on his shoulder, closed her eyes, and tried to go back to sleep.
All the weight settled squarely over his wound.
He had no choice. As the numbness receded, the true pain of the gunshot announced itself at last. A groan leaked from his throat. His avatar arms moved on instinct, wrapping around Varang’s waist, adjusting just enough to let her lie comfortably atop him.
Spider glared from the side. “What about her? Why does she get to keep sleeping?”
Quaritch glared back.
Blood loss and pain had turned his thoughts sluggish. For a moment, he had no answer.
Then he heard himself say, “…You can get up here too, if you want.”
04.
When the metal doors of the medical bay slid open, a heavy wave of antiseptic stench and suppressed gunpowder rolled out. Every step sent a tearing sensation through his abdomen, forcing his spine rigid to compensate. He had no business leaving the bed—but if he didn’t, his biological son might not survive. Three people crammed onto one medical bed was a nightmare. Not ten minutes ago they had been arguing over who got to stay closer to Quaritch; when Spider shoved Varang, she’d drawn her knife. She had no patience for children. No one cared that the bed was meant for Quaritch. He just needed to get them both out.
Lyle Wainfleet had already been waiting outside with several guards. He’d been leaning against the corridor wall, staring at the ceiling in boredom. When the door opened and he saw the formation—two large, one small—he went silent.
“Sir, you should return the kid to the lab,” Lyle said at last.
“Mm.” Quaritch replied.
The word lab detonated the rage Spider had been bottling all night. He started screaming at full volume. Quaritch frowned and didn’t even look at him. One broad blue hand clamped over Spider’s entire mouth—nearly covering his whole face—leaving only muffled noises trapped in his palm.
“…Also,” Lyle added flatly, “command wants to know what happened. There’s a discharge record from the kill zone. And you were admitted to emergency care.”
“Accidental discharge,” Quaritch said smoothly. He saw Lyle’s face twitch—one step short of a full eye roll—and added, “I’ll handle the report. Scrap the weapon for me. This never happened.”
“Understood, Boss,” Lyle replied coolly. The rest went unsaid: I really don’t want to deal with your fucked-up family mess anymore.
Varang, meanwhile, was clearly bored. She ignored the sky people’s bureaucratic exchange, reached up idly to tug at Quaritch’s kuru where it hung over his shoulder, looped her arm through his possessively, and murmured something in Na’vi—sounding very much like she was urging her lover to hurry up and toss the noisy little animal back into its cage.
Watching them, Lyle thought they looked exactly like a catastrophically dysfunctional remarried couple, eager to dump the inconvenient child back at boarding school so they could resume their private world.
End.