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Lying on the back of Payakan, drifting listlessly through the ocean, Spider and Lo’ak stared up at the stars. Below them, Payakan sang a low dirge, his deep voice reverberating through the waves and sounding as if it came from all around them, rumbling through them and rattling their bones.
Sighing, Spider crossed his arms over himself as he shifted. “This is nice,” he said to Lo’ak. “I feel like we don’t get to do this anymore. We never just hang out.”
“Too much going on,” Lo’ak agreed. “Too much to do.”
“Yeah. I’ve got so much to talk about,” Spider said. “Like, what the hell’s going on with you and Tsireya? Have you asked her out yet, or what?”
“Shut up,” Lo’ak whined, but he was holding back a laugh. “How about you? You’re like, a Na’vi freak now, even more of a freak than I am. What’s that like?”
“Great,” Spider said. “And weird.”
They were both lying on their backs side by side, their heads by each other’s feet, connected by the press of their elbows and hips and thighs. Spider could feel Lo’ak’s hair brushing against the bare skin of his ankle, and every time he moved his head, he could feel his dreadlocks pulled by the weight of Lo’ak’s foot pressing down on him. There was nobody out here but them, and Payakan singing a quiet song beneath them. It felt precious, this rare moment of peace. Neytiri and Jake had left the murai early in the night on one of their treasured ‘date nights’ and had left Kiri in charge, who had spent the night braiding coral and shells and pearls into Tuk’s hair, and had basically told Lo’ak and Spider to entertain themselves and do whatever they wanted. So Lo’ak had grabbed hold of Spider’s arm, dragged him out to where they ilu were wading, and they went to see Payakan.
Like children, they played for a while, splashing each other and seeing who could hold their breath the longest, holding tight to Payakan’s fins while he spun them around the water. Once, Spider had lost his grip, and Lo’ak had quickly grabbed hold of his hand to keep him from being lost amongst the waves. It had been terrifying. It had been exhilarating.
This was the first time he’d been alone with Lo’ak for a long time. Since he was taken by the RDA for eight months, and Neteyam had died, and they’d nearly lost everything that mattered to them. Quaritch was gone, and the Mangkwan had retreated back into the wilderness they had crawled from. Despite aiding with the recovery efforts, Jake and Neytiri always seemed to be around, taking them fishing or braiding their hair or just lying together in a big pile in their family marui right in the middle of the day for no reason other than they could and they wanted to. If Spider had to voice just how much it meant to him, put words exactly how it made him feel to finally be part of it all, he would run out of words in both Na’vi and English. But nothing was as it was. For better, and for worse. But Spider loved his brother, had never stopped loving him, and had missed these moments, just the two of them.
“I missed you, bro,” Spider said to the stars. It almost hurt to say. He hadn’t known how much he’d meant it until he’d gotten the time to really think about it.
“I missed you too,” Lo’ak shifted so his head was pressed against Spider’s shin. “So much has gone on. There’s so much I’ve wanted to say to you, so much I haven’t told you about.”
“Me too,” Spider wondered how far away Earth was from here. He knew the number geographically, but he wondered how far it really was. Quaritch had been surprised that Spider hadn’t been shipped back to Earth, and if he’d been old enough for cryosleep, he would’ve been. He’s glad that Norm and Max and the others cared about him enough not to ruin his life like that. “Hey, I’ve got an idea.”
“Oh Eywa,” Lo’ak muttered. “Here we go.”
“Shut up, jackass,” Spider had half a mind to turn his head and bite Lo’ak in the ankle, but settled for shifting his leg to nudge him in the head with his heel. “We should play a game. The RECOMs would play it all the time, where they would tell each other a bunch of things, and they would have to figure out which one was the lie. But instead of lying, we should just tell the truth.”
“That doesn’t sound like a game,” Lo’ak said. “That just sounds like talking.”
“I’m serious,” Spider laughed. “You tell me one big thing that you’ve been keeping from me, and I’ll tell you one big thing that I’m keeping from you.”
“How do you know that I’m keeping anything from you?” Lo’ak demanded, voice harder than it’d been mere seconds ago. “And why are you keeping things from me?”
Spider sighed. He loved Lo’ak. He loved him so much that it probably wasn’t healthy, thinking of someone as your brother before you considered them a friend, but that’s just the way Spider functioned. He did everything at full speed and didn’t know how to do anything in halves. He knew that something had happened while Spider had been gone, because so much had changed, because Lo’ak had changed, too much for nothing to have happened. And the worst part was that Spider didn’t even know any of it. Even when he had come back, he was so out of the loop that he struggled to follow along with what was happening and felt like he was being left out all over again.
“The same reason you’re keeping things from me,” Spider said. “Come on, man. There’s nobody out here but us, and I’m guessing that Payakan already knows everything, right?” It had been meant as a rhetorical question, but the Tulkun hummed in affirmative anyway. “Yeah, see. How come he knows, and I don’t?”
Lo’ak scoffed. “Yeah, sure, you’re telling me that Kiri doesn’t already know everything about you? That you haven’t told her your big bad secret?”
“No,” Spider felt his hands curl into fists, his nails digging into his palms, and his knuckles whitening. “She doesn’t know this. Nobody knows this.”
For a moment, a rare, blissful moment, Lo’ak was silent. Contemplative, curious. “It’s really bad then.”
“Yeah. It’s really bad,” Spider took a breath. “How about yours? Is yours bad too?”
“Uh, yeah,” Lo’ak’s breathing grew stuttered. “I think so.”
How had they gotten here? Far away from civilisation, floating on the back of a Tulkun, talking about their feelings. They weren’t the talking type. They were the leaping through trees, wrestling in the mud, racing through the village type. They were punches and hisses and bared teeth, they were curse words and angry growls and affectionate insults. They didn’t do this. But Spider felt like, just this once, they needed to.
Eventually, when the silence stretched on for too long, he sighed. He was the older one; if he didn’t start, they probably never would. “How do you want to do this? Say it at the same time, or do you want one of us to go first?”
“Let’s do it at the same time,” Lo’ak said. If Spider didn’t know any better, he’d say he was scared. But Spider did know better, knew Lo’ak like he knew the sound of Kiri’s laugh, the sound of Tuk’s feet slapping against the beach. What could possibly be so bad that he was scared to tell him about it? “Should we count, or…?”
“Sure,” Spider said, steeling himself. This was good, he thought, this was what they needed. “Let’s count. On three. One, two, three- ”
“I almost put a bullet in my head.”
“I think I was tortured.”
With a painful gasp that was sharp around the edges and cut Spider up as it entered his lungs, he bolted upright at the same time that Lo’ak did, facing each other with wide, terrified eyes. “You did what?” Spider exclaimed, reaching out to snap a hand around Lo’ak’s wrist as if he could keep him here if he really wanted to get away. “I’m sorry, did you seriously just say what I think you said?”
“What do you mean you ‘think’ you were tortured?” Lo’ak demanded at the same time, nails scrabbling for purchase on Spider’s knee. “What the fuck are you talking about?”
“No way, you first,” Spider shook his head. “I’m older, so I say you go first. Because if you don’t, I’m swimming back to shore to ask Jake right now, tsyong be damned.”
“Uh, Dad doesn’t know,” Lo’ak glanced down at Payakan’s leathery back, his gaze as far away from Spider as he could make it. “I haven’t told him or Mum. Only Kiri and Tsireya know.”
Something was clenched in Spider’s chest, a fist wrapped tight around his heart and squeezing like trying to expunge blood from a stone. Lo’ak was his little brother, his littlest brother. He’s already lost Neteyam. If Spider had lost Lo’ak too, and by his own hand no less… “Why?” He asked, the word grating like blades in his throat, voice rough like he’d gargled saltwater. “Why would you do that?"
He didn’t ask why their parents didn’t know. He didn’t ask what would possibly possess him to tell his siter and his maybe-girlfriend. And he certainly didn’t ask him why he thought he couldn’t come to him and tell him when it happened.
“It was after the Tulkun council. The one where they said Payakan was outcasted for life. You remember?” Lo’ak asked. Spider nodded. How could he forget? “When I left, Dad came after me. We, uh, we got into an argument. We fought about it. And he didn’t mean to, but he said that it was my fault that Neteyam – he said what happened to ‘Teyam was my fault.”
It had been some time now since Spider had needed an exopack and mask to breathe, but he still felt his lungs burning, like he was suffocating on caustic Pandorian air all over again. “But that,” Spider managed, struggling to get the words out. “That’s not true. That’s not true, Lo’ak. You know that, right? It wasn’t your fault.”
“Yeah, uh, I know. I know that,” Lo’ak ducked his head down. His eyes caught at Spider’s vice-like grip around his wrist – painfully tight for Spider’s aching fingers but not so much for Lo’ak – and his blue fingers leaving angry marks on his pale knee. But neither of them pulled away. “I took one of the guns we’d scavenged to the dunes and I – well. I uh. I was gonna do it. But I didn’t, I stopped. I don’t think I really wanted to do it, but I almost did. And then Kiri and Tsireya came, and they figured out what I almost did and they. Uh. They weren’t very happy.”
“No shit!” Spider wanted to scream. He wanted to yell and shout and rage, wanted claws instead of nails at the ends of his fingers so he could tear into his chest and still the frantic beating of his heart with his own fist. “What did you think was going to happen?” he forced himself to settle. Lo’ak has had too many people yelling at him, mad and disappointed and scared, and Spider was none of those things, but he didn’t want Lo’ak to misinterpret the sheer panic and heartache that threatened to overwhelm him. His baby brother, oh, his baby brother. “Why didn’t you tell anyone? Why didn’t you tell me?”
Because that was the real crux of the matter. That Spider had almost lost another brother, and he hadn’t even known.
“I didn’t want everyone to make a big deal out of it,” Lo’ak shrugged. “I don’t want anyone to pity me. It’s not gonna be a thing, you know? It was just something that happened, or almost happened, and it’s never going to happen again. One time only, I promise. And if I told Mum and Dad… well, you know what they’re like. Can you imagine what they’d do if they ever found out?”
“I get it,” Spider admitted, and he did. He knew exactly what he meant. There were some things that they’d kept from Jake and Neytiri over the years because they were afraid of how they’d react, small things like an ankle sprained by doing something they were told not to do or a place explored that they were told to stay away from. “But me? Come on, Lo’ak, you know you could’ve told me.”
“I know,” When Lo’ak met Spider’s eyes, they were big, and sad, and so bright in the darkness that it was almost like staring into the sun, the spots on his face glowing so vibrantly it almost drowned out the shape of him in the dark. “But we’d only just gotten you back, bro. I didn’t want you to have to deal with that so soon after everything that happened – you were gone for eight months, and I worried about you every day. We all did. And I didn’t want to be the reason for anything else to happen to you, even if it was just making you feel bad. And then so much happened and everything was crazy for a while and then I just… forgot.”
“You’re not supposed to worry about me,” Spider managed in a voice barely loud enough to be a whisper. “I’m your older brother. I’m supposed to be worrying about you.”
“Maybe,” Lo’ak wiped his hand down his face, brushing away tears that could’ve been mistaken for sea spray. “But who worries about you?”
Nobody worried about Spider – that was the point. He was independent; he could take care of himself. But he thought that saying that out loud would put that ugly, angry look back on Lo’ak’s face, so instead he ducked his head forward and looked up to meet Lo’ak’s eyes, forcing him to look at him instead of down to his lap. “You ever do anything that stupid again, I’m gonna dunk you in the ocean and leave you to the akula. You hear me?”
Lo’ak huffed a faint laugh. “Alright. That’s fair.”
“Don’t wait so long to tell me next time,” Spider punched Lo’ak in the shoulder. It hurt his knuckles more than it probably hurt Lo’ak, but he pretended to keel over in pain anyway, an age-old game. “I don’t want to hear from Kiri or Tsireya months later that I almost lost another brother, again.”
Nodding, Lo’ak ducked forward so he could bump his head against Spider’s, and Spider brought his hand to cup the back of his head, holding him impossibly closer. He wanted to cry. He hadn’t really gotten to cry about anything yet, not about Neteyam or the RDA or Quaritch or any of it, but now, right here on the back of Payakan in the middle of the ocean, he suddenly felt like he wanted to sob and scream and cry until the ocean was more Sky Person tears than it was saltwater. But then Lo’ak sniffled, and Spider forced himself to hold it together.
“Alright,” Lo’ak said thickly. “Your turn.”
“Huh?” Spider asked. He wasn’t thinking about much of anything at the moment. Nothing but the thought of Lo’ak, his friend, his brother, someone he loved with all his heart, almost ending his life with a pinkskin weapon while Spider was on the other side of the beach. If Lo’ak had almost died during battle or an accident, that would be one thing. But to hold a gun to his head and almost pull the trigger… Spider shivered, revolted by the whole idea.
When Lo’ak pulled back, Spider had to bite back the pitiful sound he almost made and reluctantly let him go. He didn’t go far, though, just far enough to look Spider in the eyes, his expression a little bit sad and a little bit angry. “Don’t play dumb with me, bro. You can’t get me to tell you my big bad secret and then think you can just get out of telling me yours. You think you were tortured?”
“Oh,” There was a part of Spider that had hoped that Lo’ak would just forget that he’d ever said that. It wasn’t fair, he knew, but their talk hadn’t gone the way he’d expected, and now that he had to say the words out loud, he wasn’t sure if he could do it. “Uh, I’m pretty sure. I mean, it felt like torture. What I imagine it would feel like.”
“Was it the RDA?” Lo’ak asked. Spider nodded. “What did they do to you?”
Spider shook his head. He was the oldest brother, especially with Neteyam gone. It was his job to look after Lo’ak and the others, not make things worse. “You don’t want to know.”
“Yes, I do,” Lo’ak said firmly. “I’m your brother, skxawng. I need to know. You… you need to tell someone, like I told someone. Does anyone know? Did you say anything to anyone?”
“No,” Spider said. “Not unless you count Quaritch.”
“I don’t,” Lo’ak said bluntly. “So you have to tell me. You have to. Payakan and I won’t bring you back to the village until you do, even if Mum and Dad come searching for us.”
And Spider knew that he’d do it, too. Lo’ak was a stubborn bastard, especially when it came to his family. Once, when they were little, Spider had been jealous of a toy that Kiri was playing with and had shyly asked Mo’at to make him one, and Neytiri hadn’t let her. She had said that Spider had many toys at home that would entertain him more. But Lo’ak had made one behind her back, and it had been messy and slapdash and fell apart within a month when they were typically supposed to last many years, but he’d presented it to Spider the next day with so much pride that he was practically vibrating with it. Spider had loved it. He’d wrapped Lo’ak in a crushing hug and had played with it back in Hells Gate until it started to show too many signs of wear and tear, and then it sat on a shelf in his room so he could look at it whenever he got sad, and he would always have it with him. Sometimes he thought that nobody was more stubborn than Lo’ak.
But then Spider thought about his time with the RDA, thought about Quaritch calling him son and the village burning as its people screamed and the way he had begged until his throat was raw as they killed the Tulkun. Did Payakan know that Spider had been there? Did Lo’ak’s soul brother know that Spider had witnessed the murder of his people and hadn’t been able to do anything about it?
Lo’ak was still looking at him intently, watching him with his father’s eyes as he waited for Spider’s answer. He wouldn’t be taking no for an answer. There was no getting out of this, not unless he wanted to swim back and risk getting caught by one of the many deadly beasts out here in the ocean that would be all too willing to gobble up a pinkskin snack.
He took a bracing breath, and Lo’ak shifted to look at him better, never straying too far away. He could feel Lo’ak’s warm breath against his face, could see a vein jumping anxiously in his throat. “They did a lot of things. After I was blessed by Eywa, they drilled into me and stuck things down my throat, just to see how She did it. I was awake for that. Normally, whenever Norm, Max and the scientist did something like that, they would give me medication so I could sleep through it, and I wouldn’t feel any pain. The RDA didn’t do that. They didn’t care. I was awake the whole time.”
“Bastards,” Lo’ak hissed, the bioluminescent patterns on his face somehow flaring even brighter. “You said they did a lot of things. What else did they do?”
Like a viperwolf with a bone. He should’ve known that wouldn’t be enough to satisfy him. He thought about the neural scanner, about the restrains, about the piercing, unending pain that he could still feel sometimes when he was least expecting it, that always took his feet out from under him. He couldn’t look at Lo’ak, so his gaze drifted down to the surface of the water, where he could see Payakan’s fin bobbing gently through the waves, keeping them afloat.
“They were desperate to find out where you guys went. Like, crazy desperate,” He thought about General Ardmore, he thought about the Ta’unui. “They had this machine… they could look into your brain and show a picture of it right in front of you, like cutting a hole into your head to look at your thoughts. It felt like it, too. They strapped me down, and they held my eyes open, and they tried to use it on me to tell them where Jake was. I wouldn’t tell them.”
Lo’ak’s eyes burned with anger; Spider could feel them boring into the side of his head. “This machine is what hurt you?”
“Yeah,” Spider admitted weakly. He remembered the soldiers holding him down, pinning him to the machine while they strapped him in and pried his eyes open with that mask on his face, the sheer insurmountable pain as they dug into his brain over and over and over again, the agony that made his bones sing and his blood boil, the fleeting thought that death would be the a mercy. But then he pictured Lo’ak, and Kiri, and Tuk, and Neteyam, and Jake and Neytiri, and imagined them in that same machine enduring the same treatment, and he refused to give in, because he would take that pain a thousand times over if it meant that they didn’t have to. “It was like someone had cracked open my skull and stuck their hand into my brain, but their fingers had claws, and they were just tearing up everything they could reach. They only let me out because Quaritch made them. There was a lot of blood.”
“I’ll kill them,” Lo’ak’s hands were flexing and unflexing in his lap, curling into tight fists before forcibly releasing, only to do it all over again. His ears were pinned to his head, his tail lashing violently behind them. “If we tell Kiri, she’ll come with us, and so will Mum and Dad, and Tsireya could stay behind and watch Tuk. We’ll go to the RDA base, and we’ll bring Payakan to break the boats, and I’ll kill – “
“Whoa, hotshot,” The sudden planning surprised a laugh out of Spider, especially because Lo’ak was so sincere. “We’re not killing anyone. “
“Yes, we are,” Lo’ak retorted. “Because they hurt you and they deserve to die.”
“Maybe,” Spider shrugged. “It happened a long time ago, though. It doesn’t even matter anymore.”
Lo’ak just stared at him, his eyes wide as if he couldn’t comprehend the concept. “Of course it matters. You matter, Spider. To me, to our family. You know that, right?”
Sometimes, Spider’s life felt surreal. Nothing had changed for Tuk, Kiri and Lo’ak, their relationship already more familial than was expected. But sometimes, when Neytiri called him son or kissed him on the forehead before he went to bed just like she did for the other children or helped apply salves to his sunburns, and when Jake took him fishing or taught him how to ride a skimwing with Tonowari’s aid or sat Spider down so he could paint his stripes first thing in the morning while the rest of the family got ready to start the day, Spider felt like he’d finally gotten everything he’d wanted. For his whole life, he’d been standing on the outside of the Sully’s life, desperately looking in and hoping that one day they’d open the door for him so he could join them. He didn’t know if he mattered before – they never came after him when the RDA first took him, Jake and Neytiri tried to send him back to Hells Gate all alone, they both tried to kill him on two separate occasions – but he liked to believe that he mattered now.
“Yeah, man,” Spider said when Lo’ak’s brow started to wrinkle with worry. “I know that.”
“Is that why you get those headaches?” Lo’ak asked. “The ones that make you go inside. And the nosebleeds. Because of that machine, what it did to you?”
“I think so,” Spider admitted. “I probably should’ve mentioned to Norm that he ought to take a look at my brain, but there was so much going on at the time with the whole ‘being blessed by Eywa and suddenly being able to breathe’ thing.”
The look on Lo’ak’s face was not one he typically saw directed at himself – at Jake and Neytiri, always, at Kiri and Neteyam, occasionally, but hardly ever at Spider. It was something akin to awe, wide-eyed and mouth agape, as if he had never seen him before. “All that, and they never broke you. They tortured you, and they hurt you again and again, and you still resisted. You never gave us up, even when it would’ve kept you from more pain. That’s amazing, Spider. You’re amazing.”
Spider didn’t feel very amazing. He felt wrung out, like one of the towels that Neytiri would drop on Spider’s head after a day spent swimming on the beach, so he didn’t track water into their marui. But Lo’ak was smiling, and he managed a worn-out laugh of his own. “This wasn’t how I expected tonight to go,” he sighed. “I thought we’d just chill. Not… this.”
“Me neither,” Lo’ak said. “But it feels kinda good. Lighter, I guess. I didn’t realise I was keeping that from you – I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” Spider chided. “Thank you for telling me.”
Sighing, Lo’ak leaned forward to bump their foreheads together again, one of his hands raising up to cup the back of Spider’s neck as it wanting to keep him as close as possible. He was the oldest sibling, but he felt so small in Lo’ak’s arms. He didn’t mind, though. Not while Lo’ak let Spider wrap his own arms around him and squeeze him tightly as if trying to become one. “Are you going to tell Mum and Dad about the torture?”
“That depends,” Spider replied. “Are you going to tell them about you almost killing yourself?”
Lo’ak flinched. Spider almost felt bad – almost. “Uh… no. No, I’m not going to say anything.”
“That’s alright,” Spider said. “I’ll keep your big bad secret if you keep mine.”
“Fair. I can do that, brother,” Lo’ak slumped against him, and suddenly Spider found himself holding up all of his substantial weight, bundled up in his arms. But that was alright. Spider could hold him forever if he needed to. “I See You, Spider.”
It always made Spider all choked up when someone said that to him. Even though they were saying it more and more, it still took his breath away like it was his first time. “I See You, Lo’ak.”
Bellow them, Payakan made a deep thrumming sound that sounded like a cross between a groan and a laugh, and Lo’ak chuckled, rubbing a hand across the Tulkun’s leathery hide. “We See You, too, Payakan.”
It was late. Jake and Neytiri would probably be finishing up their date night soon, and they would be none too pleased if they came home to find half their children missing. “Let’s go back.”
“Yeah,” Lo’ak agreed, and Payakan began the slow journey home, the water lapping gently across his sides as he carefully kept his precious cargo above the waves.
As the village started to get closer, the lights of cookfires in marui’s getting brighter and people going about their business on the shore, Spider shifted to bump Lo’ak’s shoulder with his. “Sully’s never quit, huh?” It seemed to have a different meaning, now.
“Dude,” Lo’ak ruffled Spider’s hair with one of his massive hands. “You know it! Sully’s stick together!”
Spider had nearly lost his brother and hadn’t even known it. Lo’ak’s brother had been tortured, and nobody ever knew. The number of things they could know and not know at the same time was astounding. Spider vowed never to let that happen again. He would bring Lo’ak out here until the end of time to make sure that never happened again if that’s what it takes.
With Lo’ak pressed against his side, the line of his body warm and solid and very much alive, Spider let himself believe, just for tonight, just for now, just for a moment, that they were going to be okay.