Chapter Text
“…I want everyone on the Phoenix team to have it hammered in their thick blue skulls - no interfacing with glowing trees! And generally, no sticking of the queue into sentient lifeforms, Colonel!”
“No problem, doc, I’m not a fan of-“
“How are we supposed to blend in, though?”
“Blending in” for a mission like that doesn’t mean you plug every waiting orifice with your braid! Especially Zdinarsk. Wainfleet, tell her I’m watching all the bodycam logs… Pah, marines!”
“It feels like you don’t trust us, doc. Does it feel like it, General, what do you say?”
“Oh, forgive me if I don’t trust you, a product of a program ran by a traitor! Plus, you - yes, don’t turn your face away, not a “memory”, you - were the one to fuck up the whole operation in the first place, wasn’t it? You. Should. Have. Reported. To. Selfridge. That. Your. Man. Was. Acting. OFF. You. Should. Have. Watched. Augustine. And. Detained. The. Whole. Team. It was your mistake, your negligence, and now that you have the kuru… the queue, I can’t honestly say…”
“You can’t seriously be blaming me for what that bastard did! I don’t know who’s behind you, but throwing blame like that…”
“Really, doctor Torres, that’s going a bit too far. Colonel here got all the reprimands he needed for a couple of lifetimes. What we need now - what I need - is for this operation to be different, OK? No more bickering between “lab-coats” and “jarheads”. It’s what set us back in the first place.”
“I get it it, General, alright? But please, both of you, try to widen your scope on the situation just a bit-…”
“It’s wide enough. RDA had accepted the previous administration’s mistakes.”
“You have a defected human in an avatar body, with extensive military experience, training Na’Vi to run a guerilla operation against us. Sure, everyone with a functioning brain understands that once you take him out, you can forget about the locals posing threat as they go back to arrows and direhorses. He’s the unique specimen, a human permanently fused with Na’Vi biology and all the advantages that provides, isn’t he?”
“Yeah, get to the point, doc.”
“My point, Wainfleet, is, that it’s no longer the case. He’s not unique. Hmmm. Listen closely - now YOU are the weak link, get it? All the Recoms are a weak link, so my orders on all matters bio take precede-…”
“You what, think me and my boys are gonna defect like Sully? General, the egghead’s gotta be fuckin’ out of his mind!”
“Quaritch!”
“That’s “senior science officer Egghead” to you, Colonel. My team recieved evidence reviews from corporate Int-Inv and from what I can tell, Sully wasn’t going to defect in the beginning. He was your perfect little tool, wasn’t he? Then Augustine had him ride the skinsuit for days on end. What? Don’t be a child! You’ve been decanted for what, a couple of months? Wait till you truly grow into the body, let the hormones take in…”
“I want to talk to the boy.”
“Get your head straight on first, Colonel. Doubt the boy wants to have bedside chats with a man he was brought up to view as a monster, let alone - ressurrected in a Na’vi body. Also that would happen only after I assess him when we’re done with the mem-spinner. General Ardmore, could you…”
“I agree with doctor Torres. After the spinner, then, well… we could discuss our options, your options, with the boy, Colonel. Agreed?”
“If he doesn’t suffer a stroke first.”
“I’ll see to it that he won’t. Top priority, Hippocrates oath, yadda-yadda.”
***
Miles Socorro - no, Spider - listens to the voices as he sits in the corner of his cell. Muffled by the blast-door, they come off strangely alien, altered and stretched by the buzzing between his ears.
He hears, but he doesn’t understand. The world is still spinning, colors and flashes of light combining into a nauseous haze in his head.
So, Spider clings to the only thing that matters now, finds it like a firm branch or sturdy rock to cling onto among this sensory overload, pulling himself up and out from the pain and confusion - the fact that he didn’t give them anything.
He fought, he fought even when it felt like his synapses had been pulled apart, setting his brain on fire.
Even with all their tech and cruelty thrown at him, he diverted, resisted and… and hid. Concealed things within his own mind so deeply, he wasn’t sure he will ever find them again. Memories that were once treasured precious gems were brought up as shields, only to be nearly torn down by that machine’s mental assault.
The thought almost makes him weep, but then there’s a loud metallic clang, and the lights in his cell become brighter and harsher.
The protesting creak and whine of servomotors announces a visitor, and as the door fully opens, Spider’s heart sinks. They came for him again? So soon? He blinks sweat from his eyes. No, no… this is bad. If they put him back in the machine now, when he’s so tired and hurting, then…
Folding almost in half, the lanky bulk of an exoskeleton squeezes into the cell and then immediately stretches back to full height. Spider jumps to his feet, fists clenched.
The new face is… no, not really new. He recognizes it, if only by the skel-suit. One of the labcoats that hung back behind General Ardmore, working over the blasted mind-reading machine.
As Spider pushes away in panic and defiance, he catches a glimpse of the man’s face beneath the shadow of his khaki cap - a narrow, clean-shaven face, already tanned by Pandoran sun. And a thin-lipped sneer, crossed over by a small pale scar.
Having grown up around Norm and Max, and the rest of the Hell’s Gate skeleton crew, Spider early on came to respect the idea of science and scientists. Hell’s Gate residents were selfless and dedicated, and… and in all aspects that were important, better than his biological parents. The “only decent people that came here. And Trudy”, as Jake had once said, and he wholly believed it.
But, of course, as he grew older, things had begun to develop nuance. That usually meant that things were worse than he had previously imagined them to be.
In this case, turns out, most of the scientists actually left Pandora post-battle with the rest of the RDA staff. The only ones who remained were the ones involved with the Avatar program and the xenobiologists. Eight people in total, and a couple of IT and communications specialists that kept what was left of the decommissioned base running.
Norm didn’t like mentioning it much, but the majority of the lab-techs, meteorologists, geologists and astrographers had chosen to side with the corporation.
“I kind of understand it,” Norm told Spider once when they’ve made a trip to the remote Hell’s Gate warehouse to get a new batch of generators, and the conversation naturally flowed towards the ever-hot topic of keeping the facility functional with so little people. “I mean, they were in it for the profit… at least to a degree. And nor we, nor Jake were gonna write them checks in place of RDA. Unless they wanted to trade Palulukan teeth, hah!”
But even then, being 12 years old, Spider felt the tang of bitterness behind Norm’s words.
“They were in it for the profit”. Not that different from the managers and the soldiers who’d come to Pandora to plunder her for rocks and Eywa knows what else. In addition, the people Na’vi allowed to stay were the people they knew - and nobody in the Omatikaya clan knew some dude who was busy studying the quality of extracted unobtanium ore. More so, if they were aware what that person’s job ultimately resulted in, Spider wasn’t sure they’d be even allowed to leave alive.
The image of a scientist as the pursuer of justice, truth and balance, a pure scholar, thirsty for the knowledge that the moon and Eywa provided, faded and tarnished rather quickly.
Even though he loved Norm, Max, Lee and others, Spider still couldn’t shake the disappointment off. Even those examples of humanity that he once clung to and hoped to follow, were tainted with the collective shame of being merely present on Pandora.
Ironically it was here, in Bridgehead, where he now fully understood what kind of people generally got recruited by the RDA and why Hell’s Gate was so empty. People that would do something like this to him, that would scramble his brain for intel, were capable of anything. Of any twisted, cruel thing that he could, or rather couldn’t, imagine. All in the name of research-slash-profit.
“Science is immoral, Miles. But that doesn’t mean we have to be. Or to be heartless”, Norm told him during that conversation in response to Spider’s question on why it had played out like that, the corporation’s departure and them living so scantly here. “The battle for Hell’s Gate showed who was what. Very… sobering, yeah. That was sobering.”
Heartless. That’s what the other teams were, in effect. And the people… no, monsters… who were now trying to pull out information out of him to find and, undoubtedly, kill the Sullys, were of the same stock. So heartless, in fact, that they didn’t even realize that no amount of meaningless offers and no amount of pain would make Spider betray the Omatikaya.
They simply lacked the ability to understand Spider’s devotion, to understand that there were things more important than rocks, money and technology. Lacked as clearly and physically as they lacked a tail.
And so, Spider hisses at the man, drops to a crouch, splays out his arms like an angry stingbat. Exhausted or not, in pain or not, he’s not going to give in an inch, not when Neteyam’s, Lo’ak’s, Tuk’s and Kiri’s lives are on the line.
As they were taking him here, back to the cell, despite the horrid state he was in, Spider managed to break the nose of one guard, and drive a hard heel into another one’s groin. “Tough kid”, that’s how Toruk Makto himself calls him, and that’s what he is. So whatever this piece of yerik shit plans to…
“Hissing sounds funny, has no one told you yet?” The man speaks in a light, if a bit disparaging tone, and it strikes Spider as a different kind of threat, making him perk up with new worry. Before, it was all stern demands and indignant shouting, and he was used to it long before getting captured. Live with Neytiri, with Jake, learn to take it all in a stride - an anger of a commanding officer and a disappointed mother.
This, however… was somehow worse. He knows a slinger beast, lanay’ka - it would hunt by cocking its head farther and farther back on a flexible, powerful neck, only to then snap it forward and fling its detached, venomous head to pierce the prey. Na’vi fear it almost as much as Palulukan, and this man’s demeanor reminds him of the slinger horror stories that were so popular in the clan. He half-waits for the man’s head to fall off and fly screaming at him.
The visitor’s eyes, a yellow so dark that in the cap’s shadow it turns almost black, slide over Spider from the height of the skel-suit in a way older Na’vi would glance at him, usually - to wordlessly chide him for his “sky-people” folly. There’s an almost perceptible scorn in the labcoat’s gawking. English, it seems, isn’t a native language for him either. There’s a weird inflection to his words, and the syllables are hard, accentuated like a snap of a metal cuff.
“Human mouths aren’t meant for that sound. Lots of spit. Not exactly threatening.”
The man makes a jest of wiping off saliva off his light-green uniform, de-synchronizing the skel-suits large arm.
In turn, Spider hisses some more. Just to spite this skxawng, to let the pain, the terror of where he was, why and with whom, forcefully push out of his chest with the air. The man cocks his head to the side and then half-turns to observe his reflection in the two-way mirror built into one of the cell’s walls.
No reaction. No beating, no threat. Reluctantly, Spider takes a peak too. Not directly, but at the reflection as well. And for the first time notices what he should’ve noticed long ago, if he wasn't so utterly worn out by fear and pain - the man is missing a leg.
Well, most of the leg, that is - the remaining stump is wrapped into the pants and strapped to the skel-suit’s harness just as a whole limb would be.
That would explain why the skxawng would drive the exoskeleton here, Spider decides, and hopes that some Pandoran animal had a good meal at the bastard’s expense.
The man kind of looks the same age as Norm, but the waxy face is all hard lines. There’s neither Norm’s kindness nor gentleness there, just unblinking glass and rough skin. He will call him “One-Leg” for now, like the Omatikaya would call an annoying beast with a distinct feature that had once evaded a hunter.
The skel-suit thunks around the cell in long strides, and Spider moves out of its way. His head begins to swim as he’s forced to keep up in this perverted game of tag, and he finds it hard to follow he jerking motions of the machine as it throws its weight around.
“Mister Socorro, if you continue to be difficult, we will continue to be difficult as well. It boils down to resources, mental, physical and material. Yours are extremely limited and non-replenishable, ours - limitless,” the skel-suit circles around the massive table in the center of the cell, and Spider mirrors the motion. “Cat” and “mouse” playing, like in those little movies that Deborah would show him when he was little. The “cat” always lost and the thought comforts him just a teeny bit. “Guess who will eventually win. I came to assess your state after the probe. Come closer, I require a scan.”
“Assess the state”. Yeah, that’s a lab-coat alright.
“Fuck off! You can just… fuck off, yeah,” fighting through a dry heave, he sputters and immediately hates how weak it comes out. How pathetic. After the initial surge of adrenaline wanes, all he feels is the thousand-year old weight in his bones and the acid swimming in his belly. And the uncomfortable exposure of his bare skin to it all. To what’s coming.
“M-hm,” the man murmurs, dangerously agreeable. “That I can.”
Without warning, he lunges at him and Spider darts away, swerving around the ungainly long limbs of the skel-suit to slide under the table.
But the exoskeleton is surprisingly agile even in such a cramped space. It moves with terrible, conserved efficiency not found in living beings, and the man dives right after Spider. The metal hand reaches, gets slapped away, and then quickly claws from the other side of the table, grabbing a handful of his dreadlocks just like the Recoms did back in the forest.
This again! He screams, he curses, he shouts… only to realize that the man puts no effort in dragging him out by the hair and leaving him to dangle on his knees before a slightly crouched One-Leg. The fucking skel-suit only looks spindly and thin, but he could as well have gone against an AMP. Something begins to burn behind Spider’s eyes, and he struggles with renewed vigor.
The tablet comes closer, lights up as Spider beats onto the metal hand holding him, kicking out and grunting with loathing and strain. The pad skims across his body.
“All green. You’re a sturdy little human boy, aren’t you?”
“I’m Na’vi, you dipshit!”
“Dipshit is an English word”, the man retorts dryly. “How very un-Na’vi of you, Socorro”.
With that, he unceremoniously lets him go and Spider slams back on knees.
“Name’s f’ckin Spider!” he snarls.
“Nickname. Pet name. Your RDA ID says “Miles Socorro”. Parents - Paz Socorro and Miles Quaritch”, the man waves his tablet, a crooked grin for a second flickering on his face. “Maybe you’ve an Omatikaya name? Humor me”.
Spider was mid-way into another string of mixed english and Na’vi insults, when the last words register in his consciousness. They stop him mid-sentence, and his mouth gapes open as he tries to frantically understand just how would One-Leg know? How? And why…
“Of course, silly of me to ask that. To have a Na’vi name one has to be Na’vi, no? Go through all the rites of adolescence. But I see your pale skin, just like mine. The stripes are almost gone,” the man points at the faded blue and softly chuckles, seeing the boy’s bewilderment. “What, you were going to say you’re one in spirit? But you’ve no queue. There’s no spirit to share, at least not in the Na’vi sense.”
The admission hits Spider like a second arrow, this time - to the gut. For it to be said so simply, so off-handedly, is unimaginable.
Worst of all, there’s no spite in the man’s voice. Just a neutral statement, like pointing out he was a boy or that Pandora revolves around Polythemus. He hates the man at the moment, passionately and to the point of shaking from contempt… But some sick part of him is grateful for this punch of reality that everyone around him had avoided out politeness or brushed it off.
Finally someone said it, confirmed and grounded that horrible truth.
He had no queue, and all the dreams of seeing Eywa, of connecting to someone, to Kiri or… well, they’re all moot now. Empty dreams, locked inn this lifeless steel box, in this human, no, demon body, with these heartless fucking bastards that are hellbent on frying his brain.
Maybe it’s because they’ve tortured him so, but Spider suddenly finds himself swallowed by a profound, deep sense of grief over his own existence. Like he was lying dead, yet unaware, and someone came to tell him that. Break the news of his passing.
Thunk. Thunk. The skel-suit paces and Spider, still in the grips of this strange grief, stares at the man’s leg.
The disability was put in the open. Like One-Leg was boasting it. Like he was proud of it and even mocking him, Spider. Showing just how in denial he was about his own disability in the form of a non-existent queue. How he grew his ‘locks out, to trail down the spine, to cover and mimic what he was missing from birth. Weak… so weak.
“The Omatikaya claimed me as my own,” he is forced to say to bridge that terrible silent gap, to protest at least something that the man was saying. “Jake Su-…”
“Yes, the infamous Jake Sully, traitor extraordinaire”, the man cuts him off, and then licks his lips, tip of the tongue running against the hair-thin scar as if tasting Spider’s lies and finding them delectable. “Ri-i-ght. Don’t see him barging down here with the whole tribe and a swarm of banshees to save his kid that oh-so-bravely resists an interrogation effort for his sake.”
The clumsy manipulation can be seen from a mile away, an attempt to set him against Jake and imply he is dispensible, unimportant to his found family.
The boy brushes it off. Kiri’s smile still shines bright in his memory, the gentle brushing of her tail against his calf as they walk through the quiet forest. No, no, the Sullys, of course were looking for him - but better they didn’t, because then all his efforts to protect them would be for nothing. He didn’t need that, he doesn’t need to be rescued, especially if the price is his named brothers or sisters safety… but a part of the man’s words actually comes through, stinging painfully. The reminder of his solitude.
The truth was that Jake would be a fool to risk it all and come for Spider. No matter how much a shameful, pathetic little part of him does want it to happen. Jake simply cannot, cannot betray his family for his sake, and even more so - when there's no guarantee that Spider wouldn’t crack.
And Spider knows he wouldn’t forgive himself if any of the Sullys die trying to free him.
He’s truly and completely alone with these people. And the absolute worst part? That it would be better that way. His body, tense before, relaxes and gives in to the acceptance of this reality. He’ll manage. He will…
“I’m too harsh, am I? Maybe Sully wanted to, but the Bridgehead has no deficiency of the Hell’s Gate facility. This planet can waste itself trying to pry us off now”.
Spider winces at the boasting.
“I don’t give a shit about you or the junk-hole.”
“I assume nobody gave you a tour of the city yet?”
“Didn’t realize I was brought in for f’ckin’ sight-seeing. I’m fine as I am right here”.
“That’s for me to decide as your briefly assigned therapist. Miller, Seong!”
The blast-door screams open once again, and two guards rush in. Not the ones from before, and Spider lets himself believe that the previous had been sent to the infirmary over their fight.
There’s another brief scuffle, one which One-Leg watches over with indifference, and with a round of shouting, shoving and a buzz of a taser, Spider is once again subdued. He kicks and spits nonetheless, refusing to accept defeat, adamant to waste himself with the struggle so much that the scanning machine wouldn’t be able to shake him back into consciousness.
“Cuff him.”
As his hands are violently wrung back to be bound with the mag-zip, one of the Sec-ops turns to One-Leg.
“Dr. Torres, the Colonel asked to talk with the boy.”
A huge metal arm waves dismissively.
“The Colonel can wait. I just want to show our guest around, let him recover a tad. He never saw a thriving human settlement before, his head is a mess. Hell, if I grew up around the likes of Patel, I’d hate mankind with the same passion”.
It might sound like a joke, but even like this, cuffed and restrained with a hard hand on his neck, Spider is perceptive. With Na’vi being so close-knit, so emotional, it becomes a second nature to him to read people’s moods and unspoken intentions - and he recognizes the camouflaged malice in… doctor Torres’ voice. Personal, heavy malice.
And at that point it all becomes painfully clear. The mind-rending machine isn’t the worst thing that has happened with his capture. He’s certain he can power through that, he has the strength and the resolve of his duty as Omatikaya. But the fact that this man, doctor Torres, One-leg or whoever he was, took an interest in him… He’d rather meet Quaritch, his fake father, than be given over to the scientist.
“His head is a mess”.
That sounded like a desire to fix it. Spider doesn’t want to know what a man like Torres thinks “fixing” is. And for the first time on Pandora since he could remember himself, he feels awfully cold.
Freezing, even as he is pushed out from the air-conditioned cell and into the stuffy corridor of Bridgehead’s SCI-DEV complex.