Chapter Text
The boy leaves his father in the ship. He swims back up to the surface and prepares for war and spends a lifetime savoring every bite of fish, seeking a faint aftertaste of his father like a mourner digging for forgotten photos. He bites his lip hard and swallows his own blood, dead man's DNA a gift re-spliced on his tongue.
The father wins the fight, drags his rival's corpse out of the water and feels revenge bleed through his fingers, leaving him cold. But then he takes the boy and pins him down, savoring the bright bright bright flare of scratching, terrified fury, enough to keep them both warm.
The boy sits in the dark and thinks he wasn't the one who killed Neteyam, he listened to me, he saved me, he loves me-- words playing on a loop like the babbles of a maniac. The boy thinks of himself: traitor, backstabber, doomed, whore, sinks sharp nails into his own thigh, golden hair scraping his hands.
The father sits in the dark and thinks of blood and his son and a world on fire, thinks of killing his employers for dragging their heels on sending him back out. He takes too many stims and dreams of the boy in a wedding veil and nothing else, holding a bouquet of Jake Sully's sweet, dripping guts. He dreams of the boy spitting coals down his throat.
The boy takes his father's knife as his father lies helpless on the rock and stabs him over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over. He buries his face in his father's intestines and weeps.
The father fucks the boy, splits him open, pieces coming apart around his dick, boiling his insides with rope after rope of cum. He can put the boy together later on, or make his creators bring him back, too.
The boy ends people with a knife and arrows, small compared to the other resistance fighters, so that everybody who sees the corpses will show this was a human's work. So the father will know it.
The father swings between not wanting to kill Na'vi, because that would make the boy weep, and wanting to kill everyone on the whole wide planet, just make it the two of them. The father carves spiders into rocks and trees wherever he can find them, webs stretching around the planet.
The boy watches the father come back, over and over again, body after body spit across Pandora's surface in an infinite loop. The ones who don't recognize or remember him hurt, even when he knows they'll all hunger eventually, same way they hunger for Jake Sully's blood.
The father leaves himself twin messages each time, the first for revenge while the second always says the kid belongs to us. Not long after the boy becomes a man, Quaritch holds him down, humming over the sound of his screams, and plunges a syringe made of bloodstained miracle into his throat, sealing his body in the moment.
"Together forever, kid," he says, and the possibilities are endless, from crimson days to endless nights like a fractured gallery under their feet. The boy rakes a hand over his father's heart and tries to wonder if this is the world where he rips it out, still beating, and lets himself feast.