Chapter Text
They were killing him.
Spider wanted to cry but no tears would come. The whirring green light snatched them away and sent that aching whine straight into his brain. His eyes hurt. His brain hurt! Everything hurt! It hurt to think, to talk, to exist! The green never stopped. Flashing, burning, searing; tearing like splinters into his eyes and going all the way into his skull. He screamed and pleaded, tried to tell them he didn’t know! Begged them to stop! They would not. They kept asking the same questions over and over again until it was all he knew. Blinding, burning, searing, and biting green, and the question.
“Where is Jake Sully?”
They kept asking even as his vision began to go dark and his throat was rent raw from screaming. Until all he tasted was the blood running from his lips into his mouth. The agony, the green, and the question was his entire world until nothing was left.
“Where is Jake Sully?”
He didn’t know! He didn’t know! HE DIDN’T KNOW!
“Where is Jake Sully?”
At some point he wondered if he had taken Quaritch’s offer things would have been different. He had not. Now they were destroying him like they were destroying Pandora. He HATED them! Even as the pain began to dull, his senses, and his memories fragmented, the hate remained.
“Where is Jake Sully?”
Somewhere during his early rounds in the machine, he wondered if this was what Neytiri felt when she looked at him. He knew the stories. Seen the desolation where Kelutral, Hometree once stood. Had grew up in the shadow of human destruction. Grew up with Miles Quartich's name hanging around his neck like a weighted chain. “I’m not like the other humans!" He had thought as a child as he tugged on Kiri’s tail and tussled with Neteyam and Lo’ak. "I’ll show you I’m not like them! That I’m good!”
“Where is Jake Sully?”
They bled him dry. Pulled every memory, every moment, every picture of his time with them to pick apart like scavengers on a corpse. The pulled every piece and strung it up to dry. They flayed his mind until everything he was lay bare and open. And still they asked.
“Where is Jake Sully?”
“I don’t know! They left me behind! Why did they leave me?” He wanted to say, but his throat is barren and dry, and all his tears are blood.
“Where is Jake Sully?”
They were getting frustrated. He could tell. Sometimes they’d hit and beat him before tossing him back in that bright, cold cell. They’d wait till he had recovered enough before dragging him out and tossing him back into the Green. He’d lost count how many times it was, now. Lost track of time.
“Where is Jake Sully?”
Sometimes Quaritch was there. Sometimes he wasn’t. Once, Spider even thought he heard him ask them to stop. They had not.
“Where-”
He was losing it now.
“-is-”
He did not know.
“-Jake-”
Fuck them.
"-Sully?”
He wondered if Eywa would take him when he died.
“Wh-?”
It was getting dark.
“-lly?”
He didn’t see the green anymore. Only black-
“Where-”
And red.
“-is Jake Sully?”
Somewhere along the line, the pain faded into…something. Something far away yet so familiar. Maybe this was death. He had said that they would have to kill him, and they were making good on that. He just hoped they never found Jake and his family. Hoped they failed and burned and were utterly destroyed like the last time!
It was odd, though…
“His vitals are taking a nosedive! Get him out of there!”
Dying felt like…it almost felt like…
“What the hell is that brain activity?”
Hunger.
As the hum of the image extractor dies down, General Ardmore let out a disappointed sigh as the boy’s limp body was extracted from the machine. Colonel Quaritch’s attempts to establish a working relationship with the boy had failed, and so he was handed back to them. The kid had been a tough nut to crack, and he’d eventually cracked, but the information they had gleaned was nowhere near what she had wanted. Remove Sully and the Na’vi people’s morale would take a gutshot. The boy had to have known something but what they had extracted was minimal. It seems he really hadn’t known anything.
She turned and made to leave.
Quartich should be notified, she supposed. He had been monitoring the interrogations as often as possible, much to her annoyance. The boy wasn’t even his son, and he'd been taking up space in the interrogation room far too often for her liking. No matter. At least they’d extracted some usual data. The Sully’s family would be high-priority targets from now on, and now they had faces and locations of other high priority Omaticaya Na’vi. Blue team would be reassigned to Hunter Killer duty and sent in to eliminate said targets. Humanity would prevail.
-A scream.
Frances Ardmore, along with the entire interrogation squadron, turned to behold horror.
The boy was alive. Alive and free of restraints; his right hand apparently torn through metal like wet paper! One of the men removing him was held aloft by that very hand. In that moment, Frances Ardmore beheld Socorro’s face. His lips were pulled back in a snarl that showed all his teeth, and his eyes were red. Not bloodshot, no. All-the-way red and glowing with an inner light that matched the color of what happened when Socorro’s fist clenched. No one had any time to react.
Blood spurted everywhere as muscle and sinew pulped.
General Frances Ardmore was no stranger to gore. She’d seen her fair share of blood and guts. Spilled enough, too. But what happened next was unlike anything she had ever seen. There was a blurring mass of red and black that unfolded from Socorro’s flesh, unravelling and unfolding like a mix between an opening flower or a spider’s web. The mass of black and red swallowed the man, compressed and compacted him, clothes and all, and pulled the mass of pulped meat and churning biomass into Socorro’s flesh.
People were screaming in the observation room behind her. An alarm was sounding. Klaxons blared.
Socorro took his free hand and began bending the metal harness away from his chest-
Frances drew her sidearm and emptied the clip until blood, brain, and bone splattered the once sterile room. She heaved a breath with her heart pounding in her chest, never taking her eyes off the corpse.
Silence reigned, punctuated only by the alarm. For a long moment, Frances just stares.
The body does not move.
Someone in observation whimpers.
The corpse twitches.
Frances swaps for another magazine but it's too late. Black and red whirl, and the bullet holes are gone. Socorro’s head is intact with eyes blazing hellfire as he rips solid metal away and he hits the floor with a thud that seems to shake the whole room. People are panicking now, screaming, hollering, and running. Frances pushes back her own panic and fear back and works off of reflex to reload and refire. Round after round punches through tan skin striped with faded blue even as she backpedals towards the exit. The bullets don’t even phase whatever the fuck Socorro is as he rises to his feet and glares her way, at least until his head snaps back when a shot punches clean through his skull and drops him. Frances runs for the exit and seals the door shut behind her before calling for all security personnel to rendezvous on her position and ordering Bridgehead to be put on lockdown.
“I don’t care!” She screamed into her comms as she watched the boy’s body jerk and twitch with those swirling tendrils of viscous red and black. “Vent the entire building if you have to! I want all armed personnel up here and I want it yesterday!”
It happened in a split second. She had looked away for a split second, and in the next came a resounding BANG! As alarms and alerts began to blare anew, Frances turns with wide eyes to look into the interrogation room and see a human sized hole punched clean through one of the ceiling vents. The sounds of bumping and thumping came directly over her head a moment later before another responding BANG shook the building, followed by the dreadful hiss of escaping oxygen. It was like a shaped charge had gone off somewhere above her! It was almost like…no, but that was impossible!
He couldn’t have busted out!?
From the panicked notifications and alerts she received soon after, it seemed he very well had!
He was running.
Bullets chased his heels. Machines dotted his way. Yellow things with many legs, hulking upright monstrosities, vehicles, and other things he had no name too. He did not let them impede him. He smashed through them, picked them up and hurled them with his strength, tore them apart with his bare hands! Then there were the humans. Some got out of his way. Some did not. Some shot at him with their guns. Those he crushed.
He did not know where he was running or where he was going. All he knew was that he had to escape! Had to get OUT! He rounds the corner, bare feet slapping across concrete and metal, and runs headfirst into an oncoming squadron of armed humans and mechs who open fire.
Bullets sting but do not kill.
He turns and he runs! He has to get off the ground! Has to climb!
Up one of the structures he goes; hand over hand, leaping from metal bar to crossbeam and smacking yellow machines out of his way. Down below the humans are yelling and screaming and mobilizing. Movement is everywhere and it pulls his eyes in every direction. Guns were raised and they open fire.
Spider ducks their bullets, curling into a ball and maneuvering between the metal around him as ricochets bounce and spark. Spider (That was his name, right?) does not stop climbing and goes faster than any human (or Na’vi) should move until he is at the very top and can survey the entirety of Bridgehead and beyond. A long stretch of barren earth stands between him and the jungle while a blue expanse of ocean was at his back. The jungle, he decides. His thoughts still felt fragmented and broken, but somehow, he just knew that was where he belonged! Where he had to go to escape them!
The sound of propellers beating the air had him turning to see a gunship closing in on him with their guns trained and ready. Spider bares his teeth with a hiss even as he steps back at their approach. His heels kiss open air.
Instinct tells him to jump.
“If I fall, I die!” His panicked thoughts bleat as the gunship comes close enough to where he sees his blurry reflection in the windows.
“No, you will not.” Something answers.
The gunship opens fire and Spider, in a blur of black and red, turns and jumps into open air.
Gravity takes him and unfamiliar instinct angles his body so that he lands feet-first.
The shockwave his landing creates sends any nearby humans flying.
“Run!” Says the voice.
Spider grits his teeth, digs in his heels, and runs. He does not notice the streaks of black and red that surge and warp across his body. Does not feel the bullets being ejected from his body. Barely feels the weight of gravity as he takes a flying leap at Bridgehead’s wall, nor sees the swirl of red and black encasing his feet when he hits solid metal, and he begins running upwards in outright defiance of gravity.
He does not feel much at all. His vision has tunneled, and all thought is pushed to the back of his mind as he climbs and climbs and climbs! All that matters is escaping!
“Keep going! Almost there!” Says the voice. It sounds familiar but he could not tell if it was a man or a woman. He obeys, though, and before he knows it, he’s over the lip of the wall. Miles and miles of bare, sandy soil are between him and the jungle, and the sight makes his stomach churn. Bridgehead like a festering wound on the land, and the humans were like-
“Like a sickness?”
The answering thought stumbled him long enough for the gunship to catch up, the roar of its engines scorching the air as it swings about to face him, machine guns spooling up in preparation to fire.
“What?” He finally speaks, voice hushed and suddenly scared and overwhelmed.
“Trust me.”
The voice sounded more defined. Less like a stray thought, less like his own. Almost familiar in a way he did not understand.
Spider’s vision fades the same time the gunship unloads on him.
And the last thing the lone pilot sees is a swirl of red and black that leaps forward with hungry smile.