Knots

The boy had been watching him for three mornings before he said anything.

Not openly. Spider was eight and already knew how to want a thing without asking for it — a trick you learned fast, living in a clan that wasn't yours, in skin that didn't match anybody's. So he watched from the lip of the marui pod, knees drawn up, while Jake sat at the edge of the platform and worked the night's tangles out of his hair.

It was a slow job. Jake did it the same way every morning, the way Neytiri had taught him years back, before he'd had the hands for it. Section. Twist. Roll the new growth tight against the old so it locked. His fingers knew it now without his head. He could do it half-asleep, watching the mist come off the water, thinking about nothing, which was the only time of day he got to think about nothing.

He felt the kid's eyes the whole time. Didn't say anything. Figured if he left a thing alone long enough it usually went away.

On the third morning it didn't.

"I want mine like that."

Jake looked over. Spider had crept down off the pod and was standing too close, the way he always stood too close, like proximity was a thing he could bank against later. His own hair was a disaster — a pale, sun-bleached mess of curls knotted with sleep and forest and whatever he'd been into the day before.

He was small for eight. That was the thing that got at Jake, every time, before anything else did — built like a held breath, all knobbed wrists and shoulder blades, the heavy brow and stubborn jaw still too big for the rest of him. The head rode a neck Jake could've circled with one hand and had room left over. He knew it without trying because some animal part of him had already measured it, the way the kid measured hurts: how little there was of him. How easy he'd be to break. How nothing out here — not the clan, not the forest, not Jake — had been built to keep him from it. His hand wanted to close around the back of that head just to feel the size of him, to know how much of him still fit under one palm. He didn't let it — he already knew the size of him would scare him.

"Like what?" Jake said.

"Like yours." Spider reached up and grabbed a fistful of his own hair and yanked it straight out from his head, like he meant to show Jake what was wrong with it. "Not — not all floppy. Like yours. So it stays."

"Your hair's fine."

"Kehe." The boy's chin did a thing — no, flat and certain, the same way Neytiri said it, like he'd caught the word off her the way you catch a cold, without anybody meaning to give him anything. "Norm cut his. Yours stays. I want it to stay."

Jake went back to his own hair. Twist. Roll. "Ask Neytiri."

The boy's face pulled down at the corners — slow, like something folding in on itself.

"No." It came out small and fast, like he'd had it ready the whole time. "I don't want to ask her." His eyes dropped — to his own feet, to the platform, anywhere but the water Neytiri had gone off across. "She says no to me. Always. Always."

Then he stepped closer.

"I asked you."

Jake kept his eyes on the water. He knew the shape of the kid's face without looking. Knew it too well. The heavy brow that was going to come in hard one day. The jaw. He'd spent a long time not naming whose jaw it was. Some mornings the not-naming worked. This was not going to be one of those mornings, with the boy standing there breathing through his mouth, waiting on him like Jake was the fixed point the whole world turned on.

He should've sent him to Neytiri. He knew that. Or better yet, sent him home.

"Sit down," he said. "In front. And quit squirming before you even start."

Spider dropped between his knees so fast he nearly went off the edge of the platform.

It was harder than Jake remembered. His own hair was coarse and thick and forgave a clumsy hand. Spider's was fine as spider-silk — and wasn't that a joke nobody was ever going to let the kid live down — and it slipped out of every section he tried to hold. Twice he got a twist halfway locked and watched it unravel the second he let go.

"Hold still."

"I am."

"You're talking. Talking's moving."

The boy went still. For about nine seconds.

"Does it hurt when it stays?"

"No."

"Did it hurt you?"

"No." Jake parted off another section, rolled it against his thumb. "Stop asking if things hurt."

A pause. Then, smaller: "Okay."

And Jake heard the okay the way you hear a thing in the dark — the shape of it more than the word. The kid asked if everything hurt because the kid had a running list, somewhere behind that heavy little brow, of all the things that could. Eight years old and already taking inventory. Jake's hands slowed without his say-so. Got gentler. He told them not to and they did it anyway.

This isn't yours, he reminded himself. He did it the way you press on a bad tooth, just to make sure it still went off. This one isn't yours. This was the other thing's blood. The face he'd spent a war learning to hate was sitting between his knees humming a tuneless little song and trusting him with the back of its skull.

He rolled the twist tight and it held.

"There," he said. "That's one."

Spider's hand flew up to feel it.

"Don't touch it," Jake said, and the hand froze, hovering, like the boy was checking a held breath was still there. Then it came down.

"How many's it gonna be."

"A lot. You're gonna sit here till your legs go to sleep."

"Okay," he said like that was the best news anybody had ever given him.

His small hands settled back into his lap and he continued humming, and Jake felt something in his chest fracture.

The sun came up over the water proper. Neytiri passed once, a bowl of something in her hands, and stopped. Jake felt her stop. Felt her look at the two of them — the man and the small pale boy folded into the cage of his legs, half a head of new knots and half a head of mess — and this time he made himself look up, because not looking was its own kind of answer.

Her face had gone still. Not cruel. Neytiri was never cruel about it; cruel would've been easier to fight. It just closed, the way a hand closes, the way it always closed when the boy came inside the circle of her home. She looked at the knots Jake had made. She looked at the soft human hair caught up in his Na'vi hands.

She set the bowl down by his knee — one bowl, for him — and said it low, in Na'vi, fast, so the boy wouldn't catch the shape of it. He is not ours, ma Jake. Not a fight. Not even new. A thing she set down between them most days now, the way you put down something heavy you've carried too far.

He didn't answer. She didn't wait for one. On her way past she ran a hand over Lo'ak's head where he hung off a pod-rope nearby — her own boy, the gesture easy, unthinking — and not the other one, never the other one, and then she was gone.

Spider had gone quiet. He didn't ask what she'd said. He didn't have to; he knew that tone in every language he had one in. He just sat very small inside the cage of Jake's knees and added it, Jake figured, to the list. Jake's thumb moved against the back of the boy's skull, once, before he'd decided to. Easy, the touch said, where his mouth wouldn't. I got you. Hold still.

The boy ate one-handed without being told he could, and kept his head where Jake's hands needed it, and that was its own small astonishment — that the kid who never held still for anybody would sit like a stone for hours, just to be the one Jake's hands were busy with. To be a boy getting his hair done by his dad, like any other kid, like it was the most ordinary thing in the world and he was owed it.

"Tuk's gonna want hers done too," Spider said, around a mouthful. "When she's big."

"Maybe."

"And Lo'ak."

"Lo'ak won't sit still."

"I'm sitting still."

"Yeah," Jake said, a smile tugging at his lips. "You are."

He hadn't meant for it to come out like that. Quiet. Surprised by itself. He felt the kid go very alert under his hands, the way an animal goes alert at a sound it's been hoping for, and Jake cleared his throat and split off another section before the boy could turn it into anything.

Too late.

"When it stays," Spider said — slow, working it out, laying the stone down careful so it wouldn't roll away from him — "when it stays, I'll look like you. Right?"

Jake's hands kept moving. Twist. Roll. "A little."

"And then people'll know."

"Know what."

The boy was quiet a second. When it came it came plain, and that was the worst of it — he knew exactly what the word weighed, and he set it down anyway.

"That I'm yours." A beat. Then smaller, laid down careful, the way you test ice with one toe, ready to snatch it back: "...Sempul?"

The word every other kid in the clan threw around like it cost nothing, like it weighed nothing, like there was an endless supply of it.

Jake stopped, his hands going still over the boy's head, his throat suddenly very tight.

He could feel the boy not breathing. Waiting to find out if he'd just wrecked it. Eight years old and already braced for the answer, shoulders up to his ears, fingers wringing in his lap.

Jake thought about all the true things he could say. That he had a face that came from somewhere Jake had bled to be rid of. That there were men, somewhere up past the sky, who'd made this kid on purpose and then left him in the dirt like a dropped tool. That yours was a word with a cost on it Jake hadn't decided he was willing to pay — not to this one, not with what this one was going to grow into, not with Neytiri's voice still hanging in the morning air saying the boy wasn't theirs.

All of it true. None of it was going to come out of his mouth with the boy sitting there holding his breath.

"Hold still," Jake said. His voice came out rough. "I'm not done."

And he started the twist again. Rolled it tight against the others. Felt it lock.

The boy let his breath out slow. He didn't ask again. Smart kid — smart enough to know he'd been given something, even if it wasn't the thing he'd asked for. He leaned back, just slightly, until the small warm weight of him settled against the inside of Jake's knee, and he stayed there.

Jake worked on through the morning. His hands kept being gentle. He'd long since stopped telling them not to.

It took most of the day, with breaks, and the kid did finally fall asleep — sometime in the afternoon, mid-sentence, slumped sideways against Jake's leg with his mouth open and one fist closed around nothing.

Jake didn't move him. He had maybe a dozen left to do and he did them slow, in the long gold light, the boy dead asleep and breathing against his shin, the new knots dark and tight and staying under his hands.

When he was done he sat there a while longer than he needed to.

The kid wasn't his. Not by blood, not by any law that would've held up anywhere Jake had ever lived. He knew that. He'd go on knowing it — through everything that was coming, the years and the war that wasn't finished and the day this small face would wear the other one over it like a mask. None of that had changed.

What had changed was smaller, and worse. Somewhere in the long gold afternoon he'd quit being able to feel the seam between this and what he felt for the ones who were his. He loved the boy like a son. He hadn't asked to. He wasn't going to say it out loud — not with Neytiri's face the way it had been, not with whose blood it was. But the wanting had set in like a lock, tight against the old growth, and it wasn't coming undone now.

He put his hand on the back of the boy's head, over the new work. Light. The way you'd touch a thing to see if it would hold. The way a father would. The way nobody else in this house was going to.

It stayed.

"Yeah," Jake said, to no one, to the water. "Okay."

And he sat in the going light with the sleeping weight of him and did not, for once, take any inventory at all.