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Jake’s grip locked around Lo’ak’s forearm like a shackle.
Lo’ak stumbled half a step, dragged out of the crush of bodies and voices, away from the heat of eyes on him, on them, into the quiet of the huts. The woven walls pressed close, smelling of smoke and salt and damp fibre. Under Jake’s long strides, the ground seemed to tilt, like the whole village had become something unstable.
Lo’ak’s arm ached where his father’s fingers dug in. It wasn’t even the pain that made his chest burn.
It was the fact that Jake wouldn’t look at him the way he used to.
Every nerve in Lo’ak’s body crackled. Anger, humiliation, something sour and sharp that didn’t have a name. Shame, maybe. Grief. The kind that sat behind his ribs like a stone and only got heavier the more he tried to swallow it down.
He tore his arm free and surged ahead, too fast, too desperate, like if he could just move first he could pretend he’d chosen this.
He refused to be seen like a child being hauled away.
Like a stupid young boy being scolded by his father.
By Toruk Makto.
But that was exactly what it was.
He spun back where people could still see, where the noise of the crowd thinned but didn’t disappear. Faces blurred at the edges of his vision, siblings, friends, elders. All of them a smear of attention he couldn’t stand.
“You never stand up for me!” he shouted.
The words came out cracked, thin at the centre. Not a roar, but a split-open thing. The anger didn’t fill the sentence the way he wanted it to. It bled out into something else. Something too close to pleading.
Jake’s eyes hit him like a slap.
Embarrassment first, blatant disrespect like he’d made Jake smaller in front of everyone.
Then anger, quick and hard, the familiar soldier-flare. The kind that meant Jake was already halfway out of fatherhood and back into command.
“Lo’ak-” Jake snapped, low from between teeth.
He didn’t finish. He didn’t need to. His hand clamped down again, harsher this time, and he shoved Lo’ak forward, away from the line of sight.
Away from witnesses.
Lo’ak’s feet skidded. The world narrowed to Jake’s palm on his skin, the press of it, the message.
Move.
Lo’ak was always the thing that ruined the picture. Always the wrong note.
When they’d pushed deep enough into the maze of huts and hanging nets, where voices were muffled by woven walls and distance, Jake finally let go, pushing him into the empty space.
Lo’ak’s arm tingled where the grip had been as he steadied his footing. He wanted to rub it, but he wouldn’t. Wouldn’t show that either.
“We are at war!” Jake’s voice cracked through the dim, sharp enough to make the air feel closer. His face twisted up like he was sick of having this argument carved into him again and again. “Do you understand that? If you disobey orders, people get killed.”
Lo’ak felt it happen to his body before his mind could stop it.
Shoulders folding inward. Ears lowering. Tail pulling close, not even a choice, just an instinct as old as prey.
He hated that his body did it. Hated that his father could still make him small with just a voice.
His eyes stung. Tears rose hot and fast. He clenched his jaw until his teeth ached, forcing them back like he could muscle grief into obedience.
“With Spider here,” Jake continued, pacing like a caged thanator, “we’re trying to keep a low profile. But that rogue is out there, stirring up the young bulls.”
Lo’ak stared at the floor, at the scuffed matting, at a broken shell bead half-ground into the weave. Anything but his father’s face.
Anything but the place in Jake’s eyes where disappointment lived.
“He’s gonna bring the whole RDA down on us,” Jake said, voice rough. “On our people.”
It made sense in the awful way things did lately, in the way explanations always arrived too late to save him.
Lo’ak lifted his head, anger flaring bright enough to burn through the shame for one heartbeat.
“You wanted him gone,” Lo’ak said, and the words came sharper now, edged. “That’s why you didn’t say anything. You wanted him gone.”
Jake’s mouth tightened. He shook his head once, like Lo’ak was a problem he’d already solved in his mind.
“He’s a loose cannon,” Jake said. His gaze raked Lo’ak up and down, not assessing like a father, not worried like a parent, but judging like a commander looking at a weak point.
“Just like you.”
The sentence landed right in the hollow of Lo’ak’s chest.
Loose cannon.
Problem.
Risk.
Then Jake stepped in and jabbed a finger into Lo’ak’s chest, hard enough to make him stumble back.
“In fact, if you hadn’t gone with him in the first place-”
Lo’ak’s back hit a post. The whole hut trembled a little with it. Something overhead rattled softly, beads tapping like teeth.
“If you hadn’t disobeyed orders,” Jake pushed on, voice rising, “then your brother would still be-”
Jake stopped.
Not gently. Not like he’d caught himself for Lo’ak’s sake.
Like the word had bitten his tongue.
His nostrils flared. His jaw worked, a snarl swallowed back. He took a step away like distance could fix what he’d already thrown.
Lo’ak sucked in a breath that didn’t feel like it belonged to him.
The tears that he’d been fighting surged all at once, unstoppable, hot on his lower lids, blurring the world.
Neteyam’s name wasn’t even said, but it was everywhere. In the pause, in the choke, in the way Jake’s eyes looked through Lo’ak instead of at him.
Like Lo’ak was the wrong son standing in the wrong place.
He blinked hard. A tear slipped free anyway, tracking down his cheek like betrayal.
“That wasn’t my fault,” Lo’ak said.
It came out small. It sounded like a lie even though it wasn’t. Like the universe didn’t believe him.
“Dad, that-” His voice broke, splintering on the word.
Jake’s expression didn’t soften.
There was no reaching for him. No hand on his shoulder. No I’m sorry.
Only that hard, wounded anger that made Lo’ak feel like he was being punished for still breathing.
The tears started falling properly then, without permission, soaking his cheeks, dripping onto his collarbone.
“That’s not my fault!” Lo’ak shouted, and shoved both hands into Jake’s chest.
It wasn’t strong enough to move him much, his father was stone, but it was all Lo’ak had left. All the hurt, all the wanting, all the desperation to be seen as more than a mistake.
He couldn’t even see his father clearly through the water in his eyes.
Couldn’t take it anymore.
Couldn’t take being the disappointment.
Couldn’t take the way his father looked at him like Neteyam should be standing where Lo’ak was now. Tall and steady and right.
Lo’ak stumbled back, turned, and ran.
He wiped his face with his forearm as he moved, smearing tears across his skin like it could erase them. The village air hit him cold and wet, carrying the scent of rain that had already passed, the kind that left everything slick and shining.
He didn’t slow down until he hit the family hut.
Inside, the familiar shapes of home turned wrong in the dim. Nets, woven baskets, the spaces where laughter used to sit. His chest heaved like he’d been chased. His hands shook. Everything in him was too loud.
He grabbed whatever was closest and hurled it.
A bowl clattered, bounced, spun away into shadow. Beads scattered like spilled teeth. Something soft hit the wall and fell. The sound was ugly and satisfying and nothing.
Then the strength drained out of him all at once.
Lo’ak sank to his knees, palms pressing into the matting, shoulders hitching, breath snagging like it was caught on barbs.
He lifted his head on a broken inhale.
Then his gaze snagged on the weapon resting where it didn’t belong in a child’s line of sight.
For a second, his whole mind went very quiet.
Not peace. Not relief.
Just the terrible, seductive thought that maybe there was a way to make the pain stop talking.
Lo’ak’s fingers twitched.
His throat closed.
Then his fingers reached for it.
𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟
Jake sat on the edge of the bed like it was a ledge over open air.
The hut breathed around him, woven walls holding in the day’s heat, damp creeping in from the night outside. Somewhere beyond the archway, the village murmured with low voices and the soft slap of water against roots. Inside, it was too quiet. Quiet had teeth.
He tipped the clay jug and let water stream into his cupped hands, again and again, like the simple motion could rinse something out of him. Like it could give his fingers a job other than clenching.
His knuckles were still pale from Lo’ak’s arm.
Still pale from holding on.
“Go to him, Jake.”
Neytiri’s voice came from the threshold, flat with exhaustion, sharp with a grief that never slept. She moved close enough that he felt her presence before he looked up, a familiar weight in the air, the pull of her.
She took the jug from his hands without asking, like she’d plucked a weapon away from someone too angry to be trusted with it. She knew exactly what he was doing. Keeping busy. Keeping his hands occupied so they didn’t shake.
“I got nothing to say to him,” Jake said.
The words came out rough, clipped. Anger still ran hot through his veins, a soldier’s reflex dressed up as righteousness. It was easier than letting the other thing in. The hollow thing. The thing that wanted to drop him to his knees.
Neytiri made a sound, something between a scoff and a snarl, and set the jug down hard enough that water jumped over the rim and spotted the matting like spilled breath. She stalked toward the archway, then stopped before the night could swallow her silhouette.
For a moment she stood framed by darkness. Tall, rigid, her injured arm held close in its sling, the line of pain running through her posture like a drawn bowstring.
“Do not blame Lo’ak,” she said, each word placed carefully, like stones set on a grave. “You said you could protect this family. That you could do.”
Jake’s throat tightened.
Neteyam’s face rose uninvited in his mind. Blue skin gone slack. Blood bright as fire against it, wrong and cruel on a body that had never learned how to be anything but steady.
Jake blinked hard. His ears tipped back without him meaning to, that old instinctive flinch toward shame. He stared down at his hands. They were wet. They looked clean. They weren’t.
He pulled in a breath and locked everything down the way he’d learned long before Pandora, years of swallowing tears until they turned into something else. Orders. Anger. Control.
“Yeah,” he said, voice low. “I thought we could be safe here.”
Neytiri crossed the hut in two strides, fury and grief moving her like a storm front. Even injured, she was all blade-edge and heat. She stopped close enough that he could see the wet shine on her lashes, the tremor in her jaw.
“Our son is dead!” she shouted.
The sound hit the walls and bounced back. It filled the hut. It filled Jake.
He surged up off the cot, the anger flashing up like a flare to meet her grief because he didn’t know what else to do with it, because if he didn’t raise his voice, he might break.
“I was wrong!” he shouted back.
Wrong about hiding. Wrong about distance. Wrong about thinking he could outlast a war by keeping his head down. Wrong about thinking safe was something he could build with his hands.
Neytiri’s lips pulled back, feral for a heartbeat, pain turning her into something sharp enough to cut. Then she stepped back, like she couldn’t stand to be that close to him in this. Like proximity made it worse.
In the brief silence that followed, Jake could hear his own ragged breath. He could hear the drip of water from the jug, steady as a heartbeat that refused to stop.
Neytiri’s shoulders rose and fell once. When she spoke again, her voice was quieter. Not softer with forgiveness, but quieter with warning.
“Go to him, Jake,” she said. “Or you will lose another son.”
The words slid under his ribs and lodged there.
Then she turned and stepped out into the night, the curtain of darkness swallowing her whole.
Jake remained where he was, alone with the damp air and the spilled water and the ugly echo of his own voice, alone with the realisation that his anger had been a way of not touching the grief.
And that Lo’ak, his son, was out there somewhere, carrying it too.
Only without a place to set it down.
𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 𓆝 𓆟
Jake didn’t remember deciding to go.
One second he was alone in the hut with spilled water darkening the matting beneath his feet, with Neytiri’s words still lodged in the air like a blade, and the next he was outside, stepping into night that tasted of wet leaves and salt.
Pandora at night wasn’t quiet the way Earth had been quiet. It didn’t go still.
It listened.
The village had lowered its voice. It was not asleep, Pandora never truly slept, but it was hushed. Fires burned down to red eyes. Shadows leaned against posts and hammocks like tired bodies. Somewhere a baby fussed, then softened into a sigh. Somewhere else, a night-bird called once, and the sound threaded through the canopy like a warning.
Jake moved through it like a ghost with weight, like something too solid to slip between regrets.
Water still clung to the boards and roots underfoot, every step left a dark imprint that vanished behind him. Beads of water trembled on fronds overhead, catching what little moonlight made it through the leaves. The air pressed cool against his skin, damp enough to feel like hands.
Living light bloomed in small, soft answers wherever his feet disturbed the ground, tiny sparks in the moss and fungi, faint blue-green halos that flared and faded as if the forest itself flinched at his passing. He’d walked this world long enough that it should’ve felt like home.
Tonight it felt like judgment.
His hands kept opening and closing at his sides, involuntary searching, like his fingers were trying to remember what it felt like to hold a child without hurting him.
He tried to tell himself he was going to talk. That he was going to fix it. That he was going to be a father and not a marine for once, not a man who solved everything with orders and consequences.
But the truth was uglier.
He was going because the silence after their fight had felt wrong in his bones, wrong in the same way the air felt wrong right before a storm broke. Because the look in Lo’ak’s eyes, right after Jake said what he shouldn’t have said, hadn’t been fury.
It had been empty.
Jake had seen that look before, in soldiers who’d stopped believing they were coming home.
He followed the path he didn’t want to name. The path his feet knew anyway, even while his mind resisted it. Down past the last circle of huts, past sleeping nets and hanging charms, toward the waterline where the world opened up and there was nowhere to hide from yourself.
The sand grew softer. Cooler. The scent of the sea thickened, brine and kelp and something clean and metallic under it. Tidewater glittered between roots. A school of tiny, luminous fish flickered through the shallows like drifting sparks, their bodies pulsing faintly with light as they threaded through dark water.
Out beyond the reefline, the ocean breathed.
His chest felt too tight, like something inside him was braced for impact. A memory of Neteyam sat heavy behind his sternum, not an image yet, just the weight of him as if naming him might crack Jake open.
The trees thinned, and the beach unfurled ahead in a pale, moon-silver sweep. Wet sand shone like skin. The tide whispered in and out, laceing the shore, retreating, returning, as if the ocean couldn’t decide whether to take or give.
Above, plankton-like motes drifted in the air, glowing faintly where the wind caught them, tiny floating embers of moonlight. A night-flower opened somewhere unseen with a soft, almost wet sound. Something moved high in the canopy, gliding wings, a ripple of shadow, then vanished, leaving only the faint shimmer of disturbed leaves.
Pandora was beautiful in a way that made Jake feel small.
He hated that tonight, beauty felt like a threat.
Jake’s gaze swept the shoreline.
Nothing.
Only the dark shapes of rocks, the curve of roots like ribs, the shimmer of wet sand, the tide’s slow pulse. Only the distant glow of the village behind him, muffled by trees.
Then-
A shape.
Near the rocks where the waves broke softer, half-hidden in the shadow of a twisted root that reached out like a hand. Knees in the sand. Shoulders hunched. A silhouette too still against all that living motion, against all that breathing light.
Too still to be resting.
Jake stopped without meaning to. The wet sand held his feet like it wanted him to stay, like the world itself was bracing.
His heart dropped so hard it hurt.
“Lo’ak,” he called.
His voice came out low, scraped raw, as if it had to climb over everything he’d said earlier to reach the air. The name didn’t sound like an order now.
It sounded like a plea.
He took a step forward, and the sand flared faintly under his foot, soft starlit blooms answering his weight. Small lights that made his shadow jump and distort across the ground.
The figure didn’t turn.
And something in Jake went cold as if the night had just opened its mouth.
Jake got closer, feet sinking into damp sand that gave way like a bruise. The ocean air hit him cold, sharp enough to sting the back of his throat. Every breath tasted of salt and wet stone. He could hear his own breathing layered over the tide’s steady pull, over the soft hiss of foam collapsing and retreating.
He could hear the faint rattle of something small, beads maybe, caught in Lo’ak’s hair, tapping together when the wind shifted. A tiny, thoughtless sound. A child’s sound. Wrong in the mouth of this moment.
Moonlight made a pale blade across the water. Glowing flecks winked in the shallows like distant stars dropped into the sea. The sand around Lo’ak shimmered faintly where his knees had pressed and scraped, disturbed the living skin of the beach. Pandora answered everything with light, even grief.
Lo’ak didn’t look up.
Jake moved slowly, circling, careful as if the night itself might shatter if he stepped wrong. His feet dragged, leaving dark crescents in wet sand.
Then Jake saw what Lo’ak was holding.
The shape was wrong immediately, angular and human, dead metal in Na’vi hands. It didn’t belong on this shore. It didn’t belong in his son’s grip.
It wasn't raised like a threat. Not aimed out toward the sea like a boy imagining himself brave.
It was held close.
Too close.
The muzzle angled upward near the line of Lo’ak’s jaw, hovering at the soft hollow beneath it, close enough that Jake’s stomach turned. Lo’ak’s hand shook around the grip, the other stayed rigid, as if holding the whole world in place by force. His finger wasn’t fully committed, curling near the guard, hovering, twitching like it didn’t know where to land.
Metal caught a thin slice of moonlight and flashed.
Lo’ak’s knuckles had gone pale.
Jake’s mouth went dry so fast it felt like his tongue stuck to his teeth. For a beat, his mind refused to translate what he was seeing. It tried to rename it, to soften it, to shove it into a box marked not possible.
But Lo’ak’s face was turned slightly away, and the tracks of dried tears stood out on his cheek, salt crusted on blue skin like the ocean had tried to claim him earlier and failed. His shoulders trembled, braced against something inside himself that wouldn’t stop pushing.
Jake forgot how to breathe.
The anger that had been burning in him all night drained out in one sick, icy rush. It didn’t evaporate. It dropped, like a stone falling through his ribs. Panic surged in its place, so sharp it narrowed his vision to nothing but Lo’ak and that sliver of moonlit metal.
This wasn’t a fight anymore.
This was a cliff edge.
Lo’ak shifted. A small movement, the kind that shouldn’t matter. His chin lifted a fraction with a broken inhale. The metal glinted closer, and the ocean behind him kept whispering, indifferent and endless.
Jake’s heart slammed once, hard enough to hurt.
And something in him, soldier, father, animal, snapped into motion before thought could catch up.
“Hey,” Jake breathed, quieter than before, hands still open. “I’m right here. Stay with me. Just… stay with me.”
Jake moved like he was stepping across thin ice.
His hand came down slow and rested over Lo’ak’s knuckles where dead metal met living skin. The weapon hovered too near the line of Lo’ak’s jaw, angled upward in a way that made Jake’s stomach clench. Lo’ak’s grip was locked hard enough to bleach his fingertips pale, tremors running through him like the aftershock of a wave.
Jake could feel it. The heat of Lo’ak’s skin, the shake in his tendons, the way his son was holding himself together by sheer force.
“I-” Jake started.
The sound fell apart in his throat, turned to gravel. He swallowed salt air and guilt and tried again, slower this time, like he was placing the words down between them instead of throwing them.
“I said things I can’t take back.”
The tide whispered up and slipped away again, leaving a thin lace of foam that glittered faintly with plankton-light. Wind tugged at the ends of Lo’ak’s hair, lifting beads that rattled softly, too delicate a sound for something this ugly.
Lo’ak’s breathing hitched. His ears flattened tight against his head. In the moonlight he looked unbearably young, all sharp angles and shaking shoulders, grief sitting on him like soaked cloth.
Jake’s chest burned.
He brought his other hand in, still slow, still visible, and covered Lo’ak’s lower hand where it hovered near the trigger. Jake didn’t grab. Didn’t wrench. He simply held, firm and steady, and applied a gentle pressure like easing a frightened animal away from a ledge.
He could feel Lo’ak’s pulse under his palm, frantic and fast.
“Give it to me,” Jake said, quiet.
The words came out like a vow he hadn’t earned yet.
“You don’t gotta carry this alone,” he added, the ocean filling the spaces between each breath. “You hear me? Not like that.”
For a moment it felt like Pandora itself held its breath with them.
Jake didn’t blink.
Didn’t look away.
He stayed, hands steady, offering himself up without armour.
Lo’ak’s throat worked. His shoulders jolted on a silent, broken inhale. The tremor in his hands stuttered, spiking, then softening, finally running out of strength.
And then-
Lo’ak’s grip loosened.
It was small. Barely a change. But Jake felt it like a door unlocking.
He didn’t waste the mercy of that moment.
He eased the weapon out of Lo’ak’s hands with the gentleness of disarming a trap, keeping his movements controlled, careful not to jolt him back into panic. Then he turned and flung it far across the sand, hard enough that it tumbled end over end and landed with a soft, ugly thud. Swallowed by wet shore and distance.
A wave crept up toward it, as if the sea intended to take the human thing and hide it.
Jake didn’t watch where it went.
He only watched Lo’ak.
Because the second the metal left his son’s hands, Lo’ak came apart like a net cut loose.
Jake surged forward and wrapped him up, arms around narrow shoulders, one hand sliding to the back of Lo’ak’s neck, firm and warm, guiding him in close. He tucked Lo’ak’s forehead against his own chest like he could shield him there, like the space beneath Jake’s ribs could become a shelter.
Lo’ak’s whole body shook. His breath hitched into sobs that sounded ripped from someplace deep and raw. Tears soaked into Jake’s chest, hot against his skin.
Jake tightened his hold. A tether. A proof.
“Shh,” Jake breathed, mouth near Lo’ak’s hair. The word was nothing and everything. “I got you. I got you.”
For a moment Lo’ak stayed folded into Jake’s chest, shaking, breath stuttering in wet, ugly pulls. Then something in him surged. Panic, pride, shame, all tangled together, and he shoved hard, wriggling out of Jake’s hold like touch itself burned.
Jake’s arms fell away, empty.
Lo’ak staggered back. Moonlight slicked his cheeks, his eyes were bright and raw, as if he’d rubbed them with salt.
“I can’t,” Lo’ak rasped. His voice caught, then sharpened with desperation. “I can’t do this, Dad. Not… not when he’s not here.”
Jake lifted a hand instinctively, an offer rather than a command. His fingers trembled faintly in the night air.
“I know,” he said, because anything else felt like a lie. His throat was tight. “I know it hurts. It hurts-”
Lo’ak’s hand flashed up and knocked Jake’s away.
“No!” he snapped, the word cracking at the edges. “Don’t-don’t say it like that.”
His chest heaved, each breath too shallow to be useful. The wind tugged at his hair, at the beads threaded through it. They tapped together with a soft, nervous sound.
Jake stayed where he was, palms down at his sides, forcing his body into stillness. Don’t crowd him. Don’t corner him. He felt like he was trying to talk someone down from a ledge with his own heart in his throat.
Lo’ak’s gaze flicked toward the dark water, then back, like he couldn’t stand to look at Jake and also couldn’t stand not to.
“I can’t live with it,” Lo’ak said, suddenly quieter, the words scraped thin. “I can’t breathe with it in my chest. It shouldn’t have been him.”
The sentence hung between them, heavy as wet cloth.
“It should’ve been me.”
Jake’s stomach dropped. The night seemed to sharpen, every sound too clear. The hush of surf, the distant trill of a creature in the trees, the faint shimmer of bioluminescence where the foam broke and died on the shore.
“Lo’ak,” Jake tried, and his voice came out rough.
Lo’ak shook his head hard, like he could shake the grief loose, like he could shake Jake loose.
“You don’t have to pretend,” he said, and there was something vicious in it, not aimed at Jake so much as aimed at himself. “I saw your face. I heard you. I know what you meant.”
Jake’s mouth opened.
Lo’ak didn’t let him fill the space.
“You look at me and you see…” His breath hitched. He swallowed hard, jaw working. “You see the one who keeps messing up. The one who pulls danger in like it’s chasing him. You see the wrong son still standing.”
He glanced down at his own hands as if they’d betrayed him. Sand clung in the creases of his palms. Moonlight caught on wet skin.
His fingers.
Lo’ak curled them, then opened them again, staring at the extra digit like it was evidence at a trial.
“I’m not even right,” he whispered. “Not like him. Not like Mom. Not like-” He stopped, because finishing the thought would make it real in a way he couldn’t survive.
Jake’s chest went tight enough to hurt. He heard, with sick clarity, echoes of his own voice. Things he’d said in anger, in fear, in that hard, ugly language of war.
The pause he’d choked on when he’d almost said Neteyam’s name like a weapon.
He hadn’t meant to carve those words into Lo’ak.
But he had.
“All you see,” Lo’ak said, and his voice shook on it, “is what I’m not.”
He lifted his eyes again, wet, furious, terrified.
“All you see is him missing,” he said, “and me… here.”
Jake went to crawl forward, then stopped himself. He could feel how fragile the space between them was, how one wrong movement could make Lo’ak bolt again, vanish into the dark.
“Look at me,” Jake said, gentle and broken. “Please.”
Lo’ak’s laugh came out wrong. “Why? So you can lie to my face?”
Jake flinched like he’d been struck. He didn’t move away from it.
Instead, he did the only thing that felt honest.
He lowered himself again, sinking to his knees so he wasn’t towering, so he wasn’t a wall. Wet sand chilled his legs. The tide breathed behind them, steady as a heartbeat.
“No,” Jake said quietly. “So I can stop doing that.”
Lo’ak blinked, thrown off for half a second by the admission.
Jake lifted his hands slowly and reached for Lo’ak’s face.
He didn’t grab.
He didn’t force.
He touched Lo’ak’s jaw with both palms the way he might steady the head of an ikran, the way he might hold something precious that could still spook and fly.
Just enough pressure to guide Lo’ak’s gaze back to him.
Lo’ak’s skin was warm under Jake’s hands. He was shaking.
“I was wrong,” Jake said, and the words came out like they’d been waiting years in his mouth. “About… about so much.”
Lo’ak’s throat worked. He didn’t pull away, but he went rigid. Bracing for the hit that always came after softness.
Jake felt that bracing like a grief of its own.
“I was scared,” Jake continued, voice low. “I’m still scared. And I put it on you like it was your job to carry. Like it was your punishment.”
Lo’ak’s eyes flicked down again, helplessly, to his own hands.
As if his body could argue the case better than his voice.
Jake followed the look.
Those fingers.
That extra proof, in Lo’ak’s mind, that he didn’t belong.
Jake swallowed. His hands slid from Lo’ak’s jaw to his wrist, then to his palm.
“Give me your hand,” Jake said.
Lo’ak’s brow knit, suspicious, hurt. “Why?”
“Because,” Jake said, and his voice trembled on the edge of something he didn’t let himself feel often. “I want you to see.”
Lo’ak hesitated. The wind lifted his hair, beads clicked faintly. The ocean hissed and pulled back.
Then, slowly, he let Jake take his hand.
Jake turned Lo’ak’s palm up between them. Sand stuck to the pads of his fingers, Jake brushed it away with his thumb, an unconscious gentleness that made his chest ache.
Jake’s breath caught, not because the sight was new, but because he suddenly understood how heavy it must feel to Lo’ak.
He lifted his own hand and pressed it to Lo’ak’s, palm to palm, fingers aligned in the moonlight.
Five against five.
In perfect symmetry.
Lo’ak stared at it as if he’d never seen the resemblance clearly before.
Jake’s throat tightened.
“You think this makes you less,” Jake said, quietly. “You think it makes you wrong.”
He held their hands together a little higher, where the moonlight could strike them cleanly, where the ocean-glow could paint their skin in soft, living blue.
“But it doesn’t,” Jake said. “It makes you mine.”
Lo’ak’s breath hitched. His eyes flared with fresh tears, anger and longing tangled together.
“I wanted him back,” Jake admitted, and the honesty of it hurt like a torn muscle. “Every second. I still want him back. I’d tear the sky open if it would bring him home.”
Lo’ak flinched at the words, like they proved his worst fear.
Jake tightened his hold on Lo’ak’s hand.
“But wanting him back,” Jake said, voice breaking, “doesn’t mean I want you gone.”
He shook his head once, sharp with regret. “I said things-God, I said things because I was drowning and I grabbed the nearest thing I could blame. And that was you.”
Lo’ak’s lips parted. His shoulders trembled. He looked so young, suddenly, that Jake almost couldn’t stand it.
“But you’re my son,” Jake said, and put everything he had left into the sentence. “You. Right here.”
He lifted their joined hands and pressed Lo’ak’s knuckles to his own chest, over his heartbeat, like a promise made in flesh instead of words.
“Neteyam was my son,” Jake said, swallowing hard on the name. “And losing him is… it’s the worst thing that’s ever happened to me.”
Lo’ak’s face crumpled, a small, broken sound escaping him.
Jake didn’t let go.
“But you are not the price,” Jake whispered. “You are not the punishment.”
He leaned in just enough that Lo’ak could feel his breath, could feel his presence without being trapped by it.
“I don’t get to lose you too,” Jake said, voice raw. “Not because of my anger. Not because of my mouth. Not because I couldn’t handle my grief like a man.”
Lo’ak’s gaze dropped to their hands again.
His voice came out small, shredded. “You looked at me like… like you didn’t know me.”
Jake shut his eyes for a beat. When he opened them, they burned.
“I did,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
The apology was plain. No excuses. No war. No but.
Just regret, heavy and honest.
Jake lifted Lo’ak’s hand again, thumb brushing the extra finger like it was something sacred instead of shameful.