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Kiri's six years old the first time she calls her father a jarhead. She doesn't remember the context, only the surprised look on his face at the word, the way he opens his mouth for a second, then closes it and shakes his head slightly, as if coming to a decision.
"Scientists teach you that, huh, babygirl?" he says, reaching down to ruffle her hair. Kiri leans into the touch without answering--she can't actually recall any of the scientists using the word before, or explaining what it means, but she assumes that they must have. Where else would she have learned it?
She has trouble finding people's faces growing up. Kiri keeps looking down when her father calls her name, as if expecting to see him at hip height (something she does see him there, but he's small, and paler, and sitting in a chair she's never seen before, so it can't be him).
Same for certain other members of the Omaticaya, grown-ups she finds herself looking for at a child's level, or even lower than that because she's a child, but she sees them as smaller than her, looking up with gap-toothed smiles. You've gotten so big, she wants to say, and presses her lips together until they hurt.
And with others still, she finds herself looking for them at eye level, as if she's expecting to somehow be as tall as they are despite having a fraction of their years. It's difficult, sometimes, especially with Grandmother, to not talk with her elders as if she's a peer instead of a child, or to reference events that both happened before she was born.
Sometimes she catches herself babbling about equations and chemicals, meshing awkwardly with the herbal knowledge she remembers learning in her Tsahìk training. She always stutters to a stop, feeling uncomfortable and off guard, and suddenly aware that she's not even looking in the right direction anyway.
Mom always huffs and mutters something about Kiri spending too much time with those scientists. Grandmother just studies her, gaze thoughtful, lost in thoughts that Kiri's not sure she wants to hear.
Neteyam smiles, soft and shy, and Kiri thinks of that same smile in a photograph attached to one of the applications for full-time base residence piling up on a wooden desk. There'd been a face there, she thinks, not quite her father's, but close enough she can understand how they might blur, melt into one.
Her father sits them all together and tells stories about their Uncle Tommy, how smart he was, how brave. Kiri closes her eyes and could almost see the words of what she, or someone, thought was a rather insightful paper for someone his age moving before her eyes, remembers the missed opportunity coming arriving in the form of another man, bitterness lashing out like a whip.
Sometimes, Kiri looks at her mother nocking an arrow or weaving and sees her as a girl, young and curious and bright-eyed. Sometimes she sees the wrong girl, features not quite right, but still familiar, still linked to unmistakable waves of pain.
Tell me about Aunt Sylwanin, she says, and waits almost desperately for information that contradicts the things which drift and cluster in the back of her mind. She hears things she didn't know before, but never something that directly contradicts what the whispers say, and she doesn't know what to think about that. Tell me about Grandfather, and it's the same.
Each time, guilt sings bitter on her tongue, and she wants to be angry, because it's not her guilt and yet--and yet--she doesn't know. She thinks it's only just dawning on that most people don't really grow up feeling this way.
She's walking along the trunk of New Hometree, tracing her fingers over the rippling bark. One particular whorl feels like a good place for samples and she pats herself down for her kit, only to keep coming up empty.
"Kiri?" Her mother's voice is soft, gentle, familiar. A hand rests lightly on her shoulder, turning her away from the tree. "Come, my heart, let's go back to bed."
She turns, and the face she sees is small and bruised and stained with snot. The face she sees is framed with tiny hands clapped over tiny ears against the gunfire; the face she sees is stained with blood not her own, dripping down her chin as her eyes bulge with silent, broken horror, nightmares reflected in her golden gaze.
Kiri screams.
(nightmare, the grownups say to her and each other as she lies shaking in her mother's lap while her father strokes her hair and her grandmother holds her hand, just a nightmare, and the words are locked up so tightly in her throat she doesn't have the strength to contradict them).
Spider's features have occasionally blurred since they were children, but never enough to really bother her. They're growing older, though, and as his face starts to sharpen she can begin to see the outline of three claw marks on the side of his head.
Kiri begins to play with his hair more often, just an excuse to run her fingers over the three marks over and over again, reassuring herself as they blur at her touch. The first time they don't, but stay stubbornly visible instead, three impossible fingers interlaced with hers, she goes tense and yanks on a strand before she can stop herself.
"Ow!" Spider's head whips around, the not-scars disappearing as he turns to face her. "Kiri, what the hell--" He frowns, anger melting to concern at whatever he sees. "Is everything okay?"
Is everything okay, doctor? The glint of a gun fury boiling in her mouth they're just children you animals they're just people you sonofabitch a casual smirk that makes her want to gouge her eyes out what you have done miles what have I done the gunshot ringing in her ears that doesn't register until much later, when the hand on her stomach turns red--
"You are not him," she forces out, softer than a breeze, but steady as a mantra. I am not her.
Spider frowns, pushing a lock of hair out of his eyes (she stubbornly blocks out the memory of a disembarking pilot moving the hair off her face in the exact same way). "What?"
"Nothing." She sinks her fingers into the ground, reminding herself that this is her home, she is of the forest, she is Eywa'eveng's daughter above all else. "Sorry. Everything...everything's fine."
There are fires burning in the distance and the pre-planned evacuation camp is thick with the smell of fear, of fresh wounds and old terrors. Kiri hunches over, hands pressed to her mouth as an ineffectual barrier against the oncoming waves of smoke, and something in her guts wants a cigarette so badly she could cry.
It's funny, how when they're huddled in the darkening woods with weapons ripped away and guns aimed at their heads, when all of her barriers are on the fritz, she doesn't mistake Spider for anyone at all. Maybe because the man standing in front of her is a far more accurate reproduction of the original model.
Looking at him makes her head hurt, an extra shot of disorientation to spice up her terror. She can't make sense of the way he seems shorter than her one second and looms the next, the way the size and make of his gun changes in his hands, the disorienting flicker between blue and white skin that makes her squeeze her eyes shut for fear of an oncoming seizure.
When she dares to open them again his form has settled a little, even though he's got scars on the side of his head that she knows aren't really there. And he's studying her in a way that makes the hairs on the back of Kiri's neck stand up, as if he recognizes her, maybe even more than he'd recognized his son.
Quaritch looks her over--not greedily, the way some of his soldiers do (in a way that makes the girl part of her quaver in confused fear, makes the woman inside her head seethe with old rage). No, this is thoughtful, in a way that makes Kiri feel seen like she's never really been before. The thought makes it hard to breathe, but it would go away.
"Why, hello," he says softly, and she shouldn't know that his strange way of speaking is called a Southern drawl, or recognizes the way she sets her teeth on edge, but she does. "Fancy seein' you down here, Dr. Augustine."
The forest around them goes still. She can see the soldiers turn their heads, feel Spider, Tuk, and Lo'ak stiffen, all caught off guard. If her parents are really out there, coming to save them, if they're close enough to hear, then perhaps they go still, too, listening hard.
"I'm not her," Kiri forces her out. "I'm not....I'm not like you." She almost adds you fuckers, but that's what her mot--that's what Grace would say, isn't it?
"Mmm." He shrugs. "Maybe not quite like us. But you're still in the same boat, ain't you?" His voice sounds strange, almost sad. "A ghost dressed up in skin."