#love the idea of neytiri being like well spiders pretty honest and loyal but he stole that shit from neteyam and lo'ak so

[be-the-glenn-to-my-maggie]

Here is the first headcanon we are expanding on:

-I think once adopted, Spider is a mama’s boy. He craves physical attention and he has been raised essentially Na’vi in a way that Jake hasn’t. I think he would connect with Neytiri’s parenting style more, I think they’d do a lot of weird shit together that the other kids would rather die than help with, like cooking or mending shit. I think Spider would be literally delighted to help with boring household chores with his mother and that’s so mamas boy of him. He’s a “mother, do you need help with dinner, can I do the dishes so you can sit down?” kid while all the rest of them are gagging and calling him a suck up in the background.

-Spider likes cooking. It's always been something he could help with easily even if he couldn't always eat what was being made. Kiri hates cooking and always has because she hates when her brothers expect her to cook. On Jake and Neytiri's date nights to avoid a fight, Spider would always just offer to help Neteyam.

-Neytiri does most of the cooking for the family. Jake is not a bad cook, he's just not a good cook. He has skills but they are mediocre. She does not mind, because she likes it. It's a chance to personally use Eywa's gifts and transfer them into energy for her family, a way to thank Eywa herself instead of just accepting the bowl from the clan cookfires. It's a calming mental reset every time, and the natural conclusion to every hunting trip.

-None of her children have taken any interest in this particular lifeskill. Kiri, who would sooner let her attention drift and let the cookfire burn the mauri to the ground, doesn't have the attention span for anything other than Eywa. Lo'ak has to be essentially bound and shackled to the cookfire to do any work, and he complains the entire time to the point that Neytiri gets a headache. Neteyam always helps with no complaints, but he obviously does not enjoy it much and it always makes Neytiri feel bad for forcing him because he's the most agreeable. Tuk is too young to be anything other than a nuisance during a task like that.

-So it's comes as a great surprise when, after Neteyam was shot and the demon child rescued, she finds him watching her every move every time she prepares a meal.

-At first she thinks it's because of the boat and the cut on his chest. The knife in her hand as she chops the roots. It's not not that, but it is something more. A curiosity for the direction she stirs a boiling pot, and for the order she adds the spices.

-It had honestly never occurred to Neytiri at all that the child had a personality or interests outside of things mimicked from her children. Insolence and loyalty from Lo'ak, disobedience and morality from Kiri, honesty and stubbornness from Neteyam, even playfulness from Tuk. But none of her kids are at all interested in cooking.

-Spider and Neteyam are both confined to the mauri for recovery, and Neteyam is out like a light by eclipse every night and has to be awoken for evening meal. Spider is silent at Neteyam's side, where he spends most of his time, like Neteyam has to watch him to be sure he's there. She doesn't ask him, just slides over a cutting board and a knife and then passes him a vegetable to cut.

-Neytiri would have to be blind to not notice how perfectly he copies her cuts from before.

-That continues, with Jake and the other kids none the wiser, for a few days, until eventually she puts him in charge of stirring. He has to leave the safety of Neteyam for that, but the lure of the task is too great. He stirs, counterclockwise four times and clockwise twice, just like she always does.

-The next night she tests him. Asks him to get out the ingredients for a certain meal, the one she made the first night she noticed him watching, over a week ago. He doesn't miss a thing. They work shoulder to shoulder, side by side. Every night on, she has him fetch the ingredients unless she shows him something new.

-Tuk is the first to catch them in their silent little game, coming in to see if Neytiri will deem Spider well enough to at least come see the stars, which look particularly clear that night. Neytiri says he can go, and is shocked by how sad he looks for one second before turning to Tuk, like she'd kicked him.

-When she directs him to start the meal the next night he seems surprised, and she realizes he thought the dismissal the night before was a permanent one. So when Tuk comes for him again when he's helping with lunch, she tells Tuk that he's busy. She is not good at reading body language without a tail or ears to judge with, but he turns even pinker than usual and seems to vibrate with energy for the rest of the day.

-Neytiri is fairly sure the entire family knows about the cooking thing, because she's pretty sure Neteyam is not actually asleep at every mealtime still at this point. He's really recovered a lot by now, and she's pretty sure he ratted her out and that's why the mauri becomes essentially off limits to everyone besides her and Spider during every meal prep time. Sometimes she thinks she can hear Kiri and Lo'ak chasing someone off who was trying to come visit.

-Spider and her do not talk for the most part, they just become increasingly in tune with each others movements. Cooking with someone is a hard pairing to match, and Neytiri usually finds it incredibly frustrating, even with Jake sometimes. Spider seems to be able to read her mind, hand her the exact right spice before she even finished the thought about how it was needed, or finishing dicing at the exact moment the vegetables need to be added.

-She finds his personality in tweaks he adds to her recipes, some needed to adjust for his human palate, but always compensated for in an explosion of creativity between them both to find an adequate or even superior substitute. She apologizes in lessons, basics and then the hard stuff, things she should've been teaching him for years. They learn in tandem, each other and the Metkayina cuisine, types of squid and clams and seaweed that add tastes that must be enhanced and balanced with the correct tools, just as a child must be to grow properly.

-She finds herself mourning days alone at the cookfire, or days with one of her other kids who wanted to be anywhere else. Days where he was likely waiting for them outside, interested in what she was doing but not wiling to ask.

-There is no direct apology, not yet. For now it is learning, and building new memories and experiences. His songcord, which she has now seen, is basically a recipe book at this point, Jake says. But so is hers. Songs of slicing meat that provides energy from Eywa, and souls meeting souls for the first time.

#my little brother is like this hes so spidercore #or actually in this post spider is so timbocore #love the idea of neytiri being like well spiders pretty honest and loyal but he stole that shit from neteyam and lo'ak so #not really #she has all these good traits for him in her mind but she won't allow herself to attribute them to him quite yet #but even the bad traits she finds she associates with her kids too so they aren't that bad #but that hasn't cLICKED yet #someone: neytiri hows spider #neytiri: well he's a great kid but neteyam was first so he's jsut copying him #ugh it's so perfect to me because we're all always saying that spider mimics the na'vi because no one ever teaches him besides the sully ki #so he learns by watching and copying #and subconciously neytiri knows this #neytiri sully #miles spider socorro #spider socorro #spider sully #tuktirey sully #kiri sully #lo'ak sully #jake sully #neteyam sully #avatar #avatar the way of water #james cameron avatar #melissa on avatar (cameron) #melissa og #we are mindmelding get in #spider sully post wow