Alternatively, Four Stages of Grief Maui Works Through without Moana (Barely in Order and Sometimes Repeatedly and/or Simultaneously) and One He Does.
A cross-posting of the same fic I put up on AO3 in December 2016.
Part 1 of the fanfic series, Where You Are.
When he lands on her island early in the morning he notices a sea turtle up on shore, taking shelter under a particularly abundant bush, seemingly staring at him and his boat. It's a little weird it's there at all when it's not egg laying season yet but he shrugs it off and goes back to deciding which new tattoo to tell her about first. He would've visited sooner but after a few adventures nearby the gods called him further than ever this time, way up north. The closest the mortals there ever got to getting his name right was Lumauig. He taught them a new way to farm and has the tattoo to prove it—one among quite a few new tattoos since the last time he came. She and her village would love the seeds and cuttings of all the new plants he got in return.
After the usual flustered scramble over the unexpected arrival of a demigod to their village is the customary formal welcome. He remains polite and involved throughout, trying not to make his search of the crowd too obvious, and there is the usual struggle to stick to decorum and not immediately sweep the chief up into a hug before she drew him into a hongi, but coming here was always the closest he felt to coming home. He welcomes the barrage of Moana's children and grandchildren with open arms as they smother Uncle Maui with the kind of love he could never get from heroics.
Manawa, true to her name, waits for her turn with a patience her mother never had, the famous pendant proudly flanked by the whale teeth in her royal necklace.
His smile wavers when he notices the wrinkles around her eyes but returns as he scans the coast.
(He tries not to think about how he's sure there were fewer coconut trees in that area last time he was here.)
The smile is as wide as ever and his voice comes out booming with cheer.
"So Chief, where's my little voyager?" he says, three of the youngest grandkids hanging from one bicep, tiny feet occasionally brushing up against his lavalava. "Down by the beaches again? It's fine, your mom never did care about formality with me. Just point me in her direction and I'll come surprise her. I'm thinking fernbird. She'll never see that coming, it's too small."
He feels her grin fade even as he continues to search the shore. The crowd begins to murmur, debating whether to stay or disperse. Only the youngest grandkids seem unfazed.
"In whose direction, Uncle Maui?" one of them says, focused on not falling.
He chuckles. "Your gramma, little girl."
She continues to swing back and forth slightly but chooses to point with confused upward nod. "This gramma?"
He follows her gaze to find Manawa staring back at him, something dawning in her eyes.
"What, Manawa? No, c'mon, she's too young to be a grandparent. Where's your gramma? Mo-aaa-na? Village crazy lady, used to be the chief?"
The little girl cocks her head and alternates between looking at the two of them. "My other gramma's name is Teuila?"
The crowd's murmurs grow before Manawa's entire body language changes and she transforms fully into the Chief. The wall of chatter crumbles the moment she raises a hand.
"Everyone," she says. "That's enough. Uncle Maui will see you all later tonight."
There is concern in their eyes as they begin to disperse, the occasional curious glimpse in his direction.
"Tane, Masina, Tiare, that means you, too."
The grandkids drop from his arm and trudge off, the one who talked earlier screaming "BYE, UNCLE, NICE TO MEET YOU" before she breaks into a run. Once they're alone the Chief is put aside and he finds himself in front of his niece once more.
He tries to lean on his hook as casually as possible.
"Wow. Gramma Manawa, huh?" he says, his heart struggling to stay light. "Man, humans. Seems like yesterday Moana handed me a little baby and told me I was looking at the next chief. And now…"
If his sunniness was supposed to lighten the mood it failed. All the same, he refuses to acknowledge Mini Maui's gaze up at him.
"Uncle," Manawa lays a hesitant hand on his shoulder, her voice soft as she bids him to actually look at her. "You're a demigod. Time passes differently for you. So I have to ask. How long do you think you've been away?"
He swallows reluctantly before he hazards a guess.
He's wrong.
There is a talk in her fale. It's only a few minutes but it lasts longer than all those centuries alone on that forsaken island. He spends the conversation in a haze.
Moana was no longer with them.
She hadn't been, not for a few years now.
They thought he had come to pay his respects.
Manawa looks more like her father than her mother—all the kids do—and this is a small comfort. There's no way he's mistaking her or any of Moana's little brood for the original. Manawa's bearing, her smile, her build, her patience, that's all Rawiri. But when she orders him to stay put while she gets something, he sees Moana's fire in her eyes.
After a few minutes in the back of the fale she returns with a present.
"She wanted you to have this. Me and the siblings, we all have our own, aye? She thought maybe you could give this one some use again."
The bigger, brasher, louder part of him wants to stay seated, to pretend he heard nothing, as though that would do anything to make this any less real. But his conscience wins out even without the help of Mini Maui and he rises.
Even though he wishes he doesn't.
In her hands is an oar. Moana's oar. The one she beat him with the day they met. His inscription, an impersonal autograph made with a chicken beak, faithfully retains the shapes he scratched too deep into the wood.
He runs his fingers gently across the carving before he receives the oar with both hands. There is a thickness in his voice.
"Thank you."
Manawa can't resist one sad little smile. "You're welcome."
The coconut tree, bent to better catch sunlight, bends further under his weight as he glares out onto the waves lapping at the shore. It springs back up and a coconut falls out as he pushes off his seat to storm onto the beach, blistering hot noon sand kicking up behind him, the oar in the hand that usually carried his hook.
"Okay, what was that?" he says, picking a random spot of water to look at and committing to it. "No warning, no little hint that maybe I should come over, you just let me stay away for this long and find out like this?"
The waves come in, the waves go out, and he waits for a response that doesn't come.
Mini Maui scrambles from new tattoo to new tattoo, gesturing furiously at his most recent deeds.
Maui flicks him over to his back.
"Mortals don't have the lifespan we do. They can't stay in a cave for a thousand years and come out fine. They grow old. They die. That doesn't change. Even when I give them the power to create life, that doesn't change."
The waves come in, the waves go out, and the Ocean still has nothing to say.
"She visited you every day. I sailed on you for years. You didn't think to tell me she wasn't doing well?"
A glow appears in the spot he chose to focus on, barely distinguishable from the glittering glare of the waves, and the water rises until it creates a familiar blob of sentient energy. By the time it's stopped growing it's tall enough to meet him but it's stooped. Contrite. Almost sad. It gestures to his boat gently, a nonexistent eye on her oar.
There is a heat in his stomach and a taste in his mouth as he realises: it pities him.
He turns and heads back into the village.
"Forget it."
He spends the usual few days in the village, just to catch up and do his part as a guest. It's back into the old rhythms: stories for the kids, feats of strength in the fields, the occasional bit of shapeshifting to help them plan a new grove or find the source of a river blockage, he even shows them how to grow the new plants he brought over.
There is a part of him that believes that if he doesn't look at the beach, he can pretend she's just on the shore, dancing with the waves. He doesn't believe that part, but that doesn't stop him from avoiding all sight or mention of the sea anyway.
Manawa doesn't push it when he pretends he didn't hear her offer to come visit Moana's memorial when he's free. Nor does she make any comments when he takes her up on her offer, pretending it was all his idea.
It's beautiful. Of course it is. Her husband may have done his duties as the chief's spouse, but his true passion always lay in bringing out the beauty in wood and stone. The carvings speak of an affection that Rawiri could never express in words, the details of her life hidden are hidden in the intricate maze of angles and swirls. A baby turtle. A goddess's heart. A hook. A chief's boat. Among a sea of other things, including symbols from adventures Maui never got to be a part of. Moana would've loved it.
He doesn't cry. The tears just don't come.
He's lost mortals before. He's lost demigods before. Maybe he was used to this by now.
But he still stands there longer than he planned, waiting for an ache in his heart and a catch in his breath.
He's not sure what he expected.
She was a human, of course this was going to happen sooner or later. Did he think just by being there when she got her malu, when she got married, when she handed him the first of many little babies, when she started needing someone to help her down to the beach, that the ending would change? That his presence somehow gave her more time, gave any of them more time?
Did he think just by staying away longer than usual, that it would hurt less when the inevitable happened?
Was it really a miscalculation, in the end?
He looks up as Rawiri starts sweeping away the shavings from his latest carving, his movements slower now that Moana is no longer around to complain about the mess.
"Was there anything I could've done?"
Rawiri keeps his eyes on the pile of wood shavings but his tone is gentle enough.
"Like what, stealing the heart from another goddess? Pretty sure she didn't like that the first time."
Maui takes it upon himself to take over the cleaning. Rawiri smiles in thanks and continues the details of the carving, squinting in the morning light.
"I mean," he says, "I don't know. A magic flower. A legendary piece of greenstone—a different one, one that actually worked. A favour from the gods. Y'know. Anything. She was the Ocean's friend. She restored a goddess's heart. She saved the world after I cursed it. The gods could've—they could've worked something out. I could've worked something out."
Rawiri's look of concentration softens and he chuckles despite himself.
"And this would've stopped my wife being mortal?"
He shrugs, more nonchalantly than perhaps he intended. "It stopped me."
The sound of Rawiri's tools against the wood stop for a moment before his wizened old hands continue their work.
"I suppose I don't blame you," he says. "I miss her, too. But Moana had her time and she was at peace with that. And you know she would've knocked that flower right out of your hand."
She would've. He hates to admit it.
"How do you—? Would you have asked her? If I brought something, just to give her more time, would you have asked her to take it?"
Rawiri sets his tools aside, and those eyes that widened in fear at the first meeting of his honorary brother-in-law now looked at him with a gentle understanding that turned those tables completely.
"Have you cried yet, Maui?"
The question takes him aback. He almost coughs all the shavings right onto his face.
"What, me? I … Demigods don't cry, man, come on."
"Moana said she once saw you cry when her pig begged you for food."
"That was—"
"And every time you held one of the kids for the first time."
"Babies are cute."
"And that time you ate with her family."
"It was my first taste of breadfruit in a thousand years!"
Rawiri's laugh is indulgent, a tired old man watching a child launch into a blatant lie. He reaches for his walking stick and struggles to get up before Maui dumps the shavings into a neat pile and scoops him up into a standing position. An appreciative pat on the arm relaxes a tension in his shoulder he didn't know he had.
"Our people encourage open grieving, Maui," he says, a fond glance at the tattoo over Maui's heart. Moana on her boat, eternally young and ready to take on the world. "Both my village and hers. You don't honour your dead through restraint, you dig deep and you feel it until they know you're thinking about them. That's how it's done here. You can get out onto your boat to be alone, if it helps—you and Moana, you think best at sea. Sail around and see if anything comes to you. But no one here will judge anyone for mourning their sister, not even a demigod."
Maui refuses to follow Rawiri's gaze. He had been trying. He had been trying this whole time. The only thing he didn't try was getting back on a boat, and that was because …
He pushes the thought back down and locks it away with a smile.
"Would you want me to get you a magic flower?" he says, eyes on his walking stick, only half-joking.
Rawiri replies with a smack upside the head.
He doesn't go anywhere near the beaches until it's time to leave, and even then he tries to keep all eyes on his boat.
When he does his boat is awash with flowers to celebrate his visit and everyone is there to see him off. Maui, demigod, shapeshifter, trickster, great friend to their ancestor, Hero to All, deserved nothing less.
It takes the slightest touch of his hands against the hull for the spell to break, for the mortality of them all to hit him in the face. He turns, and his eyes sweep across the beach to find, not Moana, but her people. Her family. Her island.
He sees her fire in their eyes, and looks, actually looks, out at all these faces that would change before he knew it, all these faces he might be seeing for the last time. His chest tightens.
He runs back onto the beach and gives one last goodbye to as many people as he can before he leaves. Manawa gets swept up into the hug he wanted to give her at the beginning of his visit before her siblings descend and join in on the hug. The kids all scramble for one more ride on his shoulders and arms and hook. Rawiri gets one last look at the Moana tattoo before he draws Maui into a hongi.
A thrill passes through him as he makes that final push back into the sea and climbs onto the deck. He won't wait too long again. He won't miscalculate. He'll be back before they even had time to miss him. Because he's fine. He's worked through everything. He's fine now, and that means he won't stay away.
The boat slides back into the ocean without a problem, and before he knows it he's back in deeper waters, watching the island slowly disappear beyond the horizon.
It's when he's far enough away from the sight of land that the sea air loses its sweetness and the thoughts he didn't know he'd been pushing away finally descend. Despite all his efforts his shoulders droop and his mouth stops smiling and once the wind dies down he goes to the front of his boat and lets himself just sit for a while, lit only by the stars and the distant moon.
The midnight sky and the darkness of the sea blend into each other until the horizon disappears. It's beautiful. Any other night and he'd just spend the night stargazing and occasionally babbling to Mini Maui and the moon, but instead he reaches into the hold and pulls out her oar, and all his attention is on the careless carvings of a heart and a hook.
They were right. The sea had cleared the fog in his mind. But he was right, too, probably, in his efforts to prevent that happening.
For the first time in a little over a thousand years he feels … heavy. Not powerful, not larger than life, but a real heaviness, like his skin was suddenly a burden weighing him down. He stoops over the oar, careful not to catch his reflection in the water, and runs his fingers across the carved surface once again, the artless scratches so small against his fingers.
In some form or another, everyone had been urging him to go to sea to get some actual time alone without the distractions only an island filled with food and work and honorary family could provide. But he isn't sure if this was what they intended, this new numbness to replace the old one, this storm to replace the fog.
He wonders if he should cover up his tattoo of her, just for a while, just until he's sure he can look at his reflection in the water without wanting to go back into his cave for a few decades. He wonders if he could ask the gods to replace the image of her with that of the heart of Te Fiti.
He wonders, until he remembers all the other people he begged to be removed from his tattoos.
Remembers he now has no idea what they looked or sounded like, no matter how earnestly he insisted that this time, this time, he wouldn't forget, that he would ask the gods put them back in someday.
He wonders when he'll forget Moana, too.
The moonlight wraps around his hand like a reassurance. He squeezes back at essentially nothing but it's enough to bring a hitch to his breath and a burning in his eyes.
The tears come out hot and his breathing comes in ebbs and gulping flows, and before he knows it he's choking out an old lament he swore he'd never need to use again, because mortals weren't supposed to be worth the heartache. The world falls away, falls away to the grief he finally feels, and he collapses in on himself like a new fern yet to unfurl, crying like he actually has a chance to reach her.
The turtle swimming next to the boat, the turtle he encountered on the beach a few days before, the turtle that waited for him by the reef until he sailed off into deeper waters, continues to go unnoticed.
He doesn't see it disappear from the surface. He doesn't register the blue glow coming from the other side of the boat. There is a sudden presence of love not far behind him, love tinged with a playful annoyance, but it waits, waits until he's ready.
The Ocean, uncharacteristically, allows him a few moments with his grief before it tells him to turn around.
Notes:
hongi - Maori, the act of pressing your forehead and nose to the other person's forehead and nose and then performing an exchange of breath. In some contexts it is the equivalent of a formal handshake.
Manawa - Maori, "patience, tolerance, the heart (of a person)"
lavalava - Samoan, a cloth garment usually wrapped around the waist. The art book suggests that Maui, being stuck on a rocky island for a thousand years, wore a makeshift skirt out of necessity rather than choice. I figure since he's no longer stranded perhaps now he can dress in more modern fashions. (Why he seems to have it in the prologue, however, I have no idea. Perhaps he lost his ti leaf skirt on the way to Te Fiti.)
fale - a Samoan house with open sides and a thatched roof.
malu - Samoan, a female-specific tattoo on the legs, going from the knees to the upper thighs right below the buttocks.
There is a reference to the Philippine Maui myths, which have a few things in common with the Pacific Maui (the hook, his strength, his terrible treatment of his brother-in-law) but enough of a divergence that they are kind of their own thing. Sometimes I wonder if it's just similarity in name but smarter people than I have made a few connections between Lumauig/Lumawig/Tawig/Aponitolau and Maui, so it's probably worth a mention.