A quick note before the second chapter: no, this is not a follow-up to Pantheon. At this point, Maui is a demigod and Moana is quite mortal (unfortunately for both of them).
That said, these stories happen at about the same time, just different timestreams - this, too, is about ten years post-movie. Thanks for reading!
Though it was less than three hours ago that Maui had stumbled to Motunui, calling for Arihi, for Tui and Sina in the same breath, it seems as though someone has shouted from the top of the Chief's Peak: the Chief of Motunui, Voyager of the Seas and Name-giver of Islands, is ill.
Without fail, when he visits Motunui, the children of the island are eager for stories. They crowd and pester him until he procures some tale, words glinting like gold in their awed eyes. Their fascination is almost palpable, the way their mouths hang open as he speaks, how their gazes follow his every movement. For hours he would regale them with exaggerated tales. Then, as the sky dims and the stars shine brightly once more, their parents come to corral their youngsters off to sleep. Then, Maui sets his wings for the thermals rising off Motunui; or, during the cooler evenings, to nap in Moana's fale.
But now, the village behind him is quiet. All around the island, like water dousing dozens of hissing fires, anxious families set their young ones to sleep - reassuring them yes, our beloved Chief will live, do not fear. She would want you to sleep soundly. Rest now, young one, and when you wake all will be well.
Maui has no faleof his own, but it's not that he has no place to stay. There are at least a dozen families who would welcome him into their homes. In fact, those three hours ago, Sina had even suggested that he find respite instead of passing the night flying, had settled a consoling hand on his shoulder as Arihi had carried her sister bodily into their medical fale.
Maui had shrugged her off with a bit more force than necessary.
He'd hated, then, how understanding she looked. Like she knew what he was thinking. Like she could see through his facade as easily as Moana could.
Shaking off the uncanny feeling, Maui had asked to accompany Moana. But however he demanded, eyes flicking toward Moana limp in her sister's arms, Sina had held firm. Gentle, but firm. Even Maui's warrior face, a scowl so ugly as to frighten wild beasts, did nothing to shake her.
Now, there is no one with Maui but the stars and the sky and the waves. His body betrays his exhaustion as he rests in the shade of a coconut grove. He can't sleep, not quite - but he isn't awake either. Instead, he stares out at the ocean, watching as its waves lap higher and higher in a futile attempt to reach its favored Voyager.
For what seems like hours, Maui half-dozes. Then, when the smell of dusk and starlight pervades the air, the Chief's sister stands over him.
Maui jolts upright at her presence, moving to stand. "Arihi -"
"Stay seated," she commands, voice no-nonsense, ringed heavily with exhaustion. With slow, labored movements, she kneels on the ground opposite him.
Maui watches her apprehensively. "How is she?"
For a brief moment, Arihi's hands fidget with the hem of her skirt, before she stills them forcibly. He stares.
Arihi never fidgets.
"I am glad you left my sister to us when you did." There's a foul-smelling rag wrapped around Arihi's fingers. At his plummeting stare, Arihi folds it neatly, settling it into a pocket enveloped in the folds of her skirt. "Her condition has worsened steadily since your arrival."
"How much longer until she wakes?" he asks, unable to tear his eyes from hers.
She hesitates for a fraction of a second, then sighs, rubbing at her prematurely wrinkled forehead with the back of her hand. "She will not."
"What... what do you mean, she won't?"
Her hands clench into fists in her skirt, pain flashing across her face. "The sleep into which my sister has fallen cannot be lifted through any medicine we have on this island."
"What - wait, on this island. What about the others?" he asks quickly, leaning toward her. "She's - we were just at Tumu, they owe us for getting rid of those stupid sea creatures, do they have something...?"
"No. There are no mortal means through which my sister can be saved."
"It's just poison, Arihi, you've treated poison hundreds - thousands of times before! There has to be somethingyou can do!"
"Maui, please understand. There is nothing left to..." her voice cracks, just for a moment, before her back straightens even further. It looks painful. "This poison is of a strength not its own. I would almost conjecture... but I cannot fathom..."
"It's of the gods," he finishes for her, feeling hollowed out. He rummages around for a solution. He knows there isn't one because he knowswhat poison flows through Moana, killing her, eating her from the inside out, but he refuses because Moana is not dying.
Nothing comes. No spark of brilliance, no ideas, nothing. Arihi's gaze drops from his own.
Past her, the ocean subsides against the bulwark of the shore, its rhythm dimming. It seems as though even the stars themselves glimmer more faintly, their lights more subdued, as they shine over the once-vibrant island of Motunui.
"Is she dead already?"
A part of Maui is appalled at how strong his voice is. Before him, Arihi's trembling spikes, and her whole face twitches with the effort of regaining her composure. But uncharacteristically, this doesn't bother Maui at all.
Right now nothing really bothers Maui at all.
"Not yet," she replies, fists clenching at her side as she stands. Her nails, looking rusty even in the dim night of evening, leave small bleeding marks on her palms. "She has, at most, two weeks."
He nods. It's all he can do.
"My father and I will create lodgings for you in Moana's fale while she... as she rests."
"Thank you," he says blandly, because it's what Moana would've wanted him to say.
Arihi looks at him searchingly, and folds her hands behind her back, hiding them from sight. Maui looks away. "If you would like to see her now, Maui, you may follow me."
Maui says nothing. Does not move to rise.
Thankfully, Arihi doesn't squeeze his shoulder, or anything that Moana might have done in her place. Instead, she nods once. Then, she leaves the grove in silence, chin raising as she steps closer to the village, putting up a strong front for her sister's people.
Maui doesn't see her go. He sees remarkably little, actually. Kind of like a hush has descended over the entirety of the island, like the strange silence that he noticed earlier has finally rattled through him as well.
Suddenly, his feet spring beneath him without so much as asking him for consent. He finds himself walking, mind whirling, away from the coconuts and the lights of Motunui and the mortal, painfully mortal Moana.
It's impossible. This whole - this whole disaster, it's impossible. It's not happening. They were just some stupid sea urchins. Not even four moonfalls ago found Moana dancing to the rhythm of the waves, laughing with him, regaling him with stories about the island of Tumu and their Chief who has grown to be Moana's dear friend. Moana is always vibrant and alive, beaming with joy. Whenever sailing, Moana bursts at the seams with curiosity and exuberance and it tears at Maui's heart in more ways than one to recall her, hardly breathing and lifeless, stretched limply along the floor of their craft as the poison sucked her life from her piece by piece, tearing the color from her face and the breath from her weakened lungs, leaving her drained and motionless and mortal-
"Te Fiti!" he shouts before he really comprehends what he's doing. The toughened soles of his feet have found the spiralling younger sister of the Chief's Peak. From this high up, a leap toward the ground would allow him a solid minute to turn hawk before hitting the ground. Numb, his brain processes the idea and dismisses it with equal apathy.
Maui just cares about being angry.
"You made her mortal! She was your favorite and you would -" he runs out of words to describe anything, to describe all of it, and lets out a strangled yell of anger and fear and helplessness and the grief he wants so desperately to believe he doesn't feel.
Blessings that he is so far from Motunui. The wind reacts quickly to his grief, howling in a counterpoint to the maelstrom churning through his stomach, as though his (immortal, immortal) organs are one with the waves themselves, cleaved through by the bow of a boat headed by the mortal who has made her home in his heart.
The wind whips his hair into a frenzy, and he's sure he looks quite deranged, but he ignores that errant thought. "The ocean chose her for more than this! She savedyou, would you abandon her so easily? Come down here and face me!" he bellows.
Maui doesn't expect a response, not really. Te Fiti's island is leagues from Motunui, and even if Te Fiti herself could hear him, she always preferred Moana, kind clever Moana, over the raving demigod who spoke too much and listened too little.
But a voice sounds behind him, composed despite the tumult wreaking havoc on the peak towering above their heads and tearing through the tops of the trees below. "Half-god Maui," it asks coolly, "why do you grieve?"
Until his dying days, Maui will deny the startled yelp that escaped his lips. Only as he breathes in does he realize that he's gasping for air, and that the rain on his face is not all freshwater. He dashes at his cheeks with the back of one doused forearm and turns toward the unexpected voice.
Whatever he was about to say - he hadn't quite formulated words yet - dies instantly in his throat.
Maui has never met Tilafaiga before. As child, he heard her name in muted whispers - the worrying of his caretakers as they spoke about her wrath, her ruthlessness. It was not right, he would hear them repeat her scorn, that this mortal would be granted the opportunity of immortality without proving himself. Though he has met the rest of the immortal pantheon, save of course Tagaloa and Saveasi'uleo, Tilafaiga remained always a mystery to him. Even Taema, her twin, had introduced herself to the youngling demigod; but Tilafaiga, he has never before seen.
There is no mistaking her now. Tilafaiga's skin is dark, like the polished bark of a coconut tree. All along her body hum tattoos of many shapes and sizes, glimmering with an unknowable sheen. They are as black as shadow, as dark as the lightless pits of the ocean, twisting around her body until he cannot tell where her brown skin ends and the tattoos on her body begin. Embedded in her face shine two white pinpricks of eyes that watch him carefully, assessing, with a cool and rational intelligence that sets his skin shivering.
But most jarring are the strange markings that glide slowly past her face. In two lines they slip around her skull, undulating like a ripple in a placid pond, expanding and contracting like the rhythm of a breathing thing. They wind smoothly, undeterred by the rain, forming a great X that crosses over her ears. One ring brushes against the top of her head as the other ducks toward the base of her neck, before both swoop upward to meet at her temples. Though he cannot understand what they say, they whisper in a strange language, a subtle and unsettling hissing always in the peripheries of his mind.
Tilafaiga. She who holds their stories. In those winding halos, Maui can feel the story of everyone who has come before him - Moana's ancestors, her people, even his own family. In her hands Tilafaiga holds every word they have spoken, every tattoo they have received, every song they sing, every name that rolls off the lips of the young students of Motunui, their ancestors and guardians, recited to the driving rhythm of the waves on the shore - Tilafaiga commands them all. And even from several feet away, even through the haze of desperate rage that clouds him, he can hear his own story. It calls to him, in a language he does not understand. And when he stops, listens closely, he can hear Moana's name - it is tangled, inextricable, bound with his own. Even in legend, they cannot be separated.
They cannot be separated. Maui determinedly shakes off the uncanny fear that her presence incites.
"I need to talk to Te Fiti," he growls, because he really, really does. Never before has he opposed the life-goddess, for fear of her destroying his hook or worse, but for this, he is unafraid.
"For what reason?"
"Her champion is dying."
Tilafaiga cocks her head at him, the movement far removed from anything that Maui would dare to term human, more akin to the body of a raven than that of a human. Her sharpened forehead does little to detract from this fleeting impression. "You grieve for the mortal Moana."
"I'm not grieving," he growls, ire sparking at her apathetic tone. "Moana's not dead, and she's not going to die."
"The mortal called Moana is indeed passing. There is little you or anyone else can do for her, half-god Maui."
Maui stares straight at her, straight into those eyes that care about nothing and no one. "Te Fiti can do something!" he shouts. "She's the goddess of life. She has to help."
"There is nothing Te Fiti can do alone, demigod."
"If she brought life to humans, she can do it again." Above their heads, impossibly, the storm intensifies. "And she will."
Tilafaiga says nothing.
At his side, Maui's hands ball into fists. He needs answers, not this - not this muted, fruitless silence. "I need to talk to Te Fiti, Tilafaiga, where is she."
"On her island."
He doesn't have time to sail for Te Fiti. He has two weeks. Possibly less. "Bring her here," he demands.
"I cannot."
"Then let me speak to her."
"I cannot," Tilafaiga repeats tonelessly.
The hot, thick umu-shaped stone boiling with his frustration coils out of his core and spills out of him in an aggrieved, furious howl. Lightning strikes, perfectly timed with his roar - and halfway below the mountain, the trunk of a tree shatters, splinters outward as the bolt smashes through its roots.
"Was that cathartic?" Tilafaiga asks icily as the thunderclap fades from hearing, eyeing him with ill-concealed disdain.
"Very much so," he sneers. Maybe if he heads to Te Fiti and does the exact same thing, she'll be more willing to help.
In instant response to that thought, his chest itches so hard it hurts. Maui balls his hands into fists and digs them into his eyebrows, trying to dispel the exhaustion-fuelled headache beating behind his eyeballs. He shuts his eyes and breathes.
Inch by inch, the fall of the rain lessens. He has to focus. This isn't his forte, this isn't what he's good at, rummaging around for a solution with his mind. He's good at - he's good at hitting things, performing hakas and flashing his hook. But this is not something he can fix with his fists and this is not something that he can afford to fail.
Gods, this is not something he can fail.
The face of Moana, glowing with laughter, flashes before his mind's eye. Moana. If Moana were here, she would know what to do. He just has to channel Moana. It should be easy, right? They've known each other for an eternity by now.
(If Moana were here, they would be laughing, sailing, flitting over the seas, finding new islands and lands and peoples and more, just like she loved, and she would not be limp and lifeless in a fale as the poison of - as poison leaches her life from her veins, she would be smiling and laughing and joking and the thought is so painful, more painful even than the fire of anger that tears through his stomach with red-hot claws, fires hotter than even the fist of Te Ka -)
No. He shoves thoughts of Moana from his mind and focuses.
This is Tilafaiga, goddess of legend, tatau and justice. Like Arihi, she speaks only in truths; but it is the details that matter, when it comes to Tilafaiga. She does not lie.
Mentally, Maui reviews their entire conversation. So he stands for several minutes, soaking in the incessant rain, before something strikes him, not unlike a clap of lightning.
"Wait," he blurts, eyes narrowing. "Before. You said that there's little I can do for Moana."
The sneering disdain in Tilafaiga's milky eyes, disguised as apathy, softens to a mere thin veneer of hatred. He should be honored, he thinks, that the legendarily emotionless Tilafaiga cracks her facade for him. Even if it is to hate.
"Indeed."
"But there is something," Maui challenges, latching onto this ember of hope with the full force of a determined deity. "There is something I could do."
"Perhaps. But to spare a life, even one of a mortal, is no inexpensive task."
"What can I do? How can I bring her back?" he asks immediately, subconsciously tightening his grip on his fishhook. An dual itch on his shoulder tells him that both of the Minis are wide-awake and listening.
"I shall not say. My sole purpose is to record and remember, to maintain the balance, half-god," Tilafaiga tells him, clasping her hands behind her back. "It is Te Fiti with whom you must deal in matters of life."
"What is Te Fiti going to want?"
Far, far below his feet, the lights of Motunui dim, save one. Even from here, despite the rain whipping past his face, Maui knows where Moana lies. For a moment it tugs at him, begging him to run, to leave this desperate confrontation and stand with her, to stay by her side where he belongs. But he shoves the thought away.
"The mortal Moana matters greatly to you, half-god," she says, gesturing with a face once more devoid of emotion toward the smoldering, fallen tree behind them. "As such, to restore her, you will need to lose that which you value equal to her essence. Should your sacrifice be deemed worthy, half-god Maui, Te Fiti will bring her champion to life once more."
Maui takes a deep breath, and blows it out. "A life for a life," he thinks aloud. "I die, give my soul to Te Fiti, she brings Moana back." He's a demigod. In the eyes of the gods, his life weighs much more than hers. It'll definitely work.
As he expected, Tilafaiga neither confirms nor denies the guess. Instead, she tilts her head to study him. It feels uncomfortably as though she's looking straight into his soul.
"I wonder how your story shall end, half-god," Tilafaiga muses to herself.
"I don't," he replies, some of his usual bluster creeping back into his tone. Now that he's got a plan - go to Te Fiti, die - he feels much better.
And hey, it's not all bad. Not like he'd ever tell Moana this to her face because she'd kill him if she knew, but... being a demigod kinda loses its appeal when you've got someone to miss. When there's someone you'll love even after they're gone. The thought of immortality is mostly terrible, he'd realized, when he realized he'd be immortal without Moana.
If she dies now, he will never see her again. He'll keep on existing until the end of time, always looking toward Tagaloa where her soul will rest. For years, for decades and centuries, he will keep his gaze fixed on the stars, aching for the constellations, for the legends he cannot touch.
Tilafaiga does not reply to his comment, but then again, he didn't really expect her to. Between one thudding heartbeat and the next, she is gone.
Maui limps down the mountain to find a boat.
There's this one part of You're Welcome in which Maui's hair kinda waves in the breeze, even though he doesn't have his hook. I kinda ran with that and, as he's the Demigod of the Wind and Sea, and decided hey! He can probably make storms when he's really upset. One, because it's cool as heck, and two, he gets to shoot lightning. (Even though it's more a manifestation-of-rage thing than a point-and-fire type thing.)
Briefly, about the poison - there is a reason there is still some uncertainties about the eel. If you're really curious, I would recommend digging a bit deeper into Samoan mythology, but if not, all will be revealed in due time. :)
As always, if you want to chat, drop by at .com!
Glossary:
Tilafaiga - twin sister to Taema in Samoan mythology. One of the two goddesses of tattoo, or tatau. She learned the art of tatau from a deity called Tui Fiti, who I personally headcanon as being Te Fiti. While returning from Tui Fiti, she was kidnapped by Saveasi'uleo. Saveasi'uleo and Tilafaiga later conceived Nafanua, the Samoan goddess of war.
In the Moana universe, I believe that Tilafaiga is the holder of history for the Samoan peoples. Because tattoos hold such cultural and personal significance, it makes sense to me that Tilafaiga would know much about the culture of each of the Polynesian peoples and their history. Also going off of this, with Tilafaiga as a sage of history and culture, I like the idea of Tilafaiga being a constellation typically used for navigation. Going along with the line from the Moana album's outtake More that goes "You know what lies ahead if you remember what's behind you", it'd be a neat link between Tilafaiga's role in history and going forward, or voyaging.
Tagaloa - the Samoan creator god, to which souls go upon death. His antithesis is Saveasi'uleo, who rules Pulotu, the underworld (analogous to Hades in Greek mythology).
Arihi - Pacific Island name meaning noble. In this 'verse, the younger sister of Moana, who helps Moana rule Motunui by taking care of the details that Moana is sometimes too hotheaded and determined to consider carefully before deciding.
Tumu - in this 'verse, the island ruled by Chief Fuefue. A close ally and trading partner to Motunui.
Fale - word for a Samoan house or structure.
Umu - otherwise known as an earth-oven. A collection of heated rocks used by the Samoan peoples to cook.
Tatau- or "tattoo". Typically holds great significance, both in a personal and cultural context.