Venus was sitting at her desk, mindlessly reading the way cells regenerate when she was disrupted.

Max, from next to her, groaned. She looked over at him. "Hey, Vee, do you think you can go through some of the old boxes in storage? I think I wrote down some stupid notes and they might help me right now."

She nodded and stood up. "What do they look like?"

"It's in a..." he thought for a moment. "A blue notebook? Like a dark blue. It should be beat up a little, I threw it across the room once."

Venus raised her eyebrows in mild surprise. "Oh, okay." She walked off to the other side of the lab and into a separate room. It had been where old things were stored and put away, kept just in case for situations like these.

She coughed at the dust, which had settled overtime. Nobody really came into the room, anymore. She moved a few boxes around, opening them up and looking inside for a blue notebook.

It seemed Venus was cursed. All she could find was everything except for the blue notebook. She began to get frustrated, grumbling as she flipped through old papers and such. She was about to give up when she came across a stack of photos. Old ones, tied together by a rubber band at the bottom of the box.

She picked them up and stared at the top picture. Her face was familiar, but she wasn't one of the scientists in the lab around her. No, she was wearing a flight suit. By closer inspection, Venus brought the photo closer to her face and read the name on the patch of her jacket.

Paz Socorro.

Her breath hitched. Spider told her about his mom when they were younger and he didn't know when to stop talking. His mom was beautiful. It was a shame she gave birth to a kid as rabid as Spider.

"Vee?" Max called out for her from a distance. "Have you found it yet?"

She jumped and tucked the stack into the inside pocket of her lab coat. If his mom had a picture in the stack, there could be more. She wanted to share the moment with the boy. After all, he had little idea of what she looked like.

She shouted back before he would get too suspicious. "Um," Venus finally caught sight of the ripped blue notebook and picked it up. "Max, this doesn't look a little beat up, I'm not gonna lie."

She could hear the grimace in his voice. "I was pissed, okay?" He admitted.

Venus chuckled and walked out. "Pissed," she handed it over to him with a smile. "is an understatement. That's borderline abuse,"

He rolled his eyes and flipped through the pages. "When you get older, you'll understand. Plus, the RDA just rejected my project proposal. I had every right to be mad."

"No need to take it out on a notebook." She stood next to his chair and leaned over to see. "Have you found it yet? What is it?"

"Observations of the connection between plants." He stopped at a page with scribbles all over it. "This was my proof for my research project. Now that the RDA doesn't control where funds go, I can finally conduct it myself."

One of the things most admirable about Max was how passionate he was about his work. It was something Venus picked up on after spending so many hours with him when she was younger. His interest could be envied.

"That's cool," she nodded. "But I have to go back to my room to grab something. I'll only take a minute."

By the time Venus made it to her room in another one of the portable facilities, her heart was racing. She closed her door and slipped the stack out from her inner pocket. Pulling the top one out to see, she smiled softly at the sight of Paz Socorro. She could only imagine how happy Spider would be to see his mom.

She tucked the photo back under and hid the pictures under her pillow. The next time she would pull them out was when Spider was there with her, so she could get his raw reaction of happiness.

She brushed the bangs out of her face and left her bedroom, adjusting her lab coat and grabbing the exopack next to the door. Venus would tell Spider at dinner.

Once she was with Max again, no matter how hard she tried to focus on the diagram of nature's connection, she couldn't stop thinking of the photos underneath her pillow.

If Spider's mom was there, hers could too.

Venus highly doubted it, though. Despite the lack of a face to the name, she knew some things of her mother. Celeste Oberon, who was shot and killed for being a part of the Na'vi sympathizers. It was the part of being different that everyone feared at some point in their lives.

Celeste, as described by Max who worked with her, was kind and sweet. She was one of the first people to connect the dots about the Na'vi. By Max's words, she was so considerate and introverted.

Max saw a little bit of Celeste in Venus.

"What's going on in that mind of yours?" Max asked her through the silence that had settled between the two.

Venus shifted in her seat and shrugged her shoulders. "Just thinking."

She was thinking. Her mind was running like a machine all the time. Before she could read and learn, she would sit on the floor in silence and think. Think, think, think.

Max had begun to think it would be the death of her.

However, there were only two things on Venus' mind: The photos underneath her pillow and telling Spider.

i feel like spider is just such a misunderstood character bc he was so conflicted and i rlly wanna portray that part of him