Look at Me Because I Exist
. Ýâ âš . Ý âĄ Ý . âš â Ý. . Ýâ âš . Ý âĄ Ý . âš â Ý. . Ýâ âš . Ý âĄ Ý . âš â Ý. . Ýâ âš . Ý
. Ýâ âš . Ý âĄ Ý . âš â Ý. . Ýâ âš . Ý âĄ Ý . âš â Ý. . Ýâ âš . Ý âĄ Ý . âš â Ý. . Ýâ âš . Ý
. Ýâ âš . Ý âĄ Ý . âš â Ý. . Ýâ âš . Ý âĄ Ý . âš â Ý. . Ýâ âš . Ý âĄ Ý . âš â Ý. . Ýâ âš . Ý
A story about a girl who does not know how to be soft learning what it feels like to want to be â for one person, at the worst possible time. It is a story about the particular cruelty of falling in love with someone who is everything you are not. Someone good and steady and bright. Someone already promised to another. Someone who looks at you like you are worth looking at, which is the most dangerous thing anyone has ever done to you.
WARNINGS: â Strong language / profanity throughout â Physical violence, blood, injury â Reader portrayed as aggressive and difficult â Emotional conflict, unrequited feelings â Guilt, shame, emotional vulnerability â Impulsive kissing without consent â Open-ended / cliffhanger ending â NO resolution- Smut
. Ýâ âš . Ý âĄ Ý . âš â Ý. . Ýâ âš . Ý âĄ Ý . âš â Ý. . Ýâ âš . Ý âĄ Ý . âš â Ý. . Ýâ âš . Ý
You didn't hear him coming.
That was the thing â you were not in a state to hear anything. You were not in a state for anything. You were sitting at the edge of the falls with your knees pulled so tight to your chest that your ribs ached with it, your face buried so deep in your arms that you could feel your own breath coming back at you hot and wet and ragged, and the sound of the water was covering everything â covering the village sounds, covering the wind, covering the small horrible noises you were making that you would be deeply ashamed of later if you remembered them clearly enough to be ashamed of.
You were not crying prettily. There was nothing pretty about this. Nothing composed, nothing restrained, nothing that could be looked at and described as sad in any soft or manageable sense. This was the other kind. The kind that happens when you have been holding something for too long and the holding finally gives out all at once â your whole body involved, shoulders shaking in those long involuntary shudders you couldn't suppress, breath coming in those horrible hitched intervals that tore out of you whether you wanted them to or not, each one ragged and audible and completely beyond your control no matter how hard you pressed your hands against your face, no matter how tightly you tried to fold yourself small.
You kept pressing harder. It kept not working.
Your face was a disaster. You knew it without looking â swollen around the eyes already, the particular heat of that, the tightness. Your nose was running in the graceless and completely undignified way that it did when you cried this hard, which you never did, which you had not done in so long you had almost convinced yourself you no longer could. Your hands were wet. Your braids had come half-loose and were stuck to your face and you kept pushing them away and they kept coming back and at some point you had stopped fighting it and just let them be there because what did it matter, what did any of it matter â
You kissed him. You kissed him and you ran and his face was â his face â
Another shudder moved through you. You pressed your forehead harder into your knees and you breathed through your mouth and you told yourself, firmly, for the seventeenth time, stop. stop it. stop right now. you are done crying. you are finished. this is over. pull yourself together â Your body did not listen.
Your body, which had carried you through fights and training and confrontations without flinching, which had absorbed impacts and kept moving and never once given you the satisfaction of tears in any situation where they might have been remotely appropriate, had apparently decided that tonight was the night, that this â this stupid, avoidable, self-created disaster â was the thing that finally broke the seal.
Wonderful, you thought bitterly. Truly wonderful timing. You were so sure you were alone.
The falls were loud. The path here was not used much in the evening. You had specifically chosen this spot for exactly that reason â far enough from everything, covered by the sound of the water, no one with any reason to come here at this hour. You had been so certain. You were wrong.
You startled so violently that your whole body jerked sideways and you nearly went off the rock entirely â your arm shot out, hand slapping flat against the stone to catch yourself, and your head snapped up with the velocity of pure shock and your hands dropped from your face before you could do anything to stop them and there he was â
Of all the people on all of Pandora, in all the vast and varied population of every soul who had ever breathed under these moons â it was Lo'ak. Standing five feet away in the bioluminescent dark with his hands half-raised in the universal gesture of someone approaching a situation they did not entirely know how to approach, and on his face an expression that you had genuinely never seen him wear before.
Not smug. Not combative. Not the particular brand of Lo'ak-specific aggravation that was his default state whenever you occupied the same general vicinity as him. Not the raised eyebrow or the crossed arms or the expression that said oh, you again. Not any of the familiar weapons in the arsenal of their mutual antagonism.
Just â careful. Genuinely, visibly careful. Uncertain in a way that looked new on him, like he had stumbled onto something he was not equipped for and was trying very hard, with whatever tools he had, not to make worse. You stared at him.
Your face was a complete catastrophe and he had seen all of it and there was absolutely nothing to be done about that now and you stared at him and he stared back and neither of you said anything for three full seconds.
Lo'ak: "This isn't a room. You can't tell me to get out of â"
"Get. Out. Go away. Leave. Pick a direction â any direction, I genuinely do not care which one â and walk in it. Keep walking. Don't stop."
Lo'ak: "I'm not going anywhere."
"I am warning you. I am giving you a real, genuine warning right now as a â as a courtesy, as an act of goodwill, which I want you to appreciate because I do not typically offer those. Whatever you are about to do â whatever version of this you are currently planning in that head of yours â don't. I am not in the mood. I am not in the capacity. I do not have the resources for whatever this is. If you say one single thing that requires me to respond with any kind of hostility I will absolutely do it and I will feel genuinely terrible about it later because I do have a conscience, I know that's surprising, but I do, so please â for both our sakes â just leave me alone."
A pause. The falls kept falling. The bioluminescence moved in the pool below in its slow, indifferent, beautiful rhythm. The mist drifted. The night held its breath.
Lo'ak sat down. Not across from you at a respectful distance. Not at the other end of the rock where there would have been sufficient space between you to maintain the comfortable fiction that this wasn't happening. He sat down next to you â close enough to be present, not so close as to be intrusive, with his elbows going to his knees and his gaze going to the water, and he said nothing. He did not announce himself. He did not make a production of it. He just â sat. Like it was a decision he had made and was not revisiting.
"I can see that. I have eyes. Why."
Lo'ak: "Because you're upset and you're alone and I'm not going to just walk away from that."
The words landed somewhere you weren't expecting. Not on the armor â underneath it, through some gap you hadn't covered, somewhere soft and unprepared. You felt your face do something complicated that you couldn't entirely control. You looked away from him.
"Since when do you care if I'm upset. You and I have been â we have not been â this is not a thing we do. You don't â we don't â" You stopped. Pressed your lips together. The tears were threatening to start again and you were furious about it, furious at your own face, furious at the specific combination of vulnerability and witnesses that was the worst possible combination. "Since when do you care."
Lo'ak: "Since â" He stopped. Scratched the back of his neck, the motion accompanied by the faint embarrassed movement of his ears that Na'vi ears do when their owner is trying not to show what they're feeling. "Since a while. I don't know exactly when. You've been around a lot. You kind of â grow on people. Against their will. It's very annoying."
Something in your chest did a small, reluctant, completely unauthorized thing that was almost like wanting to laugh. You did not let it.
Lo'ak: "You are the least fine person I have ever seen in my entire life and I grew up watching my father do genuinely insane things on a daily basis and survive them through sheer stubbornness and I still think you are currently less fine than he has ever been."
"That's â" Your voice cracked. Just slightly. Just at the edge. You pressed your teeth together hard and looked at the water and breathed. "That's not â I'm fine, Lo'ak, I just â it's nothing, it's â"
Not a question. A patient, direct, entirely non-optional request.
Lo'ak: "Where's Neteyam."
The name â said so casually, so without warning, dropping into the conversation like a stone into still water â and your whole body responded before you could prevent it. A flinch. Small and total and completely involuntary, moving through you from your shoulders to your hands, and you felt your breath catch and your jaw tighten and there was absolutely nothing you could do because it had already happened and Lo'ak was sitting right next to you and he had seen every single bit of it. Of course he had.
Lo'ak: "I haven't said anything."
"You were about to. You were about to say something and I'm telling you don't. I'm telling you right now, in advance, with all the emphasis I have available to me â don't."
Lo'ak: "I was literally just asking where he â"
"He's at the falls. I was at the falls. I am no longer at the falls. The falls are where he is and the falls are where I am not. That is the complete and entire story, Lo'ak, you now have everything, please act accordingly and stop looking at me like that."
"Like you feel sorry for me." Your voice came out harder than you meant it to, sharp and over-loud and with an edge that was absolutely a deflection and you both knew it. "I cannot stand it when people feel sorry for me. I would genuinely rather you yell at me. I would genuinely rather you be exactly as annoying as you always are. I can handle that. I cannot handle â whatever that face is. Take it off."
Lo'ak: "I don't feel sorry for you."
"Then what. What is the face."
Lo'ak: (quietly, with a directness that doesn't leave room for argument) "I feel sorry for the situation. There's a difference."
You looked at him. He was still watching the water. His profile in the bioluminescent light was something you had never actually looked at before â not properly, not with any kind of attention that wasn't tactical. He looked like his brother in some ways. The line of the jaw, the particular quality of the stillness when he chose it. And nothing like him in others. Younger, somehow. More unguarded. Right now he looked very young and very earnest and absolutely nothing like the person you had tried to put through a rock wall approximately three months ago.
It came out quiet. Not quite a question. More like an admission that had run out of places to hide and was offering itself up with whatever dignity remained.
Lo'ak: "I didn't. Not for certain. Not â specifically. But I'm not blind and you're not as subtle as you think you are." He paused. Something moved through his expression. "And my brother â my brother looks at you. Okay? He just. He looks at you differently than he looks at other people. I noticed it. I don't know when I started noticing it but I did. And I might have been a little â" A longer pause. "Weird about it. At first."
Lo'ak: "I was raised in genuinely complicated circumstances. Give me some room."
"He's â there's someone. There's already someone, there has been someone this whole time, and I knew that. I knew that and I â" Your voice started to give out on you and you stopped and swallowed hard and your eyes were burning again and you were so tired of your own eyes, so exhausted by the specific betrayal of a face that would not behave itself. "It doesn't matter how he looks at me. It doesn't matter how I â none of it matters. It was stupid. I was so â I was so incredibly stupid, Lo'ak, I just â"
You stopped. You pressed your hand over your mouth. The tears came back. Of course they did. They had been waiting politely at the edges of the conversation for exactly this moment and now they arrived all at once â not the shaking this time, just the steady relentless overflow of it, running down your face silently, and you were so tired of it, you were so tired of feeling so much in a body that apparently had no mechanism for turning it off â
"I need you to not talk for a minute."
Lo'ak closed his mouth. He sat there beside you in the dark and he did not talk and he did not fidget and he did not make a single sound that would require you to respond to it. The falls fell. The bioluminescence moved. The mist drifted across your skin, cool and indifferent. You sat with your knees pulled to your chest and your forehead pressed to them and you breathed â in through your nose, out through your mouth, the deliberate mechanical breathing of someone trying to get their body back under basic control â and you cried silently into the space between your arms and your knees and you let the water cover the sound of it.
A minute passed. Maybe two.
(muffled. barely audible. the most vulnerable four words you have said in years) "I kissed him."
Silence. Long enough that you thought maybe he hadn't heard. Long enough that you had already started building the story where he hadn't heard and you weren't going to have to deal with the aftermath of having said it out loud to his brother â
"At the falls. Yes. At the falls with the â the light was â it doesn't matter what the light was doing. Yes. At the falls. Just now."
Lo'ak: "And then you â"
"I ran so fast, Lo'ak." Something broken and slightly hysterical crept into your voice. "I have never in my life run that fast. I think I broke something in myself running that fast. I think if there were a record for how fast a person can run away from the single most humiliating moment of their existence I would hold it. I would hold it permanently. No one would touch it."
"Nothing. He didn't say anything."
"I didn't give him time to say anything! I looked at his face and I couldn't â his face was â I didn't know what it meant, Lo'ak, I couldn't read it, and I panicked, and I am a coward, I am a complete and total coward, I talk back to everyone, I back down from nothing, I have walked into situations that fully grown warriors walked away from and I could not stand there for ten seconds and hear what he was going to say so I ran." Your voice was doing that thing again, breaking at the edges. "And now I am sitting here crying in front of you which is somehow â somehow â the most humiliating part of this entire evening and I want you to understand that the bar for humiliating tonight was already set at an extraordinary height and I have still managed to find a new low."
Lo'ak: "His face was unreadable."
He said it slowly. Like he was picking up the detail and examining it.
Lo'ak: "Like â fully unreadable. Nothing."
"Like someone had taken every emotion and put them all on at the same time and they cancelled each other out into something I had no word for. Yes."
"What does 'hm' mean, Lo'ak, what is that, say words â"
Lo'ak: "It means I'm thinking. Let me think."
Lo'ak: "I can't think quieter, this is how I think â"
"Then think less. Think nothing. Stop."
Lo'ak: "You know what I â"
Lo'ak: "His face being unreadable means something. That's all I'm saying. Because I know him. I have known him my entire life. I have been watching his face since before I had words and when Neteyam feels nothing, when something actually means nothing to him, he doesn't have an unreadable expression. He has his regular face. His regular calm collected everything-is-fine face. Unreadable is different. Unreadable means there was too much. Unreadable means it all arrived at once and he didn't know where to put it and I think â"
Lo'ak: "I think if you had stayed â"
Lo'ak: "I think if you had stayed and let him â"
Your voice came apart on the please. Split straight down the middle, no controlled edges left on it, nothing managed or contained. Just â broken. The raw underneath, the soft parts, the parts you never showed anyone, fully exposed in the dark at the edge of the falls in front of the last person you would have chosen for this.
"Please. Please stop. I can't â I cannot do the maybe. I cannot do the what if. I cannot do the it could mean this, it might mean that, maybe if you'd just â" You pressed the back of your hand hard against your mouth. Breathed through your nose. Continued. "I can't let myself hope, okay? I know what happens when I hope. I know what I am like when I let myself believe something is possible and then find out it isn't. I know the size of that. I have felt that before and I barely came back from it and this â this is bigger than any of those times, Lo'ak, this is â he is bigger than any of those times, and if I let myself think that his face meant something good, if I let myself build even the smallest thing on that, and I am wrong â"
Your voice broke completely.
"I will not survive being wrong about this one. I know that about myself. I know my own limits. I have exactly one limit and this is it. I cannot be wrong about him."
The words fell into the dark and stayed there.
Lo'ak didn't say anything. You sat with your forehead pressed to your knees and you breathed and the tears kept coming silently and you didn't bother pressing your hands to your face anymore because what was the point, what was any of it for, he had already seen the whole disaster from the beginning â
Then Lo'ak shifted. And without announcement, without warning, without any of the ceremony that would have made it possible to refuse â he put his arm around your shoulders. Awkward. Immediately, obviously awkward â his arm too high, the angle wrong, the whole thing radiating the unmistakable energy of someone following a gut instinct they were deeply uncertain they had any right to follow. It was not practiced. It was not smooth. It was the hug of someone who did not hug often and was doing it anyway because something had told him to and he was listening.
You went completely rigid. Every muscle in your body locked at once â the defensive reflex, the old one, the one that had been installed so long ago it was basically structural at this point. The one that said physical contact means vulnerability means exposure means danger, do not allow it, pull back, make yourself stone â
Lo'ak: "Don't make it weird."
"You are literally the one making it weird â"
Lo'ak: "I'm trying to be â I don't know what I'm trying to be. A person. Something. Let me be something right now."
"This angle is wrong. Your arm is too high."
Lo'ak: "I know. I'm aware. I've noted it."
"It's very uncomfortable."
Lo'ak: "I'm also uncomfortable. We're doing it anyway. Stop talking about the angle."
Lo'ak: "Stop. Talking. About the angle."
You closed your mouth. You sat rigid for three seconds. Four. Five. And then â slowly, in stages, like ice that takes a long time to find the decision to melt â you let it happen. Your shoulders dropped a fraction. Your spine surrendered an inch. Your head tilted by a small, almost imperceptible degree in his direction, not quite reaching, just â toward. Your weight shifting the smallest amount sideways until your shoulder was against his and you were not pulling away.
It was the most physically open you had been with another person in longer than you could calculate. You did not say anything about it. He did not say anything about it. The falls fell. The bioluminescence moved in its slow, steady pulse beneath the surface of the pool. Lo'ak's arm stayed where it was, still too high, still the wrong angle, absolutely not moving, and neither of you spoke and neither of you moved and the dark sat around you both like something kind.
(so quietly it barely counted as sound) "I really liked him, Lo'ak."
Lo'ak: (just as quietly) "I know."
"Not just â not just the flat rock and the silences and the fruit and all of that. Those things were â I loved those things, I loved every one of those stupid boring afternoons, but it wasn't â it was more than that. It was so much more than that and I didn't know what to do with how much more it was so I just â I kept showing up. I kept collecting the small things because the small things were what I was allowed and I told myself it was enough and it almost was, for a while it almost was, but then â"
Your voice dissolved. You pressed your lips together and looked at the water and breathed through it.
"I think he might be the first person I have ever â" You couldn't finish the sentence.
Lo'ak: "Yeah." He said it like he knew. Like he didn't need the sentence finished to know exactly what it contained.
Lo'ak: "It's not stupid."
"It is. It is genuinely, objectively, completely stupid. Do you know what the first thing I ever did to him was? I punched him in the face. That's how we started. I punched him in the face and gave him a bruise that lasted nine days and then showed up the next morning to apologize and he told me to sit down and I sat down and that was â that was the beginning of the whole thing. Who falls in love with someone they punched? Who does that?"
Lo'ak: (a beat) "You also punched me in the face."
"That's â that's different."
Lo'ak: "How is it different."
"You deserved it significantly more."
Lo'ak made a sound. Short. Surprised. Bitten back almost the instant it started â but genuine, real, the involuntary kind of laugh that escapes before the person decides to let it. It lasted half a second and then he swallowed it and looked away.
Lo'ak: "That's probably fair."
"It was completely fair."
Lo'ak: "I'm going to say don't push it and mean it very sincerely."
(something that was almost a smile and wasn't quite and then wasn't at all) "Sorry."
"No." The almost-smile faded. Your voice went quiet again. "I'm not."
The water kept falling. You watched the bioluminescence move in its deep slow rhythm and thought about nothing and thought about everything and let Lo'ak's arm be where it was because you were too tired to do anything else.
Lo'ak: "I genuinely don't know. I want to give you something useful and I don't have anything useful. I'm sorry."
"You're supposed to say something wise. This is the moment where someone says something wise."
Lo'ak: "I am literally the least wise person you could have found tonight. I am notorious for this. I am known across multiple clans for my specific absence of wisdom. I once had a disagreement with a tulkun. An actual tulkun. Because I thought I could win."
"Say something anyway. Wise or not. Just â say something. Anything."
A pause. Lo'ak looked at the water for a long moment. His ears were still. He was actually thinking.
Lo'ak: "I think â and I want you to understand I am saying this as someone who argued with a tulkun, so weight it accordingly â I think that the fact that you're this scared means it's real. And I think real things are worth being scared of. And I think â" He stopped. Started again. "I think my brother is not someone who lets things be unresolved. So whatever his face meant tonight â he's going to figure it out. And then he's going to come find you."
"And if what he figured out is that it was a mistake â"
Lo'ak: "Then you'll survive it. You survive everything. It's the most annoying thing about you."
A sound came out of you. Not quite a laugh. Not quite a sob. Something in between â something that didn't have a name, that lived in the place where those two things met. You pressed your hand to your mouth and breathed through it and felt the tears start again, slower this time, the second wind of it, quieter and more tired than the first round.
(muffled behind your hand) "I hate this."
"I hate feeling like this. I hate that I let myself feel like this. I was fine. I was â I was completely fine before, I was perfectly functional, I didn't need any of this â"
Lo'ak: "You weren't fine."
Lo'ak: "There's a difference."
"Fine enough was working for me, Lo'ak â"
You opened your mouth. Closed it. Looked at the water.
"Don't be smug about it."
Lo'ak: "I'm not being smug."
"Your voice has a smug quality to it."
Lo'ak: "That's just my voice."
Lo'ak: "I'll work on it."
Another sound came out of you. Still not quite a laugh. Closer this time. Closer and then retreating again, like a tide that comes in partway and then thinks better of it.
He went very quiet. The tips of his ears moved â betraying the discomfort of someone receiving something they didn't know what to do with, something genuine and direct and requiring a response they weren't sure how to give without ruining what was happening.
Lo'ak: "Don't tell anyone about this."
Lo'ak: "Any part. The sitting. The talking. The arm. All of it. Any of it. None of this happened."
Lo'ak: "I have a reputation."
"Your reputation is that you argued with a tulkun."
Lo'ak: "And I would like to keep it exactly that and not add 'sat at the falls in the dark comforting someone' to it. I have an image."
"I'll take it to my grave."
Lo'ak: (quieter, and meaning it) "Yeah. I know."
You sat there together. At the edge of the falls, in the bioluminescent dark, with Lo'ak's arm still around your shoulders at the slightly wrong angle and your weight still tilted the smallest degree toward him and the water still falling and the light still moving and all of Pandora going on around you completely indifferent to the specific small disaster happening on this particular rock.
You were not okay. You were going to not be okay for a while. Probably a long while. Probably for as long as it took for the size of the evening to reduce itself to something your chest could hold without cracking around it. But you were not alone. You were sitting in the dark with Lo'ak's arm around you at the wrong angle and his ears doing the thing they did when he was trying not to show that he cared and he was absolutely, stubbornly, against all odds and prior history â Not leaving.
And for tonight â just tonight, just this one broken and bioluminescent and thoroughly humiliating night â that was enough. It was, against every reasonable expectation you had ever held about Lo'ak specifically and the world in general âEnough.
. Ýâ âš . Ý âĄ Ý . âš â Ý. . Ýâ âš . Ý âĄ Ý . âš â Ý. . Ýâ âš . Ý âĄ Ý . âš â Ý. . Ýâ âš . Ý
Avoiding Neteyam became the architecture of your days. You were good at many things. You were not good at most of the things people considered virtues â patience, restraint, basic courtesy, showing up to things on time, not starting fights over fish baskets. But disappearing â redirecting â making yourself simultaneously present and unreachable â that, you had always been good at. You had been doing it your whole life in one form or another, sliding out of situations before they could close around you, removing yourself from lines of sight with the practiced efficiency of someone who had learned early that the best defense was to simply not be where the problem was looking.
You applied every skill you had.
The tree incident happened on day three.
You had been coming down the eastern reef path â head down, moving quickly, completely focused on getting from point A to point B without incident â when you heard his voice ahead of you. Talking to someone. Close. Too close. The path curved and he was around that curve and there was nowhere to go except back the way you came which would have been obvious and suspicious and you were not going to be obvious â
You went up. Specifically, you went up the broad-trunked tree to the left of the path â the one with the good lower branches and the dense upper canopy â with a speed and efficiency that would have been impressive under literally any other circumstances. Hand over hand, feet finding purchase, braids flying, and within approximately eight seconds you were twelve feet off the ground wedged between two branches with leaves in your face and your heart hammering and Neteyam's voice getting closer â
He walked directly beneath you. He was talking to one of the younger Metkayina warriors about something navigational. Completely unbothered. Completely unaware. His voice calm and even and so familiar that your chest did the thing it always did now when you heard it, the sharp involuntary squeeze that you had decided to simply endure rather than acknowledge.
He passed. His voice faded. You waited three full minutes before you came down because you were not taking any chances.
You were nineteen years old and you had just hidden in a tree from a boy. The victory lasted approximately four seconds â a brief, bright flash of I did it, it worked, I am a tactical genius â before it curdled into something sad and small and deeply unexamined that you shoved directly into the back of your skull with the rest of the things you were not looking at. You brushed the bark off your hands and walked on.
Day five brought a new problem.
The communal space in the morning was unavoidable â you had to cross it to get to the reef, there was no route that bypassed it entirely, you had checked, you had actually physically walked the perimeter of the village looking for an alternative and there wasn't one. So you had developed a system: look first, assess, cross only when the path was clear.
Day five, you looked first. The path was not clear. Neteyam was crossing from the other direction, unhurried, still at enough distance that he hadn't seen you yet, and the space between you was open and flat with nowhere to go and no convenient trees â
You turned around and walked directly back into the dwelling you had just left. The elder woman named Ehä who lived there looked up from what she was doing. You looked at her. She looked at you.
Ehä: "You didn't have anything when you arrived."
"I forgot something invisible. A thought. I forgot a thought. I came back for it."
The elder stared at you with the expression of someone who had lived a very long life and was still somehow not prepared for this specific conversation. You smiled at her with all the casualness you could manufacture, turned slightly to look through the dwelling's opening at the communal space, watched Neteyam cross and disappear toward the reef paths, and then nodded.
"Found it. Thank you. Lovely morning."
You left. The elder told someone about this. You know because you heard about it later secondhand. Apparently she described it as the strange girl having an episode. You felt this was slightly harsh. You were managing a situation. There was a difference.
Day eight was the fishing platform disaster.
The fishing platforms extended out over the water at various points along the reef â wide, flat, excellent visibility in all directions which was normally an asset and was today a catastrophic liability because you were already out there when you saw him coming down the path toward the water and there was nowhere to go. The platform. The ocean. Those were the options. You looked at the ocean. You looked at it very seriously. You considered it.
You did not jump in the ocean. Instead you lay down. Flat on your back on the fishing platform as though you were simply a person who had decided to lie on the fishing platform for completely normal and unrelated reasons. Your hands folded on your stomach. Eyes on the sky. Completely at peace. Absolutely nothing suspicious happening here, just a girl horizontal on a plank above the water, minding her own business. Neteyam reached the platform edge above you.
He stopped. You stared at the sky. He looked down at you. You could feel him looking down at you with the specific quality of someone who had many questions and was choosing not to ask any of them.
Neteyam: "Are you alright."
(without moving, without inflection) "I'm stargazing."
"It's a unique approach."
A pause. The longest pause of your life. The ocean moved beneath the platform. A fish jumped somewhere to your left. The sun was extremely bright directly in your eyes and you did not blink because you were committing to this completely.
He walked on. You lay on the platform for eleven more minutes before you were confident he was gone, during which time two small children came and stared at you and you stared back and nobody said anything and eventually they left too.
Lo'ak found out about this one somehow. He brought it up exactly once, very casually, in your presence, and the look on his face when he did it was the closest thing to pure joy you had ever seen on him. You told him you would put him back through the rock wall. He said it would be worth it. You let it go because he was right and you both knew it.
Day twelve introduced the human shield strategy.
This one had not been planned. It had emerged organically from the communal dinner situation, which was: Neteyam always came to communal dinner, you could not avoid communal dinner without it becoming conspicuous, therefore you needed to be at communal dinner but unreachable, which required bodies. Specifically, it required being surrounded by people at all times.
You had never in your life voluntarily inserted yourself into groups of people. You were not a group person. You found groups exhausting and loud and full of social dynamics you had neither the patience nor the inclination to navigate. But needs must. You attached yourself to clusters with the purposeful efficiency of a person running an operation, positioning yourself inside them, keeping track of Neteyam's location at all times through your peripheral vision, rotating subtly as needed to keep at least two people between you and his direct sightline. It was, objectively, the most social you had been since arriving in these waters.
The Metkayina people found this bewildering. You had gone from barely acknowledging their existence to appearing at their elbows with apparent enthusiasm for whatever they were discussing. You asked questions. You nodded along. You were present and engaged in conversations about things you had absolutely no investment in.
Päan: "And that is why the eastern current is better for hunting ikran in the third season."
(watching Neteyam shift position in your peripheral vision, moving three inches to the left to compensate) "Fascinating. Truly. Please tell me more about the current."
Päan: "âŚAre you feeling alright?"
"Never better. The current. Go on."
On the sixth day of this strategy.
One of the Metkayina women pulled you aside after dinner with a warm and slightly concerned expression and told you she was so glad you were finally opening up to the community and asked if you would like to join the women's weaving circle. You had said yes before you could stop yourself because she had caught you off guard mid-surveillance.
You went to the weaving circle three times. You were terrible at weaving. You are still technically a member of the weaving circle.
Day fifteen: the diving incident.
You had not anticipated that he would be at the northern reef pool at that hour. You had done reconnaissance. You had been careful. But there he was, emerging from the water as you arrived at the top of the rocks above â shaking water from his braids, completely unsuspecting â and you were standing on a rock ledge twelve feet above him with absolutely nowhere to go. So you dived.
Not because you had planned to. Not because diving into the pool at this particular spot was on your agenda for the afternoon. But because standing on the ledge above him meant he was going to look up and see you and you did not have the emotional capacity for that today so you committed to the only available exit and you went off the edge headfirst. It was actually a good dive. You came up, pushed your braids back, looked around with the expression of someone who had absolutely intended this. Neteyam was looking at you from the bank with an expression that was almost certainly I have so many questions wearing the mask of his regular face.
Neteyam: "âŚYou didn't bring swimming things."
"I'm a spontaneous person."
Neteyam: "You dove fully clothed."
"I like the resistance. For training."
He looked at you for a moment longer with the expression that was definitely questions. Then he nodded, once, slowly, and walked away.You floated on your back completely soaked clothing and looked at the sky and breathed.
Your clothes took two days to fully dry. Lo'ak saw you on the way back to the dwelling, dripping steadily, leaving footprints. He opened his mouth. You pointed at him. He closed it. The tips of his ears were doing the thing. You walked past with great dignity.
Day nineteen was when Kiri got involved.
Not intentionally. Kiri was not the type to involve herself intentionally â she moved through situations the way she moved through everything, directly and without particular social calculation, going where her attention went and saying what she thought and letting the consequences arrange themselves.
She found you in the middle of a particularly elaborate detour â you had gone approximately three times the necessary distance to reach the reef storage area specifically to avoid a route that passed near where Neteyam had been twenty minutes ago, and you were moving fast and with great purpose and had just turned a corner â
Kiri: "Oh, there you are."
Kiri: "Neteyam was looking for you earlier."
You stopped walking. "What."
Kiri: "He mentioned it. He said he hadn't seen you in a few days and he was going to try to find you this afternoon. He seemed â" She tilted her head in the considering way she had. "Thoughtful. About it."
"When. Exactly. This afternoon â when, what time, which direction â"
Kiri: "Why are you asking like that."
"I'm not asking like anything. I'm asking normally. Where was he going."
Kiri: (looking at you with those eyes that always seemed to see considerably more than they should) "Are you avoiding my brother."
Kiri: "You've gone the long way around three times this week. I noticed."
Kiri: "The long way goes past the drying racks."
"I find drying racks very â"
Kiri: "You find drying racks calming."
"They're very â they're consistent. The racks. They're always there."
Kiri looked at you for a long moment with an expression of someone doing very quiet calculations. Then she did the most Kiri thing she could have possibly done, which was to reach out and pat your arm once in a way that was somehow both entirely normal and completely unnerving.
Kiri: "He's going toward the south pool."
Kiri: "If someone were trying to not be in that direction." She was already walking away. "Not that anyone is."
You looked at the south pool direction. You looked at the direction you had been going. You turned and went a completely different third direction that avoided both. Behind you, you were almost certain you heard Kiri laugh. It was very quiet. It was absolutely there.
Day twenty-three: the most embarrassing moment in a month of embarrassing moments.
You had been watching from behind a large stack of woven baskets near the communal area. You had not planned to be behind the baskets. You had arrived, seen him, and made a rapid decision. The baskets were tall enough. The cover was sufficient. It was fine. It was not fine.
Lo'ak: (from directly behind you, at a normal speaking volume) "What are you doing."
You did not make a sound. You did not move. You faced forward and said nothing and hoped that perhaps this was not happening.
Lo'ak: "I can see you. You are fully visible. There is a gap between the baskets and you are standing directly in it."
(in a very low voice) "Go away."
Lo'ak: "Are you hiding behind baskets."
"I am assessing the structural integrity of these baskets."
Lo'ak: "He's literally right there."
Lo'ak: "He's going to see you."
"He's not going to see me."
Lo'ak: "You are standing in a gap between baskets â"
Lo'ak: "He's turning this way."
You pressed yourself flat against the back of the nearest basket with the full commitment of a person whose dignity had already departed some time ago and had nothing left to lose.
Lo'ak: "He didn't see you."
(still not moving) "Good."
Lo'ak: "You can come out now."
(a long pause) "Give it another minute."
Lo'ak stood there. You stood behind the baskets. The minute passed. You came out. You straightened your wrap. You walked away without making eye contact with Lo'ak. Lo'ak fell into step beside you with an expression of someone who was physically restraining themselves from saying seventeen things.
Lo'ak: "I'm not going to say anything."
Lo'ak: "I'm just going to walk next to you."
Lo'ak: "Because I respect you."
Lo'ak: (pressing his lips together very hard) "âŚNothing. Never mind."
A month passed. A month of trees and ocean dives in full clothing and flat-on-your-back stargazing at noon and hiding behind structural weavings and going the long way around the drying racks and attending a weaving circle you had no business being in and having deeply committed conversations about eastern reef currents with people who were very confused by your sudden interest in them.
A month of waking up in the morning and not going to the flat rock. A month of afternoons that had no shape â no direction, no gravity, no particular place that was pulling you toward it. You moved through them. You occupied them. But there was nothing in them that felt like it was for you, nothing waiting at the end of the walking, nothing that made the day feel like it was arranged correctly.
Lo'ak appeared occasionally. He never said anything about it. He would simply materialize in your vicinity with his arms crossed and his expression carefully, pointedly neutral, and stay for a while, and then leave. It was irritating in the specific way that things are irritating when they are also exactly what you need. A month of your life being â bland.
That was the only word that fit. Bland in the way food goes bland when you've been ill â the same ingredients, the same preparation, the same everything, but whatever it is that makes things taste like themselves had quietly departed. You watched the same reef. You breathed the same air. You saw the same light at the same hours and it was all technically unchanged and all somehow entirely wrong. The shape of a person was missing from your days. A very specific shape. A flat-rock-sitting, rope-braiding, quiet-laughing, your-name-in-his-mouth-differently-than-anyone-else shape. And your days kept trying to be the same without it and kept failing by exactly that amount.
This is fine, you told yourself. Every morning. This is survivable. You have survived worse. You are going to be fine. Every morning it was a little less convincing.
Every morning you got up anyway and went the long way and looked first and found your trees and attended your weaving circle with your terrible technique and you kept moving because moving was the only thing you knew how to do when staying still meant feeling the full size of the empty space you were carrying â And every morning the flat rock was there. And every morning you did not go to it. And every morning that was the hardest thing you did all day.
. Ýâ âš . Ý âĄ Ý . âš â Ý. . Ýâ âš . Ý âĄ Ý . âš â Ý. . Ýâ âš . Ý âĄ Ý . âš â Ý. . Ýâ âš . Ý
He stood at the falls for a long time after she ran.
His hand at his lips. The mist settling on his skin in the particular way it did at this hour â cool and fine, the kind that made everything feel suspended, held in place, the whole world paused mid-breath. The bioluminescence came up beneath the pool the way it always did at dusk, blue-green and slow and sacred, turning the water into something that looked like the inside of a dream. The falls kept falling. The night kept arriving.
He stood in all of it and did not move. What just happened.
The question arrived with the particular blankness of something too large to process in pieces â not rhetoric, not a figure of speech, but a genuine inquiry directed inward, his mind doing what it always did when confronted with something that didn't fit its existing maps: approach carefully, from multiple angles, turn it over slowly, do not rush toward a conclusion that might be wrong.
She had kissed him. He tested the fact again. Examined it. Let it sit in full clarity without immediately reaching for what it meant.
She had kissed him. She had crossed the distance between them â and he had watched her cross it, had felt the shift in the air that preceded it, had stood completely still because something in him had recognized what was coming before his mind had caught up, some deeper register that had been paying a different kind of attention all along â and she had put her hands on his face. Gently. With an aching, specific, unmistakable gentleness that had moved through him like a current. That gentleness. He had not known she had it. He had known she was capable of things that surprised him â she was always capable of things that surprised him â but that particular gentleness, directed at him, her hands on his face like he was something worth handling carefully â
He had not been prepared. She had kissed him and then she had looked at his face and run. She ran.
The thought landed again with the same weight it had the first time. She had looked at his face â whatever his face had been doing, and he genuinely did not know, he had not had access to his own expression in that moment, he had been entirely occupied with the internal â and she had run. Which meant she had seen something in his face that made her run, or she had been afraid of what she hadn't seen, or â
I should go after her. The thought arrived immediately. He was already moving before it had fully formed â turning from the pool, following the direction she had gone, the dark space between the trees where her footsteps had disappeared into the sound of the water. He moved quickly. He knew these paths. He had learned them the same way he had learned everything about her â gradually, without intending to, the knowledge accumulating in him the way water accumulates in low places.
He knew her routes. He was going to find her.
He followed the path she would have taken â not toward the village, not toward the dwellings, but down, toward the lower pools where the bioluminescence ran brightest and the sound of the upper falls still carried but softened. She went there when she needed to not be found. He knew this about her. He knew it and had never said he knew it because some things were worth knowing quietly. He rounded the bend in the path above the lower pool. And stopped.
She was there. He could see her from the elevation â sitting at the edge of the lower pool, her knees pulled to her chest, her figure small against the glow of the water. She had stopped running. She was just â sitting. With her forehead down and her shoulders doing something that meant â She's crying.
The observation hit him somewhere specific and undefended. He had never seen her cry. In all the months of afternoons and silences and arguments and small moments â he had seen her angry, he had seen her sharp, he had seen her quiet and he had seen her laugh with her whole body and he had seen her when she was trying not to show something and failing â but he had never seen her cry.
Watching it from a distance, in the blue-green light, without her knowing he was there â
I need to go to her. He started forward. And then the figure beside her resolved out of the dark. Lo'ak.
Neteyam stopped. Completely. Both feet. Fully stopped on the path above with one hand still reaching toward the next step and his whole body suddenly very, very still.
Lo'ak. His brother was sitting beside her â close, closer than Lo'ak sat with people, with his arm around her shoulders in that slightly wrong angle that said clearly this was not something Lo'ak did often or comfortably. And she â she who flinched from contact, she who had never in all the months he had known her voluntarily leaned into anyone â she was leaning into it. Just slightly. Just a degree. But it was there. Her weight tilted toward Lo'ak's arm. Her head at the angle of someone who had found, against all expectation, a place to rest.
He could see her shoulders shaking. She was crying in front of Lo'ak. She is crying in front of Lo'ak.
Neteyam stood on the path and processed this with the same careful honesty he applied to everything and felt something move through him that he did not have an immediately comfortable name for. Their heads were angled toward each other. Lo'ak was saying something â he could see the movement of it, the particular quality Lo'ak had when he was trying to be careful with words, which was rare enough to be notable. She said something back. Lo'ak's arm tightened slightly around her shoulders. She did not pull away.
She is not pulling away. He had seen her pull away from contact a hundred times â seen the subtle flinch, the careful management of distance, the way she kept space between herself and other people like it was something she had decided on a long time ago and never revisited. He had learned not to push that. He had given her the space she needed and waited and let her find her own way toward the edges of it, and sometimes she did â sometimes she sat close enough that their shoulders touched and he was fairly certain she didn't notice, or chose not to notice, and he had said nothing about it and collected it the way he was beginning to understand he had been collecting many things.
She was not pulling away from Lo'ak. Why is she not pulling away from Lo'ak.
He tried to assemble the picture in front of him into something rational. Lo'ak and her â the history of them was fists and reef arguments and the kind of mutual antagonism that had its own particular energy. They did not do this. They had never done this. He had spent months watching them orbit each other with the charged friction of two things that could not decide whether to collide or repel, and it had always â he had always assumed â Has this been happening without me knowing.
The question was quiet. Clinical. He tried to approach it the way he approached everything â without bias, without reaching for the answer he wanted before he had found the answer that was true. Lo'ak said something else. He could not hear the words. The falls covered them, the distance covered them, and he was not going to move closer because something about moving closer felt like crossing a line he had not decided he had the right to cross.
She laughed. Not her full laugh â not the one that surprised itself out of her, the one she never seemed to intend. Just the shape of one. Just a small, brief, broken-edged sound that he somehow recognized from twelve feet above and thirty feet away because he had spent months learning the specific catalogue of sounds she made and what each one meant.
Lo'ak's arm did not move. She did not move away. Oh. The thought arrived quietly. Without drama. The way the truest thoughts often did â not with the weight of revelation but with the gentle terrible quality of something that had been true for longer than you realized and was only now making itself visible.
Oh. He stood on the path above the lower pool and looked at his brother sitting with her in the bioluminescent dark and felt something he had not felt in a very long time. Something he recognized from a great distance â not a memory exactly, more like a shape he knew the outline of.
Does Lo'ak â He made himself finish the thought. He owed it the full articulation. Does Lo'ak have feelings for her.
He turned it over. Examined it from every angle he had access to. Lo'ak was not a person who talked about what he felt â he processed sideways, revealed things late, sometimes didn't understand what he was feeling until it had already moved him into doing something about it. Neteyam knew this. He had been watching Lo'ak navigate his interior life since Lo'ak had one. He knew the signs. He thought about Lo'ak lately. The way his expression went carefully neutral whenever her name came up. The way he had stopped making his usual comments about her after â
After a certain point. After a point that Neteyam was now, standing on this path, beginning to date more precisely than he had before.
And her. What does she â
She laughed again. The small broken-edged one. Lo'ak said something and she shook her head and something in her posture shifted â not relaxing exactly, but yielding, fractionally, the held tension releasing by a degree â They are comfortable with each other. That was the word. Comfortable. Not the charged difficult energy he had always observed between them â this was different. This was the comfort of people who had arrived somewhere on the other side of friction. Who had found something in the space where the friction used to be.
When did this happen. He searched back through the last month. Lo'ak's careful neutrality whenever the subject arose. The way Lo'ak had been present lately in ways and places that Neteyam had noted and filed without fully examining. The way Lo'ak had once, very briefly, started a sentence about her and then stopped and redirected â
How long. He stood on the path in the dark and felt something that was not comfortable and was also not â he was trying to be honest â not entirely about Lo'ak. Why does it bother me.
He had been jealous before. He knew what jealousy was â he was familiar with it in the abstract, had felt it in smaller forms at smaller moments. This was not the small form. This was sitting in his chest with the weight of something that had been accumulating for a long time and had finally reached a mass that was impossible to ignore. He was jealous of Lo'ak.
His brother. His own brother, who he trusted completely, who he would walk into any danger for without hesitation, who he loved with a depth that was not complicated or conditional â He was jealous of the arm around her shoulders. He examined this with the full honesty it deserved and felt the ground shift under something he had been carefully not-looking-at for months.
He thought about the kiss. Her hands on his face. The warmth of it. The three seconds â maybe four â of something that had arrived fully formed and shattered everything he thought he knew about what he was feeling and what he had been feeling and what had been quietly growing in the particular dark of all those afternoons on the flat rock that he had told himself, firmly, for months, meant something specific and manageable and not â
Not this. Not whatever this is. He looked at them below â Lo'ak's arm, her leaning, the comfortable proximity that he had never seen her offer anyone â and thought with a clarity that surprised him: She ran from me and went to him. He turned and walked back the way he came.
Quietly. Without announcement. The falls covered his footsteps and the dark swallowed him and he walked back toward the upper pool with his hands loose at his sides and his expression doing what it did when he was containing something large â going very still, very controlled, the surface of it unreadable while everything underneath moved. He did not go to the village directly. He went to the upper falls and sat on the flat rock â their flat rock, the one she had been coming to for months, the one he had started arriving at first specifically because he knew she would come â and he sat with his elbows on his knees and he looked at the water and he thought. He thought for a long time.
The next morning he went to find Lo'ak.
Lo'ak was near the ikran nesting platforms, which was where he went when he wanted to think without being bothered, which Neteyam had always found slightly ironic given that the ikran were not restful creatures. He was sitting on the lower beam with his legs hanging off the edge, throwing small pieces of dried fish into the air and watching the juveniles snap at them.
Neteyam sat beside him. Lo'ak did not look over.
Lo'ak: "You're up early."
Neteyam: "I didn't sleep much."
A pause. An ikran juvenile made an aggressive sound at another ikran juvenile. Lo'ak threw another piece of fish. The morning light was pale and gold over the water below, the reef just beginning to show color as the sun reached it.
Neteyam: "I went to look for her last night."
A very brief stillness moved through Lo'ak. If Neteyam hadn't been watching for it he would have missed it. But he was watching for it and he saw it â the half-second of Lo'ak's hands going still before they resumed their motion.
Neteyam: "I saw you. With her. At the lower pool." Another stillness. Longer this time.
Lo'ak: "How much did you see."
Neteyam: "Enough." Lo'ak was quiet. He threw the last piece of fish. The juvenile that caught it made a victorious sound. He looked at his empty hands and then out at the water.
Lo'ak: "Don't over think"
Lo'ak: "Your doing that face."
Lo'ak: "You have a specific face right now and I'm telling you whatever you think you saw it's â" He stopped. Started again. "She was upset. Okay? I found her upset and I â I stayed. That's it. That's the whole thing."
Neteyam: "You had your arm around her."
Neteyam: "You don't put your arm around people, Lo'ak."
Lo'ak: "I put my arm around a friend"
Neteyam: "Name one time." A pause.
Lo'ak: "She needed â she was in a bad way, okay, she doesn't â she doesn't have a lot of people and she was upset and I wasn't going to just leave her there â"
Neteyam: "Why was she upset." The longest pause yet. Lo'ak looked at the water with tremendous focus, as if the answer to something was written on the surface of it that only he could read.
Lo'ak: "She didn't tell me much." Which was not the same as I don't know. Neteyam noticed this. He filed it carefully.
Lo'ak: "She was just â it was a hard night for her. People have hard nights. I stayed. That's all."
Neteyam: "She was leaning into you."
Lo'ak: (quietly, without looking over) "She needed something to lean into. I was there." Neteyam sat with that. The ikran shuffled and complained above them. The morning light moved across the water. Lo'ak's expression was the carefully neutral one he wore when he was trying very hard not to show what he was holding, and Neteyam had known this expression for Lo'ak's entire life and had always been able to read underneath it â He was not sure he could read underneath it right now.
Neteyam: "Are you â do you have feelings for her." Lo'ak's head turned. Fast. He looked at Neteyam with an expression that moved through several things in rapid succession before landing on something that was difficult to classify.
Neteyam: "I'm asking directly. I think you deserve a direct question and I think I deserve a direct answer."
Lo'ak: "I â" He stopped. His ears moved. His jaw tightened briefly. "That's â that's a complicated question."
Neteyam: "It's a simple question."
Lo'ak: "Things are not always simple just because you phrase them simply."
Lo'ak: "Why are you asking me this."
Neteyam: "Because I watched you sit with her in the dark with your arm around her and she was crying and you stayed and you looked â" He stopped. Chose the word. "You looked like you cared. Very specifically. In a way I haven't seen you look before." Lo'ak was quiet for a long moment.
Lo'ak: "I do care because she's my-"
Lo'ak: "In the way of a person who â" A pause. "In the way of someone who has been paying attention. Okay? That's all I'm going to say."
Neteyam: "That's not an answer."
Lo'ak: "It's the answer you're getting." They sat in silence. The ikran settled. The water moved. Neteyam looked at his brother's profile and saw the carefully neutral expression holding with the effort of someone who was holding something large and complicated underneath it and had decided, for reasons of his own, not to put it down.
Neteyam: (quietly) "Does she know."
Lo'ak: (looking at the water) "She knows what she knows."
Lo'ak: "Neteyam. I'm asking you â I'm asking you as your brother, who you trust, who you know â let it go right now. Okay? Just let it go. There are things happening that are not yours to untangle yet and I need you to trust me on that." Neteyam looked at him for a long moment. Lo'ak met his eyes. Held them. With an expression that was asking very sincerely for something Lo'ak did not ask for often, which was trust me on this, please, without the full explanation.
Neteyam looked away first.
Lo'ak: (exhaling) "Thank you."
Neteyam: "I'm not finished."
Neteyam: "I just â not right now."
They sat together on the platform beam in the morning light and did not speak and the ikran complained above them and the water moved below and Neteyam sat with everything he was carrying â the kiss and the three seconds and the mist and the image of her leaning into his brother's arm in the dark â and he breathed through it the way he breathed through everything that required more time than he currently had. Carefully. Without rushing to the conclusion. But the thing that was living in his chest â the thing he had examined on the path above the lower pool and recognized and then walked away from and not slept because of â that did not get smaller on the walk home or in the sleepless hours or in this conversation.
It got larger. She ran from me and went to him, the voice in him said. And he put his arm around her. And she let him.
He stood up. Gathered himself. Looked at Lo'ak one more time â Lo'ak who was looking resolutely at the water, who was not going to say more, who had drawn a line and was standing behind it with both feet.
Neteyam: "Take care of her." Lo'ak looked up.
Neteyam: "Whatever is â whatever is happening. Take care of her. She doesn't â she acts like she doesn't need it. She needs it." A long beat.
Lo'ak: (quietly, with an expression that Neteyam could not quite read) "I know she does."
Neteyam nodded once and left the platform. He walked back toward the village alone in the morning light and he did not look at the flat rock as he passed it and he thought about the betrothal â the arrangement, the practical sensible arrangement â and he thought about duty and he thought about her hands on his face â And he thought about Lo'ak saying she knows what she knows. And he could not untangle what that meant. But it sat in him like a splinter. Small. Specific. The kind that doesn't hurt constantly â only when you move. He started noticing things he had been looking at without seeing.
The way she was never where he was anymore. He had told himself initially that it was coincidence â she had her own routes, her own rhythms, she had always been unpredictable in her movements. But a week in, the pattern was undeniable. She was not appearing by accident in his vicinity and then leaving. She was not appearing at all. She was avoiding him. He tested it once, deliberately â changed his usual morning route to pass by the eastern reef path, the one she used when she went to the reef early. He had timed it to coincide with her usual departure and he walked it slowly, giving her time to be there â
The path was empty. He stood there for a moment and looked at the empty path and felt the splinter move. The second test was at communal dinner. He changed position deliberately â shifted from his usual spot to one that gave him a clearer sightline across the space â and watched her. Watched her register the shift. Watched the subtle recalculation move through her body as she adjusted her own position, inserting three different people between herself and his new sightline with an efficiency that would have been impressive under any other circumstances. She did it without looking at him. She was very good at not looking at him. He was, he was discovering, apparently very bad at not looking at her. He told himself this was concern. That he wanted to know she was alright. That the kiss and the running and the month of absence were things he wanted to understand not for his own reasons but for hers â because she mattered to him, because everyone mattered to him, because he was the kind of person who checked on people and followed up and didn't let things lie unresolved â
Then she walked behind a stack of baskets. He was crossing the communal area when it happened â watching from the corner of his vision in the way he had been doing for weeks, the constant low-level tracking that he had stopped trying to pretend wasn't happening â and she came around the corner, saw him, and walked directly behind a stack of woven baskets and disappeared.
He stopped walking. He looked at the baskets. He looked at the gap between the baskets where he could very clearly see the edge of her wrap and one foot. He looked at the gap for a moment. He thought about saying something. He thought about walking over. He thought about standing on the other side of the baskets and saying her name and watching her figure out what to do with that, and the image of it was so â he didn't know what it was. It was painful. It was also, somewhere he was not proud of, very slightly â
He looked away. He walked on. He heard, as he passed, the very quiet sound of her exhaling with relief. He walked to the end of the communal area and stood with his back to it and pressed the heel of his hand against his sternum and breathed. She is hiding from me behind baskets.
He was Neteyam. He was the firstborn of Toruk Makto's line. He had fought, led, navigated situations of genuine danger with composure and strategy. He had been trained by warriors who had faced the sky people and lived. He had responsibility for the wellbeing of everyone around him and he discharged that responsibility with intention every single day of his life. A girl was hiding from him behind baskets. And it was the most painful thing that had happened to him in recent memory.
He walked to the reef and sat on the flat rock alone and looked at the water and thought â carefully, honestly, with the full weight of everything he had been not-looking-at for months â about what he was going to do about this. And he thought about Lo'ak. She went to Lo'ak. She is not coming to me. She kissed me and she went to Lo'ak. The splinter moved again. He sat on the flat rock and felt the specific ache of something that had no easy resolution and let it be what it was â not pushing it toward sense before it was ready, not covering it with duty or practicality or the long list of reasons why he should let it go.
He sat with it. He sat with all of it. And when the evening came and the bioluminescence rose in the water below and the light turned blue-green and sacred the way it had at the upper falls the night she kissed him â he made a decision. He was going to find her. Not tonight.But soon. And she was not going to be able to hide behind the baskets for it.
. Ýâ âš . Ý âĄ Ý . âš â Ý. . Ýâ âš . Ý âĄ Ý . âš â Ý. . Ýâ âš . Ý âĄ Ý . âš â Ý. . Ýâ âš . Ý
You didn't see it coming.That was the thing about a month of perfect vigilance â it made you careless. It made you believe you had built something solid, something reliable, a system that worked. A month of trees and basket-hiding and ocean dives in full clothing and weaving circles you had no business attending, a month of going the long way past the drying racks and having deeply committed conversations about eastern reef currents with people who were baffled by your sudden enthusiasm â
A month of it working. And then you stopped paying attention for thirty seconds. Thirty seconds. Three percent of your usual vigilance. That was all it took. You came around the corner near the eastern dwelling path with your head down and your mind somewhere else entirely â somewhere it had no business being, somewhere that rhymed with flat rock and afternoon light and the specific sound of rope being braided by patient hands â and you were moving quickly because moving quickly meant not thinking and not thinking was currently your primary survival strategy â
You walked directly into him. Not metaphorically. Not the near-miss of catching yourself at the last moment. Physically, completely, with full momentum â your face connecting with the solid wall of his chest and bouncing back a full step before your body even registered what had happened. You looked up. And there he was. Neteyam.
He was â Eywa, he was right there, closer than you had allowed him to be in a month, close enough that you could see every detail of him that you had been trying very hard not to think about for thirty consecutive days. He was tall â Na'vi tall, which meant he stood nearly a head above you, his frame built for exactly this world, for the water and the sky and the carrying of weight. His skin was the deep blue of the Omaticaya, the clan he had been born into, patterned with the faint bioluminescent freckles that ran along his collarbone and down his arms â the marks that glowed faintly in the dark, that you had noticed embarrassingly early and had never stopped noticing. His braids fell over his shoulders, dark and heavy, threaded through with the shells and beads of someone who had been here long enough to earn them. His eyes â those specific golden amber eyes that caught light in a way that had nothing to do with bioluminescence, that were simply warm on their own, the way fire is warm â Those eyes were looking directly at you.You had spent a month making sure they weren't.
The patience in them hit you like a second impact. Because that was the thing about Neteyam's eyes â they were never empty, never unoccupied, never doing that half-present thing that most people's eyes did when they were looking at you but not really paying attention. When Neteyam looked at you he was looking at you, the full weight of his attention present and deliberate, and underneath the patience there was something else, something that was not as calm as the patience made it appear, something that had been sitting there for a long time waiting âYou took a step back.He took a step forward. The distance between you did not change.
Just that. Just the one word, said at a completely ordinary volume, with the quiet certainty of someone who has made a decision and is not revisiting it.
"Neteyam, I really need to â"
Neteyam: "No. You have been avoiding me for a month."
Neteyam: "You went up a tree."
The words landed with the precision of someone who had been holding them for thirty days and had chosen this exact moment to put them down. Your mouth opened. Closed.
"I was â there was something. In the tree. A thing I was looking at â"
Neteyam: "There was no thing."
"You cannot possibly know â"
Neteyam: "There was no thing in the tree. You saw me coming and you climbed a tree and you sat in it and waited for me to pass and I looked up and saw you and we made eye contact and you looked away and I kept walking because I was giving you time." A pause. "I have given you a great deal of time."
Neteyam: "You also hid behind the weaving baskets."
"I was assessing their â"
Neteyam: "I could see your foot."
The silence that followed was one of the more excruciating silences of your life, and you had lived through several. You looked at him. You looked at the earnestness of him â the open, direct, completely undefended quality of his attention â and the way he was standing with his whole body oriented toward you like a compass finding north, like you were the direction everything else was measured from â It made you want to scream. It made you want to cry.
It made you want to close the distance between you and press your face into his chest and never surface, which was the most terrifying impulse you had felt in a life full of terrifying impulses, which was saying something.
You chose anger. You always chose anger. Anger was familiar. Anger was the wall you had been building since before you could name what you were building it against. Anger was a language you had always spoken and it had never failed you and it was failing you now and you reached for it anyway because it was the only thing left.
"I don't want to talk to you."
Neteyam: "I'm not asking whether you want to. I'm telling you that we are going to. There's a difference."Something about the steadiness of it â the absence of accusation, the absence of hurt, just that immovable calm that had always been the most disarming thing about him, the thing you had never found a counter for â something about it cracked the very top layer of the wall.
"Some things don't need to be talked about, Neteyam. Some things can just â exist. As the thing they are. And be left alone."
Neteyam: "Because this is not a small thing. And because you have been miserable for a month â"
Neteyam: "You have been miserable. I have watched you be miserable from whatever distance you've allowed me and I am â" Something shifted in his voice. Just slightly. The first crack in the calm, the first suggestion of something underneath it that was not as collected as the surface. "I am not alright with that. I cannot be alright with that."
"That's not your responsibility."
Neteyam: "No. But it matters to me. You matter to me. And I need to know â" He stopped. Chose carefully. "Do you hate me."
The question hit you completely sideways. You had not expected it. You had been braced for something else â for the conversation you had been dreading, for the inevitable gentle handling of a situation that required gentle handling â and instead he had asked you that, with the specific vulnerability of someone who had been sitting with the possibility for thirty days.
Neteyam: "Do you hate me. I need to know if I did something â if I made you feel unsafe or â" The steadiness in his voice shifted again, more noticeably this time, revealing something underneath it that looked almost like fear. Not the dramatic kind. The quiet kind. The kind that lives in the chest of someone who cares about something specific and is afraid of having broken it. "I need to know if I hurt you. Because if I did, if I caused something that made you run â"
Neteyam: "Then tell me what it is."
"You didn't do anything wrong." The words came out thick. Wrong textured. Like they had to fight their way through something to get out. "You never do anything wrong. That's the â that's literally the entire â"
You stopped. You pressed your teeth together and looked at a point somewhere past his shoulder and breathed through your nose and told your eyes, firmly, that they were not going to do anything right now, they were not, you were not going to stand here in the eastern dwelling path in broad daylight and â
Neteyam: "Then what is it."
"Nothing. It's nothing. It was a mistake and it's over and I would appreciate it if we could just â"
Neteyam: "It is not nothing."
Neteyam: "You kissed me. You kissed me and then you ran and you have spent a month hiding in trees and behind baskets and lying flat on fishing platforms â"
Neteyam: "â and attending a weaving circle, which I know because three different people have mentioned it to me because none of us can believe it â"
"I have an interest in textile arts â"
Neteyam: "You dove into the northern falls fully clothed."
(a strangled sound that was not quite anything) "That was â there were specific reasons â"
Neteyam: "What were they."
"They were â they were personal reasons â"
Neteyam: "The reason was me."
The silence landed like something dropped from a height. He said it plainly. Not as an accusation. Not with bitterness or drama. Just as a fact he had been carrying and was now setting down between you where it could be seen clearly. The reason was me.
Your jaw was tight. Your hands were at your sides and your nails were pressing into your palms because that was something to feel other than the specific feeling you were trying not to feel, which was currently losing containment on multiple levels. The wall was cracking. You could feel it cracking. Every word out of his mouth was finding a crack and pressing on it and you had built this wall with everything you had and it was not holding and you were so tired, you were so exhausted from holding it, from a month of trees and baskets and the long way past the drying racks and falling asleep on the flat rock that you had told yourself you weren't going to anymore and waking up there anyway â
"I don't want to talk to you because if I talk to you I have to say things and if I say things they become real and if they become real I have to live with them and I am barely living with them now in the version where I don't say them so please â"
Neteyam: "What are you so afraid of â"
"EVERYTHING. I am afraid of everything, I am afraid of all of it, I am afraid of what I felt and what I did and what your face looked like and what it meant or didn't mean and I am afraid of the fact that you are standing here right now looking at me like I am â like I am worth looking at â"
Your voice broke.Completely. The last controlled part of it giving way all at once, the final thread snapping, and what came through the gap was not the sharp version, not the loud version â the real version. The soft and terrible and completely undefended version.
"You are engaged. You belong to someone. You have a life that is arranged and correct and you have someone who fits in it and I â" Your hands pressed flat against your sternum, against the thing cracking open inside it. "I am not that. I am not the arrangement. I am not the person who fits. I have never been the person who fits anywhere and I knew that, I knew that before I ever sat down on that rock, and I sat down anyway and I kept coming back anyway and I let myself â"
You stopped. Breathed. Continued, quieter, in the voice of someone who has run out of walls.
"I let myself feel something that I had no right to feel and I did something I had no right to do and the worst part â the worst part, Neteyam, the part that has been living in me for thirty days like something with teeth â is that I would do it again. I would do it again and that is so â that is so stupid, that is the most pathetic thing I have ever â"
Neteyam: "Stop talking about yourself like that."
"Like what? Accurately? I punched you in the face â"
"TWICE. I punched you in the face. That is who I am. I am the girl who punched you and climbed a tree to avoid you and kissed you and ran because I am a coward, I am such a coward, I talk and I fight and I make noise and I back down from nothing and then the one moment that actually mattered I turned and I ran like â like something small."
You felt them arrive and you hated them and you could not stop them. Hot and fast and absolutely without your permission, tracking down your face in the broad daylight of the eastern dwelling path with people potentially around any corner, and you were standing in front of Neteyam â who was tall and blue and golden-eyed and the most steady thing you had ever stood near â crying, which you never did, which you had not done in front of anyone for years before Lo'ak at the falls and now here, again, twice in a month, apparently this was your life now â
"I am a disaster." Your voice was barely there. "I am genuinely, objectively, completely a disaster and you are â look at you. Look at you, Neteyam. You are â"
You looked at him. You made yourself look at him â the full picture, the reality of him, the height and the composure and the specific quality of someone made to carry things without showing the weight. His braids fell perfect in the morning light, the bioluminescent patterns along his arms catching the gold of it, every part of him assembled with an ease that had nothing to do with effort and everything to do with simply being the thing he was.
"You are everything. You are so â you are good and you are steady and you are the kind of person that elders actually listen to and children follow and warriors trust and you are going to have a life that makes sense and you are going to stand somewhere with someone who deserves to stand there with you and â"
Your voice broke again. Worse this time.
"And I am the girl who hid from you behind a stack of baskets. And I have been attending a weaving circle. And I am terrible at weaving. And I love you â"
You stopped. The word sat in the air between you. You stared at him in the horror of someone who has said the truest thing they have ever said at the worst possible moment in the worst possible way.
"I didn't â I wasn't going to â that came out â"
"I didn't mean to say â"
"Please don't be kind to me about this I cannot handle â"
Neteyam: "Would you just â"
"No! No, I won't just, I refuse to just, I have been just-ing for a month and I am done just-ing, if you are about to tell me something gentle and careful and considered because that is what you do, if you are about to find the kindest possible way to â"
Neteyam: "WILL YOU PLEASE LET ME SPEAK â"
The volume of it â Neteyam, who never raised his voice, raising his voice â shocked you both into silence. You stared at him. He stared back, breathing slightly harder than usual, the composure not gone but cracked, something underneath it visible for the first time â something urgent and unsteady and very much not collected. He ran one hand over his braids. Pressed his thumb and forefinger against the bridge of his nose. Breathed out.
Neteyam: (with the control of someone who has reestablished it through sheer force of will) "When you kissed me."
Neteyam: "I am speaking. You are going to let me speak. Those are the conditions." You closed your mouth.
Neteyam: "When you kissed me â when you put your hands on my face and kissed me at the upper falls â I could not read my own expression. Because I had not â I had been so careful. I had been so deliberate about not looking directly at what was happening between us because looking at it meant knowing what it was and knowing what it was meant dealing with everything that came with knowing and I was not â" He stopped. A muscle jumped in his jaw. "I was not ready. To know. And then in three seconds everything I had not let myself know arrived all at once and I was standing at the falls holding all of it and you were already gone." Your heart was not beating correctly.
Neteyam: "And then I went to find you. I followed the path you take when you want to not be found â I know your paths, I have always known your paths, I notice things about you that I did not decide to notice and could not have stopped if I tried â and I found you at the lower pool."
You: "Lo'ak was just â"
"Nothing happened, he just found me, it wasn't â"
Neteyam: "I know what it was." He exhaled. "Now. I know what it was now. I did not know what it was that night. That night I stood on the path above you and I saw my brother with his arm around you and I saw you leaning into it and I â"
He stopped. Looked at you with the full honest weight of it.
Neteyam: "I went home and I did not sleep and I told myself it was because I was processing many things and not because the sight of you leaning on someone who was not me was the most uncomfortable thing I had felt in years."
The air between you was not empty anymore. It had never been empty, not really â there had always been something in it, something that the afternoons and the silences and the flat rock and the fruit and the shells had been building toward â but now it was visible. Present. Impossible to pretend was not there.
Neteyam: "And then you started avoiding me. And I gave you time because that is what I do, I give people time, I am patient â" a breath, "â I am very patient, you know I am patient, I have demonstrated this extensively â but a month of trees and baskets and weaving circles and I am â"
Neteyam: "I am done being patient about this."
Your hand moved. You don't know how. You don't know what combination of everything that was happening inside you translated into motion â the wall coming down all at once, the love-word still hanging in the air, thirty days of miserable careful distance collapsing into zero distance â but your hand moved and the sound it made when it connected with the side of his face was not loud and was absolutely terrible. Both of you froze.
Your hand was still raised. His head had turned slightly with the impact â a fraction, barely, the force of it not significant but the fact of it enormous. His eyes came back to yours. He reached up and touched his cheek, slowly, and the expression on his face was â
Not anger. Not hurt. Something that almost looked like â
(your voice has vacated your body entirely) "I didn't â that wasn't â I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean â" You turned.
You were going to run. The muscle memory of it engaged immediately â you had been running from this for a month, your whole body knew the motion, it was the thing you did best, you had set the personal record at the upper falls â
His hand caught your wrist. One hand. Just that. His fingers closing around your wrist with a gentleness so complete and so specific that it stopped you mid-step more effectively than any force could have. You felt his pulse against your skin â or maybe that was yours, you couldn't tell, they were both going too fast to distinguish. You pulled. He held. You pulled again, harder.He held, gently, completely, absolutely not letting go.
"Neteyam, let me go, I hit you, I hit you again, I keep â I keep hitting you and I don't mean to, I never mean to, I just â please, let me go, I need to â"
Neteyam: "You need to stay."
He turned you. The way the tide turns things â not force, never force with him, just the irresistible patient pressure of water finding its way. He turned you back toward him and you came because you had always come when he pulled, you had always oriented toward him, that was the whole problem and the whole truth of it, and you were facing him now with tears on your face and the love-word still somewhere in the air between you and his hand around your wrist with that terrible impossible gentleness â
You looked up at him. He was so tall. He had always been tall but you felt it now â the full reality of him, the blue of his skin catching the morning light, the bioluminescent patterns along his arms and collarbone glowing faintly even in daylight, his braids falling over his broad shoulders, his face â his face that you had been memorizing without permission for months â looking down at you with an expression that was finally, finally readable. All of it. Present and visible and directed at you. Not pity. Not kindness. Not the careful gentle expression of someone letting someone down softly. The same thing that was in your chest. The exact same thing.
Neteyam: (quiet as the moment before rain) "I am going to tell you something. And you are going to stay and hear all of it. You are not going to run."
(falling apart) "Neteyam â"
Neteyam: "You are not going to run."
The tear that tracked down your face was warm. His thumb came up â slowly, without asking, like it knew the way â and caught it. You stopped breathing.
Neteyam: "When you kissed me at the upper falls, with your hands on my face â do you know what I was thinking?"
Neteyam: "I was thinking that I had been an idiot. For months. I had been such a careful, deliberate, patient idiot â telling myself that what I felt was manageable, that it had a size, that I could hold it in one hand and my responsibilities in the other and keep them separate. I had been telling myself this every morning on the flat rock. Every morning, before you arrived. I would sit there and have the conversation with myself and I would decide, again, that it was manageable."
"You â you went to the flat rock in the mornings?"
Neteyam: (a beat, something almost like the small private smile) "Before you. Yes. Always before you."
Something in you cracked open so completely and so quietly that you barely felt the edges of it. (broken) "This whole time â"
Neteyam: "This whole time."
Neteyam: "Is an arrangement. It is a practical arrangement made by people with practical concerns and I accepted it because I accept my responsibilities and it has nothing â nothing â to do with what this is." His hand moved from your wrist to your hand, his fingers threading through yours with the careful deliberateness of a decision. "You are not an arrangement. You are not practical. You are the least practical thing that has ever walked into my life and I would not trade a single morning of it."
"I'm terrible at everything."
"I punched you in the face. Twice."
Neteyam: "Both times accidents. Both times the look on your face afterward was the most honest thing I had ever seen."
"Neteyam, I â" Your voice didn't make it all the way through the sentence. "I am so scared. I am so â I have never been this scared of anything and I have been in actual fights, I have been in dangerous situations, and none of them â none of them felt like this â"
Neteyam: "What if you don't."
"What if I'm too much â"
Neteyam: "You have been exactly enough. You have been exactly right. You have been exactly â you â" He exhaled, and in the exhale was a month of his own carrying, his own careful patient holding. "You, specifically. All of it. The sharp and the loud and the tree-climbing and the terrible weaving. All of it."
The tears were coming steadily now, silent and beyond stopping, and you were looking up at him in the morning light and he was looking down at you and the space between you was the size of a breath â
(in the smallest voice you have ever used) "I said I love you."
"I didn't mean to say it out loud."
His hands found your face â both of them, the full cupped warmth of them, his thumb tracing the path the tear had taken along your cheekbone â and he tilted your face up toward his and kissed you.
Not the desperate three seconds of a month ago. Not the panicked act of someone who had run out of walls. This was deliberate and unhurried and complete â the kiss of a person who had made a decision with his whole self and was not second-guessing it, who had all the time the world was giving him and intended to use it.
You felt it move through you from the top of your head to the soles of your feet, lighting up everything it touched the way bioluminescence lights the deep water â sudden and total and the kind of illumination that, once it arrives, makes the dark before it incomprehensible.
With everything. With the full thirty days of missed mornings and bland afternoons and trees and baskets and weaving circles, with the weight of I love you still warm in the air, with every piece of yourself you had been so careful to keep contained â you kissed him back and stopped being careful and let it be the size it actually was.
His arms came around you. He was warm and steady and real and he smelled like the reef and the morning and the particular combination of things that you had been memorizing without permission since the day you sat down on that flat rock â
. Ýâ âš . Ý âĄ Ý . âš â Ý. . Ýâ âš . Ý âĄ Ý . âš â Ý. . Ýâ âš . Ý âĄ Ý . âš â Ý. . Ýâ âš . Ý
His mouth was warm against yours, the faint salt of reef air clinging to his lips, mixing with the subtle sweetness of the fruit he'd eaten earlierâsomething ripe and pulpy from the morning gather. You tasted it as your tongue brushed his, tentative at first, then bolder, the slick heat of it pulling a low sound from deep in his chest that vibrated through you like the hum of an ikran's wings. His hands slid from your face, one threading into the base of your braid where it hung heavy down your back, the other settling firm at the small of your waist, fingers splaying wide to press you closer until your bodies alignedâchest to chest, hips slotting together with the natural fit of pieces long waiting to lock.
You gasped into his mouth, the sound muffled as he deepened the kiss, his tongue stroking yours with a patience that belied the growing hardness you felt pressing insistent against your lower belly. Neteyam's cock was thickening through the thin weave of his loincloth, the heat of it radiating even separated by fabric, a solid ridge that made your pussy clench with sudden, aching want. Your thighs pressed together instinctively, the friction sending a spark up your spine, but it wasn't enoughânothing had been enough for a month, and now the floodgates were open.
Neteyam broke the kiss first, but only far enough to drag his mouth along your jaw, teeth grazing the sensitive skin there with a scrape that made your nipples tighten against the bindings of your top. "Here?" he murmured, voice roughened, breath hot against your neck as his nose nudged the spot where your pulse hammered. The eastern dwelling path was quiet, but not emptyâdistant voices from the central fires, the rustle of leaves overheadâbut the risk only sharpened everything, made the press of his body feel more urgent, more stolen.
"Not here," you managed, though your hands betrayed you, fingers digging into the dense muscle of his shoulders, feeling the flex and shift beneath as he pulled you tighter. But your body arched into him anyway, hips rocking forward once, grinding against that hardening cock with a deliberate roll that drew another rumble from him, deeper this time, felt more than heard in the way it thrummed through his chest into yours.
He pulled back just enough to meet your eyes, his golden gaze dark with hunger, pupils blown wide, the bioluminescent flecks along his cheekbones flickering faintly as his breath quickened. "My  yawne," he said, low and certain, already turning you both with one arm banded secure around your waist, guiding you off the path toward the shadowed alcove where the hunting mounts were tethered during midday rest. His free hand stayed laced with yours, thumb stroking the inside of your wrist in steady circlesâa small anchor amid the rush pounding in your veins.
The air grew cooler as you slipped into the shaded grove, the scent of damp earth and crushed ferns rising sharp underfoot, mingling with the musky undertone of ikran hides stretched taut nearby. Neteyam's mount shifted in sleep, a low chuff escaping its nostrils, but he ignored it, backing you against the rough trunk of a mangrove hybrid, its bark biting textured into your shoulders through your top. He crowded in immediately, all height and heat, caging you there as his mouth claimed yours againâhungrier now, less patient, teeth nipping your lower lip until you opened for him with a whine.
Your hands roamed, greedy after so long denying them. You shoved at the ties of his chest piece first, the woven straps parting under fumbling fingers to bare the broad planes of his chest, blue skin stretched tight over ridges of muscle earned from years of bow pulls and cliff climbs. Your palms flattened there, feeling the rapid thud of his heart, the faint glow of his freckles pulsing brighter with his arousal, warm and silken under your touch like velvet heated from within. He groaned into your mouth as you dragged your nails down, light enough to tease, hard enough to leave faint trails that made his hips jerk forward.
"Skxawng," he breathed against your lips, the word affectionate, rough, his large hand cupping your breast through your top, thumb circling your nipple until it pebbled achingly stiff. The pressure sent a jolt straight to your clit, your pussy growing slick, the wetness soaking into your loincloth as you rocked against his thighâhe'd wedged it between your legs without you noticing, the thick muscle flexing under you as you ground down instinctively. The friction was perfect, rough weave of his leg bindings scraping your inner thighs, but you needed more, needed him bare and inside.
You yanked at his loincloth next, the knot giving with a tug, fabric falling away to free his cockâheavy, thick, curving slightly upward from a nest of dark curls at the base, the flushed blue length already leaking clear precum from the slit. It slapped hot against your belly as you wrapped your hand around it, fingers barely meeting around the girth, the velvety skin sliding smooth over iron-hard muscle beneath. He bucked into your grip with a hiss, the scent of his arousal hitting youâmusky, clean, like sea salt and sun-warmed skinâand you stroked him slow, thumb smearing the slick bead over the head, feeling it twitch and throb.
"Yawne," he growled, the endearment vibrating low as he stripped your top away in one efficient pull, bindings whispering free to expose your breasts. His mouth was on you instantly, latching onto one nipple with a wet suck that pulled a moan from your throat, the sound echoing too loud in the grove. His tongue flicked rough and insistent, teeth grazing just enough to sting, while his hand kneaded the other breast, callused palm rasping over sensitive skin. Your head fell back against the bark, thighs trembling as you pumped his cock faster, the wet slide of precum easing the way, his hips thrusting shallow into your fist.
But he wasn't content to let you lead. With a frustrated rumble, he batted your hand away, fingers hooking into your loincloth and ripping it down your legs in a single yankâthe fabric snagging briefly on your hips before pooling at your ankles. Cool air hit your pussy, making you shiver, exposed and dripping, the lips swollen and slick with need. Neteyam dropped to his knees in the soft moss, the motion fluid despite his size, golden eyes locked on your cunt as he gripped your thighs, spreading them wide with hands that dwarfed you.
"Beautiful," he murmured, voice thick, breath ghosting hot over your clit before his tongue dragged flat and slow from your entrance to the hood, lapping up your wetness with a groan that rumbled against you. The texture of itârougher than a human's, ridged faintly like the inside of an ikran's mouthâsent sparks exploding behind your eyes, your hips bucking as he circled your clit with the tip, sucking it between his lips with gentle pulls that built pressure low in your belly. You threaded your fingers into his braids, careful of the beads, pulling him closer as the wet sounds of his mouth filled the airâslurps and hums and your own ragged gasps.
"Neteyamâfuckâright there," you panted, thighs quivering around his head, the scent of your arousal thick now, mixing with his as he ground his cock against your calf for friction. One thick finger pressed at your entrance, circling the rim before sliding in knuckle-deep, the stretch immediate and perfect, curling to stroke that spot inside that made stars burst. He added a second quickly, scissoring them to open you, the squelch obscene and slick, his tongue never stopping its assault on your clit.
You came with a cry you couldn't stifle, pussy clenching hard around his fingers, gush of wetness coating his hand as waves pulled you under, knees buckling until he held you up with sheer strength. He worked you through it, lapping slower now, drawing out every pulse until you were whimpering oversensitive, tugging at his hair to pull him up.
He rose, mouth glistening with you, and kissed you filthy and deep, letting you taste yourself on his tongueâtangy, sharp, addictive. His cock nudged your entrance as he lifted you effortlessly, your legs wrapping his waist, back scraping bark as he notched the thick head there. "Tell me," he rasped, eyes fierce, holding still despite the tremor in his arms. "Tell me you want this."
"Want you," you breathed, nails digging into his shoulders. "Insideânowâpleaseâ"
He thrust in with one smooth push, burying to the hilt, the stretch burning sweet as your pussy yielded to his girth, walls fluttering around the invasion. You both groaned, the sound shared and raw, his cock bottoming out against your cervix with a pressure that sparked fresh heat. He stilled, forehead pressed to yours, breaths mingling hot and fast, the faint glow of his skin brighter now, pulsing in time with the throb of him inside you.
Then he movedâslow at first, dragging out to the tip before sinking back in, the drag textured and full, ridges along his length catching your walls in a way that made your toes curl. The moss muffled his knees, the bark your back, every thrust accompanied by the wet slap of skin, the creak of the tree, his grunts low and guttural in your ear. "So tightânghâmade for me," he panted, pace building, hips snapping harder, one hand braced above your head while the other gripped your ass, pulling you down onto him deeper.
You met every thrust, rolling your hips, clit grinding against his pubic bone with sparks that built fast toward another peak. Sweat slicked your skin where you joined, the air heavy with sexâmusk and salt and the earthy tang of moss crushed beneath. His braids swung with the rhythm, beads clicking softly, his mouth finding your neck to bite and suck, marking you with bruises you'd feel tomorrow.
"Come again," he demanded, voice wrecked, thumb finding your clit to rub firm circles. "For meâsqueeze my cockâ"
You shattered, pussy clamping down vise-tight, milking him as orgasm ripped through, vision whiting out with the intensity, your cry muffled against his shoulder. He followed seconds later, burying deep with a roar bitten off into your skin, cock pulsing hot jets of cum deep inside, filling you until it leaked out around him, dripping down your thighs. He held you there after, still joined, breaths heaving in sync, his arms unyielding as he kissed your temple, your eyelids, the corner of your mouthâsoft now, reverent, the storm spent but the warmth lingering.
. Ýâ âš . Ý âĄ Ý . âš â Ý. . Ýâ âš . Ý âĄ Ý . âš â Ý. . Ýâ âš . Ý âĄ Ý . âš â Ý. . Ýâ âš . Ý
Neteyam: (not moving away, his forehead dropping to rest against yours)
"Are you going to fix it."
Neteyam: (pulling back just enough to look at you, his hands still cradling your face, his eyes doing the thing they did that made you feel like the only fixed point in the world) "Yes."
Neteyam: (and there it is, the small private smile, the one that was always yours, that you had been collecting for months without knowing it was being given to you on purpose) "Later."
You laughed. It broke out of you like something that had been waiting â real and wet and undignified and the best thing you had felt in thirty days â and he heard it, and the smile became something larger, something that reached his eyes and changed the whole quality of his face, and then his arms tightened around you and you pressed your face into his chest and laughed and cried simultaneously which was humiliating and true and exactly right.
(muffled against him) "I can't believe I hid in a tree."
Neteyam: (his voice low, his chin resting on the top of your head) "You were very high up."
Neteyam: "I watched the whole thing."
Neteyam: "I told you. I was giving you time."
"How much time were you planning to give me."
Neteyam: (a pause, honest, slightly rueful) "I had decided today was the last day of time."
"So you were going to corner me."
Neteyam: "I prefer to think of it as creating a necessary conversation."
Neteyam: "You walked into me."
"Because I wasn't paying attention â"
Neteyam: "Because you were thinking about something else."
"I was thinking about â" You stopped.
His arms tightened, fractionally. One hand moved to the back of your head â careful, warm, present.
Neteyam: "Tomorrow morning."
Neteyam: "The flat rock. Tomorrow morning. Both of us. The way it was."
You stood in the eastern dwelling path in the broad morning light with your face pressed into his chest and his arms around you and the tears drying on your face and something in you that had been clenched for thirty days â
Neither of you moved for a long time.
. Ýâ âš . Ý âĄ Ý . âš â Ý. . Ýâ âš . Ý âĄ Ý . âš â Ý. . Ýâ âš . Ý âĄ Ý . âš â Ý. . Ýâ âš . Ý
Later came the same evening.
He had known it would. He had said later with the full intention of meaning it â not as a delay, not as avoidance, but as a genuine temporal promise. Later. This evening. Before another night passed with things unresolved that should not be unresolved.
He was not someone who left things unresolved.
He found his parents at the communal fire after the evening meal â the hour when his father was most settled, most himself, the restless energy of the day burned down to something quieter and more reachable. His mother was beside him, as she almost always was, the two of them existing in that specific proximity that had been the constant backdrop of his entire life. Together. Certain of each other. The kind of thing that looked easy from the outside because they had been doing it so long they had forgotten it had ever required effort.
He had grown up watching that.
He had always known, somewhere underneath everything else, what he was looking for. He had just not known, until recently, that he had found it â and in the last place anyone, including himself, would have predicted.
Jake: (looking up, reading something in his son's face the way he always could) "Hey. Sit down."
Neteyam: "I need to speak with you both."
Neytiri: (her eyes already sharp, already attentive in the way of someone who has raised this child and knows every register of his voice) "What is it."
He sat. He considered, briefly, how to begin. He was not a person who struggled with words â he had always been able to organize his thoughts, to find the clear path through difficult territory. But this was different. This was not a tactical problem or a leadership question. This was personal in a way that few things were, and personal things had a tendency to resist the kind of clean organization he was good at.
He decided to simply say it.
Neteyam: "I need to ask you to end the betrothal arrangement."
The fire crackled. Somewhere in the village a child laughed. The bioluminescence moved in the water below, the steady pulse of it that underscored everything in this place.
His father and mother looked at him.
Jake: (carefully) "Okay."
Neytiri: (a breath) "Tell us why."
He had prepared for this. He had thought, on the walk here, about the practical dimensions â the clan relationships, the implications, the things his father would need to consider as Olo'eyktan. He had prepared to address all of them.
He found, sitting here, that he wanted to start somewhere else.
Neteyam: "Do you remember â when I was very young, before Tuk was born, I asked you how you knew."
His mother blinked. Something moved through her expression â the particular quality of a memory arriving.
Neteyam: "How you knew it was each other. And you said â" He looked at his father. "You said you didn't know. Not right away. You said it arrived like something you had been walking toward without seeing it, and then one day you looked up and it was there and it had always been there."
His father was quiet for a moment.
Neteyam: "You were being uncharacteristically poetic. I was seven. It stayed with me."
Jake: (quietly) "Yeah. Okay. I can see how it would."
Neytiri: (her voice softer now, moving somewhere) "There is someone."
Neteyam: "There is someone."
Neytiri: "Tell me about her."
He thought about how to answer that. He thought about all the versions of the answer â the flat rock, the shells, the fruit, the specific sound of her laugh when it surprised itself out of her. The tree. The baskets. The look on her face when she said I love you out loud by accident and immediately wished she could take it back. The way she had never once looked at him like he was something to orient herself by â not a leader, not a responsibility, not a name that carried weight â just him. Just Neteyam. The person on the rock with the rope.
Neteyam: "She is â not what anyone would expect. She is sharp and she is loud and she has been called feral by people who meant it as a warning." A pause. "She attended a weaving circle for a month she had no business being in because she was trying to avoid me and it was the only available cover."
His father made a sound. It took Neteyam a moment to identify it as a laugh, bitten back.
Neteyam: "She punched me in the face."
Neteyam: "When she arrived. There was an altercation with Lo'ak and she was mid-swing and I stepped between them and she connected with my cheek. It was an accident."
Jake: (a longer pause) "The bruise. Three months ago. You said you walked into something."
Neteyam: "I walked into her fist. Technically accurate."
Neteyam: "It was an accident. She came to apologize the next morning. She sat on the flat rock and she looked like she hadn't slept and she said she was sorry and it was the smallest I had ever heard her voice and I â" He stopped. "I told her to sit down. And she did. And she kept coming back."
Neytiri was watching him with an expression he recognized â the one she wore when she was seeing something she had not seen before and was deciding what it meant.
Neteyam: (a pause) "I think â a long time. I was the last to know."
Neytiri: (quietly, in the way of someone who knows this exact feeling) "They are always the last to know."
His father leaned forward, elbows on his knees, the posture of someone getting into the practical part of a conversation.
Jake: "The arrangement â it was for the clan. You know that. There are people counting on the relationship it was meant to build."
Jake: "This isn't simple to undo."
Neteyam: "I know that too. I've been thinking about it since â" He stopped. "For a while. And I think â I think there are other paths to the same relationship. I think if we approach her family with honesty and respect I can make it right without the arrangement. I will take full responsibility for the conversation. I will handle it myself."
Jake: "That's going to be a hard conversation."
Jake: "You're willing to have it."
Neteyam: "I would walk into considerably harder things for considerably less reason."
His father looked at him for a long moment. The fire moved between them, gold and low. Behind them the village went on â the water sounds, the ikran in the distance, the bioluminescence pulsing in the reef below.
Jake: (finally, quietly) "Yeah. Okay."
Jake: "He's not wrong, Neytiri. And he's not â this isn't impulsive. Look at him." He looked at his wife. "When has this boy ever been impulsive about anything."
Neytiri looked at her son. For a long time. The firelight caught the patterns of her face, the fierce and careful intelligence of her, the specific quality of a mother reading a child she had been reading since before he had words.
Neytiri: "She makes you happy."
Neteyam: "She makes me feel like â like everything is the right size. Like I can be â just myself. Not the firstborn. Not the leader's son. Just â"
Neytiri: (and something in her expression settled, decided, arrived) "Neteyam."
Neytiri: "Bring her to eat with us."
Neteyam: "She is â she is not exactly â she is difficult to â"
Jake: (under his breath, to no one in particular) "This is going to be interesting."
Neteyam: (standing, something enormous moving through his chest) "Thank you."
His father waved him off in the way he did when he was trying not to show that something had gotten to him. His mother reached up and caught his hand briefly â warm, certain, the grip of someone who had made up her mind.
He walked back toward the village in the dark with the bioluminescence lighting the path and the weight he had been carrying for months â the betrothal and the practical concerns and the long responsible management of everything â considerably, measurably lighter.
He had one more thing to do tonight.
. Ýâ âš . Ý âĄ Ý . âš â Ý. . Ýâ âš . Ý âĄ Ý . âš â Ý. . Ýâ âš . Ý âĄ Ý . âš â Ý. . Ýâ âš . Ý
Here's a tightened version that keeps the emotional core and adds a quiet, meaningful ending that earns the family bond:
He found her at the water's edge â knees pulled up, braids loose, watching the bioluminescence like she was thinking very hard about something and using the pool as an excuse not to look anywhere else.
He sat beside her. No announcement. Just â there, his shoulder finding hers. You didn't get startle. Some part of you had always known he was coming.
Neteyam: "Yes. My mother wants you to come to dinner."
She turned her head very slowly. "Your mother. Neytiri. That mother. Wants me to come to dinner."
The small smile. "Neteyam: It is very much not a punishment." She looked at the water. Then back at him. Then at the water again.
Neteyam: "The truth. That you're sharp and difficult and you have the worst aim in any direction except the one that matters." A pause. "That you make me laugh. The real one. And that I've been going to the flat rock every morning since the day you sat down on it."
She stared at him. "You said that. To your mother."
Neteyam: "Word for word."
Neteyam: "Before I finished the sentence."
Something was happening to her face. She wasn't trying to stop it.
"I don't know how to come to dinner," she said quietly. "With a family. I don't â I don't do that."
Neteyam: "You sit down. You eat. You talk."
"What if I say something wrong."
Neteyam: "My brother once argued our grandma so The bar for wrong at our table is very high."
you laughed â real and unguarded â and he loved the sound of it the way he loved most things about her: hopelessly, with no intention of stopping. He reached over and took her hand. Simply. No ceremony. His fingers folding through hers like they'd always planned to be there.
Said the way he said everything that mattered. Clearly. Without drama. With the full weight of someone who had arrived without doubt.
She looked at their joined hands. At the bioluminescence. At him.
"I love you too," you replied. "I've been terrible at hiding it."
Neteyam: "Terrible," he agreed. "Truly awful."
Neteyam: "I'm not being smug. I'm being accurate."
Here it is, fully converted to second person POV with more warmth woven through:
You leaned into him â fully, this time, no part of you held in reserve. Your head found the place where his shoulder met his neck, and his arm came around you like it had always known this was where it was going. You stayed there until the moons moved and neither of you suggested leaving.
. Ýâ âš . Ý âĄ Ý . âš â Ý. . Ýâ âš . Ý âĄ Ý . âš â Ý. . Ýâ âš . Ý âĄ Ý . âš â Ý. . Ýâ âš .
Dinner was the next evening.
You wore your braids down because Neteyam said his mother would respect that, and you brought smoked fish from the reef because you didn't know what else to bring and Lo'ak had told you always bring food, it buys you at least four minutes of goodwill â advice that was obviously autobiographical.
Your hands were steady when you arrived. You were proud of that.
Neytiri looked at you for a long moment. Not unkindly â just fully, the way she looked at everything, like she was reading the whole story and not just the first page. You stood very still and did not fidget and did not look away and thought: he said she has good judgment. Trust the judgment.
Then she said, simply, "Sit. You are next to Neteyam. He will be useless as a dinner companion because he cannot stop looking at you, but that is his problem."
Neteyam said nothing. He was, in fact, looking at you.
You sat. You exhaled. You ate. Kiri explained something about reef algae within the first five minutes and it was actually fascinating once you stopped waiting for it to end â she had a way of making the world feel larger just by describing it, and you understood suddenly why Neteyam spoke about her the way he did, soft and proud. Lo'ak brought up the rock wall exactly once, received a look from both his mother and his brother at the same moment, and quietly let it go. You caught his eye across the table and he gave you a small, resigned shrug that meant we'll revisit this later and you had to press your lips together to keep from smiling.
Jake told a story about the Metkayina and the fishing technique and somewhere in the middle of it the words turned into something unintentionally beautiful and you thought: there it is. Neteyam warned me. You fit, was the thing. Awkwardly at first â the way anything real is awkward at first â and then, gradually, the way a tide fits a shore. Like your presence at this table was not an intrusion but a space that had quietly existed, waiting.
At the end of the meal, Neytiri passed you more food without asking. Just â set it in front of you. No ceremony, no comment. The way you do for someone whose hunger you've decided is your responsibility. The way you do for family. You looked down at the bowl.
Your throat did the thing it had been doing all evening, the tight warm complicated thing, and you breathed through it carefully. When you looked up, Neteyam was watching you. His expression was patient and warm and so completely unsurprised â like he had always known this was how it would go, like he had never for a single moment doubted that this table would make room for you.
I told you, it said. You pressed your foot lightly against his under the table. A small, private thing. A language with no words, only the two of you fluent in it. He pressed back. And then, so quietly only you could hear, he said your name â just your name, nothing attached to it â the way you say something you're glad to have.
The fire moved. The family talked around you, warm and overlapping and wonderfully ordinary. Outside, the bioluminescence pulsed its slow blue-green rhythm beneath the water, steady and constant and very old â the way Pandora was old, the way things that had been here long enough became woven into the place itself, inseparable from it. You thought about the flat rock. The lower reef. His shoulder finding yours in the dark. You thought: oh. So this is what it feels like. Not like arriving somewhere new. Like finally â finally â coming home.
. Ýâ âš . Ý âĄ Ý . âš â Ý. . Ýâ âš . Ý âĄ Ý . âš â Ý. . Ýâ âš . Ý âĄ Ý . âš â Ý. . Ýâ âš .
And that's the end of all of that hope you liked it, Follow for more, i'm gonna based the next one into neteyam wanting a baby! bye love you guys
. Ýâ âš . Ý âĄ Ý . âš â Ý. . Ýâ âš . Ý âĄ Ý . âš â Ý. . Ýâ âš . Ý âĄ Ý . âš â Ý. . Ýâ âš . Ý