WHAT THE HAIL

Pairings neteyam x omatikaya!female reader

Context: Reader returns back in time before Neteyam hurt her to the point of oblivion. In the past, the reader pines over Neteyam and does everything for him, only to find out he likes someone else and gets hurt. Now, knowing what will happen, she tries to move away from Neteyam — but fate is cruel and keeps pairing them together. Will this love hit or will it be another miss?. Also thanks for the idea @beau-min

PART 4

Pairings neteyam x omatikaya!female reader

Context: Reader returns back in time before Neteyam hurt her to the point of oblivion. In the past, the reader pines over Neteyam and does everything for him, only to find out he likes someone else and gets hurt. Now, knowing what will happen, she tries to move away from Neteyam — but fate is cruel and keeps pairing them together. Will this love hit or will it be another miss?

Author: I think this might be one of my favorites...I got the idea from @lulu-mlk, but with my own twist. So thanks for the suggestions.

PART 3

Pairings neteyam x omatikaya!female reader

Context: Reader returns back in time before Neteyam hurt her to the point of oblivion. In the past, the reader pines over Neteyam and does everything for him, only to find out he likes someone else and gets hurt. Now, knowing what will happen, she tries to move away from Neteyam — but fate is cruel and keeps pairing them together. Will this love hit or will it be another miss?

Author: I've been thinking of creating this type of story but forgot at someone point. So basically here neteyam hurts reader so much, reader dies while fighting because in their perspective fate is cruel. And then when they opened their eyes, the turned back in time, back before she liked him. So around age 12.

PART 2!!

Twelve. I was twelve years old again and the Kelutral smelled like morning and wet bark and the particular sweetness of atokirina' after rain, and my hands — my small, unscarred, twelve-year-old hands — were pressed flat against the living wood of the Home Tree wall, and I was standing very still, taking inventory of my own life the way you count arrows before a hunt.

Not fourteen. Twelve. Two years earlier than I had expected. Two additional years of this. Eywa, you absolute, magnificent, terrible mother.

But the first thing I noticed — the very first — was the silence where the grief used to be. That particular ache I had carried for years, that low constant wrongness of caring too much about someone who cared too little back. It was not there yet. Of course it was not there. Nothing had happened yet. I was twelve, and Neteyam was twelve, and the whole catastrophe was still an unwritten thing, and I was the only person in the entire living universe who knew how it ended.

The second thing I noticed was him.

Neteyam at twelve moved differently than the Neteyam I remembered. Easier in his own skin somehow, less aware of being watched, less polished. He was laughing with his younger siblings near the base of the great roots, and there was something so unbearably ordinary about it — the laugh, the way he shoved Lo'ak's shoulder, the way he tilted his head back — that I felt the old recognition move through me like a current. I turned away. Fast. No. Absolutely not. We are not doing this. Not again, i thought to myself.

The third thing I noticed: the day that was supposed to change everything — the river, the current, the reckless rescue that had tangled our names together and started the whole foolish story — had not happened. I had been careful. In the first weeks, when I felt the pull of familiarity, when my feet wanted to walk the old paths toward the places where our histories were supposed to intersect, I had chosen differently. Taken other routes. Spoken to other people. Kept my hands to myself and my heart behind glass.

I had outmaneuvered fate. I had been so proud of myself.

Like an idiot who thought they could have candy at the end of every supper.

Iknimaya. The first attempt. The test that every young Omatikaya both dreads and dreams about, the moment when you climb to where the ikran nest and you make your choice and the sky either accepts you or it doesn't.

I had not considered this. That we were the same age. That we would be in the same training batch. That Toruk Makto himself would be the one standing on the cliff face watching his eldest son learn to fly, and that I would be standing six bodies to the left, trying my absolute best to look anywhere except at the boy who was — in this life, in this timeline — still just a face I knew by sight and nothing else.

I had bonded with my ikran first. She was grey-green and furious and we had understood each other immediately, the way certain things simply click into place without ceremony. I had named her Txewì — little shadow — and she had bitten my wrist on the way down and I had loved her for it. I was watching Txewì settle when I heard the sound.

It is not a sound you forget. The specific pitched shriek of an ikran that has not accepted its rider, the burst of wings against wind, the crack of the connection failing. I had heard it before in training stories, had never seen it happen — in my past life Neteyam had made it look almost easy, that first bond, that first flight. Clean and perfect, the way everything Neteyam did was clean and perfect in the story I had told myself about him.

But this was not that story. This was the ikran rearing. This was Neteyam — twelve-year-old Neteyam who had done nothing to me, who was nothing to me, who was going to grow into someone who would look me in the face and say I would never like you that way — this was him losing his grip at sixty feet above the cliff base, his body arcing outward into open air, and the collective sharp intake of breath from every trainee watching, and Jake Sully's voice somewhere behind me barking his son's name —

And I was already moving. I don't know how to explain instinct to someone who has never had it override their entire rational mind in under a second. I had told myself, with great conviction and careful cruelty, that I was done. I was done saving Neteyam. I was done being the one who threw herself between him and the world. The whole problem, the root and the ruin of it, was that I had spent years being the person who caught him, and he had spent years simply expecting to be caught.

None of that mattered when his body left the saddle. Txewì responded before I had finished the thought — that is the beauty of the tsaheylu, the bond, the neural thread between rider and ikran: she felt it in me before my body had fully committed, and she banked hard, and we were dropping, and the wind was a wall and the cliff face was a blur and I was completely, catastrophically, irrevocably doing this again —

I caught him by the arm. His weight nearly took us both sideways. Txewì screamed her displeasure but held — she was stronger than she looked, my furious little shadow — and I had Neteyam's wrist in both hands, my grip bone-white, his face tilted up toward mine from below, expression cycling through terror and shock and then something softer and more dangerous that I did not want to look at directly.

We landed hard on a lower outcropping. Tumbling, both of us, a graceless sprawl of limbs and bruises, and then stillness, and then Pandora's wind cutting across the cliff face and the distant sound of the training group above us erupting into noise. I sat up first. My hands were shaking. I pressed them against my thighs so he would not see.

Neteyam pushed himself upright slowly, one hand against the rock, and turned to look at me. He was breathing hard. There was a scrape across his cheekbone that would bruise beautifully by morning, and his eyes — those impossible amber eyes that I had spent years carefully not memorizing — were fixed on me with an expression I could not read and did not try to. I stood. I brushed the dust from my knees. I called Txewì down with a small sound from the back of my throat.

Don't thank me.

He blinked.

Just — don't. I wasn't thinking. It was a reflex. It doesn't mean anything.

And I climbed back onto Txewì before he could find his words, and I flew back up to the cliff, and I did not look back, and that was my first mistake. Because the second time you save someone, they stop being a stranger. And the moment they stop being a stranger, everything else becomes possible.

He started following me three days later.

Not literally, or not at first — he was too proud for that, too aware of his own dignity, too much his father's son. But in the way that mattered: the way the world suddenly rearranged itself so that Neteyam was always near the water source when I went to fill my vessel in the morning. Always at the communal fire when I passed it at dusk. Always somehow in the sightline, always angled toward me, always with that particular look on his face of someone who has decided something and is waiting for the right moment to say it.

I refused to give him the moment. I became very interested in the other side of any room he was in. I developed an elaborate system of alternate routes through the village. I was polite — I was always polite, I had manners, my mother had raised me properly — but I was polite the way a closed door is polite: present, visible, absolutely not opening.

I knew what I was doing. I knew it was unkind. I also knew what happened if I let him in, and that knowledge sat in my chest like stone, and it was heavier than any guilt. I'd rather be cold than get hurt once again.

The first time he actually managed to speak to me was at the morning weapons training. We were paired by the instructor — not fate, not Eywa, just alphabetical assignment, I told myself very firmly — and Neteyam held out a practice staff to me with both hands and said:

I've been trying to find a way to thank you properly. For the cliff.

You don't need to.

I want to.

Then consider it done, i who you owe your life, releases you, now are we sparring or not?

He stared at me for a beat too long. Then he raised his staff. I beat him in four moves — not because I was better, though I was faster — but because he was distracted, and I was not going to be the one who was distracted, not in this lifetime, not ever again. He came back to training the next day looking determined. I pretended not to notice.

The second time: two weeks later, at the weavers' gathering near the eastern roots. I was helping my aunt with the pxorna' leaf work when he appeared beside me, crouching down in the way that tall people do when they want to seem less imposing, and he set a small bundle on the ground between us.

I looked at it. Then at him. Then back at it. It was smoked meat — wrapped in the good leaves, tied with the blue-striped reed that people use for gifts.

My mother showed me how to smoke it the right way. I asked her three times until I got it. She said if I was going to do it, I should do it properly.

He said this with the careful casualness of someone who has rehearsed the casual. Something in my chest moved, the tiniest fraction, like a root shifting in soil. I pressed it back down. Stop it me, remember how

You didn't have to.

I wanted to. You keep saying I don't have to do things. I want to. There's a difference.

Irayo.

I took the bundle. I did not smile. He watched me not smile for a moment, and something shifted in his expression — not hurt exactly, more like puzzlement, the puzzlement of a person who is used to being smiled at and has suddenly discovered that not everyone will do it just because he exists. Good, I thought. Learn that lesson now. It'll save us both. But that night I ate the smoked meat alone by the roots and it was, despite everything, the best thing I had eaten in weeks, and I hated him a little for that too.

The third time: he found me during the night-bloom watching — that hour just after second dark when the floor plants open their light and the whole forest breathes in color, violet and gold and the deep soft green of Eywa's memory. I had come alone deliberately, because alone was safe, because alone meant no one could get close enough to matter. He sat down next to me without being invited.

We sat in silence for a long time. The light moved around us, slow and indifferent, beautiful the way only things that do not know they are beautiful can be.

You don't talk much.

I talk plenty.

Not to me.

I'm talking to you now.

Barely.

Another silence. The forest breathed. A small luminescent creature moved through the roots nearby, leaving a trail of gold.

Why don't you like me?

I turned to look at him then. Twelve-year-old Neteyam, asking me with perfect earnest directness why I didn't like him, in the same tone someone might ask why the sky is a certain color — curious, a little wounded, entirely genuine. And the answer, the real answer, the one I was carrying in my chest like a second skeleton, was: because I know exactly how much I will like you and I cannot survive it again, is because i know how much you'll hurt me in the future

Instead I said:

I don't dislike you.

That's not the same thing.

No. It isn't.

He looked at me for a long moment, and I kept my face very still, very neutral, the way I had learned to keep it when everything underneath was anything but. Then he looked back at the night-bloom, and after a while he said, quietly, almost to himself:

"I'll figure it out."

Please don't, I thought. Please, please don't.

Two years.

I need you to understand what two years feels like when you are fighting yourself. When the enemy is not outside but somewhere between your ribs, that treacherous, warm, inexhaustible thing that keeps reaching toward someone despite every instruction you give it. I had the advantage of memory — I knew the ending, I had lived it, I had died in it — and still. Still.

He grew. We both did. The clan's children became the clan's young warriors, and time moved the way time moves on Pandora: by seasons and ceremonies and the slow patient turning of Eywa's light. I grew taller and quieter and more careful. Neteyam grew into something I could not afford to look at directly, the way you cannot look directly at certain things without being changed by them.

He never stopped. That was the part I had not prepared for. In my previous life — in the life I had lived and lost — I had always been the pursuer. I had been the one who orbited, who reached, who kept showing up. I had never considered what it would feel like to be the one pursued. I had never considered that it would feel like this: simultaneously the most fortifying and most devastating thing I had ever experienced.

"Every time Neteyam chose me deliberately — not out of habit, not out of history, just because he had decided to — a small piece of my carefully constructed wall turned to sand."

He brought me things he had learned. A new way to read wind direction before a hunt. A herb the elders used for headaches that grew near the second waterfall. He shared food without ceremony, without making it a moment, with the easy naturalness of someone who simply did not think twice about offering what he had. He argued with me — genuinely argued, the way you argue with someone whose opinion you respect, not to dismiss but to engage — and when I was right, he said so, and when he was right, he did not gloat. He was becoming, in the way water becomes ice, in the way the green thing becomes the ancient tree, the person I had always somehow believed he was underneath all the damage he would do to me.

Stop it, I told myself, daily, sometimes hourly. You know how this ends. You were there. You felt it. You died with it in your chest. Stop. But my hands had stopped shaking around him. And I had stopped choosing the alternate routes. And sometimes — not always, but sometimes — when he said something that cut straight through to the honest, funny, unexpectedly tender part of him, I forgot for whole seconds at a time to be afraid.

I was melting.

I hated it. I was melting and I hated it and I was still, stubbornly, catastrophically, melting.

He found me near the eastern path at midday — the lazy, gold-heavy hour when most of the clan was resting through the heat — and he fell into step beside me the way he had learned to do, easy, unannounced, as if proximity to me was simply where he was supposed to be.

I was fourteen. He was fourteen. We had been doing this complicated, unspoken, exhausting dance for two years and I was tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.

Come to the falls with me.

Not a question. He had learned that questions gave me space to construct refusals.

No.

Why not?

I have things to do.

You don't. I've been watching you the whole afternoon. You have nothing to do.

You've been watching my afternoon?

That's not the point —

That is absolutely the point, that's slightly alarming —

_____. Come to the falls. It's hot. The water is cold. We can swim and not talk about anything important and it will be a good afternoon. That is all I am offering.

He said it with such straightforward, uncomplicated sincerity that the refusal I had ready just — sat there in my throat, useless. This was the problem. This was always the problem. He never asked for too much. He never reached for the dramatic gesture or the loud declaration. He just kept asking for small things, ordinary things, afternoons and conversations and the occasional shared meal, and those small things were so much more dangerous than anything grand would have been, because I could have rejected grand, I had armor for grand — but ordinary kindness, ordinary presence, ordinary him —

I said no, Neteyam.

He went still. Something shifted in his face — the particular expression of a person who has reached the very end of their patience and discovered, to their own surprise, that there is nothing left on the other side of it. Two years, I realized distantly. Two years of this, and the easy, warm, endlessly patient Neteyam had apparently found his limit.

Kehe. No. We're not doing this again.

Doing what again —

This. This exact thing. Where I try, and you find a reason, and I accept the reason because I don't want to push you, and then tomorrow we start over like nothing happened. I've been doing this for two years, _____. Two years.

Nobody asked you to.

I know! I know nobody asked me to, I chose to, because I wanted — because I —

He stopped. Pressed his mouth shut. His jaw was tight. I watched him gather himself the way I had watched him gather himself a hundred times at weapons training, that same controlled breath, that same deliberate stillness before the strike.

What did I do?

Nothing. You didn't do anything.

Then why? Why do you look at me sometimes like I've already hurt you? I have never done anything to you. I saved your name in the training rankings when the instructor miscounted. I went out of my way — deliberately, multiple times — to be someone worth knowing. And you look at me like I'm something you're bracing against. Like I'm a coming storm.

The accuracy of it hit me somewhere in the solar plexus, that specific truth that lands not because it's cruel but because it's exact.

You're not. I don't — I don't see you that way.

Then tell me what I'm missing. Because from where I stand I am doing everything right and you are treating me like I've already done something unforgivable, and I don't know what it is, and not knowing is starting to make me —

It's nothing. Drop it.

It is not nothing —

Drop it, Neteyam!

I won't! For once in two years I am not going to let you shut this down with a look and a wall and whatever armor you put on in the morning before anyone can see you properly! I am fourteen, I am not stupid, and I know — I know — that something is happening here that you are refusing to name, and I am so —

He dragged a hand over his face. His voice, when it came back, was quieter. Rougher.

I'm so tired of guessing, _____. I'm tired of trying to earn something from you that you've already decided I'm not allowed to have. It's not fair. I haven't done anything wrong.

The words landed and stayed. I felt them settle against my ribs like stones. He hasn't done anything wrong. Not yet. Not in this life. But he will.

He will look at me one day with that same open, earnest face and he will say: I would never like you that way, and you will feel every single one of these moments turn to ash in your hands, every smoked-meat gift and night-bloom silence and warm afternoon he tried to offer me, all of it ash, and then i will die with it.

And if i let him in now, when it happens — and it will happen, because Eywa is not merciful and fate does not change because i beg it to — it will be so much worse. Because now i will have had two years of mornings and conversations and him being exactly this, and then it will be taken, and you will not survive it a second time.

I looked at him. At the boy who had not yet become the thing I needed protection from. At the face I was trying — still trying, desperately, with everything I had — not to love.

You're right.

He blinked, surprised by the agreement.

You haven't done anything wrong. And I'm — I'm sorry. For making you feel like you had. That wasn't fair.

Then tell me what's actually happening. I can handle it. Whatever it is.

I looked at him for a moment longer. At the genuine, infuriating certainty in his face that he could handle it, whatever it was, the absolute confidence of someone who had never been handed something they couldn't carry. You can't, I thought. Not this. Nobody could carry this.

I have to go.

_____ —

I was already walking. I could hear him behind me — not following, just there, the way he was always just there, the particular frustrated quality of his stillness pressing against the back of my neck.

Running away is not the same as being strong, you know. You can call it whatever you want. It's still running.

I kept walking. My eyes were burning. I pressed the heels of my palms against them, hard, the way you press against something to stop the bleeding, and I walked faster, and the forest swallowed me the way it always does — without judgment, without hesitation, completely — and the sound of him fell away behind me.

He was right. I was running. But the thing he didn't understand — the thing no one living in the present can ever understand about someone who has already seen the future — is that sometimes running is the only honest thing left. Sometimes the bravest act is knowing exactly where the cliff ends and refusing to walk toward it anyway.

Sometimes the battle isn't with the person in front of you. Sometimes it's with the part of yourself that, despite everything, despite the memory of the fall, despite the hydraulic gun and the white-dark and the dying — that part of you that is watching your own feet slow down in the forest, and wondering, just for a second, what would happen if you turned around. I didn't turn around. I kept walking.

But my feet slowed. Just slightly. Just enough to feel the warmth of the path behind me, the shape of everything I was choosing to leave, the particular quality of the air near someone you have spent two years pretending not to know by heart.

And Eywa — quiet, watching, absolutely unmoved by my preferences — said nothing at all.

Pairings neteyam x omatikaya!female reader

Context: Reader returns back in time before Neteyam hurt her to the point of oblivion. In the past, the reader pines over Neteyam and does everything for him, only to find out he likes someone else and gets hurt. Now, knowing what will happen, she tries to move away from Neteyam — but fate is cruel and keeps pairing them together. Will this love hit or will it be another miss?

Author: I've been thinking of creating this type of story but forgot at someone point. So basically here neteyam hurts reader so much, reader dies while fighting because in their perspective fate is cruel. And then when they opened their eyes, the turned back in time, back before she liked him. So around age 12.

Past:

There is an old saying among the Omatikaya — that Eywa does not give more love than the heart can hold. The tsaheylu, the bond, the sacred thread between all living things. I used to believe that. You used to think it was the most beautiful truth on all of Pandora.

Now I think it is the cruelest lie ever spoken into the roots of Kelutral.Because what Eywa never warned me about was this: you could give and give and give until there was nothing left — until the hollow of your chest became an echo chamber — and still, still, the one you had given everything to would look right through you.

They called us the Wonder Twins.

Neteyam and you. You and Neteyam. Two names that had been tangled together since childhood, since the day he had pulled you out of the river current when you were both too small and too reckless, since the day you had thrown yourself between him and a palulukan with nothing but a sharpened stick and the most foolish courage the forest had ever seen. You had saved each other. You had been each other's uturu — shelter, shadow, safe place. That was what you told yourself. That was the story you wore like a second skin.

The others had a different name for it. They called you master and dog. And you, idiot that you were, let that name sit in the air like smoke, never sharp enough to cut through it, because Neteyam — beautiful, beloved Neteyam — never said a word against it. Never once.

You saw the red flag. You saw it clearly, the way you see a ikran circling before a storm. You saw it and you smiled and you looked the other way, because that is what people do when love has made a fool of them. You put on your rose-tinted glasses and you called it loyalty and you called it friendship and you refused — absolutely refused — to call it what it was.

"You loved him. Quietly. Completely. The way the forest loves rain — desperately, even when the rain does not notice the forest at all."

Everyone knew. Every Omatikaya who glanced your way, every child who saw you trail after Neteyam with his forgotten water skin or his mended bow, every elder who watched you laugh too loudly at his jokes and go quiet when another girl spoke his name. Everyone knew.

Everyone except him. Or perhaps that, too, was a lie you told yourself.

It was your friendversary — the word was ridiculous, you had invented it at twelve years old and now at seventeen it still stuck, the way all embarrassing traditions stick. Every year on this day, without fail: a picnic at the ridge overlooking the bioluminescent valley, the one that glowed violet and gold at dusk. Every year you brought the food. Every year he brought the stories. Every year the two of you stayed until Pandora's sky turned the color of Eywa's light and you almost, almost said what was sitting like a stone behind your teeth.

You had spent three days preparing this one.

Three days gathering hamgukxo fruit, smoking the meat the way he liked it, weaving a small mat from pxorna' leaves the way your mother had taught you. You had even braided small blue atokirina' seeds into the wrapping — seeds of Eywa, for luck, for meaning, for all the things you could not say out loud.

You waited at the ridge. You waited as the sky shifted from gold to violet. You waited as the valley below erupted into its nightly glow, a thousand lights beneath you like stars had fallen and decided to stay.

You waited until it was night. He was not coming. The walk back through the forest was the loneliest thing you had ever done. You held the basket against your chest like it was something broken. The atokirina' seeds had already begun to lose their glow, the way all hopeful things do when the moment passes.

And then you heard it. Laughter. His laughter — that easy, open sound, the one you had memorized without meaning to, the one that had lived rent-free in the center of your chest for years. You turned, and there he was at the edge of the village path, standing beneath a low-hanging branch strung with communal lights, and he was glowing with it, with whatever was being said, with whoever was saying it.

She was beautiful. Of course she was. Tall, with the kind of stillness that made her look carved from the Kelutral itself. Her name was Säre, and she was everything delicate and lovely, and she was looking at Neteyam like he was something worth looking at.

And he — he was looking back. Something in you went very quiet. Then something else took over, something hot and blinding and entirely outside of your control, because before you had finished the thought you were already moving, already crossing the distance between you in long strides, and then your hand had connected with his shoulder in a sharp slap — not hard enough to hurt, but hard enough to mean something.

You ghosted me.

My voice came out strange. Too flat. Too careful. I could feel the tears threatening at the back of my throat, which only made me angrier, because i refused — i refused — to cry in front of Säre, in front of anyone, in front of him.

Neteyam blinked. The easy smile faltered. He looked at me, then at the basket still clutched to my chest, and you watched the moment of recognition cross his face — slow, sluggish, arriving the way all inconvenient things arrive, far too late.

_____. I — irayo, I'm sorry, I forgot, I was busy show—

Busy.

The word fell out of my mouth like something dead.

You were busy. On our friendversary. You forgot. After three days — Neteyam, I spent three days on this — I was up there for hours. I sat on that ridge until the whole valley lit up and there was nobody there. There was nobody there and I sat there like a skxawng waiting for you —

My voice cracked on the last word. I hated it. I hated myself f for it. I pressed on.

I said I was sorry — it wasn't intentional, things just came up, time got away from me, Säre needed someone to show her the east trails and I was the closest —

She needed someone. And I needed my friend. And you chose —

It's not a competition, _____, you're being dramatic —

Dramatic. I'm being dramatic. Right. Because sitting alone on a cliff for four hours waiting for someone who didn't care enough to send even a word — not a word, Neteyam, not a runner, nothing — that's dramatic.

You could have left! No one forced you to wait!

You did. You and five years of this thing we built, this stupid, wonderful thing, this —

I stopped. I pressed my mouth shut. Because i was about to say it. I were about to say the words that had been living at the back of my teeth for years and the timing was wrong, everything was wrong, Säre was right there watching with wide careful eyes and i was shaking and i hated all of it.

This what? What are you even saying? You act like missing one afternoon is the end of the world —

It's not just one afternoon and you know that. It's been — it's every time, Neteyam. Every time something shinier comes along, I'm the one left standing in the rain. I'm always the one left standing.

A beat. He looked at me. Something shifted in his expression — something that might have been guilt, might have been pity, might have been something else entirely — and whatever it was, it made it worse.

_____ — you're my friend. But you can't — you can't act like you have some claim on all of my time. That's not what this is. That's not what we are.

I know exactly what we are. I've always known what we are.

Then act like it! Because right now you're acting like — like you think this is something else. Like you think I owe you something, i don't owe you anything because we are just friends, we aren't lovers, i am not yours, and I don't, _____, I don't owe you —

Don't.

What do you want from me? What is it that you actually want? Because you're standing here crying over a picnic and it's more than a picnic, I can see that, so what is it? What are you not saying? Do you not trust me? is that it?!

The silence between was enormous. It had weight. It had texture. It was the kind of silence that precedes something irreversible — the held breath before the wave breaks, before the arrow leaves the bow, before the world splits cleanly into before and after. I looked at him. Really looked. At the face i had memorized so thoroughly it lived behind my eyes, at the boy i had woven into every daydream for years, at the person who had somehow never once, not once, turned that same careful attention back toward you.

And then i told him. Not in words. i didn't have to. It was in my face, in the way my composure finally cracked, in the way i couldn't hold his gaze without everything showing. And Neteyam — Neteyam who was perceptive, Neteyam who read people like maps — Neteyam understood. And the thing that broke me was not cruelty. It was not anger. It was the way his face went careful and distant, the way i had watched him put a wall up brick by brick right in front of me.

_____. I don't — I don't feel that way about you. I never have. You're my tsmuke. My sister in everything but blood. That's what you are to me. That's what you've always been. You are my closest friend and i would do everything for you. But that's about it.

Sister. Sister.

And if you've been carrying this, then — then I'm sorry. I truly am. But I think you know, somewhere, that this was never going to be — I mean — look at you and look at me, _____. It's not like you're my — it's not like you could ever be my —

Stop.

I'm trying to be honest with you —

You're trying to make yourself feel better about saying something horrible. You know what? Don't. I understand. Loud and clear. I've understood for a long time.

_____ —

You know what they call me? When you're not around? When you're off showing Säre the east trails and forgetting about your tsmuke? They call me your dog. And the worst part — the worst part — is that they weren't wrong. I was just too stupid to see....

That's not fair —

None of this is fair! None of it! I have been there for you, Neteyam. Every single time. I carried you when you were sick, I covered for you when you were in trouble, I sat on that ridge tonight with Eywa-blessed food and seeds in the wrapping because I care about you, I have always cared about you, and you stood me up for someone you met three weeks ago —

That is not what happened —

Then what happened? Because from where I'm standing, it looks very simple. I matter less. I have always mattered less. And I just —

My voice gave out. I pressed the heel of my hand against my mouth. I would not cry. I would not.

_____, listen to me, you're upset, you're not thinking —

I am the clearest I have been in years.

You're being irrational. I said I was sorry. What more do you want me to say? It's not like you're my girlfriend, _____. It's not like that would ever happen. I would never like you that way. I need you to understand that.

There it was. Clean and simple and final, the way only the truest wounds are. I would never like you that way.

I stood there for a moment, and the night sounds of Pandora continued around me — the soft bioluminescent hum of the ground, the distant call of something in the canopy, the world in its indifferent, beautiful fullness — and i felt it, the thing i had been holding together for years, crumble. Not with sound. Not with drama. Just quietly, like a structure finally admitting the damage that had always been there.

Kehe. I understand.

And then i walked away. And i kept walking.

The raid came before dawn. The sky-people and their machines, cutting through Pandora's atmosphere like blades through cloth, the sounds of ikran screaming and the crack of weapons fire and the voices of the clan rising in the old war-cry. I had been awake already — I had not slept — and when the alarm went through the village like a pulse through a root, I were already moving toward the weapons without thinking.

I had always been a good fighter. That, at least, had never been in question. The warrior who handed me myrbow did not look at my face. Just as well. I wasn't sure what was on it.

There is a kind of liberation in caring nothing for your own life. I moved through the battle like water — easy, inevitable, completely without fear.

I fought. I fought with everything I had, which was considerable, and I fought with nothing to lose, which made me dangerous. Around me, the Omatikaya were holding their own. I heard Neteyam's voice somewhere to my left calling orders, that same voice that had hours ago dismantled me piece by piece, and something in my chest went cold and clean.

I had stopped caring whether i came back from this. It was not a decision. It was an absence — the absence of the self-preservation that has to be fed by something worth preserving for. I stepped forward when others stepped back. I drew fire to myself when cover was needed. The machine — the hydraulic gun, ugly and enormous — swung toward me, and i watched it come, and thought, with perfect clarity: So this is how Eywa ends it.

I heard someone shout my name. Maybe Neteyam. Maybe no one. The sound was already very far away. The shot took in the chest.

The world went white. Then dark. Then the sensation of falling, not forward but inward, down through some impossible distance, through the whole weight of my body — through the love and the grief and the waiting and the wasted seeds in the picnic basket — and Eywa's network received me in its roots the way the earth receives everything in the end: without judgment, without hesitation, completely.

I thought, last of all: at least it's quiet now.

Then i opened your eyes. The light was wrong. Too soft. Too gold. Morning on Pandora, the particular color of it when the canopy is still thick and young and the whole world smells of wet earth and growing things. My hands — i looked at my hands — they were smaller.

The scar on my left forearm from the palulukan incident was gone. I sat up slowly, in a sleeping space you recognized. Your sleeping space, at twelve, before the family moved to the main side of the village. The sounds around me were the sounds of morning, of the clan waking, of children and adults and the distant rhythm of life.

I pressed my hand flat over my heart. It was beating. Steady and persistent and cruel in its continuity. Eywa.

I closed my eyes.

I knew exactly where i was. I knew exactly when. I knew what was ahead — the years of it, the long slow accumulation of a love that would eat me from the inside and leave me standing on a ridge alone in the dark — and i thought, with the bone-deep exhaustion of someone who has already lived through the ending: Not again.

But the morning was already moving. Pandora was already turning. Somewhere out there, twelve-year-old Neteyam was waking up with no idea what he had done, because he hadn't done it yet, and Eywa — Eywa who is supposed to be the mother of all things, who is supposed to balance and hold and sustain — had sent you back anyway. Perhaps as punishment. Perhaps as mercy. Perhaps, most unbearably, as a second chance.

I opened your eyes. I swung your legs over the side of the sleeping place .I pressed your feet against the warm living floor of the Kelutral and breathed. This time, will be different.

The village was waking up around me. Somewhere nearby, a familiar laugh rang out — easy and bright and completely unknowing, the laugh of a boy who had not yet learned what he would do to you, because in this timeline, he had not done it yet. I stood up. I did not look toward the sound. For the first time in what felt like a lifetime — and was, in all the ways that mattered — I looked the other way.

—and the loser has to fall

Context: Arranged to be married since a young age, the reader tries to be perfect in order to fit the status of "The Golden Boy's Wife." She changes her whole personality and does everything for Neteyam, yet she still cannot win his heart. Will their love bloom, or will Neteyam give his heart to another?

Author's Note: Have you ever watched Mamma Mia? There is a moment when— Meryl Streep sings: "The winner takes it all, the loser has to fall." That very verse made me think. About what it means to be groomed for perfection before you even understand what perfection costs. What happens when you pour your entire childhood — every lesson, every sacrifice, every quiet tear under Eywa's canopy — into becoming worthy of someone who never asked you to? Will a love like that ever bloom? Or will it simply... wither in the dark, bioluminescent and unseen?

Warning: emotional pain, heartbreak, rejection, harsh words, arranged marriage, and childhood sacrifices.

Life would always play the silliest, most vicious little tricks on you. Even the ones you never deserved. Even the ones that dressed themselves up in fate and called it Eywa's will. Mine arrived the moment I was born — wrapped in the scent of night-blooming flowers and the glow of a Kelutral branch that had not lit up like that in living memory.

His name was Neteyam. Son of Toruk Makto. Son of the Olo'eyktan. First-born of the clan's most sacred lineage. And, according to two mothers standing beneath the Tree of Voices while the whole of Pandora seemed to hold its breath — my intended.

Our mothers had spoken of it long before either of us could walk. When we were both newborns, it is said that the Hometree's luminescent roots flared gold and teal in a pattern that no elder could explain. Mo'at herself had pressed a wrinkled hand to the bark and whispered something none of them were permitted to repeat. My mother took it as a sign. His mother — the fierce, war-painted Neytiri — had tilted her head, studied my sleeping face in the woven cradle, and said nothing. Which, my mother always insisted, was its own kind of agreement.

Neteyam, when he was old enough to understand, apparently did not share his mother's silence. He listened — because he was disciplined and the clan's golden son obeyed — but he listened the way rain listens to a drought. Politely. Without wanting to.

I did not know any of this the first time I truly met him, face to face, when we were both seven years old and the forest around the Omaticaya village smelled like rain and warm earth. I only knew that he was tall for his age. That his queue was already neatly braided the way older warriors wore theirs. That he frowned — not cruelly, but with the furrowed brow of someone deeply inconvenienced by the universe — and that his eyes, when they finally landed on me, were enormous and amber-gold and entirely unimpressed. My face went the color of a Pandoran sunrise. Warm and uncontrolled.

I know what you are thinking. How could you fall for a boy who did not do a single remarkable thing? Who stood there frowning at the dirt like it had personally offended him? Well. I have always had a soft heart for beautiful, unattainable things, and ofc my heart is extra weak when your that cute. My mother says I inherited it directly from her. She married my father because he looked unbearably handsome standing at the edge of a thanator hunt and did not flinch. It seems, i fell for a boy because he frowned and the world still bent around him like he was the center of gravity. Eywa forgive me. I have my work cut out for me.

Years passed the way years do when you are trying to become something you were not entirely born as. I trained. God, did I train.

While other Na'vi children were still learning to braid their queues and chase each other through the bioluminescent undergrowth at dusk — still falling out of trees and laughing about it, still pressing their small palms to the Tree of Voices just to feel the warmth without needing to understand it — I was already seated, spine straight, in a circle of the clan's eldest women before the morning mist had finished lifting from the forest floor.

I was eight years old the first time I was corrected for sitting incorrectly. Eight. I had crossed my legs in the way that felt natural, that every child sits when they are tired and the ground is soft and there is no particular reason to perform. Elder Ralu had looked at me without breaking her own posture and said, quietly and without cruelty, that the intended of the first son does not sit like she is waiting for nothing. She does not slouch. She does not fidget. She does not exist casually. I spent the next three hours learning how to fold my legs in a way that communicated presence, not comfort. By the time I was allowed to stand, both of my feet had gone numb and I had not yet said a single word.

That was the first lesson. There were hundreds more. I learned to weave ceremonial garlands — not quickly, but correctly, which meant a single crooked petal could undo a morning's work and earn nothing more than a calm instruction to begin again. I learned to walk with a clay vessel of water balanced on my head, first on flat ground, then on the uneven roots that snaked across the village paths, then on the narrow walkways that connected the Hometree's higher platforms, where the drop below was not something you wanted to think about. I spilled. I spilled many times. I was told to fill the vessel again and try once more, and I did, because I had no other choice available to me.

I learned the herbs. Which roots reduced fever. Which leaves, when pressed into a paste, drew infection from a wound. Which seeds should never be combined. Which bark the Tsahik preferred for the morning rituals and which was reserved for ceremony only, and the difference between those two things was not written anywhere — it was simply known, and therefore I had to know it too. I memorized it all. I recited it in my sleep. There were nights my mother would find me murmuring plant names into my pillow and she would smooth my hair back and say nothing, which was the kindest and saddest thing she ever did for me.

I learned how to speak in the presence of elders — not too softly, which reads as hiding, and not too clearly, which reads as performing. The correct pitch was somewhere between the two, as though you had an opinion you were confident in but were gracious enough not to impose. It took months before I found that register naturally. Before that, I practiced in front of still water, watching my own reflection make adjustments that I could not feel from the inside.

I learned the songs. All of them. The harvest songs that require four-part harmony and a specific tonal drop on the third verse that has no written notation — it must be felt. The mourning songs that the women carry when a warrior does not return from the hunt, low and circular, designed to pull grief out of the chest before it calcifies. The songs for iknimaya, for first bonds, for the naming of newborns, for the planting of the season's first seeds. I learned every one. My voice was not exceptional — it was adequate — and adequate, I was told, is its own kind of acceptable as long as everything else compensates.

I learned to embroider. The patterns that encode a Na'vi woman's lineage in thread — her grandmother's clan, her mother's role, the sacred name given to her at birth and the one she will carry after her bonding. I learned to do it without pricking my fingers, which is far harder than it sounds, and then I learned to do it in low light, and then I learned to do it while holding a conversation, which is the real skill, the one that no one names out loud but everyone expects.

I gave up the Tree of Voices. Not all at once — that would have been a grief I could have named and mourned properly. It happened gradually, in the way that important things are often lost: an afternoon replaced by a fitting, a morning stolen by a ceremony rehearsal, a whole season gone before I noticed that I could no longer remember the last time I had pressed my queue to the roots and simply listened. The other children went. I heard them talking about what they heard there — ancestor voices, old songs, something that felt like being held by the whole history of the clan. I smiled when they described it. I did not tell them that I had stopped going. It seemed like something worth being ashamed of, though I was not entirely sure why.

I gave up the floating rocks. The reckless, breathless joy of climbing them on a dare, of hanging off a ledge while the valley spooled green and impossible below you, of screaming just because the sky was that enormous and you were alive inside it. I was told once, gently but clearly, that the intended of the first son does not take unnecessary risks with her body. Her body belongs, in a sense, to the lineage she will carry. I understood this. I did not argue. I watched the other children from the platform's edge instead and practiced keeping my expression pleasant and still.

I gave up being seven in the way that seven is supposed to feel. I gave up ten, and twelve, and fourteen. Each age arrived and passed over me like a season that I had not quite been present for — I was always one step inside the next lesson, one correction behind the current expectation, one performance away from being ready.

There was one afternoon — I was twelve, I think, perhaps thirteen — that I keep returning to when I am trying to remember the exact moment I understood what this life was costing me.

I had been asked to serve at a small gathering in the Sully family's living space within the Hometree. Nothing ceremonial — simply a meal, a meeting of the clan mothers, the kind of quiet domestic occasion where an intended learns to move invisibly and usefully through a room. I had prepared for it. I had worn the right beadwork. I had practiced the correct way to present a vessel of food — two hands, a small inclination of the head, eye contact held for exactly the right duration before a modest glance downward.

And then I dropped it. Not dramatically. Not with a crash that shattered the gathering and drew every eye at once. It simply — slipped. The clay bowl turned in my fingers and hit the woven mat with a dull, definitive sound, and the contents scattered, and the smell of the food was suddenly too present in the quiet of the room, and every woman looked up.

I froze. I recovered quickly — bent, gathered, apologized in the right register, kept my voice level. But the heat in my face was uncontrollable, and the silence in the room had a particular texture, the kind that has an opinion in it.

It was Neytiri who spoke first.

Leave it. Stand up.

I stood. The bowl was still on the mat. My hands felt enormous.

You have been training for how long now? Four years?

Six, Ma Neytiri.

Six years. And you cannot carry a bowl across a room without losing it.

I — yes. I apologize. It will not—

Do not apologize to me. An apology is not a correction. Look at me.

I looked at her. Neytiri, who had ridden a Toruk. Who had fought the sky people in the dark of a burning Hometree. Who looked at me now with the flat, measuring gaze of someone who had very little patience for the performance of effort when effort itself was missing.

You are pretty. Everyone says so. The elders talk about your face, your posture, the way you hold yourself in ceremony. Very lovely. Very composed.

She paused. The other mothers had gone very still around us.

What is the point of being pretty when you fail your role?

The room did not react. The clan mothers looked at their hands, at the walls, at the space above my left shoulder. Nobody disagreed with her. Nobody said anything at all. I do not remember what I said in response. I think I said something measured and appropriate, because I had been trained to say measured and appropriate things, and by that point the training had gone deep enough that it activated even when the rest of me had gone completely blank. I cleaned the mat. I refilled the bowl from the cooking pot. I finished serving the meal without another mistake.

I did not cry until I was outside, around the curve of the Hometree's roots where the dark was thick enough to be private, and I pressed my back to the bark and breathed through it the way you breathe through something you cannot fix, long and deliberate, until it was small enough to carry again. I was twelve years old. And I understood, for the first time with my whole body rather than just my mind, that beauty was not the goal. Beauty was only the entrance fee. The goal was perfection, and perfection had no ceiling, and every time you believed you had reached it, the floor simply rose to meet you and the distance above remained exactly the same.

"What is the point of being pretty when you fail your role?"

I trained harder after that. I trained the way you train when fear has replaced ambition — not because you want to reach something, but because you cannot afford to fall short again. I trained until the bowl never slipped. Until my hands knew the weight of every vessel in the Sully household by memory. Until I could cross a room in any light, on any surface, carrying anything, and arrive at the other side looking as though nothing about it had cost me effort.

Eventually, I became precise. I became poised. I became — and the clan said this openly, as though it were a gift rather than a verdict — "The flower that attracts all." Every elder approved of me. Every ceremony I attended, eyes would follow. The mothers of unmated warriors would watch me pass and lean together to murmur. I had become, by every measurable standard of Omaticayan womanhood, the ideal.

What they did not say — what none of them ever said — was what it had taken. The twelve-year-old girl with her back against the bark. The years of sitting in classrooms of patience and refinement while her feet went numb. The mornings she had woken up already exhausted from the weight of the person she was required to be before she had fully finished becoming a person at all. They saw the flower. They did not ask about the roots.

Then the rumors started. They moved through the village the way whispers always do in a close clan — in glances, in pauses, in the sudden hush that falls when you walk into a gathering that was loud the moment before. I caught fragments. A name I did not recognize. A girl. A girl that Neteyam had been seen with at the edge of the forest canopy, away from the village paths, away from where the elders walked. Her name was Mhari.

The worst part was not the hearing of it. The worst part was the two seconds before I understood what I was hearing — when it was still just sounds, still just a name, still just a sentence without a shape — and how quickly that blankness curdpled into something I did not have a graceful word for. Not quite pain. Not quite rage. Something older and quieter than both. The feeling of having spent years building a house in someone else's name and arriving one morning to find the door already locked from the inside.

I had given up afternoons. I had given up the Tree of Voices. I had stood in a clan mother's gathering at twelve years old and swallowed Neytiri's words whole and trained harder because of them, because I believed that the harder I trained the more real this would become, the more he would see it — see me — and understand that I had chosen him, not just obeyed the arrangement, chosen him, over and over, every single day in every small sacrifice he never witnessed.

And he had been in the forest. With her. Laughing, presumably, the way people laugh when nothing is at stake. I had been so careful. I had been so unbearably careful. And it had not mattered at all.

I did not want to believe it. I am not, I told myself, a jealous creature. I had been raised to be gracious, to be composed. The perfect intended of the clan's first son does not run after rumors like a child chasing an ikran shadow.

But I was also, underneath every careful layer of training, still the seven-year-old girl who had gone red in the face over a frowning boy. And that girl — the one who had never been permitted to be unfinished, or useless, or simply young — she could not sit quietly and breathe. She was already on her feet. So I went to find him.

I found them at the edge of a mossy overlook not far from the village — a place where the bioluminescent fungi lit the ground in soft turquoise rings, the kind of spot that lovers chose precisely because it was beautiful and secluded and nobody who mattered would think to look there. Neteyam was there, leaning against a root as though the world owed him its ease. And beside him, laughing softly at something he had said — something small and private, the kind of thing you only say when you are completely comfortable — was a girl I did not know. Mhari.

She was lovely in the uncalculated way that things which have never been trained are lovely. Easy. Natural. Unaware of being watched in the way that I had not been unaware of anything since I was eight years old.

The sight hit me somewhere behind my sternum, in a place I had not known could hurt that particular way. Not a sharp pain. Something worse — a slow, spreading recognition, the way cold water rises. I had spent six years learning to be perfect for him, and he was here in the dark with a girl who had not tried at all.

I stepped forward. My voice came out far steadier than I deserved.

Neteyam. What is this?

He turned slowly. No startled guilt. No shame. Only that familiar, exhausted look — a boy braced for exactly this moment and deeply resentful of its arrival.

We are engaged. You understand that, yes? The whole village understands that. The elders understand that. What in Eywa's name are you doing out here with her — alone — where anyone could see you? Do you know the whispers already running through the clan? Do you have any idea what this looks like to the Tsahik, to your father—

Neteyam: Let go of my arm.

I'm not — I don't even have your arm, I'm just — Neteyam, talk to me. Please. Tell me this is nothing. Tell me I misunderstood. I will believe you. I want to believe you. Just say something that makes this make sense—

Neteyam: I am so tired.

...What?

Neteyam: I said I am tired. Of this. Of the engagement. Of watching you walk into every room like it's an audition. Of the way you speak to my mother's circle with that perfect, measured voice. Of the way you exist around me like you are always one step away from being graded. It is exhausting to be near you.

That one landed differently. Not like a blade — like something dropped from a great height, flattening everything underneath it on impact.

I am — I do that because — Neteyam, I was taught to—

Neteyam: I know you were taught to. That is the problem. Everything about you is taught. Every smile, every gesture, every word you choose. I look at you and I cannot find a single thing that is actually you. Do you even know who you are underneath all of it? Or did they train that out of you too?

That is not fair—

Neteyam: It is not about fair. It is about what is real. You are not real to me. You are a role. A very well-executed role. But I cannot — I will not spend my life standing next to a performance.

You think I don't feel things? You think I have stood beside you at every ceremony, learned everything I was asked to learn, become everything I was told to become — and felt nothing? I have felt everything. I have felt it for years and I had nowhere to put it because you never once—

Neteyam: Stop. I did not ask you to do any of that.

I did it for you—

Neteyam: You did it for an idea of me. There is a difference. You decided what I needed from a wife before you ever asked me a single question about what I actually wanted. You built your whole life around a version of me that I never agreed to be.

He said it so simply. Like it was obvious. Like it had always been obvious. Like I was the last one in the clan to understand something everyone else had long since stopped discussing.

Then tell me what you want. Tell me who Neteyam is and I will — I will learn that too, I will—

Neteyam: That is exactly what I mean. You will learn it. Like another lesson. Another thing to practice in front of still water until it looks convincing enough. Do you hear yourself?

What else am I supposed to say?! I don't know any other way — they didn't teach me any other way—

Neteyam: I know. And I am sorry for that. I genuinely am. But that is not a reason for me to pretend that what is between us is something it has never been.

There could be something. If you gave it time — if you just — Neteyam, we have barely spoken, how can you know that there is nothing when we have never—

Neteyam: Because every time I have looked at you, I have felt nothing. I have tried. I want you to know that — I have tried to feel what I was supposed to feel. I waited for it. And there was nothing. There was just a girl performing being my future and a weight in my chest that got heavier every season.

The bioluminescent fungi pulsed around us in their soft, indifferent turquoise. Mhari had not moved. She stood against the mossy rock with her eyes down, as though she understood that this moment was not hers and was trying very hard to take up less space in it.

And her? You feel something for her?

A pause. The kind that answers before the words do.

Neteyam: That is not what this conversation is about.

It is exactly what this conversation is about. Answer me. Look me in the face and answer me.

Neteyam: ...Yes.

One word. One syllable. And somehow it undid more than everything else combined — because everything else had been about the engagement, about the performance, about what I was or was not. But that yes was about something I could never have trained my way into. Something that simply existed between two people who had not been assigned to each other by a glowing tree and two mothers with opinions.

I gave up my childhood. Do you know that? I gave up climbing the floating rocks. I gave up the Tree of Voices. I gave up afternoons and laughter and being useless and young because someone told me that was how I would be worthy of you. I have bruises on my knees from kneeling on training mats for hours. I have memorized every herb in your mother's household. I have perfected a smile that doesn't reach my eyes because the reaching kind was called too eager. I did all of that. For you. And you stood in this forest and felt nothing.

Neteyam: I know. And I am—

Do not say you are sorry again. Do not say it.

He closed his mouth. The forest breathed around us — warm and bioluminescent and completely unconcerned. Somewhere above the canopy the floating mountains drifted, green and impossible and indifferent to every small human grief happening beneath them.

Neteyam: Do you even love me?

I—

Neteyam: Do not. Do not say it. That word, coming from you — it doesn't sound like love. It sounds like something you decided before you were old enough to decide anything. You do not love me. You love the version of me that would complete the story you were handed as a child. The golden boy. The first son. The ending your mothers planned. That is what you love. Not Neteyam. You have never even met Neteyam.

Then let me meet him. Let me — please, just—

Neteyam: It is too late for that.

How can it be too late? We haven't even—

Neteyam: Kehe. I am done. I am ending this engagement. I am sorry — truly, I am — but I will not say it again, since you have asked me not to. Do not follow me.

He walked away. Past the turquoise rings of glowing fungi. Past the moss, past the overlook, past the place where the floating mountains were just barely visible through the canopy — green and vast and silent. Mhari lifted her eyes to mine for exactly one second. Not unkind. Just honest. Then she followed him. And I stood there.

Alone under Pandora's sky. The bioluminescence pulsed around me, gentle and entirely uncaring, the way it always did. The way it would tomorrow, and the next day, and every day after that — because the forest does not register the specific weight of a girl standing in the dark realizing that the life she built has just been handed back to her, quietly and without ceremony, like something nobody wanted to keep.

I did not move for a long time. Not because I was dignified. Not because I was composed. But because every graceful thing I had ever learned — every step, every word, every carefully managed expression — had been arranged around the axis of him, and without that axis, I genuinely did not know which direction to face. The fungi pulsed. Pandora breathed. And somewhere in the warm dark of the forest, Eywa's network carried the weight of my grief into the roots, the way it had carried every grief before mine, without judgment and without answer.

My childhood was gone. I had handed it over willingly, in small pieces, every single day, like offerings pressed into soil — and the soil had taken everything and grown nothing in return.

I had not learned to play with the other young Na'vi the way they played — reckless and loud and beautifully present — because I had been too busy being prepared. I had not climbed the floating rocks for joy because I was told it was unbecoming of the first son's intended. I had not sat with my queue unbraided and my feet in the river, listening to nothing in particular, simply existing in the uncomplicated way that children are supposed to exist before someone assigns them a purpose. There was always another lesson. Another refinement. Another layer of polish to apply to a surface that nobody was ever going to look at the way I needed them to.

I had sat at the roots of the Tree of Voices not to listen to my ancestors — not to feel that warm, enormous hum of belonging that the other children described — but to rehearse. To practice what a perfect daughter-in-law would say in every imaginable social situation. I had approached Eywa not as a child running home, but as a student in a lesson she could never afford to fail. I had turned even the sacred into curriculum.

And now he stood in a bioluminescent clearing with a girl who laughed without measuring the sound, and he looked at her with something open and unguarded in his face — something I had spent years trying to earn and had never once been given — and I understood with the kind of clarity that only arrives when it is already too late that no amount of training, no degree of perfection, no sacrifice made quietly in the dark had ever been going to change what he did not feel.

You cannot train someone into loving you. I wish someone had told me that when I was eight years old, sitting with numb feet, learning how to fold my legs correctly. I wish someone had told me that at all.

The crying, when it came, was not elegant. There was nothing practiced about it, nothing composed, nothing that resembled the measured, appropriate display of emotion I had been taught to produce when grief was socially expected. It was the other kind. The kind that bends you. That starts somewhere deep in the chest and moves upward without asking permission, that takes your breath and your posture and every careful thing you have constructed and dismantles them simultaneously. I knelt on the moss and I pressed both palms flat against the forest floor — against the soft glow of Pandora pulsing beneath my skin — and I cried so hard my shoulders shook.

I cried for the afternoons. For the floating rocks. For the Tree of Voices and every ancestor I had never properly listened to because I was too busy rehearsing how to speak to the living. I cried for the twelve-year-old girl who had stood in a clan mother's gathering with a dropped bowl and absorbed Neytiri's words and turned them into fuel, who had believed — genuinely, completely, with her whole small heart believed — that if she tried hard enough, the trying itself would become a language he could hear.

I cried for the seven-year-old who had gone red in the face over a frowning boy and decided, in that ridiculous, tender, irreversible moment, that he was worth becoming someone new for.

He was not worth it. Or — no. That is not right either, and I have never been able to lie convincingly, not even to myself. He was worth it. He was. That was the cruelest part. He was worth every bit of it. He simply did not want it.

Was all of it not proof? Were years of silent devotion not love made visible? Or was I simply a shadow — not even a shadow of him,

but a shadow of someone who had never existed at all?

Somewhere far above me, through the canopy, the stars of a sky that was not Earth's burned in colors that had no names in any human language. I thought about what Mo'at had always said — that Eywa does not give signs without reason. That the bond of tsaheylu cannot be faked. That what is real will endure.

I had built something real. I had built it for years, brick by brick, lesson by lesson, sacrifice by sacrifice. I had believed in it with the whole weight of my childhood, with the entirety of everything I had been willing to give, and I had given so much. I had given until there was very little of me left that had not been shaped by the giving.

And it had endured for no one. It had stood perfect and untouched and entirely unwanted, like an altar built in a temple that nobody visited. The Eywa network hummed through the roots under my palms — ancient and enormous and full of every grief any Na'vi heart had ever pressed into the soil. I wondered if it felt mine. I wondered if it carried the weight of it the way it was supposed to. I wondered if, somewhere in the vast living archive of the forest, there was a record of a girl who tried too hard for too long and was not thanked for it.

And then something shifted, quietly, in the deepest part of my chest. Not healing — nothing so clean as that. Something more like a door closing. A decision made in the marrow before the mind has finished catching up.

What is the point of loving someone who does not even see your worth?

The trees bioluminesced above me. The fungi pulsed below. And for the first time in my life — the very first time, without an audience, without a lesson, without a purpose — I stopped performing. I simply cried, screamed wondering why such love even exist? why i can't have that one thing that i wanted, why loving someone must hurt so much. Until there was nothing left to cry with. Until I was emptied out completely, light and hollow and strangely, terribly clear. And then, when the crying was done, I made the only decision that had ever been entirely my own.

I went back to the village. I walked the path I had walked a thousand times, the one I knew so well I could have navigated it in darkness — and I did, because by then the forest's glow was the only light there was. I walked it perfectly, out of habit, because even now my body defaulted to what it had been taught.

I went to my sleeping space. I did not take much. The beadwork my mother had made for me when I was small — not the ceremonial pieces, not the ones they had given me for the engagement, just the childhood ones, the ones threaded before anyone had decided what I was going to be. A small carving. A length of woven cloth. Things that belonged to me, not to the role. I did not leave a note. There was nothing I knew how to say that was not going to sound like an accusation or an apology, and I was done performing both.

I walked out of the village before the first light touched the canopy. I did not look back. I had been told, once, that looking back is the body's way of asking permission to return, and I could not afford to ask that. Not now. Not when the asking would undo everything.

Pandora received me the way it always had — without opinion, without ceremony, bioluminescent and enormous and entirely indifferent to the smallness of one girl walking away from the life she had been assigned. The roots glowed beneath my feet. The canopy whispered above. Somewhere behind me, the Hometree stood as it always had, vast and ancient and unchanged. I did not say goodbye to it. I had given it enough.

He found out the way bad news always arrives — sideways, from someone who assumed he already knew. One of the younger clan women mentioned it in passing, the way you mention weather, the way you mention something unremarkable — a pity about the girl, leaving so suddenly, do you know where she has gone? — and Neteyam had stopped walking in the middle of the village path and said, very carefully, what.

She was gone. Her sleeping space was cleared. Her ceremonial beadwork was still there — all of the engagement pieces, every careful, beautiful thing she had been given to mark her as his — but the small childhood ones were missing. Whoever she had been before the training had taken what it could carry and walked out before dawn.

He stood in the empty space for longer than he intended to. It smelled faintly of the herbs she had always kept nearby — the ones from his mother's household that she had memorized so completely she had begun keeping her own supply. He had not known that. He had not known a great many things, he was beginning to understand, because he had not looked.

He found his mother in the place she went when she was thinking — high in the Hometree, on the platform where you could see the floating mountains through a gap in the canopy. Neytiri was sitting with her back to him when he arrived, and she did not turn around.

Neteyam; She is gone.

A long silence. The floating mountains drifted in the middle distance, unhurried.

Yes.

Neteyam: Did you know she was going to—

No. But I am not surprised.

Neteyam: — I told her the truth. I told her what was real. I cannot be blamed for—

Turn around and go back to your sleeping space, Neteyam. I do not want to say something I will regret.

Neteyam: Then don't. Just — talk to me. Tell me where she might have gone. I only want to make sure she is—

Safe?

She turned around then. And Neteyam, who had faced his father's disappointment and his teachers' corrections and the judgment of a hundred elders without flinching — Neteyam took a half step back from the look on his mother's face.

You are concerned about her safety now. Now that she is gone. Now that she made a decision you did not anticipate and it has unsettled you. Now you are thinking about her.

Neteyam: That is not fair—

Do not talk to me about fair. Do you know what that girl did? Do you have any idea?

Neteyam: She trained. I know. She trained and she prepared and she—

She was eight years old when she sat before the elder women for the first time. Eight. I was there. I watched her sit with her legs folded wrong and get corrected and fold them again without complaint. I watched her carry water vessels on those floating platforms for three seasons before she stopped spilling. I watched her come to my household and learn every herb, every root, every preparation — not because she was required to, not because anyone was standing over her with a consequence, but because she wanted to know the things that mattered to the people around you.

Neteyam said nothing. His mother's voice had dropped — not softer, but lower. The kind of low that means a fire burning at its base rather than its tips.

She asked me once — she was perhaps ten, eleven — she asked me what your favorite meal was. Not what was appropriate to serve at a ceremony. Not what the household required. What you liked. What made you happy when you ate it. I told her. She learned to prepare it. She never once served it to you because she was afraid it would seem like she was trying too hard. So she just — knew how. In case you ever needed it. In case it ever mattered.

The words settled over him like weight. Quiet, and accumulating.

Every single thing she did — every lesson, every sacrifice, every morning she woke up and chose to keep becoming something difficult — she did it with you in her mind. Not your title. Not your lineage. You. She used to watch you train from the upper platform when she thought no one was looking. She was not watching the golden boy. She was watching my son. She learned the difference between those two things long before you did.

Neteyam: sa'nok, I didn't — I didn't know—

No. You did not know because you did not look. Because it was easier to see the performance than to ask what was underneath it. You told her she was fake. You told her she was a role. You told her you felt nothing when you looked at her — and she stood there and listened and then she went home and she left. Because what else was she supposed to do? You took everything she had built and told her it was worthless, and then you walked away. You fool.

Neteyam: I—

Don't you know? Don't you understand what that kind of love costs? I do. I know exactly what it costs. Your father and I did not have an easy beginning either — but I saw him. I looked. I asked. You never once asked her a single question, Neteyam. Not one. In years. You decided what she was and you stopped looking. And she kept trying anyway. That is not performance. That is devotion. And you called it fake to her face.

He sat down. Slowly, without intention, the way a person sits when their legs have simply made the decision for them. The platform's edge, the gap in the canopy, the floating mountains hanging green and impossible in the air beyond. Something was moving in his chest that he did not have a clean name for. A recognition arriving in the wrong order — the understanding coming long after the moment it would have been useful.

Neteyam: She watched me train.

Every morning she could manage it.

Neteyam: She learned what I liked to eat?

Years ago. And never used it because she didn't want to seem like she was trying too hard. Does that sound like someone who loved a title?

He pressed his hands flat against the platform and stared at them. The bioluminescence of the Hometree moved faintly beneath the bark. Slow and steady, the way a heartbeat is steady. The way hers must have been, he thought, when she stood in that clearing and tried to say something and he had told her not to finish the sentence.

Neteyam: ...I told her the word made me feel ill.

A silence. His mother did not fill it.

Neteyam: When she tried to say she loved me. I told her it made me feel sick.

Yes. You did.

Neteyam: — where is she? Which direction did she go, someone must have seen—

No one knows. She left before the light. She did not tell anyone because there was no one to tell — she had given every hour of her friendship and companionship to becoming your wife and had very little of either left for herself. She walked into Pandora alone. That is what you gave her.

Neteyam: Then I will find her. I will go now, I will follow the path toward the eastern forest and—

Neteyam.

Just his name. The way she said it when he was a child and had made a mistake that could not simply be corrected. He stopped.

Pandora is vast. She has a full night's head start and she knows how to move quietly — you made sure she never had reason to learn otherwise. You do not know which direction she went. You do not know which clan she might seek shelter with, or whether she intends to seek any shelter at all. You do not know, because she made herself invisible to you so carefully and for so long that you have no map of her. You never built one.

Neteyam: Then tell me where to start. Please. mother, please—

I cannot tell you what I don't know. And even if I knew — I am not certain I would tell you tonight, while you are still thinking about what you feel rather than what she needs. Go and think. Go and sit with what you have done. And tomorrow, if you still want to find her, you will have to earn that. The way she earned everything. Slowly. With nothing guaranteed at the end.

She turned back to the mountains. The conversation was over. He remained on the platform for a long time after that, not moving, with the Hometree's pulse beneath him and the wide dark of Pandora spread out in every direction below — vast and bioluminescent and full of a girl he had never properly looked at.

He thought about what she had said in the clearing. I gave up my childhood. Said it not as a weapon — said it as a fact, the way you name something that has already happened. No plea in it. No bid for sympathy. Just the accounting of a person who had kept meticulous records of every cost and was finally, briefly, permitted to read them aloud before the file closed.

He thought about the dropped bowl. He had heard about it, years ago, from one of the younger warriors who had a sister in the clan mothers' circle. He had filed it away as a story about her training and not thought about it again. He had not thought about what it cost a twelve-year-old girl to stand in front of his mother and receive those words and then go back and try harder. He had not thought about her at all, not really, not as a person with an interior life that continued when he was not present to observe it. He thought about her watching him train from the upper platform.

He had never noticed. He had never looked up. And somewhere in the vast living dark of Pandora, under a sky full of stars with no names,

she was walking away from everything she had ever built

toward something she had not yet decided to be

and he did not know which direction she had gone.

He had spent years certain he felt nothing. Standing at arm's length from her certainty, her devotion, her relentless, quiet, costly love — and feeling nothing, he had told himself, nothing, it is simply nothing.

But sitting on this platform with her gone and the empty space of her absence already reshaping the air around the village like a removed stone reshapes the current of a river — sitting here now, he was no longer certain that what he had felt was nothing. He thought it might have been something he did not recognize because no one had taught him what it looked like from the inside. He thought it might have been the beginning of something he had ended before it could finish becoming. He thought: I did not know. I genuinely did not know.

And then, with the particular cruelty of realizations that arrive precisely one moment too late: that does not change anything. She is still gone. And I do not know where she is.

"The winner takes it all. The loser has to fall. It's simple, and it's plain. Why should I complain?" — ABBA, Mamma Mia

Warning - Mature, Tragic love arc — emotional damage ahead, Amnesia trope — memory loss of romantic feelings, Unrequited love (one-sided, then mutual, then lost), Themes of sacrifice and right person, wrong time ,Brief depictions of conflict/injury (non-graphic), Canon-adjacent Na'vi culture, language, and spirituality.

Two Days After

The Omatikaya had a word — txantslusam — that meant, roughly, wisdom that comes too late. The kind of understanding that arrives after the moment it could have changed anything. The elders repeated it with sorrow rather than judgment, because they were old enough to know the truth of it. The universe does not brief you before the lesson. The universe does not ask if you are ready. It simply arrives, and you are simply in it, and you learn what you learn in the wreckage rather than the warning.

You had learned the word young. You had not expected, at twenty-one cycles, to need it this badly. You had not expected to be this — sitting in the pre-dawn dark with your hands flat on your own stomach and the whole world rearranged around you while you were not looking.

Two days. It had only been two days.

Two days since they had carried Neteyam out of the smoke and the chaos, his body limp and enormous and wrong in the arms of the warriors who bore him — two days since his head had struck the ground with a sound that had no name in any language, a sound your body had understood before your mind did, a sound that had traveled up through the earth through the soles of your feet and lodged in your sternum where it was still living, still reverberating, a stone that would not stop moving.

Two days since Mo'at had knelt over him in the healing tent with her hands pressed to his temples and her eyes closed and her face the specific closed expression of a healer who is listening to something no one else can hear, and said nothing for so long that you had counted your own heartbeats to have something to count.

Two days since he had opened his eyes.

Two days since he had looked at you — at you, through you, past you and through you and to somewhere you were not — and said, in a voice that had been scraped clean of fourteen years of everything:

"Who are you?"

Three words. Three words and the whole architecture of your life had come down so quietly it was almost dignified. Not a collapse. A dissolving. The way salt dissolves in water — you could not find the exact moment it stopped being itself.

You had kept yourself together in the tent. You had kept your face still and your breathing even and your hands at your sides while Mo'at said give it time, the mind heals in its own order, do not lose hope — and you had nodded and you had been a person of the People, which meant you had not crumpled, which meant you had performed steadiness as the last remaining act of love you could offer someone who no longer knew your name.

You had kept yourself together walking out of the tent. You had kept yourself together through Lo'ak's face — Lo'ak, who was not built for concealment the way you were, Lo'ak whose every feeling lived directly on the surface of him, whose expression when he looked at you in the doorway of the tent had said I am so sorry, I am so sorry, I am so sorry without a single word leaving his mouth.

You had kept yourself together through Kiri's hands finding yours in the dark outside the tent, and holding on, and not letting go until you gently, carefully, pulled away. You had kept yourself together.

And then you had walked into the forest alone and sat down at the base of a great root and you had not kept yourself together at all.

The second morning — the morning — you woke before the sun had any right to be considered rising, your body pulling you up out of sleep with the insistence of something that needed to be known. Your eyes opened to the dark ceiling of your sleeping space and you lay still, cataloguing. The exhaustion that sat deeper than tired. The particular nausea that was not illness. The way your body felt like it had been quietly rearranged in the dark, reorganized around a new center without your permission, your own interior suddenly someone else's territory.

You had grown up at Mo'at's knee. You had learned the signs that bodies give before they speak. You had learned them young and you had learned them well and you lay in the dark of your sleeping space and you knew — with the flat, irrefutable certainty of knowledge that does not care how inconvenient it is — before you had confirmed it, before you had risen, before you had done anything at all. You knew.

You went to the healer's stores in the early grey-black of pre-dawn, moving quietly through the sleeping village, past the banked communal fires and the slow breathing of the People in their rest. You retrieved what you needed. You went back to your sleeping space and you performed the small ceremony — the one the elder healers had taught you, older than the sky-people's machines, older than the words for what it detected — and you sat in the dark.

And you waited. And the result came. You sat with it in your hands for a very long time. Positive.

You were carrying Neteyam's child. The child of a man who had looked at you two days ago with eyes cleared of everything and said who are you as though you had never existed, as though the fourteen years and the bark with words on it and the seven flowers and the river and the dark and Nga oeru lu tirea — as though all of it were a story you had told yourself and none of it had left a mark.

The child of that man. Growing, right now, in the small dark of your body. Present. Real. Composed of both of you, carrying both of your histories in its new blood, knowing nothing yet of what it had been born into. You pressed both hands flat against your stomach.

You breathed. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. The way Mo'at had taught you when you were nine cycles old and a storm had come in fast over the Hallelujah Mountains and the whole village was grey with it and you had been afraid.

You are of the People, Mo'at had said, her hands on your small shoulders. The People do not break. You pressed your hands against your stomach and thought, with a clarity so sharp it bordered on fury: Mo'at has never had to do this.

Kiri came an hour later. You had not told her. You had not told anyone. But Kiri had always listened to Eywa more carefully than any person you had ever known, and Eywa, apparently, had not kept your secret.

She sat down beside you without preamble. She looked at your face and then at your hands, still flat on your stomach, and she went very still — the specific stillness of someone receiving information that requires the whole self, every part, every listening thing inside them, to process all at once.

"Tell me," she said. So you told her.

The silence after you finished lasted long enough that you counted three slow pulses of bioluminescence in the vine above you. Then Kiri reached out and covered your hands — both of them, still pressed flat against your stomach — with hers. "Oh," she said. Barely a word. Just a sound. And then, quieter: "Oh."

"Three days," you said. Your voice was level. You were holding the leveling the way you hold water in cupped hands — with total attention, knowing that any movement, any distraction, any small failure of focus, and it would be gone. "The wedding is in three days, Kiri."

"I know."

"He doesn't know my name." The sentence tasted like ash. "He looked at me and there was — nothing. Like I was a stranger who had wandered into the wrong tent. Like every single thing we — like I made it up. Like I invented it."

"You didn't —"

"Like the years were a story I told myself." Your voice cracked, finally, on years. You felt it crack the way you feel a branch give beneath your weight — that instant of knowing before the falling. "Like the bark, the flowers, the first hunt celebration, all four times I — like the river, like the night we — like the ring he — like none of it left any mark on him at all and I am the only one carrying it and Kiri —"

You stopped. You pressed your hands harder against your stomach.

"Kiri, I am carrying a child to a man who doesn't know my name."

Her hands tightened over yours. "Why is Eywa doing this to me."

It came out flat. Not a question, exactly. More like something you were laying at the feet of whatever was listening. "Stop —"

"I need you to tell me why." The flatness gave way and beneath it was something enormous years of patience worn down to its last thin layer, something raw and not quite rage and not quite grief but containing both, pressing up against the back of your sternum like it needed more space than your body could give it. "I waited. I waited so long. I tried correctly and I tried incorrectly and I respected his answer when it hurt and I was patient and I loved him in the way I was supposed to love and I let him choose me in his own time and we were three days away — three days, Kiri, I could count them on one hand — and now he is in that tent and he doesn't know my face and I am sitting here in the dark with his child in my body and I need someone to explain to me —"

Your voice broke all the way through. "Is this the punishment?" The words came from somewhere below language, from the place that existed before you had learned to manage yourself. "Is this what I deserved for wanting something I was not supposed to want? For reaching for someone above my — for presuming that I was allowed? Is Eywa saying to me: child, you were warned, he was never for you, and here is what arrogance costs?"

"Stop." Kiri's voice was sharp in a way you rarely heard from her. "Stop that right now."

"Tell me it isn't true —"

"It isn't true." She took your face in both of her hands — the gesture your grandmothers had used, the oldest gesture of the People, I am here, I am present, I am looking directly at you and you are not invisible. Her eyes were bright and fierce. "Eywa is not made of punishment. She is not a clan elder with a ledger keeping score of who reached too high. She is —" Kiri's voice faltered, just briefly, and in the faltering you could hear how much she meant it. "She is every root and every voice and every thing that has ever been joined to every other thing. She does not look at a love that survived fourteen years of being unreturned and decide it deserves destruction. That is not what she is."

"Then what is this?"

"I don't know." And Kiri saying I don't know was more frightening than most people's certainties, because Kiri always knew, Kiri listened to the world in frequencies you couldn't access. "I don't know and I am angry about it and I think you are allowed to be angry about it too. But it is not your punishment. Say that back to me."

You couldn't. She pressed her forehead to yours — tsaheylu without the queue-braid, the gesture made in bare human contact, the way of the People when words stop working.

"I'm carrying his child," you whispered, against her forehead. "Kiri. I'm carrying his child and in three days I am supposed to stand under Eywa's Tree and —" "I know."

"I'm scared." "Ma 'ite." She said it so gently it split something open in your chest. My family . She only ever used it for the people she truly meant it about. "I know. I know you are. I'm here."

You sat together in the dark that came before the dawn — her hands on your face, your hands on your stomach, the bioluminescent forest breathing its slow luminous breath around you, syaw fko oeru Eywa, syaw fko oeru Eywa, Eywa lives in me, Eywa lives in me — and the world did not offer you comfort in any form you could reach, but it offered you this: being witnessed. Being held. Being known by someone who had chosen to know you, who had come before you asked, who sat in the dark beside you without requiring you to be alright. You thought: I am being taken apart by something that isn't even looking at me. The cruelty of indifference. The cruelty that doesn't notice.

You didn't say it out loud.

You only said: "Don't tell anyone about the child. Not until —"

You stopped. You didn't know what came after until.

"Not yet," Kiri said.

"Not yet," you agreed.

You watched the sun come up together. It had no decency, the sun. It came up anyway, slow and amber and enormous, flooding the forest with light that had no interest in what had happened in the dark. It came up anyway. It always did.

The Wedding Day

The dress was white.

Not the white of sky-people fabrics — that cold, manufactured white that had always looked wrong against Na'vi skin, too sharp, too clean, too much like absence. This was the white of moonbell flowers, hand-processed over seven days by three elder women who had sat together in the early mornings doing the work with the quiet focused love of people who understood what they were making. They had threaded luminescent fibers through the fabric — vines from the deep forest, the kind that grew only where the spirit-lines ran strongest — so that in the dark of Eywa's Tree the whole dress would glow. Softly. Like something lit from within.

You had stood for two fittings with your arms out and your chin up and your chest doing something complicated that you had not let reach your face. You had thought, both times: he is going to see me in this and remember.

You had thought: when he sees me in this, something will come back. Something has to come back. The bouquet was pale na'rìng blooms — forest flowers that grew only near spirit-lines, flowers that smelled like deep places, like the dark before dawn, like everywhere Eywa was most present. They had been bound with a cord braided by your mother and Neytiri together on a single afternoon, the two of them sitting in the warm communal light, not quite speaking, occasionally reaching across the weaving to touch hands. You had watched them from a distance and thought: these two women are making something for the life I am about to have.

The altar was under Utral Aymokriyä. The Tree of Voices. Of course it was. Because it had to be somewhere that meant something — somewhere the vows would travel down into the roots and be kept, somewhere every ancestor who had ever spoken into this earth would be present, holding the moment like cupped hands.

Jake had come to you, quiet and a little sheepish, three days before — before everything, before the accident, when three days had still felt like a small and manageable distance rather than an ocean — and said: "Human custom. Father of the groom stands next to his son. I just — I'd like to be there beside him. If that's alright."

You had said yes. You had smiled at him, at this sky-person man with his human face trying to participate in his son's Omatikaya wedding with the earnest awkward sincerity of someone who loved his family with his entire self and sometimes didn't know quite how to hold it. You had liked him enormously for asking instead of assuming.

That had been before. The ring had been made by a craftsman in the tradition of both worlds — because Neteyam had wanted that, had specifically asked for both, had said I am of two peoples and she deserves something that holds both of them. Metal from a sky-people source, shaped in the Omatikaya fashion, small and precise and curved like a promise. The inside had been engraved in Na'vi, in Neteyam's own handwriting — he had gone to the craftsman himself with the words already written, unwilling to trust the translation to anyone else.

Nga oeru lu tirea. You are my spirit.

You had held the ring exactly once, the night the craftsman delivered it. You had turned it in your fingers and found the engraving in the dark by feel alone, each letter a small groove pressed into the metal, and you had thought: he chose these words. Out of every possible thing to say, he chose these words. He wanted you to carry this on your body. He wanted it to be permanent.

The ring was in its woven box, lined with soft leaves, sitting in your sleeping space. You were standing at the edge of the village in your moonbell dress with the na'rìng bouquet in both hands, waiting, while the whole clan gathered at Eywa's Tree.

Waiting. The sun was already high. He did not come on his own.

You had known, in the part of yourself that had learned to know things before they happened — the part that had pressed itself against every surface of this situation and mapped its contours — that he would not come on his own. You had known it the way you had known about the child. Quietly, with no ceremony. Simply as a fact your body had accepted before your mind caught up.

They brought him.

Mo'at on one side — her face arranged into the healer's neutrality, the expression of someone who has seen enough of the world's worst and best moments that she no longer permits either to change the architecture of her face. Jake on the other side, and Jake's face was not neutral, Jake's face had never been neutral a day in his life, and you looked at it once — the complicated human grief of a father watching his son not-recognize his future wife, the guilt of someone who cannot fix this and knows it — and then you looked away because you could not hold what was on Jake's face and also hold yourself together.

You had been holding yourself together for three days. You had one more hour to hold. Just one more hour. You could do one more hour. Neteyam walked to the altar.

He was wearing the ceremonial dress of a firstborn Omatikaya son — the colors of his family, the markings of his rank, the braided queue that Neytiri had prepared for him that morning because she could not do nothing and this was something she could still do. He looked like himself. From a distance, in the right light, he looked exactly like himself — tall and careful and present, moving with the quiet sureness that had always been native to him.

And then he looked at you. And you saw his face. Polite.

That was the word. The only word. The face of someone who has been told they are supposed to be somewhere and is applying their full intelligence and goodwill to the task of being there correctly. The face of someone solving a problem with insufficient information. The face of a stranger in his own ceremonial colors, looking at you in your glowing white dress the way a person looks at something they can see is significant and cannot feel the significance of.

He looked at you like you were a beautiful stranger at someone else's wedding. You held your bouquet with both hands.

"You are —" He paused. Not cruelly. Carefully. The pause of someone accessing information they've been given rather than information they hold. "You are the one I was —" Another pause. His jaw tightened slightly — frustration, you recognized it, you had memorized every micro-expression his face made over the years, this one meant he was angry at himself for not having the words.

He looked at you. There was effort in it — visible, genuine effort, the same effort he gave everything he valued, and for one suspended, terrible second you thought: he's going to find it. It's there. He's going to reach back and find it and this will be alright.

"I'm sorry," he said. "I — I'm trying."

"I know," you said. "I know you are."

The elder began the ceremony. You had heard these words at a dozen weddings. You had attended every joining ceremony you could since childhood because you had always known — with the same certainty you knew the forest paths, the same certainty you knew the smell of rain before it came — that you would speak them yourself one day. You had listened the way a student listens to something they intend to use. You had let the words wear grooves in you, deep comfortable grooves of repetition, so that when your turn came the words would feel like coming home rather than arriving somewhere new.

Before Eywa and before the People and before all the voices in the roots of this Tree, these two spirits declare themselves woven. What Eywa has drawn together, no thing of earth or sky may separate. What is joined here is joined in every root, every voice, every light in the dark of the world— Neteyam's hands were in yours.

You felt them. You knew these hands — you had learned these hands in the dark, you had held these hands at the river, you had been held by these hands in ways that were still written on your body if not on his. You knew the weight of them, the exact temperature, the particular way his thumb moved when he was thinking about something.

His hands were in yours and they were being careful. Not tender. Not the tenderness of someone touching something they love. Careful. The careful of someone who has been told to hold something fragile that belongs to someone else. The careful of a person doing the right thing in a situation they do not understand, trying very hard not to cause harm, trying to be good in the only way they currently know how.

His hands were in yours and they felt like a stranger's. That was when the first wall came down. Not with sound. Not with drama. Simply — a quiet internal collapse, something structural giving way in the deep foundation of you, and you felt it happen and you kept your face completely still because the elder was still speaking and the whole clan was watching and your mother was somewhere in that watching crowd and Kiri was behind you and you were three days pregnant with this man's child and you were not going to fall apart in front of Eywa's Tree.

You were not. Then Neteyam stepped back. One step.

One single step backward, away from your hands, away from the altar, away from you — and it was not dramatic, it was not a shove or a shout, it was quiet in the way only the worst things are quiet, and his face had moved past polite and past trying and arrived at something you recognized with the bottom-dropping-out sensation of someone who has walked off a ledge they didn't know was there. Distress.

The elder stopped speaking. The whole clearing stopped.

"I —" Neteyam pressed the back of his hand against his mouth for a moment, a gesture you had never seen him make, a gesture that meant he was fighting something. "I cannot."

"Son," Jake said, low and tight.

"I cannot do this." Not loud. Not angry. Quiet in the way of someone speaking from a place so far below ordinary language that volume becomes irrelevant. "I have tried. I — I want to do what is right. I want to be — I know that everyone is telling me this is right, and I believe that they believe it, but I stand here and I look at —"

He looked at you. You looked back at him.

"I look at you," he said, and his voice was not unkind, it was never unkind, that was the unbearable part, "and I feel nothing that tells me this is true. I feel nothing that says I know you. And I — I have been told so many things about who you are to me and I want them to be real, I want it, but wanting something to be real is not the same as it being real, and I —" He stopped. His throat moved. "I cannot stand at this tree and speak vows to someone I do not know. I cannot make that promise to Eywa for someone I do not remember. It would be a lie. And I would rather —" His voice cracked, just slightly. "I would rather disappoint everyone here than lie at the roots of Eywa's Tree."

The silence that fell was total. Not the silence of shock — though that was in it. The silence of an entire clan holding their breath in collective recognition that they were watching something irreparable happen in real time and there was nothing any of them could do to stop it.

You could hear the bioluminescent roots of the Tree pulsing. You could hear your own heartbeat. You could feel, with absolute clarity, the child that no one else knew about — the small fact of it, nestled in the dark of you, present and real and utterly unknowing of the world it had been made into.

Neteyam was looking at you. His expression was — remorseful. That was the word. The expression of a genuinely good person who has caused genuine harm and knows it and is not going to pretend otherwise. And you knew him well enough — you knew every chamber of him, every hallway, every locked door — to know that the remorse was real. That he meant every word. That he was not being cruel.

He was being honest. He had always been honest with you. Even when it cost him. Even when it cost you more.

"I'm sorry," he said, to you, directly to you, in a voice that meant it completely. "I am so sorry. You deserve someone who — you deserve to be known. And I don't — I can't give you that right now. I don't know if I —"

"Okay," you said.

The word came out of somewhere that was past hurt. Past anger. Past the grief and the exhaustion and the three days and the child and the dress that seven women had made and the cord your mother had braided with Neytiri on a warm afternoon. Past all of it. In the place where there is nothing left to lose you sometimes find a strange, terrible clarity, and you were in that place now, and from that place the only word was:

"Okay." "_____." Kiri's voice, from behind you. Barely a word. A hand at your back, barely touching.

"Okay," you said again. To no one. To the air. To Eywa, who was in the roots beneath your feet and the light in the trees and who was apparently having some kind of day. You looked down at the bouquet in your hands. Na'rìng blooms. Pale and forest-dark. Bound with the cord your mother and Neytiri had made together, touching hands above the weaving. You looked up at Neteyam one more time.

He was looking at you with remorse and distance and the particular helpless expression of someone watching something they've broken and being unable to retrieve a single piece of it. You thought, clearly and without bitterness, the most devastating thought you had ever had: He broke this and he doesn't even remember making it.

Then you turned. You walked away from the altar. You walked through the parting crowd — the People making space for you the way the forest makes space for something that is moving with the inevitability of water, because there was no stopping what was happening and the most respectful thing anyone could do was get out of the way. You did not look at their faces. You could not look at their faces. You had counted on one hand the number of people you loved most in the world and they were all standing in that crowd watching you walk away in a dress that was still glowing and you would not look at a single one of them.

You walked until the Tree of Voices was behind you. You walked until the jungle was in front of you. You walked until no one could see you anymore. Then you stopped.

You stood in the deep green dark of the forest in your moonbell-white dress, alone, glowing softly like something sacred that had been left somewhere with no altar to rest on. The na'rìng blooms were still in your hands. The bioluminescence of the forest pulsed slowly around you, the way it had pulsed at a hundred important moments of your life — at the hunts, at the namings, at the night you and Neteyam had sat in the dark together and the world had rearranged itself into something finally, finally right. The same light. A different world. You pressed one hand flat against your stomach.

The child did not know. The child was simply there, in the dark of you, growing with the complete and trusting indifference of something that does not yet have the context to understand what it has been born into. Neteyam's child, you thought. Growing in my body. While he stands at a tree and tells our whole clan he doesn't know me.

You thought: I came to you with years on my back and a child I haven't told you about and a ring in a box in my sleeping space and a dress that seven women made with their hands and I stood at that tree and I was so ready.

I was so ready. I have been ready for so long.

You looked up at the canopy. The light came through in shafts, amber and green, the forest's own cathedral, the place where Eywa breathed most audibly if you knew how to listen. Eywa ma'weya, you thought.

Eywa. I have been patient. I have been so patient. I have asked nothing of you that wasn't mine to ask. I loved him correctly and I waited and I respected and I carried and I endured. And I am standing in this forest in a dress that glows and I am alone and I am carrying your son's grandchild and I do not know— I do not know what you want from me. I do not know what this is supposed to teach me. I do not know what I was supposed to do differently. The forest breathed. The light shifted. A fan lizard called from somewhere high above, bright and completely indifferent.

You held your bouquet. You stood in the dark.

And the thought arrived, not with dramatics, not with the crash of revelation, simply quietly, the way the worst truths always arrive: I have lost everything. I have lost him and the wedding and the future and I am carrying a child whose father just stood at Eywa's Tree and called me a stranger. And the forest is still breathing. And Eywa is still here. And none of it — not a single piece of this — is going to stop because I am standing here broken.

It doesn't stop. It never stops. It just keeps going, and it takes me with it, and I do not get to choose.

You stood in the moonbell-white dress that no one was going to see, glowing softly in the dark for no one, holding flowers that were never going to be laid at any altar, and you breathed.

In. Out. Eywa ma'weya, tskxe si oeru. Eywa, speak to me. Let the stones be still. The stones were not still. You breathed anyway.

You waited until dark. Not because the dark made it easier. Nothing about this was going to be easy. You waited because the dark meant fewer eyes, fewer faces, fewer people who loved you having to watch you do something that could not be watched without cost. You had spent the hours between the altar and the dark in your sleeping space with the door closed, still in your dress — you couldn't bring yourself to take it off, not yet, not while the sun was still up, not while the day was still technically the day it was supposed to be — sitting with your back against the wall and your hands on your stomach and your eyes on nothing.

You had not cried. You had been saving it.

When the last light went out of the sky and the bioluminescence of the forest took over — that slow, breathing, ancient light that had been here before the sky-people came and would be here long after all of this, long after you, long after whatever mark this day left on the world — you stood up.

You changed out of the dress. Carefully. Slowly. The way you handle something for the last time, with the deliberate attention of someone who knows they are saying goodbye and refuses to rush it. You folded it with your hands flat and your breathing measured and you did not let yourself think about the seven days it had taken to make or the three elder women who had made it or the morning you had put it on and pressed your face into the na'rìng blooms and told yourself: today. Finally. Today. You gathered what there was to gather.

You built the fire at the edge of the village — far enough from the sleeping spaces for privacy, close enough to Eywa's roots that the earth could hear. You knelt in the dirt. The fire took on the third try, which felt like the universe being difficult on purpose, and you almost laughed except that you didn't have the architecture for laughing right now, your interior was arranged for something else entirely.

You knelt in the dirt. You began.

The Bouquet

You picked it up and for a moment you just held it. Na'rìng blooms. Pale and deep-forest dark, the kind of flower that only grew where the spirit-lines ran strongest, where Eywa was most present in the ground. They had smelled, this morning — this morning, which felt like it belonged to a different century — like everything sacred. Like the deep places. Like the dark before dawn when the world is still deciding what it wants to be. You had pressed your face into them this morning.

You had been standing in your glowing white dress with the whole day in front of you and you had pressed your face into these flowers and breathed them in and thought — with the stupid, stubborn, exhausted faith of someone who has survived so much that they genuinely cannot conceive of the universe having one more cruelty left in reserve — today is the day everything was worth it. You had believed that. This morning, with these flowers against your face, you had believed it completely.

You looked at the cord binding them — the cord your mother and Neytiri had braided together on that warm afternoon, the two of them occasionally reaching across the weaving to touch hands without speaking. Two mothers making something for the life you were about to have. Two women who loved their children enough to sit together in the light and make something with their hands. Your mother had touched Neytiri's hand above the weaving and Neytiri had touched back.

You held the bouquet over the flame. The cord went first. It caught faster than you expected, and for a second you almost pulled it back — the reflex of someone who has changed their mind — but you hadn't changed your mind. You hadn't. You held steady.

Then the petals. One by one, curling at the edges the way living things curl when they are becoming something else, glowing briefly — that same bioluminescent glow, just for a moment, just long enough — before they darkened. The smell of burning na'rìng was nothing like the smell of living na'rìng. You had not known that before tonight. You knew it now, and you understood that you would know it for the rest of your life, that this smell would find you in unexpected moments — a cooking fire, a torch in the dark — and bring you back here, kneeling in the dirt, watching something sacred become ash.

This was the bouquet I was going to carry to you, you thought. Not to the fire. To him. To Neteyam, who was somewhere in the village right now, who had stood at Eywa's Tree and said I don't know her and meant it, who was probably asleep by now, who would wake tomorrow with no knowledge of what you were doing in the dark tonight. I carried these flowers to an altar you left. I am returning them. I am returning them to Eywa, who made the flowers and the spirit-lines and the cord and the hands that braided it and whatever it was between us that made any of this make sense.

I am giving it back. I don't know how to give it back but I am trying. You watched until the last petal was gone.

The Dress

You almost didn't do this one. You sat with it in your lap for so long that the fire had burned lower before you moved. You kept touching it — running your thumb along the hem, along the seam where the luminescent vines had been woven in, along the neckline that one of the elder women had redone twice because she hadn't been satisfied with it the first time, because she had wanted it to be right.

Seven days. Three elder women who had woken before the sun every morning for seven days to make something for a life you were supposed to have. They had gone into the deep forest for the luminescent vines because you had asked. They hadn't asked why you wanted vines from that far in. They hadn't asked anything. They had simply gone, because you had needed something and they were the kind of women who went when someone needed, the kind of women the People made in the old way, in the tradition of Mo'at and Neytiri, in the tradition of every woman who had ever understood that love was sometimes expressed most purely as going.

You pressed your lips to the fabric. Once. Just once. In the place where the vines were woven thickest, where it would have glowed the brightest if anyone had been there to see it.

You were supposed to be seen, you thought, and the thought broke something in you cleanly, the way clean breaks are almost worse than ragged ones. You were supposed to be the last beautiful thing before the rest of my life started. You were supposed to be what I was wearing when Neteyam looked at me for the first time as his wife.

You were supposed to mean something other than this. You laid it on the fire. It caught slowly — fabric always did, taking its time, as if it too was reluctant — and then all at once, the way things do when they have made their decision. The luminescent vines went last. They burned blue-white, briefly, a color that had no name in any language you knew, a color that belonged to deep forest and spirit-lines and the specific quality of light in Eywa's most present places. It was the most beautiful thing you had ever seen. It was the most terrible thing you had ever seen.

You sat with your hands in your lap and you watched it go and you did not look away. You owed it that. You owed it the dignity of being witnessed as it disappeared, since no one had been there to witness it as what it was supposed to be.

You watched until there was nothing left but the memory of blue-white light.

The Altar Decorations

You had made these yourself. That was the thing about these — they were entirely yours. The bouquet had been bound by your mother's hands. The dress had been made by the elder women's hands. The ring had been shaped by a craftsman's hands following Neteyam's words. But these — these lengths of forest vine strung with hand-carved beads, each bead a different size and shape depending on what it held — these were yours. Your hands. Your knife. Your nights spent working by low firelight when everyone else was sleeping, carving the specific weight of specific memories into small pieces of wood and bone.

There was one bead for the first hunt celebration. One for the night at the river. One for the fourth attempt, the dawn he'd appeared at your door undone and honest before he'd finished thinking. One for the moment he'd taken your hand and said slow like it was a direction he'd chosen. And one — the one you had carved first, before any of the others, the one you had spent the longest on — for the day he had removed a thorn from your ankle without being asked. When you were seven cycles old. When it started.

You had not told anyone about that bead. Not even Kiri.

You held the vine in your hands and you tried to find it — the thorn bead, the first one, the beginning — and then you stopped yourself. If you found it you would not be able to let go of it. And you had to let go of it. You dropped the whole length of vine into the fire without looking for it. You turned your face away as it caught. You pressed the back of your hand against your mouth and you breathed through your nose — in, out, in, out, Eywa ma'weya — and you did not watch this one go.

Some things you could witness. Some things you could not.

The Sketch

This one you had been carrying against your chest.

Since the accident — since the terrible sound and the healing tent and who are you — you had kept it folded against your skin, inside your wrap, close to your heartbeat, the way of the People when they carry something sacred. You had pressed it there every morning when you dressed, the way of carrying a prayer, and it had been warm from your body every time you touched it. It was a piece of flattened bark. He had drawn on it one evening, not long ago — it felt like a different lifetime, a different version of the world — sitting beside you with a marking root and his tongue slightly between his teeth in the way he had when he was concentrating. He had been sketching the altar layout. He had been embarrassed about it before he even started, saying I cannot draw, sa'nu always said I draw like Lo'ak describes things, which is to say incorrectly and with too much confidence.

You had laughed. You had told him it would be perfect. It had been. Not because the drawing was skilled — it wasn't, his proportions were off and the Tree of Voices looked, generously, like a large and enthusiastic bush, and one of the decorative arches he had drawn appeared to be load-bearing in a way that would have been structurally impossible. But because of his face. Because he had been so genuinely, openly excited, the way Neteyam was excited about things he cared about — with his whole self, without self-consciousness, with the focused energy of someone who had decided this mattered and was going to give it everything regardless of whether his spatial reasoning cooperated.

He had been excited to marry you. He had sat beside you with his bad drawing and his marking root and he had been excited. You unfolded it now. His handwriting was in the margins. Small. Careful. The handwriting of someone who was accustomed to leaving notes for himself, practical and direct: Flowers here — ask _____ what she prefers.

Make sure Jake has somewhere to stand. He'll worry if he doesn't have somewhere to stand. Eywa's roots visible from the guests — important.

Ask _____ what she prefers. You read it twice. Ask _____ what she prefers.

He had written your name in the margins of a drawing of your altar. He had written it the way he wrote everything — like it was simply part of the practical landscape of his life, like consulting you was as natural as noting where the flowers should go. Like you were assumed. Like you were the person whose preferences were the relevant ones, always, automatically, without question.

Ask _____. You folded it back up.

You held it against your chest one more time. Pressed it flat against your heartbeat. Just for a moment. Just for the length of one breath.

Then you put it in the fire.

"This was the future," you said, out loud, to the air, to the roots of Eywa's Tree nearby, to whatever was listening. "I am returning it. I am giving it back. I don't — I don't know what to do with a future that didn't happen, so I am giving it back to you, and I am asking you to do something with it that I can't."

The bark caught quickly. His handwriting went last — the ink darkening, the letters holding their shape for one final moment before the shape dissolved.

Ask _____ what she prefers. Gone.

The Ring

You had known, from the moment you gathered everything, that this was last. You had arranged the order deliberately, consciously, the way you arranged everything — with the full weight of your attention, with the care of someone who understands that how you do something matters as much as what you do. You had known that this was last and you had known what last would cost and you had done everything else first so that by the time you arrived here your reserves would be depleted enough that the shaking would be honest rather than something you could manage.

You opened the box. River grass, woven tightly. Soft leaves for lining, the kind that stayed supple even when dried, the kind the healers used when they wanted something to feel like care. The craftsman had included them without being asked. He had understood what he was making.

The ring sat in the leaves.

You looked at it for a long time. It was small. You had not expected it to be so small — not delicate, not fragile, but precise, in the way of something that had been thought about carefully and made to fit exactly one thing and nothing else. The metal caught the firelight and held it. The Omatikaya shaping along the outside was fine work, patient work, the kind of work that took hours and required the craftsman to care about what they were making.

You picked it up.

You turned it in your fingers until you found the inside. Until you found the engraving. You did not need the firelight to read it. You had memorized it the first time you held it. You had traced it in the dark of your sleeping space, letter by letter, until the words lived in your fingertips as much as in your mind. Nga oeru lu tirea.

You are my spirit. He had written those words himself and brought them to the craftsman on a piece of bark. He had not trusted the translation to anyone else because he had not wanted anything to be lost between the choosing of words and the cutting of them into metal. He had wanted it to be his words. His handwriting. His decision, made permanent in a material that could not be reconsidered.

He had chosen spirit. Not heart — heart was the easy word, the obvious word. He had chosen spirit. Tirea. The whole of a person. The part that persisted. The part that Eywa received when the body was returned. He had chosen the word that meant: not just this life. Not just this body. You.

You.

He had chosen you. You pressed your thumb against the engraving. You could feel every letter. You could feel where each groove had been cut by a careful hand following careful instruction. You could feel the word tirea under your thumb, five letters, permanent, made with the specific intention of being unable to be undone.

He had not wanted it to be possible for this to be undone.

Nga oeru lu tirea. Your hand was shaking. You noticed this the way you notice things when you are very far inside your own grief — from a slight distance, with something approaching clinical interest, as if the shaking were happening to a hand that belonged to someone else. Your hand was shaking and your vision had gone uncertain at the edges and there was a sound building in your chest that you had been holding back since the altar, since the okay, since the walk through the parting crowd, since the forest and the dark and the glowing dress and the realization that you had lost everything.

You held the ring over the fire.

The firelight came up to meet it. Amber and gold. The metal warmed in your fingers instantly, the heat traveling up through the band and into your skin. The engraving was against your palm now. You could feel it even through the warmth.

Tirea. Spirit. You breathed in.

You breathed in and you held it — the breath, the ring, the fourteen years, the seven flowers and the four attempts and the bark with words on it and the river and the dark and the child currently growing in your body whose father was asleep somewhere in the village not knowing any of this — you held all of it in one inhale, everything that had been building since you were seven cycles old and a thorn was removed from your ankle by careful hands —

You let go. The ring fell into the embers.

It did not burn. Of course it didn't burn — it was metal, it was made to last, it was made specifically to be the thing that did not change — and that was the thing that broke you, finally, completely and without remainder. It sat in the embers, glowing with borrowed heat, and it was still there, still Nga oeru lu tirea, still exactly what it had been made to be, unchanged, unburned, permanent in the middle of all this ash.

He wanted something that couldn't be undone, you thought. He made something that couldn't be undone. And here I am trying to undo it. And even the fire won't help me.

The sound that came out of you was not a cry. You had cried before — in trees, in forests, in the dark of your sleeping space after the third attempt, in your mother's arms after the fourth. You knew what your crying sounded like. This was not that.

This was older than crying. This was the sound that lives below language, below the part of you that knows words and uses them and organizes itself around them — the sound of something structural giving way in the oldest part of you, the part that had been built around him since you were seven years old. It was the sound of Nga oeru lu tirea entering a fire. It was the sound of a wedding that did not happen and a child who did not yet know it had no father who remembered it and a woman in the dark who had tried with her entire self, her entire life, every available tool, for fourteen years — and had been given everything and then had it all removed in the space of one terrible sound on one terrible afternoon. It was the sound of someone putting down a weight that has left permanent damage.

You screamed once, into the forest, into the indifferent breathing dark of Eywa's world. Not a word. Not a name. Just sound. Just the thing that had been living in your chest since the tent, since who are you, since the altar, since okay — just that, released finally into the air where it could dissipate, where it could be absorbed by the roots, where Eywa could take it if she wanted it.

Then you folded forward.

You pressed your forehead to the earth — the old gesture, the deepest gesture, the one the People made when they had nothing left to stand on, when the only honest position remaining was down, face to the ground, returning the weight of yourself to the mother who made you.

Take it, you thought, forehead against the earth, hands flat in the dirt, the fire burning beside you, the ring glowing in the embers with its permanent words. Take all of it. The fourteen years. The four attempts. The flowers and the bark and the wedding that didn't happen and the future that isn't mine anymore. Take the child I'm carrying who deserves more than this world has arranged for them. Take the sound his head made when it hit the ground. Take the look on his face when he stepped back from me at the altar.

Take all of it. I can't carry it anymore. I'm returning it. I'm giving it back to you. Do something with it that I can't.

The earth under your forehead was cool and solid and utterly patient, the way earth always is — it had been here before you and would be here after and it would receive whatever you gave it without comment, without judgment, without the particular cruelty of being witnessed by someone whose face you had to manage. You stayed there.

The fire burned lower. The ring glowed in the embers and eventually the smoke became too thick to see it and eventually your vision had gone too wrong to see anything properly anyway, because you were crying now, finally, past the place where you could hold it, past the place where control was a thing you could afford — and these were not the small careful tears you had trained yourself to cry in private. These were the tears of someone who had run out of private. Someone who had put down every single thing they were carrying and had discovered, in the putting-down, that the things had been load-bearing.

You had been holding yourself up with fourteen years of loving him. You had put it in the fire. And now there was nothing between you and the ground except the ground. You pressed your forehead to the earth.

The forest breathed around you — syaw fko oeru Eywa, syaw fko oeru Eywa — Eywa lives in me, Eywa lives in me, Eywa lives in the roots against your forehead and the air in your lungs and the fire beside you and the ring in the embers and the child in your body and the sleeping village just beyond the trees and Neteyam, somewhere in it, asleep, unaware, whole in a way you were not.

Eywa said nothing. Eywa never said anything. That was the thing about her — she held everything. Every grief, every joy, every love that didn't work out the way it was supposed to, every wedding that became a burning, every ring that sat permanent and unchanged in the embers of something that had tried very hard to be a future. She held it all. She answered none of it. She simply continued. And so did you. For a while. And then you stopped.

You woke to a ceiling you recognized. That was the first thing — the ceiling, the familiar weave of it, the way the morning light came through the walls of your family's sleeping space in that specific amber-grey that belonged only to this place, only to this hour, only to the home you had grown up in. The smell of dried herbs your mother kept in bundles along the upper beams. The distant sound of the village beginning its morning in the way villages always did — slowly, unevenly, the sounds of people who had not had their worlds ended arriving into their ordinary days.

You lay still. You stared at the ceiling.

And for one half-second — one single, suspended, merciful half-second that you would spend the rest of your life trying to get back to — you did not remember. You were simply a person, waking up. Ceiling above you. Herbs on the wall. Morning light. The uncomplicated animal fact of being alive in a body in a place you knew.

Then it came back.

Not gradually. Not in pieces, the way sleep sometimes releases you slowly into waking. All at once — the altar and the step backward and I don't know her and okay and the forest and the fire and the bouquet and the dress burning blue-white and the ring that wouldn't burn and your forehead against the earth and the sound that had come out of you that you had never heard yourself make before. All of it. Simultaneous. Like a wave that had been building while you slept and chose the exact moment of your waking to arrive.

You breathed. In. Out. You turned your head. Your mother was beside you.

She was sitting in the way of someone who has been sitting for a very long time — not the sitting of someone who chose to sit, but the sitting of someone who arrived and then could not find the reason to move. Her hands were in her lap. Her back was straight with the effort of straightening it. She was looking at you with an expression that stopped your breath completely.

Your mother was not a woman who showed grief easily. You had always known this about her the way you knew things about the deep forest — not because anyone had told you, but because you had simply grown up in proximity to it and learned its geography by living inside it. She was made of the same material you were made of: controlled, steady, the particular kind of strong that looks like stillness from the outside and costs everything on the inside. You had inherited it from her. You had always been proud of that inheritance.

She was sitting beside you with grief on her face so open, so unguarded, so completely unmanaged — grief that had overrun every wall she had ever built, grief that was simply there the way weather is there, not chosen, not performed, just present and enormous and hers — that for a moment you did not recognize her.

Your mother. Your steady, controlled, unbreakable mother. Broken.

"Nìmun," you said. The word came out wrong — too small, too uncertain, the voice of someone much younger than you were. Mother. "What —" She made a sound.

Not a word. Not language. Something older than language — a sound that lived below the part of her that knew how to speak, below the part that had always known the right thing to say in every difficult moment of your life. Just a sound, pressed out of her by something she had been holding since before you woke, and she brought her hand up and pressed it flat over her eyes as though she could hold it in if she just covered the right part of herself.

"Nìmun." You sat up. The movement sent something through you — a wave of physical information, your body asserting its current state, something you named and then unmade, refused entirely, pushed down into a place you would deal with later. "Look at me. Tell me right now." Her hand came down slowly.

She looked at you with eyes that had been crying recently — not just now, not just this morning, but for long enough that the marks had settled into her face, into the lines around her eyes, into the particular exhausted gravity of someone who has been given something terrible to carry toward someone they love and has been carrying it through the dark hours waiting for them to wake up so they could set it down.

"The healer came," she said. Her voice was the controlled voice. You recognized it because it was your voice — the water-in-cupped-hands voice, the voice of someone using every available resource to hold a shape that wants to collapse. She was using it the way you had used it at the altar. She was using it and it was costing her the same thing it had cost you.

"When I fainted —" "The healer came. Mo'at came." Her throat moved. "They examined you. They found —"

"I know what they found."

Your hand moved to your stomach before you had decided to move it. Automatic. The new habit, worn into you in only two days, the gesture of a body that had begun organizing itself around a new center — a center that had existed for two days and been the only piece of hope you had left, the only thing you had been carrying into the future with you when everything else had been placed in the fire.

Your mother's hand came down over yours. Over your hand. Over your stomach. Her fingers pressed warm and deliberate over yours and you felt her touch travel through your palm and into the skin beneath it and into the place where the new fact had been living, and something in the quality of her touch — something in the weight of it, the gentleness, the particular careful grief of it — told you, before a single word, what she was about to say.

"No," you said.

Just that. Just no. Aimed at the air, at the information, at the next sentence before it could become real. As though refusal were a physical thing that could stop the words from arriving. As though you had any power left over what the universe was about to hand you.

"Ma 'ite —"

"No."

"My child." Her voice broke on it — not at the edges, not the small controlled fracture you were used to from her, but all the way through, the word splitting open in her mouth, and you realized she wasn't just saying it to you, she was saying it for both of you, for you and for the thing you had both just lost, for the grandchild she had not yet known about and now never would. "The child —"

"Don't."

"_____ —"

"Don't say it. Don't —" Your voice had gone somewhere below language. Below the place where words lived. "Don't say it yet. Give me one more —"

"Ma 'ite." And her voice, even broken, even fractured all the way through — her voice was the steadiest thing left in the world. "I have to say it. I have to say it because you need to know and because there is no way to carry this for you and I have tried, I have tried since Mo'at told me, I have been sitting here since before the sun came up trying to find a way to carry it for you and I cannot, I cannot, so I have to give it to you even though —" She stopped.

She pressed her lips together. She looked at your joined hands on your stomach. "The stress," she said, finally. Each word placed with the anguished care of someone crossing unstable ground, testing each stone before putting their weight on it. "The grief. The body — when the spirit is in too much pain, the body answers. It cannot help it. It answers the way the forest answers a fire — by releasing what it cannot protect. Mo'at said — she said the child was not yet strong enough. It was too new. The night by the fire, the days before, the wedding — it was too much, and the child was too small, and the body —"

Her voice gave out entirely on the last word. She did not finish the sentence. She did not need to. The silence that came after was the loudest thing you had ever heard. You sat with her hand over yours over your stomach and you looked at the dried herbs on the wall and you said nothing.

You looked at the herbs — the bundles your mother had hung there for as long as you could remember, the healers' herbs, the ones that smelled like safety and home and the particular comfort of being small and cared for — and you thought about absolutely nothing. Your mind had gone somewhere entirely empty. Not numb. Not blank. Empty. The specific emptiness of a space that has just been cleared out suddenly, the space left behind when something that was there is no longer there, the absence louder than the presence ever was.

Your body was not a vessel anymore. It was just a body. Just yours.

Just yours, alone, the way it had been before, before two days ago, before the dark and the rain-washed night and the bioluminescent walls and his hands learning you — just a body, just a single body, not two. Nga oeru lu tirea, you thought, from somewhere very far down. You are my spirit.

You had been carrying him inside you. For two days you had been carrying him — not in the way you had carried him for fourteen years, not in the invisible interior weight of loving someone who did not love you back, but literally, physically, actually — a piece of him, a piece of both of you, a small impossible fact that you had held in the dark and the cold and the wedding morning and the altar and the fire. Through all of it. Through the okay and the walking through the parting crowd and the forest and the burning and the screaming and the forehead against the earth — through every single one of the worst moments of your life, the child had been there. The last piece of something that had been whole. The one thing you had not put in the fire. And now the fire had come to find it anyway. The universe had waited until you had nothing left and then it had taken the one remaining thing.

He exists in me, you thought. He was in me. Half of him was growing in my body and it was the only part of him that still —

You stopped. You could not finish the thought. You could not finish it because finishing it meant accepting what the finished thought said, and you were not — you were not there yet, you were not anywhere near there yet, you might never be anywhere near there.

"I lost my child," you said.

Out loud. To the room. To the herbs on the wall and the morning light and your mother's hand over yours. Not to anyone. To the air. Because it needed to be said in words, in language, in the specific irreversible form of a sentence spoken aloud — because until something is said aloud it can still pretend to be uncertain. You were not going to let it be uncertain.

"I lost my child," you said again, in the voice from below the control, in the voice you had used at the fire. "I was going to — we were going to — I had not even — I hadn't told him, I hadn't told anyone, I was going to tell him after the wedding, I was going to tell him and see his face, I was going to watch him understand, I was going to —"

Your mother moved. Both arms. Around you. The way she had not held you since you were very small — since before you had learned to be a person of self-control, since before you had inherited her steadiness and made it your own, since the time when being held was still something you reached for instead of something you carefully didn't need.

She pulled you in and she held you with both arms and she pressed her lips to the top of your head and she held you the way you hold something you are afraid of losing and have already lost, the way you hold something when holding is the only thing left, the only gesture remaining in a language that has run out of words.

And you — You who had held yourself together through four attempts and one honest conversation on a ridge above three valleys. You who had held yourself together through three weeks of deliberate distance and a dawn visit at your door and I don't function correctly when you're far. You who had held yourself together through the accident and the tent and who are you and the two days after and the wedding morning and the altar and okay and the fire and the ring that would not burn.

You did not hold yourself together. The sound that came out of you was not crying. It was not the small careful crying you had practiced in trees and forests and the dark of your sleeping space over fourteen years of loving someone quietly. It was not the once-in-a-private-tree grief you had permitted yourself after the third attempt. It was not any kind of crying you recognized as yours.

It was the sound of a person who has lost a child. It was the sound of a person who stood at a wedding altar carrying a secret and walked away carrying it still and burned everything else and came home with nothing — nothing at all, nothing left, not the wedding, not the man, not even the small impossible proof that the love had been real enough to make something. Nothing. Just your body. Just your mother's arms.

Just the sound you were making that you did not recognize as yours but that was the most honest sound you had ever made in your life. You pressed your face against your mother's neck and you grieved.

Not decoratively. Not with the dignity that grief sometimes allows you when it is witnessed. Fully, messily, without architecture, without the control you had spent fourteen years building and maintaining and using as the primary load-bearing structure of your entire interior life — you grieved Neteyam, the real one, the one who had known your name, the one who had drawn a bad sketch of an altar with ask _____ what she prefers in the margins. You grieved the wedding that had been three days away and then had not happened. You grieved the ring in the embers with its permanent words. You grieved the dress that had burned blue-white and the bouquet that had smelled like spirit-lines and the bead you had carved and never shown anyone, the one for the thorn on your ankle when you were seven cycles old, the bead for the beginning. And underneath all of it — deeper, more fundamental, the grief beneath the grief, the loss that made all the other losses feel manageable by comparison: You grieved your child.

You grieved the small impossible fact of them. You grieved the two days you had carried them through the worst events of your life, unknowing, growing, completely trusting in the body that had failed to protect them. You grieved the face you would never see, the queue-braid you would never braid, the first hunt you would never watch. You grieved tell him after the wedding, watch him understand, see his face. You grieved a future that had been, briefly, in your body. Gone now. Gone.

Your mother held you and said nothing, because there was nothing to say, because some griefs are not the kind that language can enter — they are weather, enormous and indifferent, and you must simply let them move through you because they are too large to resist and resisting them will only break you further.

She held you and pressed her lips to the top of your head and occasionally made a sound against your hair that was not a word, just a sound, just the oldest sound a mother makes for a child in pain — the sound that predates every language the People had ever spoken, the sound that Eywa had built into the specific frequency of a mother's voice. You let it move through you. The weather moved. From somewhere very deep, in the storm of it, a thought arrived. Small. Quiet. Almost inaudible beneath everything else. He does not know.

Somewhere in this village, in his own sleeping space, in his own ordinary morning — Neteyam was waking up. He was waking up to a world he understood, a world he could navigate, a world that did not contain the specific wound of this morning because he did not remember making it. He would rise and speak to Lo'ak and eat his morning food and sit in the sun that had come up without decency and he would know none of this.

He did not know that you had been carrying his child. He did not know the child was gone. He did not know about the fire, the ring, the dress, the forehead against the earth, the sound you had made that you did not recognize as yours. He did not know that you had fainted at the edge of his world and woken up in the ruins of what his accident had made. He did not know.

And you were not ready to tell him.

You were not sure you would ever be ready to tell him. You were not sure that the words existed in any language — Na'vi or sky-people or the older tongue that the elders sometimes used for things that had no modern name — that could carry what you would need them to carry. You were not sure you could form the sentence I was carrying your child and I lost them because the grief of losing you was too much for my body and remain in one piece on the other side of it. But you had learned, this morning, in the oldest way — the way of txantslusam, of wisdom that arrives too late to be useful and arrives anyway — that the universe does not ask if you are ready.

It does not consult you. It does not brief you before the lesson. It simply hands you the thing and says: carry this. Carry this.

You had been carrying things for years. You had become, without meaning to, a person defined by carrying — carrying love that was not returned, carrying patience that had no guaranteed end, carrying hope when hope had nothing to rest on. You had been carrying things since you were seven cycles old and a thorn was removed from your ankle and the ground went unreliable beneath your feet and never quite went reliable again. You could carry this too. You didn't want to. You were so tired.

You were so profoundly, bone-deeply, soul-deeply tired, in the way that goes past sleep, in the way that rest cannot touch, in the way that only comes from having spent too many years pouring yourself into something that kept not being enough. But the universe had not asked. Carry this, it said.

Ma 'ite, your mother said, against the top of your head, and the words meant my child and they were true and they would always be true, no matter what had been lost, no matter what the morning had taken — you were still hers. That had not been placed in any fire. Carry this, the universe said. You breathed in. You breathed out.

The herbs hung on the wall. The light came through the woven walls in amber-grey. The village continued its morning outside, indifferent and ordinary and entirely unaware. Somewhere in it, Neteyam was waking up. He did not know.

Eywa ma'weya, you thought, from the bottom of everything, from the place you had not known existed until today. Eywa ma'weya, tskxe si oeru. Eywa, speak to me. Let the stones be still. Please. Please.

The stones were not still. But your mother's arms were around you. And you were still here. And for now — for this moment, in this room, with the herbs on the wall and the unreasonable morning light — that was the only thing that was required of you. Still here. Still carrying. Still here.

You became cold. Not unkind — you were too essentially yourself to be unkind, and kindness had been worn into your muscle over twenty-one cycles until it operated independently of your intention, the way breathing operates, the way the heart beats without being asked. You could not have turned it off if you'd tried. It was structural.

But the warmth — the specific, particular warmth that had lived in the center of you for fourteen years, the warmth you had aimed, almost entirely, in one direction, the warmth that had been the organizing principle of your entire interior life — that warmth had gone somewhere you could not follow it. Somewhere behind glass. Somewhere on the other side of a fire that had burned everything you could name and some things you couldn't.

You did your work. You spoke when spoken to. You sat at the communal fire in the evenings and let the light fall on your face and produced the appropriate responses to the appropriate questions. You were, by every visible measure, present. You were not present.

You were somewhere behind your own eyes, watching yourself perform the shape of a life, waiting for something you couldn't name and were no longer sure would come. Txantslusam, the elders would say. Wisdom coming. Not yet. Coming. You had been waiting for wisdom your whole life and it kept arriving after the moment it could have changed anything. You went once to the place where the child had almost been — the sleeping space, the walls, the specific quality of the dark in that room that you had memorized on a rain-washed night that had felt like the beginning of everything and had turned out to be the beginning of the end of everything. You stood in the doorway and you looked at the walls and you felt nothing.

And then you felt too much. And then you left, and you did not go back, and you added it to the list of places in the village that you navigated around now, the geography of your own grief mapped onto the physical landscape of your home — the altar path, the doorway, the edge of the forest where you had built the fire, the tree where you had cried after the third attempt, the river where he had held your hand and said slow like a direction he'd chosen. The whole village was a map of him.

You lived in it anyway. You had no other village.

Neteyam, without knowing why, began to remember. You knew this not because he told you — you were not speaking, not in the way you had spoken before, not in the way of people who share the same interior landscape — but because the People talk, and because Lo'ak had a face that communicated everything his mouth chose not to say, and because Kiri had taken to sitting beside you in the evenings with a careful, watchful expression that meant she was monitoring something she hadn't told you about yet.

You knew he was remembering. You knew it the way you had always known things about him — the way you had learned the forest, by living in close proximity until the knowing was simply part of you.

You did not go to him. You told yourself you were giving him space to heal. You told yourself it was a kindness, a mercy, the most loving thing you could do for someone who was putting themselves back together piece by piece and did not need you standing in the doorway asking if the pieces fit yet.

You told yourself this. You knew, underneath the telling, the actual truth: you were afraid. Not of him. Never of him. You were afraid of yourself — of what would happen to whatever structural integrity you had managed to rebuild if you stood in front of him and he looked at you with the new thing in his eyes, the searching thing, the almost-recognizing thing, the thing that looked like the song coming back from a long way away.

You were afraid that if he looked at you like that, you would go toward it. And you could not survive going toward it again. You had nothing left to survive it with.

Lo'ak found you one evening, sitting alone at the edge of the village where the ground dropped away into the valley and you could see three rivers from a single vantage point. He sat beside you with the particular Lo'ak energy of someone who has something to say and is trying to decide whether to say it. You waited.

"He asked about you," Lo'ak said finally.

You said nothing.

"He asks about you every day." Lo'ak picked up a small stone and turned it in his fingers. "He remembers more every day. He remembered the river yesterday. He came and told me about it like — like someone who found something they'd given up on finding. He was —" Lo'ak stopped. Pressed his lips together. "He looked the way he used to look when he talked about you. Before."

You were quiet for a long time.

"Lo'ak," you said finally.

"Srane."

"Tell him —" You stopped. You looked at the three rivers. You thought about everything you could ask Lo'ak to tell him and how none of it was something you were willing to put in someone else's mouth. "Tell him nothing. Tell him I'm alright."

"Are you?" The question sat between you.

"No," you said.

Lo'ak didn't say anything. He put the small stone down carefully, like he was returning something that belonged to the earth.

"He's falling in love with you again," Lo'ak said, very quietly. "I think you know that."

"I know," you said.

"And?"

You looked at the rivers. The bioluminescence was beginning to come up in the valley below, the slow nightly miracle of Eywa's world lighting itself from within — the thing that had been happening every night since before you were born and would happen every night long after, the thing that did not stop because of weddings that didn't happen or children that didn't survive or men who forgot and then remembered too late.

"And," you said, "it's too late, Lo'ak."

He didn't argue. He sat with you until the valley was fully lit below, and then he left, and you sat alone in the glow of a world that was still beautiful despite everything, which you had decided to take as neither comfort nor insult but simply as information. The world was still beautiful. You were still in it. That would have to be enough for now.

You hadn't planned to talk to him. You had been careful — precise, deliberate, architectural in your avoidance — not out of cruelty but out of self-preservation, out of the understanding that you were a person operating on the last of your reserves and that certain things would spend those reserves faster than you could rebuild them. Neteyam was one of those things. The sight of him, the sound of him saying your name in the new way — the way that meant something again — was one of those things.

But you had not accounted for an afternoon in late dry season when the light came down through the canopy at exactly the angle it had come down at a hundred important moments of your life, golden and specific and unreasonably beautiful, and you turned a corner at the edge of the village and he was simply there.

Sitting at the boundary where the village met the forest, where the root systems of Eywa's Tree reached the surface of the ground in great curved arches that the children used as benches and the elders used as altars. He was sitting on a root with his forearms on his knees and his head slightly bowed and the expression on his face was the one you had mapped fourteen years ago and never forgotten — the searching expression, the one that meant he was trying to locate something he'd lost in a dark room and was applying his entire self to the problem of finding it.

You could have turned around. You did not turn around. You sat beside him. Not close — a careful, measured distance, the width of everything that had happened between you. He heard you arrive. He turned his head. And there it was, exactly as you'd feared it would be — the thing in his eyes that was almost recognition and softer than recognition, like someone who has been hearing a song without being able to name it and has just, just, found the title.

He looked at you and you could see him remembering. Right there, in real time, while you watched. You could see the pages returning.

"_____," he said.

And the way he said it destroyed something in you quietly. He said it the way he used to say it. Not the blank careful politeness of the healing tent, not the labored effort of the wedding altar. He said it the way he had said it on a ridge above three valleys, on a riverbank, in the dark — like it was the most natural word his mouth knew how to make, like it had been waiting in him all along and had simply been temporarily misplaced.

He said your name like it meant everything.

Because it does, something in you said. It always did. You've known that since you were seven cycles old. You looked at your hands.

"I remember more," he said. His voice was careful and urgent in equal measure, the voice of someone who has found something precious and is trying to hold it without breaking it. "Every day there is more. I remember — I remember a river. I remember sitting in a tree above the village at night and counting the fires below. I remember bark — words on bark that someone gave me, and I remember sitting down when I read it, I remember the ground coming up —" He stopped. "I remember the way you look when you are trying not to feel something. You press your lips together and you look slightly to the left. You have been doing it since we were children and you have never known that I noticed."

The ground went unreliable under your feet. Even sitting down. Even motionless. The ground went unreliable the way it had gone unreliable when you were seven years old and a vine was removed from your ankle by careful hands.

"Neteyam —"

"I need to tell you something," he said. And he said it with the urgency of someone who has learned, through the specific education of loss, that there is no such thing as later, that later is a promise the universe does not honor, that if you have something to say you say it now while the person is in front of you and the air is still between you and there is still time. "I need to say it and I need you to let me finish."

You said nothing. You pressed your lips together. You looked slightly to the left. He noticed. Of course he noticed. He had always noticed.

"I remember you," he said. "Not just the facts — the river, the bark, the tree. I remember — I remember what it felt like to realize. I remember sitting at a river and taking your hand and thinking: oh. Oh, this is what this is. I remember learning that the word I had been using was wrong, that tsmuke was the wrong word, that I had been calling a song by the wrong name for years and then someone told me the real name and the world rearranged." His voice was quiet and completely direct. "I remember falling in love with you. The first time. I remember it coming back. And I am — I am telling you that it is coming back again. Now. Here. Whether I have the right to say it or not."

The forest breathed. Somewhere in the canopy, something called. You sat with your hands in your lap and the ground unreliable beneath you and fourteen years of loving this man pressing against the back of your chest like weather that had been building for a very long time.

You breathed in.

"Neteyam." His name in your mouth felt like the oldest word you knew. Like something worn smooth by use. "I need you to listen to me now." "I'm listening." "I lost a child," you said.

The words fell into the space between you like stones into deep water. You watched him receive them — watched the expression on his face move through surprise and then something that had no name, something that was the face a person makes when they are handed a grief so specific and so enormous that the face does not have a prepared response for it.

"I know," he said, very quietly. "Lo'ak told me — he told me you had lost something. I didn't know —"

"Our child," you said. "Yours and mine. I had been carrying them for two days. Since before the wedding. I found out the morning of — the morning before the ceremony. I didn't tell you because there was no —" Your voice held. You were so tired of your voice holding. You were so tired of being the person whose voice held. "There was no version of that conversation that made anything better. So I carried it alone. To the altar. Through the fire. And then my body —"

You stopped. "My body answered the grief," you said. "Mo'at said it was too much. The child was too new and the pain was too large and the body answers. It answers whether you want it to or not."

He made a sound. You did not look at him. You had decided, before you sat down, before this conversation existed, that you would not look at him during this — that you would say it to the air and the roots and the forest, the way you had said this was the future, I am returning it, because some things needed to be spoken into the open rather than into a face, because some things were too large to be contained in the space between two people looking at each other.

"I lost the wedding," you said. "I lost you. I lost the child. In three days. In that order. And I am telling you this not to wound you — you are not responsible for what happened to your mind, I know that, I have always known that — but because our child existed, briefly and completely and really, and I am the only one who has been carrying that, and it is too heavy to carry alone for the rest of my life, and you are their father, and you deserved to know."

The silence that followed was the deepest silence you had ever sat inside. Not the silence of the altar — that had been a held breath, a crowd of witnesses, a public grief. This silence was just the two of you at the edge of the world, with the forest breathing around you and the roots of Eywa's Tree beneath you and the late afternoon light turning everything amber and merciless.

"I am so sorry," he said.

And you heard it — you heard what the words were carrying, heard the genuine weight of them, heard that this was not the apology of a person who doesn't know what they're apologizing for. He knew. He understood exactly what had been lost and exactly what his forgetting had cost and he was receiving it, with both hands, without trying to set it down or soften it or make it into something that could be more easily survived. He was receiving it. He had always been good at receiving things, when he knew what they were.

"I know," you said. "I know you are."

"Our child —" His voice broke on the word our and he stopped and you heard him collect himself, heard the specific sound of someone doing the work of being present in something unbearable. "Our child deserved —"

"Don't," you said. "Please don't. I cannot — I cannot hear about what they deserved. I know what they deserved. I have been knowing it every day. Please." He stopped. Silence.

Then: "Can I —" and you heard his hand move, heard the whisper of it through the air toward you, felt the warmth of him at the edge of your peripheral vision reaching, and you wanted — you wanted — you felt the wanting the way you felt the ground go unreliable, the way you always felt anything to do with him, with the full involuntary weight of fourteen years —

"No," you said. Gently. Carefully. With the last of the control you had.

"Not right now." He withdrew his hand. You heard it return to his own lap. You heard the specific sound of a person who has been stopped short of the one thing they wanted and is trying to accept that gracefully. He tried.

"I am remembering you," he said, after a long time. "Every day the pages return. I look at you and it is like finding something I was convinced was gone forever, something I had — I had given up on finding, and then I turn a corner and it is simply there, and I do not know what to do with the having-found-it because I also know what the losing of it cost." His voice was very quiet. "I think I was given something extraordinary. I think I had something that most people never have — to be loved the way I believe you loved me — and I did not know what I was holding, and then I forgot I was holding it at all, and by the time I remembered —"

He stopped.

"By the time I remembered," he said, "the holding had cost you everything."

You looked at him then. You couldn't help it. You looked at him — at this man who had been your entire interior landscape since you were seven cycles old, at the face you had memorized in every light and mood and season, at the eyes that were amber-gold and shaped like his mother's and were looking at you right now with the thing in them that had been growing since the memories started returning — the thing that was no longer almost-recognition, that was simply recognition, full and unqualified and too late.

He looked like himself. He looked like your Neteyam. And that was, somehow, the worst and most important thing about this entire scene — not that he had forgotten, not that he had stepped back at the altar, not that he had said I don't know her in front of everyone you loved. But that he had come back. That he had found his way back to himself, to you, to the song with the right name — and that you were standing on the other side of a fire looking at him and feeling the warmth that had never gone anywhere, that had simply gone behind glass, and knowing that the glass was there for a reason.

The glass was there because you were still standing. Because you had survived by building it. And you could not dismantle the thing that was keeping you alive just because the reason you'd built it was looking at you with full eyes and a voice that said your name the right way again.

"I know," you said. "I know you did. I know you lost it. I know you found it again."

"_____—"

"And I know —" Your voice cracked and you let it crack, you let it be audible, you did not manage it back into stillness because you had been managing things into stillness for fourteen years and you were done, you were so done, with performing steadiness as a substitute for being known — "I know that what you're feeling is real. I can see it. I have been able to see it for weeks. I see you, Neteyam, I have always seen you, that has never once been the problem."

"Then—"

"I lost our child." You said it a final time, not because he needed to be reminded, but because you needed to say it — needed to say it in his presence, needed him to hear the specific weight of those three words in your specific voice, needed there to be a witness to the truth that you had been carrying alone. "I lost our child and I lost you on the same day and I burned everything we built on the night between, and I woke up the morning after with nothing — nothing left, not a single thing — and I have been rebuilding from nothing, Neteyam. From nothing. With my hands. Alone."

"You are not alone —"

"I have been alone in the ways that matter."

The words landed. You watched them land. You watched him receive them and not argue with them because he was honest and he knew they were true.

"You are the fire," you said, and your voice was barely above a whisper now, and the whisper was somehow more final than any volume could have been. "You are the thing I burned. And I cannot — I cannot take the ash of something and make it new again just because the burning is over. I don't know if I have enough left. I don't know if I will ever have enough left. And I refuse to give you what remains of me and have it not be enough. You deserve more than the ruins of someone. And so do I."

He was looking at you. He was looking at you the way he had looked at the bark with words on it, years ago — with the full weight of his attention, with the enormous careful heart that had always been his defining characteristic, with the expression of a man who is being honest with himself about something that costs him. He said nothing for a long time. And then, quietly, in the voice of someone who has understood something fully and is not going to pretend otherwise:

"I know," he said. "I know. I am not — I am not asking you to give me what you don't have. I would never ask that. I am only —" He stopped. His jaw tightened. "I am only telling you that I am here. That I remember. That if you ever —" He stopped again. "That the door is not closed on my side."

You stood up. Your legs held. They had always held, eventually, through every version of this — every altar and fire and forest and waking-up-to-bad-news. Your legs held and you stood and you looked down at him, at this man, at this specific and irreplaceable and devastating man who had been the organizing principle of your entire life and who was looking up at you now with eyes full of everything he had remembered and everything he understood it had cost. You felt something.

You always felt something. You had stopped pretending you didn't. It lived in the same place it had always lived. It was behind the glass. It was warm behind the glass, it had always been warm, it would probably always be warm — that was the thing about loving someone since you were seven years old, you didn't get to choose whether it stopped, you only got to choose what you did with the continuing.

You had chosen to walk. Walking was not the same as not loving. It was just the only thing left that was entirely yours to do.

"Neteyam," you said. His name in your mouth one last time, in this conversation, in this afternoon, in this version of your lives. He looked up at you.

The light was amber and late and the forest was breathing and somewhere in the roots beneath your feet, every voice that had ever spoken into Eywa's Tree was still speaking, still held, still permanent — every vow ever made and every grief ever given and every love that had been real enough to leave a mark on the world's memory, held in the wood and the root and the bioluminescent dark.

Yours was in there. You had stood under that Tree in a dress that glowed, with flowers that smelled like spirit-lines, and even though the vows had not been spoken, you had been there. You had shown up. You had carried fourteen years and a secret and a child and you had shown up in a white dress with your mother's cord around the bouquet and you had been ready. You had been so ready. The Tree had heard that, even if no one else had.

Eywa held everything. You looked at Neteyam — at his tired, searching, newly remembering face — and you felt the enormity of what you were leaving, felt it the way you felt the ground go unreliable, felt it the way you had felt everything to do with him for fourteen years, with the full weight of a love that had survived being unreturned and returned and lost and burned and was, even now, even here, even after everything —

Still warm. Still there. Still yours. "Maybe," you said, "we get married one day."

His breath caught. "But who knows?"

You turned away before you could see his face change. Before you could see what those words did to him. Before the thing behind the glass could find a crack and come through, before the warmth could reach you in a way that would make the next step impossible. You turned away and you walked.

Past the roots of Eywa's Tree where an altar had been prepared and not used. Past the elder woman with the knowing eyes who had given you seven flowers for permanence and watched them mean nothing and left offerings at the Tree of Voices on your behalf in quiet faithfulness. Past Lo'ak, who looked at your face and then looked at the ground and pressed his fist briefly to his chest — the gesture of the People for I see your grief, I honor it, I will not make you speak it. Past the path that led to the communal fire. Past the sleeping spaces and the morning-herb smell of your mother's home. Past all of it. The village fell behind you. The jungle opened ahead.

You walked into it and the bioluminescence rose around you — the ancient light, the living light, the light that was Eywa breathing through every root and vine and glowing thing in this world — and it fell on you the way it had fallen on you your entire life, indifferent and beautiful and present, and you let it.

You breathed. In. Eywa ma'weya. Out. Tskxe si oeru.

The stones were not still. The stones were not still and Eywa did not speak and somewhere behind you Neteyam was sitting on a root with five words in his chest — maybe we get married one day — and the but who knows that came after them, and the silence where your presence had just been, and all of it, all of it going into the roots beneath him, into the Tree, into the memory that Eywa kept of every love that had ever been real enough to hurt this much.

You were still walking. Not toward. Not away.

Forward. Simply forward. Into whatever the world was going to be next, with what remained of you, carrying what you had been given to carry — the thorn and the fourteen years and the fire and the child and the ring with its permanent words and the glass that was keeping you alive and the warmth behind it that had never, not once, not for a single moment, gone out. You were still yourself. Smaller, in some ways. Larger in others.

Changed in the way that only real things change you, the way that only real losses leave real marks, the way that only a love that was genuinely enormous can leave a genuinely enormous absence in its place. You were still you. The forest received you. Eywa breathed.

And behind you, in the village, in the amber light of a late afternoon that neither of you would forget — Neteyam sat on the root of Eywa's Tree and looked at the place where you had been and understood, fully, for the first time, the thing that wisdom always costs:

That knowing what you had, and losing it, and remembering it, and watching it walk away from you into the forest — was not the same as having it back. That love, returned too late, was still love. That it simply had nowhere left to go.

I debated for a long time whether to write this chapter. And then I thought about what it means to love someone completely — to build a life around a person, — and then to have all of it taken. Not by cruelty. Not by choice. Just by the indifferent machinery of fate, which does not care what you deserve. I thought about what it means to carry that. And I thought: this story has to go here. Because some loves are real and enormous and they still end. And the ending doesn't make the love smaller. It just makes the world quieter.

Context- From childhood, _____ has carried feelings for Neteyam that go far beyond the bond of clanmates or friends. He, in turn, loves her completely — but only as a spiritual sister, his steadiest constant, the one person outside his family he trusts without question. For years she tries and fails to reach him differently: through words, through Na'vi tradition, through confession, and finally through a quiet withdrawal that brings him running back — still not understanding why. Then, slowly and without warning, Neteyam begins to see her. Truly see her. What unfolds between them is tender and unhurried — a love made of years of knowing — and it leads to a wedding planned beneath the roots of Eywa's Tree, a ring glowing with the light of the Tree of Souls, and a future that feels, at last, certain. Four days before the ceremony, a patrol gone wrong leaves Neteyam struck by a concussive blast. He survives. He wakes. He remembers everything — except the months that changed them. He looks at _____ with the same warm, uncomplicated affection as always, and sees only his closest friend.

Warning - Mature / intimate content — reader discretion advised (18+) Tragic love arc — emotional damage ahead, Amnesia trope — memory loss of romantic feelings, Unrequited love (one-sided, then mutual, then lost), Themes of sacrifice and right person, wrong time ,Brief depictions of conflict/injury (non-graphic), Canon-adjacent Na'vi culture, language, and spirituality, Reader-insert format — _____ denotes the reader

Words - 6,5k words

There is a saying among the Omatikaya — Eywa ma'weya, tskxe si oeru — Eywa, speak to me, let the stones be still. The elders repeat it at the beginning of difficult things. At births. At huntings. At the moment a healer's hands press over a wound that may not close.

You had been saying it since childhood. Since the very first time you had looked at Neteyam, son of Jake Sully, and felt the ground beneath your feet become something uncertain — not soft, not dangerous, simply unreliable. Like you could not predict what came next. Like the jungle had rearranged itself without warning and forgotten to tell you.

You were maybe seven cycles old, and he had pulled a thorned vine off your ankle without being asked. He didn't even look up. He just saw the problem and solved it, the way Neteyam always solved things — quickly, quietly, as though caring for others were simply a reflex rather than a choice. His fingers had been careful. Precise. He'd made a small sound in the back of his throat when he saw the blood, something soft and disapproving, aimed not at you but at the vine, at the world for having put it there.

That was when it started. That was when — it started. You grew up the way children of the People grow up — together and wild and barefoot through the luminescent undergrowth, your queue-braids catching bioluminescent spores in the dark hours. Neteyam ran faster than anyone, climbed higher, spoke in full sentences to Eywa when others still stumbled through the prayers. He was firstborn of Toruk Makto. He moved through the world with the sureness of someone who has never once doubted where they belong.

You belonged beside him. You had decided this very early and saw no reason to revise it. But Neteyam — Neteyam was the kind of person who loved widely and well and with tremendous platonic devotion. He called you his tsmuke — sister of the spirit, the one whose voice settled him when Lo'ak's chaos was too loud and Kiri's strangeness too quiet. He trusted you with his fears, his failures, the nights he couldn't sleep for the weight of being Toruk Makto's firstborn son. He shared his food with you. He braided wayward strands back into your queue without being asked.

He simply never saw you the way you saw him. "You are the steadiest thing I know," he told you once, sitting in the boughs of a great purple-leafed tree above the nighttime village, your tails curled separately beside you. The bioluminescence of the forest hummed around you, and from far below came the sound of the clan's evening fires and Neytiri's voice, low and musical, singing something old. "You are the thing that doesn't change." You had smiled and said nothing. You were very good at saying nothing. You had been practicing for years.

It did not stop you from trying.

Attempt One — The Celebration of First Hunt

You had been sixteen cycles old, paint still drying on your collarbone from the celebration, firelight catching in your eyes. You had rehearsed it in your head for two weeks. You had rehearsed it out loud to a banshee that didn't care, to a river that didn't respond, and to Kiri, who had simply looked at you with those too-knowing eyes and said, flatly:

"He won't understand it right away. Our father is human. He thinks love must be declared like a mission briefing. Use small words. Possibly a visual aid." "A visual aid," you had repeated. "I'm being serious."

You had not brought a visual aid. In hindsight, you should have brought a visual aid. You found him near the edge of the drumming circle, slightly apart from the celebration, watching Lo'ak try to impress someone with a story that was getting more elaborate by the sentence. You tapped his arm. He turned. You looked at his face — firelit, young, unsuspecting — and delivered your prepared speech.

"I see you, Neteyam. I mean — I see you more than I should. More than tsmuke." He had looked at you for a long, aching moment. Your heart had performed something extraordinary in your chest. Then he had pulled you into a hug, pressed his forehead briefly to yours in the easy way of deep friends, and said, with tremendous warmth: "I see you too. You are everything to me." And then he had immediately turned back to watch Lo'ak's story, still with one arm around your shoulders in the comfortable, brotherly way he'd had since you were children, and laughed when Lo'ak's story reached its inevitable catastrophic conclusion.

He meant it entirely as a kindness. It landed like a stone dropped from a very significant height. You stood inside the circle of his arm and experienced the unique emotional phenomenon of being told you are everything to me and somehow feeling worse than you had before you'd said anything. You made a mental note to tell Kiri you should have brought the visual aid. You did not have the energy to be anything other than honest with yourself: you had just been friend-confessed to. He had taken your romantic declaration and one-upped it with platonic devotion. He had out-loved you incorrectly. Later, Kiri found you sitting alone behind the food baskets, methodically eating smoked meat with the expression of someone making peace with a long imprisonment.

"He hugged you, didn't he," Kiri said. Not a question.

"He said I was everything to him," you said.

"As a friend," said Kiri.

"As a— yes. As a friend."

Kiri sat beside you. "I told you. Visual aid."

"Kiri."

"Srane?"

"Please stop talking."

Kiri handed you more smoked meat. It was the kindest thing anyone did for you that entire evening.

Attempt Two — The Gift of Flowers

Among the Omatikaya, braiding certain mountain flowers into someone's queue-braid while they slept meant I have chosen you. Every child learned this in their first cycles — it was not obscure, it was not subtle, it was the cultural equivalent of a neon sign. It was also, you had been told by every elder you'd ever listened to, considered one of the most romantic gestures a person of the People could make.

You had planned it for a week. You had consulted the elder women about which flowers, specifically. Seven, one of them had said, eyes twinkling, clearly delighted to be involved in something, for permanence. For saying this is not a season, this is a direction. You had sourced the flowers from three different parts of the forest. You had practiced the braiding motion on your own hair until your arms ached. You had approached Neteyam's sleeping space before dawn when the light was still purple and the rest of the clan breathed in slow synchronized sleep, and you had knelt beside him and begun. Your hands shook so badly on the first flower that you nearly dropped it on his face. You did not drop it on his face. You were a person of extraordinary self-control.

You wove all seven. Perfectly. In the correct pattern. With shaking hands and held breath and a prayer to Eywa that was mostly just please, please, please repeated in irregular intervals. Then you left before he woke up, because you were brave but not that brave. He found you at morning meal. He was wearing all seven flowers. He was beaming. He sat down across from you and reached across the woven mat to touch your hand, and his smile was the most open, grateful, radiant expression you had ever seen on a living face.

"You are too good to me," he said. "Only you would remember I was feeling low yesterday. You always know what I need before I know it myself. Thank you. Truly. You are the best friend I have ever had."

The best. Friend. He had, in the same breath, complimented your emotional intelligence, expressed profound gratitude for your presence in his life, and classified you so firmly in the friend category that you could see the label from where you were sitting. You watched him reach up and touch one of the flowers gently, with genuine affection, as though they were precious to him. They were precious to him. That was somehow the worst part.

"I am glad," you said. Your voice did not shake. You were a person of extraordinary self-control. "Eat your food, it will get cold."

He wore the flowers all day. He told three separate people that you had woven them to cheer him up. The elder woman who had advised you on the seven flowers for permanence passed you in the afternoon, looked at Neteyam's flower-braided queue with bright knowing eyes, and then looked at your expression, and the brightness faded into something gentler and more sympathetic. "Ah," the elder said softly.

"Don't," you said.

"I said nothing."

"Please continue not saying it."

The elder patted your arm and moved on. You went into the forest that evening and sat with your back against a Tree of Voices until the grief passed through you like water through cupped hands — present, and then gone, and then you couldn't quite prove it had ever been there.

Attempt Three — The Direct Words

By nineteen cycles you had grown profoundly impatient with yourself. You had tried subtle. You had tried symbolic. You had tried cultural tradition so obvious an elder smiled at you in pity. None of it had worked because, you had finally concluded, Neteyam was not dense — he was simply operating on a completely different emotional frequency, one that had been fine-tuned to care for everyone except in a romantic direction toward you. Fine. Direct, then. You would be direct.

You cornered him — there was no softer word — after a training session, when his skin was still sheened with effort and his queue-braid hung loose over one shoulder and you had exactly the right amount of adrenaline left over from your own session to do what you were about to do before your nerve failed.

"I love you," you said. "Not as tsmuke. Not as kin. I love you the way the ikran loves the sky — because it is where I am supposed to be. I have loved you since the vine on my ankle, since I was seven cycles old, and I have attempted to tell you this in several ways that you did not receive as intended, and so I am telling you now in the plainest possible language and I am asking you to hear it correctly this time."

You watched him absorb this. The silence that followed was the most expensive silence of your life. You watched him go through several expressions in quick succession: surprise, then something you couldn't name, then the particular focused stillness of someone whose mind was working very hard beneath a very controlled surface. Neteyam sat down. Right there on the training ground, like his legs had made an executive decision. He pressed his hands together between his knees and bowed his head and you could see him choosing each word with the same care he used when he was delivering someone the kind of news that changed things.

"You are the most important person outside my family," he said at last, to his hands. "What I feel for you is real and permanent and it will not change. But I do not think I feel it the way you are asking. I do not know what it is — I do not think I have examined it. I know that when you are not near me something is wrong with the air. I know that your voice —" he stopped. "I do not want to lie to you. I would rather you hate me for an honest answer than love me for a comfortable one."

You had respected him enormously for it. You had also, once you were alone, sat down in the dirt and stared at the middle distance for a very long time. Something is wrong with the air, he'd said. He'd described being in love with you as something is wrong with the air and then classified it as not romantic and then expressed a preference for honesty that you genuinely admired while also finding it, in this specific moment, extremely inconvenient. You cried for three days in the dark. Not consecutive — you had responsibilities, you were a person of the People, you had things to do — but in accumulated hours that you measured out in careful doses so no one would see.

On the second day, Lo'ak found you in the high branches and sat beside you without asking why, which you appreciated. He was quietly terrible at comfort but he was excellent at simply being somewhere.

"He told you," Lo'ak said eventually.

"He told me," you confirmed.

"He's an idiot," Lo'ak said.

"He was honest and kind and said something is wrong with the air and then said he doesn't think it's romantic."

Lo'ak made a face that communicated volumes. "Yeah. That tracks. He once described a sunset as 'logistically impressive.'"

"He did not."

"He absolutely did. Sa'nu made him eat dinner outside for a week."

Despite everything — despite the three days and the dark and the expensive silence and the careful honest words — you laughed. Just once. Just briefly. It was enough to get you through to the third day.

Attempt Four — The Last Letting Go

At twenty-one cycles you tried something different. You pulled away.

It was strategic, you told yourself. Necessary. If Neteyam could not identify his feelings through your presence, perhaps your absence would function as a kind of mirror — hold the shape of the thing up to the light, let him see what it looked like without you in it. You were not doing this for hope. You were doing this for clarity. You were releasing you both from the suspended state you'd been occupying, this warm and terrible almost that had no resolution. This was your final attempt. It was shaped like surrender rather than pursuit, but it was still an attempt. You were self-aware enough to admit that.

You were distant at meals — polite, present, simply less. You were briefer at training. You did not save him the best portions of food. You did not appear at his shoulder in the moments you usually appeared. You stopped weaving flowers. You redirected the enormous daily energy of paying attention to Neteyam toward other things — toward your craft, your relationships with other members of the clan, toward the elder who had once patted your arm, who was teaching you healing songs. It was, you told yourself, going quite well.

It lasted three weeks.

On the twenty-second day, before the sun had fully risen, you heard a sound at the entrance of your sleeping space. You were already awake — you were often awake before dawn now, it was one of the new habits of your redirected life — and you turned to find Neteyam standing in the doorway. He looked terrible.

Not ill. Not injured. Simply like someone who had lost something and had been very quietly unable to locate it for three weeks and had reached the end of his ability to continue not addressing it. He was still in his sleep-wrap. His queue-braid was undone from the night, loose over one shoulder. He had clearly come here without planning to — the kind of movement that happens before the mind gives permission.

"Did I do something," he said. Not quite a question. Like he already knew the answer was complicated. "You feel far away. You have felt far away for weeks and I keep trying to find what I did and I cannot find it and that is worse, somehow. Tell me how to fix it. I can fix things if you tell me what they are."

You looked at him. You looked at his face — at his stupid, earnest, irreplaceable face that you had been carefully not-looking-at for three weeks — and felt every wall you'd constructed do something structurally unsound.

"You didn't do anything," you said.

"Then why —"

"You didn't do anything," you said again, softer. "Come in. Sit down. You'll let the cold air in standing there."

He came in. He sat beside you. He did not touch you — he had been more careful about touch since the third attempt, which was its own small grief — but he was present, completely and entirely present, in the way that was uniquely Neteyam, in the way that had made the last three weeks feel like trying to breathe with one lung. You sat in silence as the dawn assembled itself outside.

"I made Lo'ak go look for you yesterday," he said finally, to his hands.

"I know. He found me."

"He said you were fine."

"I was fine."

"He also said —" Neteyam paused. "He said some things I have been thinking about."

You made a mental note to ask Lo'ak exactly what he had said. Then you made a second mental note to bring Lo'ak the good smoked meat at the next meal, regardless of what he'd said, because he had gone and looked for you.

"Don't think too hard," you said.

"I always think too hard. You know this about me."

"I know everything about you."

The sentence sat between you, simply and enormously true. Neteyam turned his head and looked at you, and there was something in his expression you didn't know how to read — something new, or something you'd seen before but always explained away, always filed under the wrong category, always interpreted as the comfortable thing rather than the frightening one.

He looked away again. The dawn finished arriving.

"Don't go far," he said at last. Quiet. More honest than he usually allowed himself to be before he'd finished thinking something through. "Whatever it is — don't go far. I don't know how to —" He stopped. "I don't function correctly when you're far."

You realized, sitting there in the new morning beside him, that you were never going to stop. Not because you hadn't tried. Not because you hadn't chosen to release it, hadn't spent three weeks building the architecture of a life that didn't rotate around him.

But because Neteyam, at dawn, undone and honest and sitting beside you without being asked, was simply this. Was simply the way he was. Was simply someone whose heart had always made room for you even when his language didn't have the right word for what the room was for.

"I don't function correctly either," you said.

He exhaled. Nodded once, like something had been confirmed that he hadn't known he was waiting on. You sat together until the clan woke around you. He left to find Lo'ak. You watched him go. You made no more resolutions about letting go.

You had simply, finally, arrived at the particular exhausted peace of a person who understands that some things are not a choice. Eywa had threaded something between you before you'd had the words for it, and the thread had not broken under the weight of thirteen years and four attempts and one very honest conversation and three weeks of deliberate distance. It had only pulled tighter.

Eywa ma'weya, you thought. The stones are not still. But I think — I think they are settling.

What changed was this time. Or perhaps what changed was Neteyam himself — because people do change, even the ones who seem carved from certainty, even the ones who move through the world like they have never once had to question their footing. He was twenty-two cycles old when he began looking at you differently, and he could not explain it the way he could explain a hunting trajectory or a diplomatic negotiation. It had no logic he could name. It simply arrived one evening when you were laughing at something Lo'ak had said, your head thrown back, your bioluminescent markings flaring gold-green with the movement, and Neteyam felt the floor of his chest drop out entirely.

He stayed very still. He was good at staying very still when something alarmed him. Lo'ak noticed anyway. Lo'ak always noticed the things Neteyam least wanted noticed. He said nothing — just looked at his brother with the long-suffering expression of someone who had been waiting years for a specific person to catch up to something obvious — and then he looked at you, and then he looked back at Neteyam, and he shook his head slowly, like a person watching someone finally discover fire.

Neteyam spent two weeks in denial. Thorough, disciplined, firstborn denial. He kept his hands busy and his mind occupied and he catalogued every logical reason why what he was feeling was simply deep and abiding friendship, the kind the Omatikaya songs spoke about, the kind of closeness that could live between two people for a whole lifetime without being anything else.

He was not convincing, even to himself. The thing that broke the denial was small and ordinary and devastating in the way that only small, ordinary things can be. It was a morning training session. You had taken a blow to the shoulder — not serious, barely worth noting, the kind of thing that happened in training twice a week — and you had simply rolled with it and gotten back up and said something sharp and funny to the person who'd done it, and Neteyam had felt something move through him that was not concern or fraternal protectiveness or any word he had clean access to. It was older than words. It was the thing the elders meant when they said Eywa weaves before we are ready to see the pattern.

He sat with it for three more days after that, alone in the high branches where he did his best thinking, and he thought about a vine on your ankle when you were seven, and the way your voice sounded when you sang healing songs, and what you had said to him years ago in the plainest possible language, and what he had said back — something is wrong with the air — and he understood, finally and fully and without any further room for denial, that he had been describing love with the vocabulary of confusion because he had not known, yet, that those were the same language.

Then he came to you. He found you in the late evening near the Tree of Voices, where you sometimes sat alone, your hands working on something woven and your expression quiet. The light was the deep amber-violet of near-dark, and the forest was beginning its nighttime luminescence, and you looked exactly the way you always looked — steady, present, like something permanent — and he almost lost his nerve three separate times on the way over.

He didn't. He was Neteyam. He finished things.

"I think," he said, standing before you in the evening light with the stiff formality of someone unused to not knowing what to say, "that I have been looking at you incorrectly. For a very long time." He paused. He tried again, and this time his voice was quieter, stripped of the formality, just honest. "I think I have been — I think something is true that I was not aware of. And I need you to know it. Because you told me the truth when it was difficult, and you deserve the same."

You went very still. Your hands stopped their work.

"I have been thinking," he continued, with the careful cadence of someone laying down something fragile, "about what I said to you. Three cycles ago. That something was wrong with the air when you were not near me. I told you it wasn't romantic." He met your eyes. "I was wrong. I was not lying — I did not know yet. But I was wrong. And I am sorry it took me so long to understand what I was saying."

You stared at him. He took a breath.

"I see you," he said. "I mean — I see you more than I should."

He was using your words. From years ago, from the firelight and the drumming circle and the night you had been sixteen and brave and he had not understood. He had remembered them precisely — every word, the exact cadence, as though he had been carrying them without knowing why. You did not say anything for a very long time.

The forest hummed softly around you both. Somewhere in the middle distance a night creature called once and went quiet. The bioluminescence of the ground plants pulsed in slow, calm waves, the way it did when the forest was peaceful, when Eywa was simply present and not warning of anything, just breathing alongside whoever stood within it. And then you began to laugh.

Not the sharp, defensive laugh of someone protecting themselves. Not the tired laugh of someone who had been through too much to react any other way. Softly, without a single grain of bitterness, with the particular full-bodied relief of someone who has been holding their breath so long they had forgotten what breathing normally felt like — and had just, unexpectedly, been given air.

"You are so slow," you said. Your voice was warm and wrecked and wondering all at once.

"I know," said Neteyam. And there was something in those two words — no defense, no qualification, just complete and unguarded acknowledgment — that was more tender than an apology and more honest than an excuse. Just: I know. I know I was. I'm here now.

He reached out. Slowly, with the same deliberate care he used for things that mattered, he tucked a single loose strand of your hair back from your face, his fingers barely grazing your cheek, the most careful hand you had ever felt anywhere near you. And the ground beneath your feet became, for the first time in fifteen years, completely reliable.

You looked at him. He looked at you. The forest breathed.

"You remembered what I said," you said, quieter now. "Word for word."

"I remember everything you say." He said it simply, like a fact, like something he had always known and was only now allowing out into the open air. "I have always remembered everything you say. I thought that was —" the corner of his mouth moved, something self-deprecating and a little wondering, "I thought that was friendship."

"You thought something is wrong with the air was friendship."

"I was not well-informed," said Neteyam.

You laughed again, and this time he laughed too — quietly, low, the rare unguarded laugh that almost nobody ever got from him — and you thought distantly of the banshee you had rehearsed to, the river that hadn't responded, the three days of crying you had measured out in careful doses, the twenty-two days of deliberate distance, the elder who had patted your arm and said ah and said nothing else. You thought about every single prayer that had been mostly just please, please, please in irregular intervals. You thought: Eywa was not ignoring me. Eywa was composting.

"Kiri is going to be insufferable about this," you said.

"Kiri has been insufferable about this for years," said Neteyam. "She told me last week that I had the emotional perception of a river stone. She said it with eye contact. She did not blink."

"She wasn't wrong."

"She was not wrong," he agreed, with great dignity. "I am a reformed river stone."

You were still laughing when he reached for your hand — tentatively, a question rather than an assumption, which was exactly right, which was so precisely him that it ached a little — and you let him take it, and the warmth of it moved through you like the forest at first light, slow and thorough and certain. You sat together as the night deepened around you, your hands joined, the bioluminescence rising gently from the earth beneath you as though the forest itself was quietly, privately pleased. Eywa ma'weya, you thought. The stones are still. They have been settling toward this all along.

What followed was the best months of your life. You understood this with the present-tense clarity of someone who has wanted something long enough to recognize it fully when it arrives — not with disbelief, not with the braced waiting for it to be taken away, but with the simple, grounded certainty of yes. this. finally.

Neteyam was a different kind of partner than you had imagined — more careful, more verbal, more deliberate in his tenderness. He had spent years watching you and had apparently filed away every detail with the same precision he applied to everything else. He knew which berries you preferred after training, and which shoulder you favored when you were tired, and the specific silence you made when you were thinking versus the silence you made when you were sad. He loved you the way he did everything: with his entire attention, quietly and completely, as though you were something worth the full weight of him.

He learned the new language of you — or perhaps he had always known it and was simply, finally, allowed to speak it aloud. A hand at the small of your back when the clan gathered and the press of people was too much. His forehead dropping to your temple when he found you after a long day, no words, just the warm fact of him arriving beside you. The way he said your name now had a different quality to it, a softness at the edges that had always been there in some form but was no longer being held at arm's length.

You would lie in the boughs of the great trees at night, your back against his chest, his arm curved over your waist, both of you watching the bioluminescent forest breathe below you. He would speak softly into your hair about small things — what Lo'ak had done, what Kiri had said, what direction the wind was carrying from the eastern mountain. It was ordinary in the way that only the most important things are ordinary. It was everything.

Kiri, for her part, said nothing. She simply looked at the two of you at the first meal you shared sitting close together, glanced at the exact position of Neteyam's hand near yours on the woven mat, and turned back to her food with the serene expression of someone whose patience has been retroactively justified. You caught her eye. She raised one brow, the smallest possible movement, which communicated I told you with remarkable efficiency without technically saying anything at all.

Lo'ak was less restrained. Lo'ak waited exactly one day before finding you alone and saying, with great satisfaction, "I have been waiting for this since we were twelve," and then accepting the good smoked meat you had promised him without any further comment, because Lo'ak, for all his noise, understood when a thing had simply arrived in its own time and needed no further discussion.

18+WARNING!!!!!!

The rain came sudden and warm that night, the kind that turned Pandora's canopy into a glowing cathedral of water and light, every leaf dripping bioluminescent trails that shimmered like liquid stars. You'd been laughing as you sprinted through it with Neteyam, your hand swallowed in his larger one, heart pounding not just from the run but from the thrill of him—finally yours, after all the stolen glances and careful touches that had built to this. The downpour soaked you both in seconds, water plastering your top to your breasts, your loincloth heavy and clinging between your thighs, outlining the ache that had simmered there all day from his nearness during training.

You ducked into the hollow of a massive root together, the space carved smooth by floods into a curved basin just big enough for two bodies. The walls glowed soft blue from moss, casting rippling light over Neteyam's drenched form as he shook water from his braids—shells clinking, beads sparkling wet. He was breathtaking like this, rain tracing paths down the deep blue planes of his chest, pooling in the dips of muscle, his loincloth near-transparent over the thick ridge of his cock, already swelling from the chase, from how your hip had brushed his mid-stride. Your nipples tightened painfully against your soaked top, pussy pulsing with heat, slick gathering despite—or because of—the chill seeping from the mossy floor.

He turned to you, golden eyes locking on yours in the low glow, that new look in them—patient, devouring, the one he'd only let free since you'd become his. Water dripped from a loose braid onto his shoulder, sliding slow down his skin, and he didn't brush it away. He just watched you, breath coming heavier, asking without words. Your answer rose unbidden—lips parting, chest rising fast, heat flooding your face and between your legs. Your queue stirred against your back, tendrils reaching instinctive.

Neteyam closed the distance, his knuckles grazing your jaw first, rough from bowstring calluses, sending shivers down your spine. His thumb traced your lower lip, parting it until you caught the pad between your teeth, nipping light—the rumble he let out low and primal, vibrating through the humid air straight to your clit. "____" he murmured, the sound of your name gravel-rough from his throat, wrapping possessive around you.

You surged up, claiming his mouth—lips slick with rain sliding warm against his, tasting clean water and the faint sweetness of midday fruit lingering on his tongue. The kiss deepened hungry, your tongue tangling with his deliberate strokes, sucking until his cock jerked heavy against your belly through wet fabric. Your palms flattened on his chest, dragging over rain-slick ridges, thumbs flicking his nipples to peaks that made him hiss sharp into your mouth, hips grinding forward instinctive. He stripped you next, fingers nimble at the ties despite the water, peeling sodden weave from your skin with hands that trembled just slightly—exposing your breasts to the humid air, nipples aching as the moss-light played over them. His gaze dropped, pupils blowing wide, and he palmed one breast heavy, rolling the nipple pinching between fingers until fire shot to your core. "So responsive," he breathed hot against your skin before his mouth descended—wet suction latching on, tongue lashing rough, teeth scraping the edge with a sting that had you moaning loud, fingers knotting in his braids. Wet hair strands slipped cool through your grip, his scent rising sharp—rain and musk and the earthy tang of arousal thickening the air.

Your hands fumbled his loincloth free, yanking it down muscled thighs until his cock sprang heavy against his abs—thick blue length veined and flushed, head glistening precum that you thumbed over the slit, stroking base to tip with a twist. He bucked into your fist, groaning around your nipple, the vibration pulling fresh slick from your pussy. "Need you bare," you whispered, voice wrecked, cupping his sac—warm weight tightening in your palm, balls heavy with promise.

Neteyam eased you down onto the moss, the floor yielding soft and cool under your back, dampness seeping chill against heated skin as he knelt between your thighs. His cock dragged hot along your inner thigh, leaving a sticky trail, before his fingers found your pussy—lips swollen, drenched, clit throbbing. He parted you slow, thumb circling the nub firm while one finger sank knuckle-deep inside, curling to drag that textured spot that made your walls clench fluttering around him. "Eywa—you're dripping for me," he rasped, adding a second finger to stretch you wide, the squelch filthy and loud as he fucked them deep, thumb grinding your clit relentless. Your hips bucked, coil twisting vicious in your belly, your arousal's scent heady in the close space, blending with the salt of his leaking cock nudging your leg.

"Now please nete," you gasped, tugging his queue. Your tendrils met his in a brush that ignited—tsaheylu snapping full, bond sealing with a rush that doubled every nerve. You felt him feel you: the tight heat of your pussy as if it gripped his cock already, his own throbbing ache echoing back amplified. He shuddered hard above you, eyes half-lidded in bliss, the loop infinite—your moans his pleasure, his pulse yours.

He pulled his fingers free with a slick pop, cockhead notching your entrance, pressing insistent as he rocked in—inch by thick inch stretching you open, ridges catching every flutter of your walls, the wet drag audible over your shared pants. Bottomed out balls-deep, sac snug to your ass, you both froze, foreheads pressed, bond humming electric between queues—his awe flooding warm through you, your grip milking him like a second heartbeat.

He thrust then—slow grind first, pelvis circling to mash your clit under coarse curls at his base, moss rasping textured up your back with each rock. "Feel that?" he panted against your lips, hand pinning your thigh wider for deeper angle, braids curtaining your faces damp and swinging. "How you take my cock—perfect—made for this." The slap of hips turned rhythmic wet, his length spearing deep, balls smacking your ass sticky each time.

You raked nails down his back, blue skin welting under your touch, legs hooking his waist to yank him harder—the bond making every plunge yours twice over, hitting that spot inside sparking stars. Slick coated your thighs, his, the air thick with sex—musk sharp, rain-fresh, the earthy squish of moss yielding beneath. "Neteyam—fuck—harder," you begged, clit grinding his bone, tension coiling brutal.

"Good girl," he growled, pace snapping brutal, hips pistoning, one hand pinching your clit frantic as he buried root-deep—holding, grinding as his cock swelled impossibly thicker, pulsing jet after hot jet of cum flooding your pussy, painting your cervix thick and deep, excess spilling creamy around his base to drip into the moss. The bond shattered you—his release crashing yours amplified, walls spasming vise-tight, squeezing every drop as ecstasy ripped through doubled, your cry raw against his neck, vision pulsing bioluminescent. He slumped over you, still sheathed deep, cum warm and locked inside, queues twined thrumming aftershocks.

He nuzzled your forehead in the after-dark, breaths syncing steady, rain whispering soft beyond the hollow. "____" he whispered—just your name, held safe like a secret finally freed. The bond lingered thread-warm between you.

"I'm sorry it took me so long," he murmured, cock softening but unmoving inside, hand stroking lazy circles on your hip, shifting his seed deeper with the motion.

"You're here now," you replied, fingers tracing his jaw's strong line, feeling his contentment echo through the link, his seed taking unseen root in your fertile depths—life kindling quiet, secret. "That's the part I'm keeping."

The proposal happened the way many things happened with Neteyam — both planned and spontaneous, careful and slightly chaotic, and thoroughly, thoroughly him.

He had spoken to Neytiri first. Then to your father. Then to Toruk Makto himself, which had apparently involved a conversation so formal and earnest that Jake Sully had to excuse himself partway through because his expression was doing something he needed privacy to deal with. Neteyam had then, by your later accounting, consulted Dr. Augustine's spirit-memory, Mo'at's blessing, the elder who had once patted your arm and said ah, and approximately seven other people across three days before he had spoken to you. You knew all of this because Lo'ak had the worst secret-keeping face in any clan on any moon.

He had been vibrating with it for two days. He kept looking at you with the barely-contained energy of someone holding a living creature that wanted very much to escape, and every time Neteyam glanced at him he found somewhere else to be with suspicious urgency. Kiri had watched this with the resigned expression of someone who had tried and failed to prevent a natural disaster.

So when Neteyam knelt before you in the blue-lit evening near the roots of Hometree, the luminescent moss glowing soft beneath him, his hands holding the small carved wooden box with the same careful steadiness he gave to things that mattered enormously — you already knew. You had known for two days. You had spent two days pretending you did not know, and being quietly, privately incandescent with happiness about it, because knowing it was coming had not made it any less real, and watching him prepare had only made you love him more.

"You knew," said Neteyam. Slightly wounded. Adorably wounded. "I know everything about you," you said. "I have been studying you for years." You looked at him, kneeling there in the evening light with his heart entirely visible on his face, open in the way he had learned to be open with you and no one else quite so completely. "Say it anyway."

He said it. Every word deliberate, unhurried, chosen with the same care he used for everything that mattered — and it mattered, you could hear that it mattered, you could feel it in the way the air held still around you both, the way the forest seemed to lean in. You said yes before he finished. Then you said it again, properly, once he had, because he deserved to hear it land.

Lo'ak, who had been hiding with truly impressive lack of skill behind a nearby root, made a noise that was equal parts celebration and relief — the sound of someone who had been physically containing excitement for forty-eight hours and had just been released from the obligation. It was quickly and efficiently silenced by Kiri, who had one hand over his mouth before the echo had finished and who met your eyes over his head with an expression of serene, long-vindicated satisfaction. Neteyam opened the box. The ring inside glowed faintly blue in the evening dark, and you stopped breathing for a moment because it was so precisely, completely, specifically you — and you realized, with a warmth that moved through you from the ground up, that he had been paying attention every single day.

He slid it onto your finger. His hands were steady. Yours were not, quite, and he noticed and held them until they were.

Because Jake Sully was still human at heart — still, beneath all the years and the world that had changed around him, the marine from Earth who had grown up with a different sky and a different set of ceremonies — Neteyam wanted the wedding to hold both worlds. He had thought carefully about this, the way he thought carefully about everything. It would be Na'vi in spirit and setting and prayer, but it would carry the shapes of human ceremony too, as a gift to his father and to the part of himself that had grown up beautifully, gracefully, between two cultures.

He told you this the night after the proposal, the two of you sitting close together in the high branches, your new ring catching the bioluminescence every time you moved your hand — which you were doing somewhat more than necessary, and he pretended not to notice, which was its own small tenderness.

"I want him to feel it," Neteyam said. "My father. I want him to stand there and know it as something he recognizes."

You leaned your head against his shoulder. "He will," you said. "He already does. He cried when you asked him." A pause. "He told you that."

"Lo'ak told me that. Apparently Jake Sully had to walk away and stand behind a tree for a moment." Neteyam was quiet. His arm tightened around you slightly, the particular movement he made when something moved him and he was choosing not to make a great deal of it. "He's a good father," he said finally. "You're a good son," you said. "He knows that too."

The forest breathed around you. The ring glowed softly on your hand. They chose Eywa's Tree — the great neural network at the center of the village grove, where the roots of the world converged and the air hummed with ancient presence, the kind of presence that made you feel simultaneously very small and exactly the right size. An altar was built from living wood and woven moss, hung with luminescent flowering vines that bloomed specifically in the dark, as if the forest had been consulted and had agreed to dress for the occasion. The Omatikaya weavers spent two weeks threading the ceremonial frame with strands of ikran-silk and offerings from the hunt, working in the early mornings when the light was still lavender and the dew had not yet left the leaves.

The ring had been Neteyam's own design — human-style, at his specific and deliberate request, though carved from native Pandoran mineral and set with a fragment of a seed from the Tree of Souls, encased in resin so it glowed faintly blue at dusk and dawn and in the dark. Jake Sully had helped him design it, the two of them bent over sketches together with the particular focused quiet of a father and son doing something that mattered to them both. Norm Spellman had sourced the mineral, and had apparently been very emotionally invested in the procurement, which you found deeply endearing. It had taken four weeks to make. It had sat in a carved wooden box in Neteyam's quarters while it was being made, and he had opened it approximately twice a day just to look at the box, which Lo'ak had found hilarious, and which you would not learn until much later, when Lo'ak told you at the wedding feast with great delight and Neteyam accepted this betrayal with the dignified silence of someone who could not technically deny it.

Your wedding dress was made by Neytiri's own hands — a collaboration, technically, because you had opinions and Neytiri had the skill and the two of you had spent many evenings together over it, evenings that had drifted into laughter and occasional spirited creative disagreement and then somehow always arrived at something better than either of you had started with. She worked with the focus and precision she brought to everything, but there were moments — when she held the cloth up to the evening light to check the fall of it, or when she smoothed a seam with her thumb — when you caught something on her face that was not about the dress at all. Something older and quieter. The look of a mother watching something good happen to someone she has chosen to love.

"You are good for him," she said one evening, without looking up from her work. Not the beginning of a longer speech. Just the thing itself, offered plainly. "He is good for me," you said.

She looked up then. Looked at you for a moment with those clear, direct eyes. Then she nodded once, and went back to the dress, and that was that — the fullest acceptance you had ever received from anyone in your life, delivered in eleven words and a single nod, and it settled into your chest like something permanent. The dress was the blue of deep forest shadow and the silver of bioluminescent water. It moved when you moved, the way good Na'vi cloth always does, like something living, like it had been woven from the forest itself and was simply being borrowed for the occasion.

A bouquet of moonblossoms — flowers that only opened after dark, pale white and faintly glowing, carrying the cold clean scent of highland air — had been gathered from the meadows where you and Neteyam had run as children, barefoot and wild, before either of you had words for what you were to each other. Kiri had gone to find them herself. She had pressed one into your hand without ceremony, with the directness that was entirely and specifically Kiri, and said: "I always knew."

"You told me he wouldn't understand it right away," you said. "You told me to use small words and possibly a visual aid." "I knew it would work out," Kiri said, entirely unbothered. "Those are not contradictory statements."

She walked away before you could argue, which was also entirely and specifically Kiri. You stood holding the moonblossom and smiling in spite of yourself, and the scent of it was highland air and childhood and every morning you had ever woken up knowing that today you would see him.

Five days before the wedding, you stood in the grove at dusk and looked at the altar rising between the great roots of Eywa's Tree. The vines were already blooming. The woven silk caught the last of the light and held it. The air hummed, low and constant, the way it always did here — the sound of something that had been listening for a very long time.

You thought about a thorned vine and a seven-year-old boy who hadn't looked up. You thought about firelight and rehearsed speeches and smoked meat eaten behind food baskets. You thought about seven flowers woven with shaking hands and a silence that had been the most expensive of your life and three weeks of deliberate distance and a morning in a doorway and a laugh without bitterness and the most careful hand you had ever felt on your face. You thought about the ring on your finger and the dress that moved like something living and the meadow where the moonblossoms grew and Lo'ak's terrible secret-keeping face and Kiri's long-vindicated serenity and a father who had walked behind a tree and a mother who had said you are good for him with the weight of a blessing. You thought about Neteyam, twenty-two cycles old, sitting down on a training ground like his legs had made an executive decision. You thought about him saying something is wrong with the air and not knowing yet what he was saying. You thought about him at dawn in your doorway, undone and honest. You thought about him kneeling in the blue evening light with a glowing ring and his whole heart on his face.

The happiness was so large and so complete it frightened you slightly, the way very good things sometimes do — when you are aware, with the full knowledge of someone who has waited and tried and grieved and arrived, of how much you would lose if it were taken.

You said a quick, private prayer. Eywa ma'weya, tskxe si oeru. And the stones did not stay still. They rose. They sang. They rearranged themselves into something that looked, from where you were standing, exactly like everything you had ever asked for — and the ground beneath your feet was perfectly, completely, permanently reliable.

Five days, you thought. Five days, and then the rest of your life. You could wait five days. You had, after all, always been very good at waiting.

The trouble between the RDA remnants and the clans had been simmering for weeks. Everyone knew it was there — it lived in the tightness of council meetings, in the way the watch-riders came back with their jaws set, in the way Jake Sully spread his hands flat on the planning mat and said not yet with the voice of a man who knew what yet eventually became.

Neteyam knew it was there. He had been part of the watch-patrols, had attended every council, had told Jake twice — calmly, precisely, the way he said things that needed to be heard — that the southeastern perimeter needed more riders. He was responsible and diligent and prepared and four days from becoming your husband.

He was not supposed to be on that patrol.

You knew this. You had known it the night before, when you'd watched him reviewing the scout reports with the focused stillness that meant he was already deciding something you hadn't been consulted on. You had not said anything because you knew Neteyam — because years of knowing someone meant you also knew which arguments you would not win, and this was one of them. He did not send people into situations he was not willing to enter himself.

It was one of his best qualities. It was also the quality that was going to end you both. You were at the eastern grove with Kiri, reviewing the floral arrangements for the altar — the moonblossoms had been placed that morning, pale and glowing in the early light, and Kiri had been adjusting the angle of the woven silk with the precise dissatisfaction of someone who had a vision — when you heard it.

The ikran cry. Not the ordinary call. Not the territorial sound or the dawn-greeting or the absent noise of a creature at rest. The specific, piercing, high cry that meant someone was coming fast and low and there was urgency threading through every note of it, urgency that moved through your body before your mind had processed the sound.

You were running before the rider landed. You did not remember deciding to run. Your body simply understood something your thoughts had not yet caught up to, and it moved, and Kiri called your name behind you and you did not stop.

The patrol had run into a machine. One of the old shielded RDA vehicles — faster than it should have been, faster than the intelligence reports had indicated, carrying equipment that the clans had only begun to identify. A concussive wave on detonation. A deterrent, not a weapon. Designed to scatter, not to kill.

Neteyam had seen one of the younger riders in its path. He had pushed them clear. He had taken the wave directly.

The rider who brought the news could not quite meet your eyes. He kept saying it was not the worst. That Neteyam was breathing. That the Tsahik believed he would live, that there was no bleeding they could not manage, that the wave had been a deterrent and not a weapon and the difference mattered. He kept saying these things in the careful, repetitive way of someone who has been told to lead with the reassurances, and you kept nodding in the careful, mechanical way of someone whose body had defaulted to function because the alternative was the ground.

Somewhere between the eastern grove and Mo'at's healing tent, you stopped being able to feel your feet. You were holding something. You looked down at your hands and found the small carved wooden box — the one Neteyam kept on the shelf in his quarters, the one that held the ring — and you did not know when you had picked it up or why, only that your hands had found it and closed around it and now you could not seem to let go. They worked on him for four hours.

Four hours is a very long time when you are sitting outside a tent listening to the sounds inside it and translating each one — a sharp intake of breath, a murmured instruction from Mo'at, a silence that went on three seconds too long — into either he is alive or the other thing, the thing you could not let yourself form into a coherent thought.

Neytiri sat with her knees drawn to her chest, her eyes closed, her lips moving in continuous prayer, each word shaped with the precision of someone who had been praying to Eywa since before you were born and knew that the asking had to be exact. You watched her hands — still, deliberately still, the hands of a hunter forcing stillness on themselves — and you thought: she is terrified. The most capable woman you had ever known was sitting outside a tent and she was terrified, and somehow that was the most frightening thing of the entire four hours.

Jake Sully stood very still with his hands pressed flat against his thighs, a posture you had learned over years meant he was holding himself together by force of habit, by the muscle-memory of a man who had been trained to hold position under fire and had never quite unlearned it. He did not speak. His jaw was set. His eyes did not leave the tent entrance.

Lo'ak paced. Back and forth, back and forth, with the coiled energy of someone whose body would not allow stillness — Lo'ak, who had sat beside you in high branches without asking why, who had gone to look for you when Neteyam asked him to, who had said he's an idiot with the great frustrated love of a younger brother. His eyes found yours every few passes and each time they did you saw the same thing in them that you were trying not to show in yours.

Kiri sat beside you. She did not speak. She did not offer comfort or analysis or the particular long-suffering wisdom she usually deployed in difficult situations. She simply sat, close enough that her shoulder was against yours, and stayed there, and it was the kindest thing she had ever done for you.

You held the carved box. You had not opened it. You did not know why. You only knew that your hands needed something to hold onto and this was the thing they had chosen and you were not going to examine that too closely right now.

When Mo'at emerged, the exhale that moved through the gathered clan was a physical thing — a collective release of held breath, like pressure escaping from a sealed space, like the forest after a lightning strike when you realize the tree is still standing. She said he was awake. She said he was asking questions. She said the wave had taken something but not the things that could not be given back.

You stood up before she finished speaking. You were the third person allowed in. After Jake, after Neytiri — which was right, which was the correct order, and you told yourself this firmly as you stood outside the entrance for the three seconds it took you to arrange your face into something that would not frighten him.

You were very good at arranging your face. You had been practicing for fifteen years. You stepped inside. He was sitting up.

That was the first thing — he was sitting up, which meant his spine was intact, which meant the wave had not done the worst of the things it could have done, and the relief of it moved through you so sharply it almost took your legs out. His braid hung loose over one shoulder, undone from the patrol, and there was healer's clay still marked along his temple where Mo'at had worked. He looked tired in the specific way of someone whom pain has made extremely present in their own body — alert, careful, eyes tracking with the precision of someone taking stock of everything around them.

He looked like himself. He looked exactly, completely, utterly like himself, and you thought: I am going to be fine. We are going to be fine. He is here and he is himself and in four days —

He looked at you. You crossed to him. You took his hand without speaking, because there were no words organized enough yet, because everything in you was still in the process of reassembling itself from the four hours outside, and his hand was warm and solid and real and that was enough.

He looked down at your joined hands. He frowned. Not his usual frown — not the focused, thinking frown, not the frown he made when a problem required more than one pass. This was smaller. The particular expression of someone reaching for something and finding the shelf slightly out of place.

"Are you hurt?" he said. His voice was careful, measured, the voice of someone calibrating their words while their mind was still doing something else. "Were you on the patrol?"

The ground did something.

"No," you said. Your voice was steady. You were a person of extraordinary self-control. "I was at the grove."

He nodded. He filed this information away with a small, satisfied movement, the way he filed things that confirmed the world was in order. Then he looked at you — really looked, in the assessing way he had — at your face, your hands, the box you were holding that had once sat in his quarters and that he had opened twice a day just to look at. His expression settled into something warm. Fond. Uncomplicated. Familiar.

And the ground dropped out from under you entirely, because you knew that expression. You had known that expression for years. You had spent years on the receiving end of it and years learning what it looked like when it changed into something else — something deeper, something that had learned to say your name like a word kept safe — and what was looking at you now from his face was not that. It was the before.

It was the tsmuke (sister/family) look. The you are the steadiest thing I know look. The you are everything to me, platonically and completely look that had once landed on you like a stone dropped from a very significant height.

"I am glad you are safe," he said. Warm. Genuine. Completely, quietly, devastatingly platonic. "You didn't have to come. But I'm glad. You are always so —" he paused, searching for the word with the slight effort of someone whose head was still recovering, "you are always here. When it matters. You have always been like that."

He pressed your hand. The way he had pressed your hand at sixteen, at seventeen, at every age before twenty-two, in the comfortable, brotherly, easy way of someone who loves you with their entire heart and has placed that love in exactly the wrong category.

"Thank you for coming," he said. "It helps. Having you here — it always helps. You know that."

You understood. Not slowly. Not piece by piece, the way comprehension sometimes assembles itself with mercy. All at once, with the terrible, total clarity of a wave — the same wave that had taken him, you thought distantly, and there was something unbearable about that — you understood.

He remembered you. He remembered your name, your history, the texture of fifteen years of friendship, every year of tsmuke and steady presence and being the thing that didn't change. He had woken up with all of that intact, every year of before, every morning of your childhood, every bough of every tree you had ever climbed together.

He had simply lost the months that remade everything. The evening near the Tree of Voices when he'd said I see you more than I should with your own words in his mouth. The rain and the hollow root and the neural bond that had felt like the forest closing a loop it had been working toward for fifteen years. The morning he had tucked a strand of your hair behind your ear with the most careful hand you had ever felt, and the ground had gone, for the first time, completely reliable.

The box he had opened twice a day just to look at. Gone. All of it, in four hours, gone. And the person sitting before you, holding your hand with such warmth, such genuine uncomplicated warmth — was looking at you with the face of someone who did not know why you were holding a ring.

"You've been crying," he said, with the gentle observation of someone noting a fact they wish they could fix. He reached out and touched your face briefly with his thumb, wiping something away — and that gesture, so like him, so exactly like the careful hands that had always moved toward you when you were hurting, nearly broke something structural in your chest. "Don't cry for me. I'm here. I'm not going anywhere."

You don't know that, you thought. You don't know how many ways that means something right now. "I know," you said.

"You worry too much," he said, and there was fondness in it, deep easy fondness, the fondness of someone speaking to the person they trust most in the world and have never once considered losing. "You always have. Since we were children. I used to think — do you remember when we were young, you would check on the banshee hatchlings every morning even when the riders said they were fine?"

You remembered. You remembered because he had teased you about it once, years later, laughing in the boughs of the purple-leafed tree, and you had laughed back and thought: even the small things, he keeps the small things.

"I remember," you said.

"That's you," he said simply, as though this explained something. "You have always been like that. It is one of the things —" he stopped, and something briefly complicated moved across his face, something you might have read as more if you had not just spent four hours understanding what less looked like, "one of the things that makes you who you are. My —" another pause, "my tsmuke. In the truest sense."

Tsmuke. The word landed with the full weight of everything it used to mean and everything it no longer meant and everything it had briefly stopped meaning and now meant again without his knowledge.

You smiled. You had always been very good at smiling when it cost you everything. The practice had started years ago, behind food baskets, with smoked meat and Kiri's silence and the particular peace of a person making terms with a long imprisonment.

You had not expected to need that particular skill again.

"Of course," you said. "Rest. I'll stay."

"You don't have to —"

"I'll stay," you said again, softer. Final.

He looked at you for a moment longer with those clear, honest eyes — the eyes that had learned to see you differently and had now, without warning, unlearned it — and then he settled back, and closed them, and trusted you completely, the way he had always trusted you, with no idea at all what he was trusting you with.

Outside the tent, four days from now, an altar waited between the roots of Eywa's Tree. The moonblossoms Kiri had gathered from the highland meadow were already blooming in the dark. The woven silk caught the night air. The luminescent vines moved like something breathing.

Inside the tent, you held his hand while he slept, and the box with the ring pressed into your palm, and you breathed in through your nose and out through your mouth in the careful, deliberate way of someone managing something very large in a very small space. The nausea hit without warning.

Sharp. Rolling. The kind that started low and rose fast, and you barely had time to register it before your body made a decision entirely independent of the situation — independent of the tent, the sleeping figure beside you, the ring box, the altar four days away, all of it — and you were outside in the night air on your hands and knees in the soft earth and your body was emptying itself with the merciless thoroughness of something that had been waiting for a quiet moment.

You sat back on your heels when it was done. The forest hummed around you, patient and ancient and deeply unbothered by what was happening to you. You pressed the back of your hand to your mouth.

You thought about mornings, recently. The way certain smells had been wrong. The way you had been tired in a new way, a deep-roots way, a way you had not had language for because you had been otherwise occupied with moonblossoms and altar arrangements and a ring that glowed blue in the dark.

You thought about what that meant. You looked down at the box in your hand. The ring inside it, made by a man who had opened the box twice a day to look at it, who no longer remembered why, who had just called you tsmuke with the warmest, most devastating sincerity you had ever been on the receiving end of. Eywa ma'weya, you thought, and it came out broken, barely even a thought, more like something torn loose from the place where prayers live.

The stones did not answer. The ground beneath you was dirt and root and ancient earth, and it did not feel reliable at all.

You stayed there in the dark for a long time, the box in your hands, the forest breathing around you, and you did not know yet what shape the world was going to take when the sun came back. You only knew two things, with the simple, crushing, irrefutable certainty of facts that do not care whether you are ready for them: Neteyam did not remember. And you were not alone in your body anymore.

Hi again, Istg i'm moving on to a new topic soon so just enjoy the netayam stuffs! comment what you'd like the ending would be.

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A story about a girl who does not know how to be soft learning what it feels like to want to be — 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: — Strong language / profanity throughout — Physical violence, blood, injury — Reader portrayed as aggressive and difficult — Emotional conflict, unrequited feelings — Guilt, shame, emotional vulnerability — Impulsive kissing without consent — Open-ended / cliffhanger ending — NO resolution- Smut

Words-

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You didn't hear him coming.

That was the thing — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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 —

You kissed him. You kissed him and you ran and his face was — his face —

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 — 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 — this stupid, avoidable, self-created disaster — 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 — 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.

Lo'ak: "Hey."

You startled so violently that your whole body jerked sideways and you nearly went off the rock entirely — 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 —

Lo'ak. Lo'ak.

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 — 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 — 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.

"Get out."

Lo'ak: "This isn't a room. You can't tell me to get out of —"

"Get. Out. Go away. Leave. Pick a direction — any direction, I genuinely do not care which one — and walk in it. Keep walking. Don't stop."

Lo'ak: "I'm not going anywhere."

"Lo'ak."

Lo'ak: "Yeah."

"I am warning you. I am giving you a real, genuine warning right now as a — 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 — whatever version of this you are currently planning in that head of yours — 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 — for both our sakes — 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 — 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 — sat. Like it was a decision he had made and was not revisiting.

You stared at him.

"What are you doing."

Lo'ak: "Sitting."

"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 — 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."

Lo'ak: "What?"

"Since when do you care if I'm upset. You and I have been — we have not been — this is not a thing we do. You don't — we don't —" 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 —" 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 — 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.

"I'm fine."

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 —" 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 — I'm fine, Lo'ak, I just — it's nothing, it's —"

Lo'ak: "What happened."

Not a question. A patient, direct, entirely non-optional request.

"Nothing."

Lo'ak: "Where's Neteyam."

The name.

The name — said so casually, so without warning, dropping into the conversation like a stone into still water — 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.

"Don't."

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 — don't."

Lo'ak: "I was literally just asking where he —"

"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."

Lo'ak: "Like what."

"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 — 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 — 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.

"How did you know."

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 — 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 — 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 —" A longer pause. "Weird about it. At first."

"Weird about it."

Lo'ak: "I was raised in genuinely complicated circumstances. Give me some room."

"Lo'ak."

Lo'ak: "Yeah."

"He's engaged."

A beat.

Lo'ak: "I know."

"He's — there's someone. There's already someone, there has been someone this whole time, and I knew that. I knew that and I —" 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 — none of it matters. It was stupid. I was so — I was so incredibly stupid, Lo'ak, I just —"

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 — 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 —

"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 — in through your nose, out through your mouth, the deliberate mechanical breathing of someone trying to get their body back under basic control — 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 —

Lo'ak: "…Oh."

"Yeah."

Lo'ak: "Just now."

"Yeah."

Lo'ak: "At the falls."

"At the falls. Yes. At the falls with the — the light was — it doesn't matter what the light was doing. Yes. At the falls. Just now."

Lo'ak: "And then you —"

"Ran. Yes."

Lo'ak: "You ran."

"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."

Lo'ak: "What did he —"

"Nothing. He didn't say anything."

Lo'ak: "He didn't —"

"I didn't give him time to say anything! I looked at his face and I couldn't — his face was — 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 — somehow — 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.

"Completely."

Lo'ak: "Like — 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."

Lo'ak: "Hm."

"Don't 'hm' me."

Lo'ak: "I'm just —"

"What does 'hm' mean, Lo'ak, what is that, say words —"

Lo'ak: "It means I'm thinking. Let me think."

"Think quieter."

Lo'ak: "I can't think quieter, this is how I think —"

"Then think less. Think nothing. Stop."

Lo'ak: "You know what I —"

"I said stop —"

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 —"

"Stop."

Lo'ak: "I think if you had stayed —"

"Lo'ak —"

Lo'ak: "I think if you had stayed and let him —"

"Lo'ak, please."

Your voice came apart on the please. Split straight down the middle, no controlled edges left on it, nothing managed or contained. Just — 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 — 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 —" 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 — this is bigger than any of those times, Lo'ak, this is — 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 —"

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 —

Then Lo'ak shifted. And without announcement, without warning, without any of the ceremony that would have made it possible to refuse — he put his arm around your shoulders. Awkward. Immediately, obviously awkward — 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 — 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 —

Lo'ak: "Don't make it weird."

"You are literally the one making it weird —"

Lo'ak: "I'm trying to be — 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 —"

Lo'ak: "Stop. Talking. About the angle."

You closed your mouth. You sat rigid for three seconds. Four. Five. And then — slowly, in stages, like ice that takes a long time to find the decision to melt — 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 — 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.

A long time passed.

(so quietly it barely counted as sound) "I really liked him, Lo'ak."

Lo'ak: (just as quietly) "I know."

"Not just — not just the flat rock and the silences and the fruit and all of that. Those things were — I loved those things, I loved every one of those stupid boring afternoons, but it wasn't — 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 — 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 —"

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 —" 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.

"It's so stupid."

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 — 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 — 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 — 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."

Lo'ak: "No you're not."

"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.

"What do I do."

Lo'ak: "I don't know."

"Lo'ak."

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."

"Did you."

Lo'ak: "I did not win."

"Lo'ak."

Lo'ak: "Yeah."

"Say something anyway. Wise or not. Just — 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 — and I want you to understand I am saying this as someone who argued with a tulkun, so weight it accordingly — 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 —" He stopped. Started again. "I think my brother is not someone who lets things be unresolved. So whatever his face meant tonight — 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 —"

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 — 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."

Lo'ak: "I know."

"I hate feeling like this. I hate that I let myself feel like this. I was fine. I was — I was completely fine before, I was perfectly functional, I didn't need any of this —"

Lo'ak: "You weren't fine."

"I was fine enough."

Lo'ak: "There's a difference."

"Fine enough was working for me, Lo'ak —"

Lo'ak: "Was it."

You opened your mouth. Closed it. Looked at the water.

"…No."

Lo'ak: "No."

"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."

"It's very smug."

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.

"Lo'ak."

Lo'ak: "Yeah."

"Thank you."

He went very quiet. The tips of his ears moved — 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."

"Which part."

Lo'ak: "Any part. The sitting. The talking. The arm. All of it. Any of it. None of this happened."

"Lo'ak."

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: "Good."

"I mean it. Thank you."

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 — Not leaving.

And for tonight — just tonight, just this one broken and bioluminescent and thoroughly humiliating night — that was enough. It was, against every reasonable expectation you had ever held about Lo'ak specifically and the world in general —Enough.

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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 — patience, restraint, basic courtesy, showing up to things on time, not starting fights over fish baskets. But disappearing — redirecting — making yourself simultaneously present and unreachable — 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.

Every. Single. One.

The tree incident happened on day three.

You had been coming down the eastern reef path — head down, moving quickly, completely focused on getting from point A to point B without incident — 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 —

You went up. Specifically, you went up the broad-trunked tree to the left of the path — the one with the good lower branches and the dense upper canopy — 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 —

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 — a brief, bright flash of I did it, it worked, I am a tactical genius — 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 — 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 —

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.

"Good morning."

Ehä: "…Good morning."

"Lovely day."

Ehä: "You just left."

"I forgot something."

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 — 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."

Neteyam: "It's midday."

"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.

Neteyam: "…Alright."

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: "…Are 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 — shaking water from his braids, completely unsuspecting — 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.

(casually) "Good water."

Neteyam: "…You didn't bring swimming things."

"I'm a spontaneous person."

Neteyam: "You dove fully clothed."

"I like the resistance. For training."

Neteyam: "Training."

"It's a technique."

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 — 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 — 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 —

Kiri: "Oh, there you are."

"Kiri —"

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 —" She tilted her head in the considering way she had. "Thoughtful. About it."

"When. Exactly. This afternoon — when, what time, which direction —"

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."

"No."

Kiri: "You've gone the long way around three times this week. I noticed."

"I like the scenery."

Kiri: "The long way goes past the drying racks."

"I find drying racks very —"

Kiri: "Calming?"

"Yes."

Kiri: "You find drying racks calming."

"They're very — 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."

You stared at her.

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."

"I know where he is."

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 —"

"Lo'ak, I swear —"

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.

A pause.

Lo'ak: "He didn't see you."

(not moving) "Good."

Lo'ak: "He's gone."

(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."

"Good."

Lo'ak: "I'm just going to walk next to you."

"Fine."

Lo'ak: "In silence."

"Thank you."

Lo'ak: "Because I respect you."

"Lo'ak."

Lo'ak: "The baskets —"

"Lo'ak."

Lo'ak: (pressing his lips together very hard) "…Nothing. 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 — 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 — bland.

That was the only word that fit. Bland in the way food goes bland when you've been ill — 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 — 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.

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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 — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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 — she was always capable of things that surprised him — but that particular gentleness, directed at him, her hands on his face like he was something worth handling carefully —

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 — 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 — 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 —

I should go after her. The thought arrived immediately. He was already moving before it had fully formed — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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 — sitting. With her forehead down and her shoulders doing something that meant — 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 — 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 — but he had never seen her cry.

Watching it from a distance, in the blue-green light, without her knowing he was there —

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 — 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 — she who flinched from contact, she who had never in all the months he had known her voluntarily leaned into anyone — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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 — he had always assumed — Has this been happening without me knowing.

The question was quiet. Clinical. He tried to approach it the way he approached everything — 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 — 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 — 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 — not a memory exactly, more like a shape he knew the outline of.

Does Lo'ak — 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 — 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 —

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 —

She laughed again. The small broken-edged one. Lo'ak said something and she shook her head and something in her posture shifted — not relaxing exactly, but yielding, fractionally, the held tension releasing by a degree — They are comfortable with each other. That was the word. Comfortable. Not the charged difficult energy he had always observed between them — 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 —

How long. He stood on the path in the dark and felt something that was not comfortable and was also not — he was trying to be honest — not entirely about Lo'ak. Why does it bother me.

He had been jealous before. He knew what jealousy was — 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 — 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 — maybe four — 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 —

Not this. Not whatever this is. He looked at them below — Lo'ak's arm, her leaning, the comfortable proximity that he had never seen her offer anyone — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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."

Lo'ak: "Hm."

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 — the half-second of Lo'ak's hands going still before they resumed their motion.

Lo'ak: "Yeah?"

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"

Neteyam: "I'm."

Lo'ak: "Your doing that face."

Neteyam: "What face?."

Lo'ak: "You have a specific face right now and I'm telling you whatever you think you saw it's —" He stopped. Started again. "She was upset. Okay? I found her upset and I — I stayed. That's it. That's the whole thing."

Neteyam: "You had your arm around her."

Lo'ak: "She was crying."

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 — she was in a bad way, okay, she doesn't — she doesn't have a lot of people and she was upset and I wasn't going to just leave her there —"

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.

Neteyam: "Lo'ak."

Lo'ak: "She was just — 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 — He was not sure he could read underneath it right now.

Neteyam: "Are you — 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.

Lo'ak: "What?"

Neteyam: "I'm asking directly. I think you deserve a direct question and I think I deserve a direct answer."

Lo'ak: "I —" He stopped. His ears moved. His jaw tightened briefly. "That's — that's a complicated question."

Neteyam: "It's a simple question."

Lo'ak: "Things are not always simple just because you phrase them simply."

Neteyam: "Lo'ak."

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 —" 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-"

Neteyam: "In what way."

Lo'ak: "In the way of a person who —" 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."

Neteyam: "Lo'ak —"

Lo'ak: "Neteyam. I'm asking you — I'm asking you as your brother, who you trust, who you know — 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.

Neteyam: "Alright."

Lo'ak: (exhaling) "Thank you."

Neteyam: "I'm not finished."

Lo'ak: "I know."

Neteyam: "I just — not right now."

Lo'ak: "Yeah."

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 — the kiss and the three seconds and the mist and the image of her leaning into his brother's arm in the dark — 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 — the thing he had examined on the path above the lower pool and recognized and then walked away from and not slept because of — 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 — 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 — whatever is happening. Take care of her. She doesn't — 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 — the arrangement, the practical sensible arrangement — and he thought about duty and he thought about her hands on his face — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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 —

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 — shifted from his usual spot to one that gave him a clearer sightline across the space — 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 — 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 —

Then she walked behind a stack of baskets. He was crossing the communal area when it happened — 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 — 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 — he didn't know what it was. It was painful. It was also, somewhere he was not proud of, very slightly —

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 — carefully, honestly, with the full weight of everything he had been not-looking-at for months — 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 — 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 — 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.

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You didn't see it coming.That was the thing about a month of perfect vigilance — 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 —

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 — 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 — and you were moving quickly because moving quickly meant not thinking and not thinking was currently your primary survival strategy —

You walked directly into him. Not metaphorically. Not the near-miss of catching yourself at the last moment. Physically, completely, with full momentum — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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 —You took a step back.He took a step forward. The distance between you did not change.

"I have to go —"

Neteyam: "No."

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 —"

Neteyam: "No. You have been avoiding me for a month."

"I haven't been —"

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 — there was something. In the tree. A thing I was looking at —"

Neteyam: "There was no thing."

"You cannot possibly know —"

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."

"I —"

Neteyam: "You also hid behind the weaving baskets."

"I was assessing their —"

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 — the open, direct, completely undefended quality of his attention — 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 — 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 know."

"Then —"

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 — 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 — 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 — exist. As the thing they are. And be left alone."

Neteyam: "Not this."

"Why not this."

Neteyam: "Because this is not a small thing. And because you have been miserable for a month —"

"I have not been —"

Neteyam: "You have been miserable. I have watched you be miserable from whatever distance you've allowed me and I am —" 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."

You stared at him.

"That's not your responsibility."

Neteyam: "No. But it matters to me. You matter to me. And I need to know —" 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 — for the conversation you had been dreading, for the inevitable gentle handling of a situation that required gentle handling — and instead he had asked you that, with the specific vulnerability of someone who had been sitting with the possibility for thirty days.

"What?"

Neteyam: "Do you hate me. I need to know if I did something — if I made you feel unsafe or —" 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 —"

"You didn't —"

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 — that's literally the entire —"

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 —

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 —"

Neteyam: "It is not nothing."

"Neteyam —"

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 —"

"That was training —"

Neteyam: "— and attending a weaving circle, which I know because three different people have mentioned it to me because none of us can believe it —"

"I have an interest in textile arts —"

Neteyam: "You dove into the northern falls fully clothed."

(a strangled sound that was not quite anything) "That was — there were specific reasons —"

Neteyam: "What were they."

"They were — they were personal reasons —"

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 —

"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 —"

Neteyam: "What are you so afraid of —"

"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 — like I am worth looking at —"

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 — the real version. The soft and terrible and completely undefended version.

"You are engaged."

Neteyam: "I —"

"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 —" 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 —"

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 — the worst part, Neteyam, the part that has been living in me for thirty days like something with teeth — is that I would do it again. I would do it again and that is so — that is so stupid, that is the most pathetic thing I have ever —"

Neteyam: "Stop."

"I'm not done —"

Neteyam: "Stop talking about yourself like that."

"Like what? Accurately? I punched you in the face —"

Neteyam: "That was —"

"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 — like something small."

The tears came then.

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 — who was tall and blue and golden-eyed and the most steady thing you had ever stood near — 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 —

"I am a disaster." Your voice was barely there. "I am genuinely, objectively, completely a disaster and you are — look at you. Look at you, Neteyam. You are —"

You looked at him. You made yourself look at him — 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 — 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 —"

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 —"

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 — I wasn't going to — that came out —"

Neteyam: "I know."

"I didn't mean to say —"

Neteyam: "I know."

"Please don't be kind to me about this I cannot handle —"

Neteyam: "Would you just —"

"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 —"

Neteyam: "WILL YOU PLEASE LET ME SPEAK —"

The volume of it — Neteyam, who never raised his voice, raising his voice — 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 — 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 —"

Neteyam: "I am speaking. You are going to let me speak. Those are the conditions." You closed your mouth.

Neteyam: "When you kissed me — when you put your hands on my face and kissed me at the upper falls — I could not read my own expression. Because I had not — 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 —" 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 — 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 — and I found you at the lower pool."

A pause.

"You saw."

Neteyam: "I saw."

You: "Lo'ak was just —"

Neteyam: "I know."

"Nothing happened, he just found me, it wasn't —"

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 —"

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 — 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 — but now it was visible. Present. Impossible to pretend was not there.

(barely) "Neteyam."

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 —" a breath, "— I am very patient, you know I am patient, I have demonstrated this extensively — but a month of trees and baskets and weaving circles and I am —"

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 — 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 — 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 — 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 —

Not anger. Not hurt. Something that almost looked like —

(your voice has vacated your body entirely) "I didn't — that wasn't — I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I didn't mean —" You turned.

You were going to run. The muscle memory of it engaged immediately — 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 —

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 — 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.

"Let me go."

Neteyam: "No."

"Neteyam, let me go, I hit you, I hit you again, I keep — I keep hitting you and I don't mean to, I never mean to, I just — please, let me go, I need to —"

Neteyam: "You need to stay."

"I can't —"

Neteyam: "You can."

He turned you. The way the tide turns things — 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 —

You looked up at him. He was so tall. He had always been tall but you felt it now — 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 — his face that you had been memorizing without permission for months — 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 —"

Neteyam: "You are not going to run."

The tear that tracked down your face was warm. His thumb came up — slowly, without asking, like it knew the way — and caught it. You stopped breathing.

Neteyam: "When you kissed me at the upper falls, with your hands on my face — do you know what I was thinking?"

(barely) "No."

Neteyam: "I was thinking that I had been an idiot. For months. I had been such a careful, deliberate, patient idiot — 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 — 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 —"

Neteyam: "This whole time."

"And the betrothal —"

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 — nothing — 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."

Neteyam: "I know."

"I hid behind baskets."

Neteyam: "I know."

"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 —" Your voice didn't make it all the way through the sentence. "I am so scared. I am so — 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 — none of them felt like this —"

Neteyam: "I know."

"What if I ruin it."

Neteyam: "What if you don't."

"What if I'm too much —"

Neteyam: "You have been exactly enough. You have been exactly right. You have been exactly — you —" 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 —

(in the smallest voice you have ever used) "I said I love you."

Neteyam: "I heard."

"I didn't mean to say it out loud."

Neteyam: "I know."

"Are you going to —"

He closed the distance.

His hands found your face — both of them, the full cupped warmth of them, his thumb tracing the path the tear had taken along your cheekbone — 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 — 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 — sudden and total and the kind of illumination that, once it arrives, makes the dark before it incomprehensible.

You kissed him back.

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 — 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 —

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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 earlier—something 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 aligned—chest 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 enough—nothing 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 empty—distant voices from the central fires, the rustle of leaves overhead—but 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 circles—a 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 again—hungrier 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 thigh—he'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 cock—heavy, 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 you—musky, clean, like sea salt and sun-warmed skin—and 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 yank—the 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 it—rougher than a human's, ridged faintly like the inside of an ikran's mouth—sent 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 air—slurps and hums and your own ragged gasps.

"Neteyam—fuck—right 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 tongue—tangy, 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. "Inside—now—please—"

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 moved—slow 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 tight—ngh—made 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 sex—musk 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 me—squeeze my cock—"

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 mouth—soft now, reverent, the storm spent but the warmth lingering.

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Neteyam: (not moving away, his forehead dropping to rest against yours)

"That's a real problem."

Neteyam: "I know."

"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."

"When."

Neteyam: "Later."

You: "Neteyam —"

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 — real and wet and undignified and the best thing you had felt in thirty days — 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."

"I had good handholds."

Neteyam: "I noticed."

"You saw me go up?"

Neteyam: "I watched the whole thing."

"And you kept walking."

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."

"You cornered me."

Neteyam: "You walked into me."

"Because I wasn't paying attention —"

Neteyam: "Because you were thinking about something else."

"I was thinking about —" You stopped.

Neteyam: "What."

"The flat rock."

A silence.

His arms tightened, fractionally. One hand moved to the back of your head — careful, warm, present.

Neteyam: "Tomorrow morning."

"What?"

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 —

Released.

(barely a sound) "Okay."

Neteyam: "Okay."

Neither of you moved for a long time.

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Later came the same evening.

He had known it would. He had said later with the full intention of meaning it — 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 — 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 — 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 — 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: "Neteyam —"

Jake: "Neytiri."

Neytiri: (a breath) "Tell us why."

He had prepared for this. He had thought, on the walk here, about the practical dimensions — 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 — when I was very young, before Tuk was born, I asked you how you knew."

His mother blinked. Something moved through her expression — the particular quality of a memory arriving.

Neteyam: "How you knew it was each other. And you said —" 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.

Jake: "I said that?"

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."

Not a question.

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 — 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 — not a leader, not a responsibility, not a name that carried weight — just him. Just Neteyam. The person on the rock with the rope.

Neteyam: "She is — 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.

Jake: "She sounds —"

Neteyam: "She punched me in the face."

Jake: "She — what?"

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."

Jake: "Neteyam."

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 —" 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 — the one she wore when she was seeing something she had not seen before and was deciding what it meant.

Neytiri: "You love her."

Neteyam: "Yes."

Neytiri: "Since when."

Neteyam: (a pause) "I think — 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 — it was for the clan. You know that. There are people counting on the relationship it was meant to build."

Neteyam: "I know."

Jake: "This isn't simple to undo."

Neteyam: "I know that too. I've been thinking about it since —" He stopped. "For a while. And I think — 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."

Neteyam: "Yes."

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 — the water sounds, the ikran in the distance, the bioluminescence pulsing in the reef below.

Jake: (finally, quietly) "Yeah. Okay."

Neytiri: "Jake —"

Jake: "He's not wrong, Neytiri. And he's not — 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 — like everything is the right size. Like I can be — just myself. Not the firstborn. Not the leader's son. Just —"

Neytiri: (and something in her expression settled, decided, arrived) "Neteyam."

Neteyam: "Ma."

Neytiri: "Bring her to eat with us."

He blinked.

Neteyam: "She is — she is not exactly — she is difficult to —"

Neytiri: "Bring her."

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 — 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 — the betrothal and the practical concerns and the long responsible management of everything — considerably, measurably lighter.

He had one more thing to do tonight.

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Here's a tightened version that keeps the emotional core and adds a quiet, meaningful ending that earns the family bond:

The Lower Reef

He found her at the water's edge — 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 — there, his shoulder finding hers. You didn't get startle. Some part of you had always known he was coming.

"Did you talk to them."

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."

Neteyam: "She does."

"Is this a punishment."

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.

"What did you tell her?"

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."

"And she said yes."

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 — 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 — real and unguarded — 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.

Neteyam: "I love you."

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."

"Don't be smug."

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 — 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.

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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 — 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 — 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 — 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 — the way anything real is awkward at first — 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 — 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 — 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 — just your name, nothing attached to it — 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 — 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 — finally — coming home.

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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

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A story about a girl who does not know how to be soft learning what it feels like to want to be — 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: — Strong language / profanity throughout — Physical violence, blood, injury — Reader portrayed as aggressive and difficult — Emotional conflict, unrequited feelings — Guilt, shame, emotional vulnerability — Impulsive kissing without consent — Open-ended / cliffhanger ending — NO resolution

Words - 14604k words

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You were not raised to be gentle.

You were not raised to bow your head, to soften your voice, to make yourself smaller so others could feel bigger. You ran with the wind in your braids and fire in your chest and you answered to no one — not the elders, not the warriors, not the sacred customs that everyone else seemed so eager to swallow without question. Rules were cages dressed in tradition. Expectations were chains made of flowers. You refused every single one.

You had not always lived among the Metkayina. You came with the Sully clan — or rather, you came near them, drifting in their orbit the way debris drifts near something larger without ever quite belonging to it. You were not their family. You were not anyone's family, not really. You had people who shared your blood and that was the beginning and end of that story. The ocean was new to you. The reef was new. The way these people moved through water like they were born of it — that was new too. Everything was new and unfamiliar and you met all of it the same way you met everything:

With your chin up and your guard higher. They called you feral. They whispered it when you walked past — the Metkayina mothers pressing their children closer, the young warriors watching you with a mixture of annoyance and reluctant fascination. That one, they said. She is too much. She does not know how to be still. She does not know how to be quiet. She does not know how to be grateful, and she should be — they took her in, didn't they? She should be humble. She should be soft. She should learn her place.

You wore it like a trophy. Let them talk. Let them press their children away from you like you were something contagious. You had heard worse from people who mattered more and it had not broken you then and it would not break you now. You were not here to be palatable. You were not here to make their lives easier by making yourself smaller. You took up exactly as much space as you wanted and if that made them uncomfortable then good — good — they could choke on it.

Your mouth was a weapon you never bothered to sheathe. Sharp, fast, deliberate. You said what others only thought, dragged it into the open air where it could bleed and breathe and make people uncomfortable. The elder who gave his favorite students better reef plots — you said it out loud, directly to his face, in front of everyone. The warrior who took credit for a younger man's catch — you announced it at the communal fire like it was nothing, like the truth was just weather, just a thing that existed whether anyone wanted it to or not. You had no patience for the polite silences people wrapped around their small hypocrisies. You had no interest in the performance of respect when the thing beneath it was rotten.

That was what they never understood about you. They thought you were cruel. They thought you were reckless, thoughtless, a fire with no direction. But you had direction. You had always had direction. You were just aiming at things they had agreed, collectively, not to aim at.

So yes. You were the girl who talked back. The girl who showed up late and left early and laughed too loud during ceremonies not because you didn't care but because the ceremony felt hollow and you had never learned to pretend otherwise. The girl who had been warned, corrected, reprimanded by five different elders in the span of a single moon cycle — a record, someone told you, not admiringly. The girl who had been called aside, spoken to gently, spoken to firmly, threatened with consequences that never quite materialized because even the people who wanted to punish you weren't sure what punishment would stick.

Nothing stuck. That was the truth of it. You were like water — everything slid off, every lesson, every correction, every disappointed look from someone who had briefly believed they might be the one to reach you.

You were not reachable. You had decided that a long time ago and you had not revisited the decision. You were fine. You were always fine. You didn't need anyone's approval and you didn't need anyone's warmth and you didn't need to be understood because being understood meant being known and being known meant being seen and being seen meant someone could find the soft parts —

And none of it mattered to you. The warnings didn't matter. The whispers didn't matter. The slow, tired disappointment on the faces of people who had given up trying — none of it touched you, not really, not where it counted. Not until the day you picked a fight with the wrong person.

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It started — like most disasters — over something completely stupid. A place by the reef. A basket of fish. A look Lo'ak gave you that you didn't appreciate. That was it. That was the whole beginning of the worst afternoon of your life.

He had been walking past with that particular expression he wore sometimes — the one that sat somewhere between casual arrogance and mild contempt, the one that said I am the son of the most important man alive and I know it even when I'm pretending I don't. You had been crouched by the water sorting through your catch, minding your own business for once in your life, and he had looked at you the way people look at something left in their way. An obstacle. An inconvenience. That was all it took.

Lo'ak: "Move. You're in the way."

You looked up slowly. Took your time with it. Let the silence sit just long enough to make the point that you were not someone who moved on command. "Excuse me? I don't see your name carved into the reef, sky people's son." That landed wrong. You knew it the second it left your mouth — the way his jaw tightened, the flicker of something old and sore and deep crossing his face before he shut it down. The five fingers. The sky people blood. The thing that had followed him here the same way yours had followed you, the thing nobody said out loud because they were polite about it, which you were not.

You knew it was a low hit. You threw it anyway.

Lo'ak: "What did you just call me?"

"You heard me. Don't play stupid — or maybe you can't help it. Maybe it's just your natural state."

Lo'ak: "You've got a real death wish, you know that? Walk away. Walk away right now before I —"

"Before you what? What are you going to do, Lo'ak? Run and tell daddy? Write it in your feelings journal? Cry into your fancy little human hands? What? I'm waiting. Finish the sentence."

His eyes went dark.

Lo'ak: "You don't want to do this."

"See, that's where you're wrong. I absolutely want to do this. I've been wanting to do this since the first time you looked at me like I was something stuck to the bottom of your foot. So come on. Let's go. Or are you all talk?"

He shoved you. Both hands, flat against your chest, hard enough to send you stumbling back two full steps and knock your basket sideways, fish scattering across the wet rock. It was the kind of shove meant to end things — a warning, a boundary, a back off. The kind that assumed you would take it and reassess.

You didn't reassess. You launched yourself back at him and shoved with everything you had and he went back harder than you did and then it was over — the pretense of it ending there, the last thread of restraint snapping clean — and then it was just war.

His fist caught you across the cheekbone first and your head snapped sideways and white light burst behind your eye and before it even fully cleared you were already swinging back. Your knuckles cracked against his jaw and he made a sound — half curse, half grunt — and grabbed your arm and twisted and you went down to one knee on the rock and the stone tore into your skin and you felt it, the bright hot scream of it, and it made you furious.

You wrenched your arm free and drove your elbow up into his ribs. He folded sideways. You used it — got your feet under you, grabbed a fistful of his collar, swung him into the nearest flat rock hard enough that the impact shuddered up your own arms. He recovered faster than you expected, got a hand in your hair and pulled and you snarled — actually snarled, the sound tearing out of you like something animal — and raked your nails down his forearm until he let go.

You were bleeding. He was bleeding. Neither of you cared. The crowd gathered fast. They always did. People love a spectacle and there was nothing more spectacle than you — wild-eyed, furious, a gash opening under your cheekbone where his ring had caught you, blood tracking down your jaw and dripping off your chin — going head-to-head with the second eldest of Toruk Makto's line. Lo'ak's lip was split. His forearm was a mess of red lines. There was a bruise blooming across his jaw that was going to be spectacular by morning.

Good. You hoped it hurt. You hoped it hurt for a week.

Lo'ak: "You are UNHINGED! You are actually, genuinely unhinged — what is WRONG with you?!"

"Everything! Everything is wrong with me and I STILL fight better than you so what does that say about YOU?! Huh?! The great warrior's son can't handle one girl — embarrassing, Lo'ak, that is genuinely embarrassing —"

Lo'ak: "I am going to —"

"Going to WHAT?! You keep starting sentences you can't finish! Is that a family trait or just you?!"

He came at you again and you caught his arm and used his momentum against him, pivoting, sending him stumbling, and when he turned back around his face was pure fury — not the performative kind, not the kind he'd been wearing before. Real. Raw. The kind that meant the next hit was going to be serious.

Lo'ak: "I swear to Eywa I will put you in the ground —"

"THEN DO IT! Stop talking and do it, you coward, you absolute waste of — you think you scare me?! You think I haven't been hit harder by people twice your size?! Come on! COME ON!"

Lo'ak: "You are INSANE, you are an absolute MENACE, I don't even know why they LET you stay here —"

"Oh that's rich coming from the boy who had to BEG the Metkayina to take his family in! At least I'm honest about what I am! You walk around like you BELONG here, like you EARNED something, like you're not just here because your daddy made a deal —"

Something ugly crossed his face. Something that went past anger into something more wounded, and you knew — you knew — that you had gone somewhere real and terrible and you should stop. You did not stop.

Lo'ak: "Shut your mouth —"

"Make me! You've been trying to make me since we started and you STILL haven't managed it so clearly that's not happening today —"

Lo'ak: "I said SHUT YOUR MOUTH —"

"AND I SAID MAKE ME, Lo'ak, those are your two options, pick one and commit —"

He grabbed your collar. You grabbed his. You were chest to chest now, both of you heaving, both bleeding, both past the point of reason or pride or anything resembling sense. The crowd around you was loud — shouting, some of them, urging one of you to stop, a few of the younger ones with their eyes wide like they weren't sure if this was horrifying or the most exciting thing they'd ever seen.

Someone screamed for you to stop. Someone screamed for Lo'ak to stop.

Neither of you did. Neither of you were even close to done. You had gone somewhere past stopping, somewhere in your chest where the anger had burned so hot it had become its own kind of calm, and you pulled back your fist —

And then — impact. But not the one you intended.

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You didn't see him step between you.

That was the thing that would stay with you long after the bruises faded and the crowd dispersed and the evening swallowed the whole disaster whole — you didn't see him. You didn't see him coming. You didn't see him move. One moment it was Lo'ak in front of you, Lo'ak with his bloody lip and his fury and his hands still twisted in your collar, and the next moment there was someone else entirely and your fist was already gone — already past the point of no return, already committed to the arc with every ounce of force you had left in your body behind it, momentum dragging you forward like a current you couldn't swim against — Your knuckles connected with the side of his face. The sound it made was horrible.

Not the dull thud of a bad hit, not the sharp crack of bone meeting bone that you had gotten used to in the blur of the last few minutes. This was different. This was the sound of something going catastrophically, irreversibly wrong. It rang through your fist and up your forearm and into your shoulder and for one suspended, terrible moment your entire body understood what your mind hadn't caught up to yet —

That was not Lo'ak. Silence.

Not the hushed silence of people being polite. Not the murmuring, shifting silence of a crowd deciding whether to intervene. The total, crashing, absolute silence of every single person present watching something go very, very wrong all at once. The kind of silence that has weight. The kind that presses down on your chest and holds you still whether you want it to or not.

Neteyam staggered. One step back. Two. His body turning slightly with the force of it, one hand shooting out to catch himself — forearm braced against the rough bark of a nearby tree, head dipping forward, braids falling across his face. He stayed like that for a moment that felt much longer than it was. Just — still. Bent at the edge, breathing, processing.

And then he straightened. Slowly. Painfully slowly. Like he was deciding how to do it, like every inch was a choice. He rose to his full height and the crowd saw his face and the silence, impossibly, got louder.

His cheek was already darkening. You could see it from where you stood — still rooted to the spot, fist still half-raised, your body not yet having received the message that the fight was over. The color bloomed fast and mean across his cheekbone, deep purple-red spreading under the surface of his skin like ink dropped in water. His jaw was tight. A muscle jumped there, once, and then went still. He raised his hand — slowly, like he wasn't sure he wanted to confirm it — and his fingers hovered an inch from his face before he thought better of it and lowered his arm back to his side.

He did not touch it. He did not curse. He did not make a sound. He did not look at Lo'ak. He looked at you.

His expression was carefully, deliberately, almost supernaturally neutral. Whatever he was feeling — pain, shock, anger, something else entirely — he had locked it somewhere behind those eyes and swallowed the key. The only thing on his face was a stillness so complete it didn't look like calm. It looked like control. Like a person holding something very large very carefully so it didn't break anything on its way down.

Neteyam: "Enough."

One word. One word spoken at a perfectly ordinary volume, not loud, not sharp, not raised into a command — just said, the way you say the sky is blue or the tide is coming in. A fact. A conclusion. The end of something.

And the crowd — the same crowd that had been shouting thirty seconds ago, that had been feeding the fire with their noise and their watching — exhaled as one and took a collective step back and was quiet. Like he had simply reminded them who he was and they had remembered. Your fist dropped to your side. You hadn't even realized you were still holding it up.

Lo'ak was saying something. You could see his mouth moving, could see the way he was looking between you and his brother with an expression that cycled rapidly through anger and shock and something softer and more guilty underneath both. He was talking. The words were happening. You couldn't hear a single one of them.

You couldn't hear anything.

The world had narrowed down to the roaring of your own pulse in your ears and the sight of that bruise and the sound — that sound, that horrible sound your knuckles had made — playing on a loop somewhere at the back of your skull where you couldn't reach it to make it stop.

You hit him.

You hit him.

You hit him.

The thought arrived fully formed and kept arriving, over and over, the same four words in the same flat horrified voice, because your mind had not yet found anything more sophisticated to do with what had just happened. He stepped in. He just — he stepped in, between you and his brother, because that was apparently just something he did, just a thing that was in his nature, to put himself in the space where the harm was going — and you had put your fist through that space without looking, without thinking, without stopping —

He wasn't even part of this.

He was never part of this.

He just stepped in and you —

Your hand was throbbing. You looked down at it without meaning to. Your knuckles were torn up from the rock and from Lo'ak's jaw and now from this — from him — and there was blood tracking across your fingers and mixing with the salt water still drying on your skin and you stared at it like it belonged to someone else.

Oh Eywa. What did you do.

Neteyam looked at you then. Done with whatever internal process had kept him still and silent — done or simply finished, the way he finished things, cleanly and without ceremony. He looked at you the way he apparently looked at everything: steady, measured, present. Those golden eyes that caught the light and held it. Calm in a way that had nothing to do with indifference and everything to do with something deeper, something more deliberate, something you did not have a word for because you had never personally possessed it. There was no anger in his face. Not a trace of it.

That was somehow the worst thing that had ever happened to you.

You could have handled anger. Anger you knew — anger was familiar, it was the language you'd spoken your whole life, it was something you could push back against and feel righteous doing it. If he had yelled at you, if he had looked at you with fury or contempt or even cold disgust, you would have known what to do. You would have found your footing. But there was nothing like that. There was only that terrible steadiness. That awful, patient, open looking — like he was still deciding what you were. Like the answer wasn't as simple as you'd made it for everyone else.

Neteyam: "You're bleeding."

The words landed soft and matter-of-fact. Not an accusation. Not even a particular expression of concern, just — an observation. A thing he had noticed. A thing apparently worth saying. Your mouth opened. Closed.

"…I know."

Your voice came out wrong. Too small. Scraped of its edges in a way you didn't authorize and couldn't immediately explain. He looked at you for another moment — reading something in your face that you weren't aware you were showing, filing it somewhere, making no comment on it.

Neteyam: "Go get it cleaned."

Not you should have thought about that before. Not look what you did. Not you ought to be ashamed of yourself — every phrase you had been waiting for, bracing for, the words you'd already started building walls against. Just — go get it cleaned. Like he was talking to someone who mattered enough to take care of. Like the next few minutes of your wellbeing were a thing worth directing you toward. Like despite everything — despite the crowd and the blood and the horrible sound and the bruise spreading dark and vivid across his cheekbone — you were still, to him, simply a person standing in front of him who was hurt.

He wasn't scolding you. He wasn't yelling. He wasn't performing his own injury for the crowd or making you kneel in it or extracting the full weight of what you owed him right here in front of everyone. He was just — looking at you. Steady and clear and without malice. Like you were real. Like you were worth the effort of being seen correctly. Something in your chest did something you didn't have a name for and didn't want to examine. You turned and walked away.

Quickly. Before the something could finish happening. Before Lo'ak could redirect his energy toward you. Before anyone in that crowd could get a good look at your face, because something was happening to it — something was pulling at the corners and pressing behind your eyes and you were absolutely, categorically not about to let a single person here witness whatever that was. You walked until the sound of the crowd was gone.

You walked until there was only the reef and the water and the wind and the distant, endless noise of the ocean — and you stopped, and you stood there, and you pressed your bloody knuckles against your mouth

And you breathed. And you did not think about the way he had looked at you. You did not think about it at all.

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You did not sleep that night. You lay flat on your back staring at the ceiling of your dwelling and replayed it forty-seven times. The swing. The sound. The way he staggered. The bruise already blooming across his cheekbone like a dark flower.

You did that. You.

It wasn't even the guilt that surprised you — you'd felt guilt before, faint and distant, easily ignored. This was different. This sat in your ribcage like a stone. This wouldn't move. You went to him the next morning.

He was outside his family's dwelling, seated on a wide, flat rock with a piece of rope in his hands — braiding it with the focused, methodical patience that seemed to be just part of him. He looked up when he heard you approach. The bruise was worse in daylight. Deep blue-purple against his dark skin, blooming from cheekbone to jaw.

Your stomach dropped to your feet.

"…I'm sorry."

The words came out smaller than you intended. Scraped raw. He tilted his head slightly.

Neteyam: "Are you?"

"Don't — don't do that. Don't make it a question. I am. I'm sorry. I wasn't trying to hit you, you just — you came out of nowhere and I was already mid-swing and I — I'm sorry, okay? I don't — I don't usually —"

You stopped. Pressed your lips together. This was excruciating.

Neteyam: "I know you don't."

"You don't know anything about me."

Neteyam: "I know you look like you haven't slept. I know you came here before the second tide. I know you've been standing at the edge of my sight since yesterday evening trying to convince yourself to walk over."

You stared at him. "…You noticed that?"

Neteyam: "I notice most things."

A beat of silence stretched between you. He went back to his rope. You stood there, completely unsure what to do with yourself, because you had come here with one purpose and accomplished it and now had absolutely no reason to stay — Except that you didn't want to leave.

That was new. That was a very new feeling and you weren't sure you liked it.

"Does it hurt?"

Neteyam: "Yes."

"Good. I mean — no. I meant — no, obviously not good, I just — that came out wrong."

And Neteyam — Neteyam, of all people, dignified and careful and nothing like you — laughed. Low and brief but genuine. Like you'd surprised it out of him.

Neteyam: "Sit down. You're making me nervous, standing there like you're about to run." You sat down.

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You kept coming back.

It started as guilt — a debt you couldn't stop counting, couldn't stop turning over in your hands like a stone with no smooth side. You owed him. You had split open his face with your carelessness and left a bruise that lasted nine days — you knew because you counted, because every morning you looked at him and catalogued its progress with the grim attention of someone monitoring damage they caused — and you owed him something and the only currency you had was presence. So you showed up. Every day, sometimes twice. You hovered at the edges of his space like something that hadn't quite decided whether it was welcome and hadn't quite worked up the courage to ask.

You brought him things sometimes. Small things. Stupid things. A particular kind of fruit — red-gold and sweet, something between a mango and something with no name in any language you spoke — that he had mentioned once, in passing, barely even a full sentence, just a half-formed observation about missing it, and you had spent an embarrassing amount of time the next morning locating a tree that bore it. You left it without comment. You told yourself it was nothing. You told yourself that anyone would do the same.

A shell from the northern rocks — perfectly spiral, pale as bone, with a faint iridescent sheen that caught the light and held it the way certain things do, the way certain moments do. You found it on an afternoon when you were supposed to be doing something else entirely and you picked it up and stood there holding it and thought he would think this was interesting before you could stop yourself, and then you stood there a moment longer feeling deeply stupid about that, and then you put it in your wrap and brought it to him anyway. He had held it up to the light and turned it slowly in his fingers and said where did you find this and the way he said it — quiet, genuinely curious, like the answer actually mattered — had done something to the inside of your chest that you chose not to investigate.

It's just repayment, you told yourself. This is what repayment looks like. This is nothing. Then it became habit.

The morning felt wrong without it. You would wake before the second tide and lie still for a moment and your mind would already be moving toward him — not dramatically, not with any of the breathless urgency you would later recognize in it — just the simple, animal pull of that is where I am going today. The way you moved toward water when you were thirsty. Instinct. Routine. Nothing more.

Then — slowly, stupidly, without your permission and without the decency to announce itself so you could prepare — It became something you wanted.

Not just habit. Not just guilt repaid in installments. Something that had its own weight, its own warmth, its own specific texture that you would have recognized anywhere. You didn't name it yet. You were not ready to name it. But you felt it — the way you feel weather changing, the way the ocean shifts before a storm, something in the air that your body understood before your mind caught up.

He was so different from you. That was the first thing. The most obvious thing, the thing anyone with eyes could see from a distance — but it was different, living inside that difference, spending time in it until you knew all its specific shapes.

Where you were loud, he was quiet. Not the quiet of someone with nothing to say — the quiet of someone who had decided that words were worth something and spent them accordingly. He did not fill silence for the sake of filling it. He did not perform. He simply was, in whatever room or reef or stretch of open water he occupied, present in a way that made everything around him feel more real.

Where you were sharp, he was steady. You came at the world with edges — with the particular aggression of someone who had learned early that the world came at you first, that softness was a liability, that the best defense was to be more trouble than you were worth. He came at it with something else entirely. Not softness exactly — he was not soft, you had seen him in training, had seen the particular focused intensity he brought to everything he did — but a kind of groundedness that nothing seemed to shake. He absorbed things. Processed them. Responded rather than reacted. You had never learned the difference. He had never needed to learn it because he had simply always known.

You ran from stillness the way you ran from most things that felt like they might hold you in place. Stillness meant thinking. Thinking meant feeling. Feeling meant the soft parts were exposed and the soft parts being exposed was the single most dangerous thing you could imagine. You had spent your whole life in motion for exactly this reason.But his stillness was different.

His stillness didn't demand anything from you. It didn't press. It didn't expect you to fill it or perform inside it or justify yourself against it. It simply existed — large and patient and strangely permeable, like you could step into it and still remain yourself. Like being near him somehow granted you access to a version of quiet that had nothing to do with suppression and everything to do with rest.

You had not rested in a very long time.

The Metkayina had a word — syulang — that didn't translate cleanly into anything you'd grown up with. It meant something close to the peace of being known by the water. The understanding that the ocean held you not because you had earned it but simply because you were there, because you had come, because you had trusted it with your weight. You had heard elders use it in ceremony. You had never understood it in your body until you sat next to Neteyam for the first time in silence and felt, with a shock that you immediately suppressed and did not speak of, oh. this is what that means.

Neteyam: "You don't have to keep coming, you know. The debt, if there was one, is settled."

It was an afternoon in the shallow reef, the water low and warm and green-gold around the rocks. He was working on something — he was always working on something, always occupied with some quiet task that his hands did almost independently while his mind went elsewhere — and he said it without looking up, casual, like an observation rather than a question.

"I know."

Neteyam: "Then why do you?"

He looked up then. Just briefly. Just enough to catch your eye and hold it for a moment — not demanding, not pointed, genuinely curious in that particular way he had that made you feel like the answer actually mattered. Like you actually mattered. Like the specific contents of your interior life were a thing worth being interested in.

You opened your mouth.

Because you are the only person I have been around in longer than I can remember who does not make me feel like I am too much. Because I have spent my entire life being a problem and you look at me like I am a person. Because when I sit next to you the noise in my head goes quiet and I don't know how you do that, I don't know what it is about you specifically, and it terrifies me a little because what happens when this stops, what happens when you figure out what everyone else already knows, what happens when you decide I'm not worth the effort —Because I think I have been waiting for you to leave since the first day I came to apologize and you told me to sit down and you laughed and I felt the ground shift under me and I have been waiting for it to shift back ever since.

"Nothing better to do."

The corner of his mouth moved. Not quite a smile. The suggestion of one — the motion of something fond and slightly exasperated moving through his expression before he reined it back in. He saw through it. He always saw through it. You could watch it happen in real time — the brief, quiet assessment in his eyes, the moment of recognition, the decision not to push. He never pushed. He never cornered you in your own deflections and demanded you be honest. He simply received what you gave him and left the rest of the space open, patient, available, like a door that stayed unlocked.

It made you want to walk through it so badly it scared you. So you didn't. You sat down instead. You picked up a piece of rope that was lying nearby and began to fray the end of it for no reason, just to have something for your hands, and after a moment he went back to his work and the afternoon settled around you both like something familiar.

Sometimes they talked for hours.

About nothing — about the color of the evening water when the bioluminescence came up and turned the whole reef into something out of a fever dream, soft blue-green light pulsing under the surface like a heartbeat. About which reef fish were the most irritating and which were merely annoying and which had, in Lo'ak's case specifically, a genuine personal vendetta. About whether Kiri's ability to speak with plants was unsettling or beautiful — you said both, you said it was the kind of thing that could be both at the same time, and Neteyam had gone quiet for a moment in that way he did when something landed somewhere real for him, and then said yes. you're right. it's exactly like that and you'd felt inexplicably proud of yourself for an answer to a completely trivial question.

About his mother sometimes — carefully, in small pieces, the way you share something precious. About Pandora, the old one, the forest one, which he carried in him like a country he'd left behind. About what home meant when you'd had more than one of them. You hadn't offered your own version of that conversation but he hadn't asked for it, and somehow the not-asking made you want to give it to him anyway. You noticed things. You noticed them the way you notice when the tide is changing — slowly, then all at once.

The way he tilted his head slightly when he was thinking through something complicated, like he was listening to it from a different angle. The specific sound of his laugh when something genuinely caught him off guard — rare, lower than his regular voice, like it came from somewhere he didn't usually let things come from. The way he always sat facing the water. The way he remembered things you said — small things, throwaway things, things you'd forgotten you'd even told him — and brought them back later with a naturalness that suggested he hadn't been keeping track, that he'd simply retained them because they mattered, because you mattered, because what you said was worth holding onto. Nobody had ever held onto what you said before.

People heard you. People reacted to you. People were exhausted by you and entertained by you and occasionally frightened of you. But nobody kept you. Nobody took what you offered and filed it somewhere careful. He did. Without making a ceremony of it. Without asking anything in return.

One afternoon he said, without preamble, you mentioned once that you don't like the smell of the low-tide mud near the eastern bank and redirected the walk you'd been about to take, so casual about it that it took you a full minute to realize what he'd done, and by then it was too late to react appropriately because he'd already moved on to something else and the moment had passed. You spent the rest of the afternoon trying to remember if that had been a dream or if it had actually happened.

It had actually happened. It kept actually happening.

Sometimes they sat in silence and it was the most comfortable silence you had ever occupied in your entire life. Not dead silence — the reef was never truly silent, there was always water and wind and the distant cry of something living — but the silence between you, the silence that lived in the small space where your shoulders almost touched when you sat side by side on the flat rock watching the tide come in. That silence had texture. Had warmth. Had a specific quality that you had started to recognize the way you recognized weather — the feeling of it on your skin, the way it settled differently depending on the day.

You had a secret. You had several secrets at this point, stacked neatly in the dark where you kept things you weren't ready to look at. But this one in particular: there were afternoons where you came not because you felt you owed him, not out of habit, not even out of wanting — but simply because the silence was there and it was the only place in your entire life that felt like enough. Sometimes Lo'ak appeared.

He came around the corner of the dwelling one afternoon with the energy of someone who had not fully decided whether he was still angry and spotted you sitting next to his brother and stopped dead.

Lo'ak: "Why is she here."

Neteyam: "She is visiting."

Lo'ak: "Visiting. Her. She is visiting."

Neteyam: "Lo'ak."

Lo'ak: "I'm just — I'm noting it. I'm noting that this is happening."

"You can note it from somewhere else."

Lo'ak: "I still haven't forgiven you, by the way."

"I still don't care, by the way."

Neteyam: "Both of you. Please. I am begging you with everything I have and everything my ancestors left me."

Lo'ak: "She started it —"

"You shoved me first —"

Lo'ak: "Because you called me —"

"You were looking at me like —"

Neteyam: "I will walk into the ocean. I will walk in and I will not walk back out. This is a promise."

Lo'ak had pointed at you with an expression of profound grievance, then pointed at his brother with an expression of profound betrayal, and then left. You watched him go. You looked back at Neteyam. Neteyam was pinching the bridge of his nose with his eyes closed in the manner of someone communing privately with Eywa for strength.

"He's dramatic."

Neteyam: "You punched me in the face."

"I thought you were Lo'ak."

Neteyam: "Does that make it better?"

"…I'm choosing not to answer that."

He opened his eyes. He looked at you. And then — slowly, helplessly, with the air of a person whose own face had betrayed him — he laughed. Real and low and startled out of him, and you felt it move through you like warmth, like the bioluminescence coming up under the water, like something lighting from the inside. You laughed too. You couldn't help it.

Even those moments. Even the bickering and the Lo'ak standoffs and the stupid boring afternoons where the most exciting thing that happened was a particularly aggressive fish and the long comfortable silences and the small observations and the fruit and the shell and the way he said your name like it was simply a word and not a verdict —

You collected all of it. Quietly, carefully, without admitting to yourself that you were doing it. You kept them somewhere inside your chest in the place where the stone of guilt had been, the place that had been cold and heavy for so long and was now — without your permission, without your planning, without any input from the part of you that made decisions —

Warm. You didn't examine it too closely. You were afraid of what you'd find.

You were afraid because somewhere underneath all of it, in the part of you that was honest even when you didn't want it to be, you already knew.

You already knew what it was.

You just weren't ready to say it yet.

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Neteyam was like the sun.

You thought it one afternoon without meaning to — the thought arriving fully formed and uninvited, the way the most honest thoughts always did, slipping past your defenses in a moment of carelessness. You were across the reef from him, far enough that you could watch without it being obvious, pretending to be occupied with something else entirely while your eyes kept finding him the way water finds the lowest point. Inevitable. Helpless. Quietly devastating.

He was talking to one of the elder Metkayina warriors — something about the reef paths, you thought, something navigational, his hands moving in those careful illustrative gestures he used when he was explaining something he cared about getting right. The warrior was nodding. Of course he was nodding. Everyone nodded when Neteyam spoke, not because he demanded it but because he made sense, because there was something in the way he organized his thoughts and offered them outward that made you want to follow the logic all the way to its conclusion just to see where he'd take you.

The light was hitting him the way it only did in late afternoon — gold and heavy, the kind that made everything it touched look chosen. His braids caught it. His skin caught it. The careful architecture of his face caught it and held it and you stood there across the reef like an idiot and thought —

Oh. He looks like the sun.

Bright and clear and constant and warm in a way that reached you even when you weren't standing close. That was the thing about him that nobody talked about because maybe it was so obvious it had stopped being remarkable to everyone else — the way his presence radiated outward. The way people near him seemed to breathe easier. The way even difficult conversations, hard truths, uncomfortable silences felt somehow manageable in his orbit, like his steadiness was a thing you could borrow just by being nearby.

Everyone moved around him like he was a fixed point. You had noticed this early and filed it away as simple charisma, the natural gravity of a leader's firstborn, something political and practiced. But it wasn't that. You understood that now. It wasn't practiced at all. It was just — him. The Metkayina children who came to watch the Sully clan practice were always bravest near Neteyam. The warriors who had their doubts about the forest clan's place here softened first in his presence. Even Lo'ak, all sharp edges and restless energy, went a degree quieter when his brother was in the room.

He was something you could orient yourself by when everything else was shifting water and wind. You had needed that more than you wanted to admit.You are not supposed to stare directly at the sun.

Everyone knows this. It is not a complicated rule. It is the kind of thing children learn once and carry forever — a simple, self-evident truth that requires no reinforcement because the consequence enforces itself. You stare too long at the sun, you lose something. Your vision goes white. The image burns itself into your retinas and stays there long after you've looked away, a ghost of brightness superimposed on everything else you try to see.

Everyone learns this early and carries it like the simplest of safety rules. You kept staring anyway. And slowly — so slowly you almost didn't notice until it was already true, until you were already so deep in it that the surface was no longer visible — you realized that the warmth you felt when you were near him wasn't just comfort anymore. Wasn't just the relief of syulang, the peace of being held without condition. It had changed. It had grown into something else in the dark while you weren't looking, fed by all those afternoons and all those silences and all those small moments you had been collecting and telling yourself meant nothing.

It wasn't just safe anymore. It was something more intimate. Something that lived lower in your chest — quieter than anything you'd felt before and somehow hungrier for it, the way the quietest fires burn longest. Something that made your skin feel too tight when he sat close, when the space between your shoulders collapsed to inches and you could feel the warmth that came off him and had to actively, deliberately not think about it. Something that made you memorize the way he said your name without meaning to — the specific cadence of it, the way the syllables sat in his mouth, the way it sounded different from every other voice that had ever said it, like he was the first person who had ever said it correctly.

You noticed the exact moment he started looking for you when he arrived somewhere. That was when you knew it was bad.

It was subtle — barely a thing at all, just a brief sweep of the space when he entered it, a small orientation, like checking that something was where he'd left it. He probably didn't even know he did it. But you saw it. You saw it because you were always already watching, always already tracking him the way you tracked weather, and the moment you saw it your heart did something embarrassing and involuntary and you looked away fast and told yourself it meant nothing, it was nothing, you were projecting —

Oh.

Oh no.

You sat with it for three days. You carried it around like something you'd found and weren't sure what to do with — this feeling, this terrible specific feeling that had no business being in your chest, that had moved in without asking and rearranged the furniture. Three days of being near him and smiling at the right moments and saying the right things and meanwhile running a constant quiet internal argument with yourself that went in circles and resolved nothing and exhausted you completely.

On the third night you lay in the dark and the argument finally ran out of road. You admitted it to yourself in a voice so small it barely counted as words. The way you confess things you're ashamed of — quickly, quietly, to no one, in the hope that saying it once will be enough and you won't have to say it again.

I think I am in love with him.

The words sat there in the dark and didn't go away. You waited for it to feel like an exaggeration. You waited for the more reasonable part of you to come back online and suggest an alternative explanation — that it was attachment, that it was gratitude, that it was the simple confusion of spending too much time with someone who treated you with basic decency when you weren't used to it. You had thought all of those things over the three days. You had tried all of them on. They had not fit.

This fit. That was the worst part. It fit perfectly and cleanly and with a completeness that left no room for negotiation. You were in love with Neteyam and the love was not small and manageable — it was the size of the thing you'd been trying not to see for weeks, large and obvious and already fully formed, the way things get when you ignore them long enough.

And then the second part arrived. The part that followed the first like a shadow follows a body, inevitable, attached, darkening everything it touched.He would never.

Not like a question. Not even like a conclusion you were drawing — more like something you already knew, something that had always been true, something that had been sitting quietly in the corner of the room this whole time waiting for you to be ready to look at it.

Think about who he was. Think about what he was. Neteyam — firstborn of the Olo'eyktan's line, raised in the shadow of Toruk Makto's legacy, carrying the weight of two clans on his shoulders with a grace that made it look like nothing. Neteyam — who moved through the world with dignity and intention, who chose his words like they were worth something, who treated every person he encountered with a consideration that cost him nothing because it was simply his nature. Neteyam — who the elders trusted and the warriors respected and the children followed without being asked, who was everything a leader's son was supposed to be and somehow also genuinely, privately, specifically good. And you.

You.

You, who had been called feral so many times it had stopped stinging. You, who had exhausted every elder in the village and picked a fight with his brother over a basket of fish and punched him — punched him — the first time he tried to help you. You, who had no stillness in you, no grace, no patience, no instinct for the kind of careful tending that relationships between people required. You, who ran from anything that tried to hold you in place and burned bridges so automatically you had stopped noticing the smoke.

You thought about the kind of person Neteyam would end up with. The kind of person who made sense beside him — someone steady, someone rooted, someone who understood ceremony and duty and the long responsibilities of lineage. Someone who could stand at his side and reflect something worthy back at the people watching. Someone who made the picture complete rather than disrupting every edge of it.

You thought about yourself standing next to him in any formal context — you, with your too-loud laugh and your sharp mouth and your comprehensive inability to be appropriate when appropriateness was required — and the image was almost funny. Almost. The kind of funny that lives right next to something else, something that sits in your sternum and presses.

He was light and order and intention. You were noise and motion and consequence. He deserved someone who would be easy to love. Someone whose love would not arrive with complications and bruises and a history of burning everything soft she ever touched. You were not easy. You had never been easy. You did not know how to be easy. You had tried, once or twice, in the distant past, and it had come out wrong every time, too much or too little, off-rhythm, graceless.

You thought about the way he looked at everything — that patient, present, receiving attention — and you thought about directing that look at you, fully, knowingly, the way it would have to be directed if this were ever a thing that was real. The way he would have to know all of it. The whole of you. Not just the afternoons on the reef but the rest — the anger and the damage and the long ugly history of being someone nobody quite knew what to do with.

And then you thought: he is too good for that. He is too good for you. This is not a self-deprecating thought, this is not you being dramatic — this is just true, this is just a fact of the world, this is the sun and you are standing in it and that is wonderful and that is enough and that is all it is ever going to be. Then you shoved it down as deep as it would go.

You were good at this. This was, in fact, one of your genuine skills — the burial of things, the compression of feeling into something small and dense and silent enough to carry without showing. You had been doing it your whole life. You were efficient at it. You took the love — the whole terrible warm specific size of it — and you wrapped it in the coldest water you had and pushed it down under the stone of everything practical and necessary and true, and you held it there until it stopped moving.Then you told yourself — firmly, clearly, in the voice you used for things that were not open to discussion —

It doesn't matter.

It can't matter.

It won't.

You said it three times. Once for each day you'd spent pretending it wasn't true. Then you lay in the dark and listened to the ocean and waited for morning, and when morning came you got up and went to find him because that was what you did now, that was the habit, that was the acceptable version of this — the presence, the afternoons, the comfortable silences — and you sat down next to him on the flat rock and the warmth of him reached you even across the small distance between you and you breathed through it.

This is enough, you told yourself. This is enough. This is enough. This is enough. You said it until it almost sounded true.

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You found out about the betrothal from Kiri.

Not from him. Not from anyone who thought to prepare you, to soften the ground before dropping something heavy onto it. From Kiri — sweet, strange, honest Kiri who loved her brother and assumed, reasonably, that this was simply information that existed in the world and could therefore be shared with anyone in it. She said it the way she said everything: plainly, without performance, the truth arriving in her voice the same way it arrived in everything she did — unadorned and absolute.

You were sitting together near the shallows. She was doing something with a cluster of sea plants, arranging them with that focused, quiet attention she gave to living things, talking about something else entirely — something about the reef ecosystem, something about the way certain coral communicated distress, something that you had been genuinely listening to because Kiri was one of the few people whose observations you found more interesting than your own thoughts.

And then, without looking up, without any change in her tone, without any indication whatsoever that she was about to detonate something inside your chest —

She mentioned it. His name. A girl's name you didn't recognize. The arrangement. Something about how it had been discussed for some time, how it made sense given the clans, how she supposed it was all very practical even if she personally found the whole business a little —

She kept talking.

You stopped hearing.

Not because the words stopped coming — they kept coming, her voice continuing its calm and thoughtful path through the subject — but because something had happened behind your eyes, some small catastrophic shift, like a support beam giving way in a structure you hadn't realized you'd been living in. The whole thing shuddered. You felt it in your back teeth. You smiled.

You don't know how. You don't know what combination of pride and survival instinct and sheer lifelong practice at performing feelings you didn't have and suppressing feelings you did — you don't know what assembled the smile on your face in that moment but it was there, fully formed, by the time Kiri glanced up. Present and plausible and giving absolutely nothing away.

"Oh — that's wonderful. Really. That's— yeah, that makes sense."

Wonderful. You said wonderful. The word tasted like ash and salt and you kept smiling through it and Kiri nodded and moved on and you followed along — laughed when she said something lightly amusing, responded when she asked something small, tilted your head and made the sounds of a person who was present and engaged and entirely fine — And you waited.

You waited the way you wait out a current that's stronger than you — not fighting it, just holding still, conserving everything, existing inside it until it passed and you could move again. You waited through the rest of the conversation and the easy goodbye and the walk away from the shallows, measured steps, nothing rushed, nothing that would draw a second glance.

You walked until you were alone. And then you stopped.

And you let the smile fall off your face like something dead.

It dropped. Just — dropped, the muscles releasing all at once, and what was underneath it was nothing. Not tears, not immediate visible grief — just nothing. The blankness that comes before the body figures out what it's supposed to feel. You stood in the space between the dwellings with the sounds of the village going on around you at a comfortable distance and you stared at the ground and you breathed very carefully in and out and you waited for the nothing to resolve into something navigable.

Of course. The word arrived first. Just that. Of course — not even a complete thought yet, just the conclusion, the two syllables of inevitability, the sound a person makes when the thing they were dreading turns out to have already been true for longer than they knew.

Of course he was. Of course there was already someone — someone chosen, someone decided upon, someone who had been considered and selected with the same care and intentionality that Neteyam brought to every single thing in his life. Someone right. Someone who made sense in every way that mattered and in every context that counted. Someone who fit. Of course. Of course. While you were sitting on flat rocks and pretending your reasons for coming were casual and collecting small moments like they belonged to you — of course there was already someone else. Of course the space you thought you'd been slowly, stupidly hoping to occupy was never empty to begin with.

Of course. Of course, of course, of course —

You pressed the back of your hand against your mouth and breathed through your nose and waited for it to pass.

Then you took it apart deliberately, piece by piece, because that was what you did with things that were too large to hold whole. You broke them down. You named them. You arranged them in a line and looked at them until they were just facts and not feelings.

His heart belongs to someone else. Say it again. Say it until it sounds like weather, like tide tables, like something impersonal and fixed and entirely outside your jurisdiction.

His heart belongs to someone else. It was never yours. It was never even close to yours — you were never in consideration, you were never in the room where that kind of decision gets made, you were never a name that appeared on any list of possibilities. You don't get to be surprised by this. You don't get to feel robbed of something you were never given.

You are not the kind of person that someone like Neteyam ends up with. That one landed harder than the others. That one had teeth.

Because it wasn't cruel — that was the thing, that was what made it so much worse than cruelty. It wasn't self-pity dressed up as honesty. It was just true. Plain and structural and true the way gravity is true, the way the tides are true — not a judgment, just a fact of how things were arranged.

Think about her. Whoever she was — this girl, this chosen girl, this person whose name had been mentioned alongside his like it belonged there, like they made sense in the same sentence. Think about what she probably was. Steady. Rooted. The kind of girl who moved through ceremony with her head up and her hands graceful and her voice never raised above what the moment required. The kind of girl whose presence was an asset and not a liability. The kind of girl who had never in her life started a fight over a basket of fish or punched someone in the face or been called feral by people who meant it as a warning.

Think about her standing beside him. Think about how that looked — the image of it, clean and complete and correct, two people who made sense together the way things make sense when they are made for each other.

Now think about yourself standing beside him. You are the kind of person he steps in front of to stop from hurting people.

That sentence. That sentence. You turned it over and it cut on every side. Because it was the truest summary of everything you were to him and everything you would ever be — not a companion, not a person he moved toward, but a force of damage he moved between. Someone to be managed. Someone to be redirected. Someone whose primary relationship with the world was collision and whose primary relationship with him had begun with your fist in his face.

You are the problem. You have always been the problem. You walk into rooms and something breaks. You open your mouth and something bleeds. You have spent your entire life being too much — too loud, too harsh, too sharp, too restless, too broken at too many edges — and you looked at a boy made entirely of light and steadiness and grace and you thought, what exactly? That you were the exception? That he would be the one person in the world who looked at everything you were and decided it was worth choosing?

You are a girl who punched him in the face the first time he tried to help you. What did you think was going to happen.

The answer, of course, was that you hadn't thought. You had felt — which was worse. You had felt things and followed them and built a small, secret architecture out of afternoons and silences and pieces of fruit and shells and the specific sound of his laugh, and you had lived inside it for months without examining the foundation, and now you were standing in the rubble of your own stupidity and the rubble was shaped exactly like you deserved.

You accepted it. You built the acceptance deliberately, stone by stone, the way you built everything — with your hands, with force, with the grim efficiency of someone who has had a lot of practice making peace with things that don't deserve peace. You accepted that he belonged to someone else. You accepted that he had always belonged to someone else. You accepted that the warmth you had mistaken for something personal was simply what he was — what he was to everyone, the sun shining on everything equally, not choosing, not directing, not meaning anything specific by the fact that it reached you too.

It doesn't mean what you thought it meant. It never meant what you thought it meant.

You were just standing in the light. That's all. Anyone standing in the same place would have felt exactly what you felt.

You accepted it. At least — that's what you told yourself. You kept showing up.

That was the shameful part. That was the part you couldn't dress up in any language that made you look like a person in control of yourself. You kept going back. Every day, nearly, the way you had before — sitting beside him on the flat rock, arguing with Lo'ak, existing in the comfortable orbit of his presence like you hadn't just rebuilt every internal wall you had around the specific knowledge that none of this was yours to keep.

You told yourself you were fine. You told yourself you were mature. That this was what maturity looked like — loving someone and wanting their happiness above your own and not making it their problem. That you could hold the feeling in one hand and his wellbeing in the other and keep them separate, keep them clean, never let one contaminate the other. You were so convinced you had it managed. And then he would smile.

Not the public smile — not the one he gave the elders or the warriors or the general population of people who existed in his life. This one. The small one. The private one that arrived without announcement and lived mostly in the corners of his expression, the one that meant something had genuinely landed somewhere real inside him, the one that you were — you were almost certain — not something he distributed freely. The one that felt, every single time it appeared, like something being handed to you specifically. Something in you broke a little more.

Quietly. The way things break when they've been holding too long — not catastrophic, no single dramatic fracture, just the slow accumulation of stress until the material can't hold its shape anymore. A little more every time. A little quieter every time. Until you weren't sure what was still intact and what was just the shape of something that had already given way.

And every time he said your name. He said it differently than other people. You had tried to talk yourself out of this observation because it was the kind of observation that a person makes when they are in trouble and looking for evidence to justify the trouble. But it was true. It was simply, factually, undeniably true that your name in his mouth was a different thing than your name anywhere else — unhurried, without the faint exhaustion or edge that most people put into it, like he had no complicated feelings about it, like saying it was simply a thing he did willingly.

Every time you heard it you had to remind yourself to breathe normally. And every time he noticed something.

That you hadn't eaten — he would say nothing, just redirect the conversation somewhere near food until you ended up with something in your hands almost without realizing. That you were favoring your left side after a training incident you hadn't mentioned — he had simply adjusted where he sat so you weren't reaching across yourself to hand him things. That you got a certain look — a particular tightening around your eyes — right before you said something you were going to regret, and he would ask you a question in that moment, just a small question, just enough to interrupt the momentum and give you the half-second you needed to reconsider.

He saw you.

Not the version of you that was visible to everyone — not the loud one, not the difficult one, not the one they called feral and meant it as a warning. The version underneath. The one that existed in the silences and the small admissions and the moments when your guard slipped because you'd forgotten to hold it up because he made you forget. He saw that version and he treated it gently and he never once made you feel like a project or a problem or a thing to be managed.

And he was engaged to someone else. And you sat next to him in the afternoon light and breathed through it and kept your face arranged into something peaceful and ordinary and fine —

And something inside you, in the place you'd buried everything, put both hands against the stone you'd built over it —

And screamed.

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The evening was the color of regret.

That pale purple-gold that comes just before the last light goes — when everything looks soft and bruised at the edges and the world holds its breath and you feel, briefly, terribly, like the only two people in existence. Like Eywa had drawn the rest of the world back like a curtain and left just this — just the falls, just the fading light, just him, just you, just the unbearable specific weight of everything you were not supposed to feel.

You'd come to the falls together without planning it. That was how it always happened with you two — no direction, no agenda, just movement, just the natural gravitational pull of two people who had somehow, stupidly, become each other's default direction. He had been walking. You had fallen into step beside him. Neither of you had said where. It hadn't seemed necessary. It was never necessary anymore.

That should have scared you. That had scared you, weeks ago, when you first noticed it — the way you had stopped needing to explain yourself to him, stopped needing to justify your presence, stopped performing the casualness of showing up. Somewhere in the accumulated weight of all those afternoons it had simply become true, and true things don't require performance.

You should have been more afraid of that than you were.

The path to the falls was one you both knew by now — the particular arrangement of roots to step over, the place where the canopy thinned and the sky came through in long gold panels, the sound of the water growing gradually from suggestion to certainty. You had walked it in silence, the comfortable kind, the kind that had its own texture and warmth, and you had not looked at him more than twice and you had kept your breathing even and you had told yourself —

This is fine. This is just an evening. This is what you do. This is allowed.

The water fell in long silver ribbons from the high rocks, catching the dying light and breaking it into pieces, turning to mist where it met the pool below — a soft, suspended cloud of it that caught the last gold of the sun and held it, glowing faintly, like something sacred. The sound of it was steady and low and covered everything like a blanket drawn up to the chin. Like the world had drawn close and hushed itself specifically for this moment, and you wished it hadn't, you wished there were noise and people and interruption, you wished for Lo'ak to appear from nowhere and start an argument, you wished for anything that would make this feel less like the universe arranging something.

Neteyam stood a few feet ahead of you at the edge of the pool.

Looking out at the water. Still, as always — that particular, practiced stillness that was not emptiness but its opposite, not absence but the most complete kind of presence, the kind that filled whatever space it occupied without effort or announcement. The last light was on him fully, the way it always seemed to find him, gold and honest and merciless.

You looked at him. You looked at the line of his jaw and the set of his shoulders and the way his braids moved faintly in the mist-cooled air. You looked at his hands — loose at his sides, relaxed, the hands of a person who was at peace with where he was. You looked at the way he breathed — slow and unhurried and deep, like the world gave him all the time it had ever made, like nothing in him was braced against anything.

You looked at him and something in your chest cracked open like a geode — split clean down the middle, and what was inside was not stone but light, and the light was the worst thing, the most painful thing, because light in a cracked place has nowhere to go but out and you had been trying so hard, so hard, to keep it in —

I could die happy looking at him. The thought arrived whole. Fully formed. Devastating in its simplicity. Not morbid — not the dark kind of thought that comes from pain — just true, the way only the most honest things are true, without apology or decoration. That you could stand here in this light with the falls making their soft silver noise and look at him, and if the world ended in this exact moment, you would not feel cheated. You would not feel unfinished.

You would feel full.For the first time in your life. Completely, quietly, heartbreakingly full.

(barely a whisper, barely even a sound) "Neteyam."

He turned his head slightly. Not all the way — not quite looking at you, not quite looking away, that particular angle that meant he was listening, that meant you had his attention even when you didn't have his eyes.

Neteyam: "Mm."

Not a word. Just a sound. Just I hear you, I'm here, go ahead. The way he always responded when he was thinking about something and you pulled him back — no irritation, no impatience, just the simple signal of his presence offered freely.

"Do you ever — " You stopped. Swallowed. Started again. "Do you ever think about how fast things change? Like — one day everything is one way and then something shifts and it's completely different and you didn't even — you didn't even see it coming."

A pause. He considered it the way he considered everything — genuinely, without rushing toward an easy answer.

Neteyam: "Yes."

"Does it scare you?"

He turned to look at you then. Fully. Those golden eyes finding yours in the fading light with that particular quality of attention that had always undone you slightly — the feeling of being looked at by someone who was actually looking, not scanning, not assessing, not preparing their response. Just seeing.

Neteyam: "Sometimes. But I think — " He paused. Looked back at the water briefly, then back at you. "I think the things that change you are usually the things that were always supposed to. Even when you didn't ask for them."

You stared at him.

(quietly) "That's a very peaceful way to see it."

Neteyam: "You don't see it that way."

"I — no. No, I don't. I think some things change you that were never supposed to. I think sometimes things happen and they just — they just wreck you, and there's no meaning in it, and you can't make it into a lesson because it just hurts and that's the whole story."

He was quiet for a moment.

Neteyam: "What are you talking about?"

"Nothing."

Neteyam: "That wasn't nothing."

"Neteyam —"

Neteyam: "You get a look." His voice was even. Gentle. Infuriatingly, unbearably gentle. "When something is actually wrong. When it's not the usual kind of wrong — not anger, not frustration. When it's something else. You've had that look for a while now."

The air left your lungs.

"I don't — I'm fine."

Neteyam: "You're not.

"Don't tell me what I am."

Neteyam: "I'm not telling you what you are. I'm telling you what I see."

(voice tight) "Then stop looking so hard."

Silence. The falls kept falling. The mist drifted between you, soft and cool and indifferent to the specific disaster unfolding in its midst.

Neteyam: (quietly, carefully) "You can talk to me. You know that." And that — that — was the thing that broke it. Not the light on his face. Not the evening or the falls or the accumulated weight of every afternoon you had ever spent beside him. That. The simple, devastating offer of you can talk to me — said without agenda, without performance, without any awareness of what it cost you to receive it.

You can talk to me.

As if you were someone worth talking to. As if what you carried deserved to be heard. As if he would still be standing there after you finished saying it, unchanged, unbothered, still looking at you with that patient and terrible clarity — He is engaged, you thought. He is engaged and he is kind to you because he is kind to everyone and you have mistaken the sun for something personal and you are standing here at the edge of the worst decision you have ever made in a life full of bad decisions and you should walk away. You should laugh it off. You should say something sharp and redirect and walk away and go home and never speak of this moment to anyone including yourself —

He turned his head slightly — not quite looking at you, not quite looking away — and the last light shifted across his face, caught the line of his jaw, the curve of his mouth, the particular quality of his patience — And every single stone moved.

The whole architecture. Everything you had built — every wall, every buried thing, every careful construction of it doesn't matter, it can't matter, it won't — it moved all at once, like the tide taking sand, like the ground deciding it was done holding its shape. You crossed the distance without deciding to.

Your hands found the sides of his face — gently, for once in your life, with an aching, unfamiliar gentleness that didn't feel like yours but was coming from you anyway — and you felt him go still under your palms, felt the exact moment of his surprise move through him like a current, and you turned him toward you and you kissed him.

It lasted three seconds.

Maybe four.

Maybe a lifetime compressed into something small and irreversible — the way some moments are larger on the inside than they appear from the outside, the way some things, once done, immediately belong to a category of things that cannot be undone. His lips were warm. Completely still. You felt him go motionless under your hands — not pulling away, not leaning in, not doing anything at all except existing in it, suspended, like the whole world had taken a breath and forgotten to release it. Like he was waiting. Like he was in the middle of processing something too large to process quickly and his body had simply paused while his mind caught up.

Three seconds.

Maybe four.

You pulled back.

You opened your eyes.

You looked at his face.

And the bottom dropped out of everything.

Because you could not read it. You — who had learned him, who had spent months studying the specific geography of his expressions, who could tell the difference between his thinking silence and his feeling silence and his I'm about to say something that matters silence — you looked at his face and found nothing you recognized. Not anger. Not joy. Not the soft decline of someone who was sorry but certain. Not the warmth of someone who had been waiting for this.

Nothing. Everything. Something that was so many things at once it had collapsed into a single expression that had no name in any language you spoke. His eyes were wide. Just slightly. Just enough. His lips were parted by a fraction — the shape of a word not yet formed, a word still deciding whether to exist.

The mist drifted between you. The falls kept falling.

His eyes met yours and in them was something vast and uncharted and you could not read the map, you could not read the map, you had always been able to read him and now in the single most important moment of your entire life you could not read him and the not-knowing was going to kill you —

Neteyam: "_____"

He said your name. Or he began to — the first sound of it, the shape of it starting in his throat, his lips forming the beginning of it with that particular quality he always gave it, the one that sounded like he meant it, like it meant something to him that this was specifically your name and not anyone else's —

And you ran. You turned. You ran.

Like the coward you are. Like the girl who had talked back to every person who ever tried to hold power over her, who had never in her life walked away from a confrontation, who had built her entire identity on the principle of I do not back down — you backed down. You turned your back on the most important thing you had ever done and you ran.

Through the violet evening. Through the dark gathering between the trees like water rising. Through the soft mist that clung to your skin and your braids and your eyelashes as you passed through the edge of it. The falls grew distant behind you, their sound fading from a roar to a murmur to a whisper to nothing, and still you ran.

Your chest was cracked open. Not metaphorically — physically, or so it felt, the specific sensation of something structural giving way, something load-bearing that had been quietly failing for months finally going all at once. Your lungs burned. Your throat burned. Your eyes burned with something you refused to name and refused to release because if you started you were not confident you would stop and you could not afford to stop because stopping meant thinking and thinking meant — What did you do.

Your feet hit the earth over and over, the rhythm of it almost punishing, and the voice in your head was not loud but it was relentless —

What did you do. What did you do. What did you do —

You kissed him. You kissed him and he has someone and you knew that, you have known that for weeks, you buried it and built stone over it and you kissed him anyway because you are selfish and stupid and you cannot control yourself, you have never been able to control yourself, this is what you do — you ruin things, you burn things, you take something that was good and careful and real and you blow it apart with your bare hands because that is the only thing you have ever been reliably good at —

He looked at you and you couldn't read his face.

You couldn't read his face and that means it could be anything. It could be pity. It could be discomfort. It could be the careful expression of a gentle person figuring out how to let someone down without destroying them. It could be — it could be —

It doesn't matter what it is. It doesn't matter. You ran. You made the decision for both of you by running. You are a coward and you ran and now he knows and everything is ruined and the only thing left to do is keep moving because stopping means feeling the full size of this and you are not ready —

You are not ready.

You are not ready.

You ran until your legs gave out their protest and the dark had closed in fully around you and the village sounds were still distant and there was nothing in any direction but the night and the ocean far below and the sound of your own breathing coming apart at the seams. You stopped.

You pressed your back against a tree. Slid down it. Sat on the ground in the dark with your knees pulled to your chest and your hands pressed flat against the earth on either side of you, grounding yourself, anchoring yourself, because the world felt like it was tilting and you needed something solid.

The tears came then. You didn't sob. You didn't make noise. You had never been a person who cried loudly — crying loudly meant someone might hear and someone hearing meant someone knowing and someone knowing meant — They came silently. Hot and fast and entirely without your permission. Down your face and off your jaw and dropping onto the backs of your hands where they were pressed into the dirt.

You ruined it, the voice said, quieter now. Not cruel anymore — just sad, which was somehow worse. You had something. You had the afternoons and the silence and the flat rock and the fruit and the shell and his laugh and his name in his voice and the way he looked for you when he walked into a space — you had all of that, it wasn't what you wanted it to be but it was something real and it was yours and now you have burned it down the way you burn everything down and it's gone.

It's gone.

Because you couldn't just — you couldn't just let it be what it was. You couldn't just keep the stone in place. You always have to push, you always have to take it too far, you always have to —

You pressed your hands against your face.

Breathed.

In.

Out.

In.

He said your name.

He had started to say your name and you had run before you could hear the rest of it and you would never know — you might never know — what the rest of it was going to be. That thought sat in the center of your chest like a coal. Not burning. Just — hot. Constant. Something you were going to have to carry now. The falls were far away. Invisible. Inaudible.

You sat in the dark alone and you breathed and you didn't let yourself think about his face.

You almost managed it.

. ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁. . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁. . ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁ ⟡ ݁ . ⊹ ₊ ݁. . ݁₊ ⊹ .

PART 3 (FINAL CHAPTER)

Chapter Warnings⚠️ : This chapter contains heavy emotional angst and prolonged heartbreak, dual POV switching between Y/n and Neteyam, jealousy as a catalyst for self-realization, emotionally charged confrontation with raised voices and tears, one-sided argument that becomes two-sided, accusations of selfishness and bad timing, the specific pain of someone realizing their feelings too late, reader character breaking down and crying mid-confrontation, a confession that arrives at the worst possible moment, painful and unresolved dialogue before resolution, a kiss that is unsanctioned and sudden and passionate, emotional walls being dismantled without permission, bittersweet resolution that does not erase prior damage, themes of jealousy, pride, delayed feelings, and the terror of being hurt twice by the same person, and Na'vi language and cultural references throughout. This chapter contains the payoff but does not pretend the damage wasn't real. If you have been hurt by someone who came back too late and too uncertain — read with care.

7k words

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Weeks passed.

I counted them the way you count things you are trying not to count — without meaning to, without wanting to, the tally accumulating in the back of your mind regardless of how firmly you instruct it to stop. Three weeks since I had last looked at him directly. Four weeks since I had responded to anything he said with more than two words. Nearly a full cycle of Pandora's moons since I had allowed myself to exist in his presence as anything other than a cold and deliberate absence wearing my face.

It was working.

That was the terrible part. The coldness was working in the sense that it was doing what coldness does — creating distance, building walls, convincing the outside world that the person inside them had moved on and was fine and did not think about a particular set of amber eyes more often than was reasonable for someone who had supposedly decided to stop.

But walls, I was learning, do not actually keep things out. They just change the direction the hurt travels. Instead of moving outward toward him, it turned inward, and inward hurt had a particular quality — quieter and more persistent, the kind that sits with you in the dark without asking permission and does not leave when you tell it to.

I missed him. I missed him with the specific, humiliating completeness of someone who had organized their entire emotional landscape around a person for years and then tried to remove that person from it overnight. The landscape did not simply rearrange itself into something clean and ordered. It left gaps. Irregular, conspicuous gaps in the shape of him — the shape of his laugh, the particular way he moved through the village, the steadiness he carried that had always made the air around him feel slightly safer than the air elsewhere.

Did he ever truly laugh at me, I wondered sometimes. Or had I only ever been something he smiled at the way you smile at something small and harmless — with fondness, yes, with genuine warmth, yes, but not with the specific recognition that means you, particularly you, are the reason for this. I was beginning to suspect I knew the answer. I just could not decide if knowing it made things better or worse.

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Neteyam's POV

She was not looking at him.

That was the first thing he noticed every morning now, which was a problem, because noticing it meant he was looking at her, which meant he was paying attention to her in a way that had apparently been quietly building for longer than he had realized and was only now making itself known at the most inconvenient possible time. She is not looking at you, he told himself. Good. That is what you asked for. That is what you said you wanted — for her to understand, to stop, to redirect herself toward someone else, someone who would— She walked past him without a glance. He watched her go. He had no business watching her go. The laugh was what he kept coming back to, which made no sense to him and annoyed him considerably. Her laugh specifically — the one she used when something had caught her genuinely off guard, the one that came out slightly too loud and slightly too unguarded and that she always seemed faintly embarrassed by afterward, like she had revealed something she hadn't meant to. He had heard it dozens of times over the years without registering it as something notable. It was just part of the ambient texture of the world, filed away with all the other unremarkable constants.

It had been nearly a full moon's cycle since he had heard it. He had not realized until its absence how much space it had apparently been taking up.

This is not— he started, internally, and then stopped himself, because he had been beginning that sentence for two weeks and had yet to find a satisfying ending for it. This is not fair to her was one version. This is not something you are allowed to want was another. This is not real, this is just the particular human tendency to desire what you have discarded was the version he returned to most often, because it was the most comfortable, because it offered him the most flattering interpretation of his own behavior. He was not certain it was true. He was not certain of very much, lately.

"Brother."

Lo'ak dropped down beside him with the specific casual destructive energy that he brought to every situation, landing cross-legged in the space next to Neteyam and surveying the village with the cheerful alertness of someone who was never, under any circumstances, minding his own business.

"Brother," Neteyam said back, in the tone he used when he was hoping Lo'ak would interpret the flatness as a signal and take his cheerful alertness elsewhere. Lo'ak never interpreted flatness as a signal.

"Did you know," Lo'ak said conversationally, the way he always introduced things that were not going to be conversational at all, "that there are rumors spreading? About you and Y/n?" He paused for what Neteyam recognized as performative consideration. "Well. About you rejecting Y/n, more specifically. Which—" he let out a short laugh, "—I cannot believe she actually tried. I genuinely cannot. You have to admit that takes a particular kind of courage, or possibly a particular kind of—"

"Lo'ak."

"I am just saying it is memorable," Lo'ak said, holding both hands up briefly. "Anyway. Good for her, honestly. Now she can move on. Marry someone who actually—" he made a vague gesture that communicated you know, wants her without requiring the words. "From what I have heard, Yofeu has been paying very close attention to the situation since the rumors started. Watching to see how things settle."

Neteyam went still. It was a small stillness, the kind that someone who was not paying attention might not notice. Lo'ak was, annoyingly, always paying attention.

"What," Neteyam said. Not a question. Flat. Careful.

Lo'ak turned to look at him with the expression of someone who has just been given exactly the reaction they were probing for and is choosing how to handle it.

"Yofeu," he repeated. "You know him. Good hunter. Strong. His queue is longer than yours, which I know means nothing but some people consider it—"

"I know who he is," Neteyam said. His voice was even. His jaw was doing something he was trying to make it stop doing.

"Then you know he is also interested," Lo'ak said. "Which — come on, Neteyam, can you really act surprised about this? Y/n is — " he paused, and something in his voice shifted slightly, became less performative and more honest, "she is good, brother. She is smart and she is strong and she leads with her whole chest even when she is terrified, and grandmother speaks of her with the particular voice she reserves for people she genuinely respects, which as you know is a very short list." He let that settle for a moment. "It is not surprising that other men are noticing what was in front of you the whole time."

The silence between them was weighted.

"I did not say—" Neteyam started.

"You did not have to," Lo'ak said, and his voice had gone quiet, which was rare enough that Neteyam actually looked at him. Lo'ak met his eyes with an expression that was, underneath the performance, genuinely concerned. "I know your face, brother. I have been watching your face my entire life. And what I see on it right now is not the face of someone who made a clean decision and is at peace with it." He stood up, unhurried. "I am just saying. Do not wait until Yofeu makes his tìyawn known before you figure out what yours actually is."

He left. Neteyam sat with the image of Y/n laughing at something Yofeu said, tilting her face up the way she did when something caught her off guard, and felt something move through him that was sharp and cold and entirely without justification. He had no right to it. He felt it anyway.

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Y/n POV

He was watching me. Not subtly. Or rather — Neteyam being subtle, which meant it was subtle by the standards of someone who had never needed to be subtle because the world had always simply arranged itself around him without requiring navigation, which translated in practice to: obvious. Transparent. The kind of watching that a person who has spent years cataloguing someone's behavior patterns cannot possibly miss.

He was peeking at me from across the village the way Lo'ak used to peek around corners before jumping out to frighten Tuk, with that particular quality of visible concealment that defeats its own purpose entirely. I noticed it the first time and told myself it meant nothing. I noticed it the second time and told myself he was probably concerned about some practical matter. Some clan obligation that tangentially involved me. Something entirely ordinary.

By the fifth time, I had assembled a small, frantic, completely untrustworthy list of possible explanations — he is worried about me, he wants to check that I am alright, he has something logistical to communicate, he is simply looking in my general direction and I am flattering myself by assuming I am the specific object of his attention—

And underneath all of those explanations, quiet and insistent and entirely unwelcome, was the one I refused to write down. The one I would not let myself finish forming because forming it would mean hoping again and hoping again was something I had specifically, explicitly, painfully decided I was done with.

He kept hesitating. That was the part I could not account for. Every time he moved in my direction with that particular quality of intention — the set of his shoulders, the way his stride shifted from its usual easy certainty into something more careful — he would get within a certain distance and then stop. Pull back. Find something else to look at. The hesitation was so unlike him that it made something in me want to reach across the distance I had built and ask him what was wrong, which was deeply inconvenient given that the distance was the entire point.

I got fed up on a Tuesday afternoon.

I am not proud of the impulse. It was not strategic. It was three weeks of accumulated tension and a morning of watching him hover at the edge of my peripheral vision like a very large, very conflicted moon that could not decide on its orbit, and something in me simply ran out of patience for the uncertainty.

I turned around.

I walked directly toward him.

He saw me coming and something moved across his face — surprise, and something else underneath it that I catalogued and immediately instructed myself to uncatalogue.

I stopped in front of him.

"Alright," I said. My voice came out flatter than I intended, the particular flatness of someone working hard to sound unbothered. "What do you want, Neteyam?"

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He looked at me.

The full weight of it — the amber eyes, the attention that had always made me feel simultaneously seen and invisible — and I watched him breathe, a deliberate careful breath, the kind you take before saying something you have been rehearsing.

"Y/n," he said. His voice was low. Careful in the way he was always careful, words placed like something fragile being set down on uncertain ground. "I know this is — I know I have no right to say this. I know how it sounds. And I know that what I said before—"

"Then don't say it," I said.

He blinked.

"Whatever you are about to say," I said, and my voice was doing something I was working very hard to prevent it from doing, something around the edges that gave things away, "you cannot say it now. You don't get to say it now."

"Y/n, please—"

"No." The word came out with more force than I had intended, and I watched him absorb it, watched his jaw tighten slightly. "You said what you said. You were very clear. You were — Eywa, Neteyam, you were so clear, you left me nothing, not a single—" I stopped. Pressed my lips together. Started again. "You told me you saw me like Tuk. You told me what I felt was desperation. You told me I was a child who did not understand the difference between wanting something and deserving it. Those are not words that a person says and then—"

"I know," he said. Quiet. Pained.

"Do you?" Something was rising in my chest that I had been keeping very carefully compressed for weeks and it was choosing this moment, apparently, to stop being compressed. "Because you have been watching me for two weeks, Neteyam. Hovering. Hesitating. And I have been trying — I have been working so hard to — " my voice cracked on the last word and I hated it, hated the sound of it, hated that my body was betraying me in front of him again. "I built those walls because you told me to. You stood in that clearing and you told me, with your kind voice and your reasonable words, that everything I had been feeling for years was wrong and misplaced and built on desperation, and then you said you were sorry and you watched me run and apparently that was enough for you, and I spent a month putting myself back together, and now you are—" I gestured between us, a sharp frustrated motion. "What is this? What are you doing?"

He was silent.

"Say something," I said. My voice broke on the second word and I did not recover it. "Please. Because if you are here to tell me again — if you are here to make sure I understood, if you came to check that the message landed clearly enough — I need you to know that it did. It landed. Every single word of it. I hear it when I wake up and I hear it when I try to sleep and I have been hearing it for weeks so if that was the point then the point has been thoroughly made and you can—"

"I think I like you."

The words landed in the space between us like something dropped from a great height. Small and enormous at the same time. Four words in that same careful voice, and I felt them hit every wall I had built in sequence, felt each one shudder. I stared at him.

"I think—" he started again.

"You think,"I said. My voice had gone very flat. "You think."

"Y/n—"

"You think you like me." I repeated each word with the precise deliberateness of someone making sure they have heard correctly. "After — after everything you said. After the clearing, after— you stood there and you told me I was like a sister to you and you told me my feelings were desperation and you told me I was a child who didn't understand what love was, and now you are standing in front of me saying you think you like me?" Something in my chest was shaking. "You think?"

"I know," he said, and his voice had dropped lower, more urgent, "I know how that sounds. I know I don't deserve to say it. I know the timing is — Y/n, I have been trying to understand it myself, I didn't know, I genuinely didn't—"

"You didn't know," I said. "Or you didn't look."

He went quiet.

"Because those are different things," I said, and my voice was shaking now in a way I couldn't control. "Not knowing because the feeling wasn't there — that is one thing. That is forgivable. That is just being human. But not looking — choosing not to look because it was easier, because I was convenient and familiar and you knew exactly how I felt and it was simpler to just — to just keep me there, in that little box, little sister, little child, never asking yourself whether—"

"That is not what happened," he said, and there was an edge in his voice now, something that was not quite hurt and not quite defense but somewhere between them. "Y/n, I was not keeping you anywhere. I was not being cruel on purpose. I told you the truth as I understood it—"

"As you understood it then," I said. "And now what — rumours says someone else is interested and suddenly you understand it differently?"

The silence that followed was electric. His expression shifted. Something that looked, for just a moment, like being caught.

"That is—"

"Is that what this is?" My voice was very quiet now, which was somehow worse than the shaking. "Yofeu? Is that what changed? Because another man noticed that I exist and now suddenly you can't stop watching me from across the village?"

"No," he said, firm and immediate. "That is not—"

"Then what?" I said. "What changed, Neteyam? Between the clearing and now, what exactly happened that made your tìyawn suddenly remember that I was here? Because I was here before. I was here for years. I was so here that the entire clan was laughing about how obvious it was. And you looked at me and saw Tuk, and you were very clear about it, and I believed you, and I started — I was trying—"

My voice broke completely. I did not recover it this time.

"I was trying to stop," I said, and it came out raw and small and stripped of everything I had been holding around it. "I was finally, actually trying to stop. And you don't get to—" I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth for a moment, breathed, "you don't get to come back now and say you think you like me. That is not — you cannot do that to me. You already—"

"I know what I did," he said.

"Do you?"

"Yes." He took a step toward me. I did not step back, which was either courage or the failure of my legs to receive the relevant instruction. "I know what I said in that clearing. I know how it landed. I know that I was — that I was certain, and I said it with certainty, and I did not understand then what I understand now, and I know that is not a fair thing to ask you to accept. I know I have no right to stand here and tell you that something shifted in me and ask you to—"

"Then why are you here?" I said. "If you know all of that — if you know how little right you have — then why are you standing in front of me, Neteyam?"

He looked at me. Those amber eyes, steady and uncertain at the same time, carrying something in them I had spent years imagining and had stopped letting myself imagine and was now seeing in reality and did not know what to do with.

"Because," he said, quietly, "I would rather stand here with no right and say the true thing than stay away and let you believe the untrue thing forever."

"And what is the true thing?"

"That I see you," he said. The words were simple. Devastating in their simplicity. "Not as Tuk. Not as a child. Not as something peripheral. I see you, Y/n. I do not know when it changed or how or what exactly I feel, but I know it is not what I told you it was. And I know that I have been standing at the edge of this for weeks trying to find the right words and there are no right words, there is only this, and I am sorry, and I see you."

The unil atokirina' drifted between us in the evening air, slow and indifferent, their bioluminescence beginning to pulse softly as Pandora moved toward dusk. Somewhere in the forest behind us a fan lizard called once and went quiet. The village breathed and moved around us and I stood in the middle of it with my walls crumbling in a way I had not given them permission to crumble and my eyes full of something I was losing the battle against keeping inside.

"You hurt me," I said. It came out a whisper. "Neteyam. You really, genuinely hurt me."

"Srane," he said. Yes. Quiet and undefended and without any attempt to explain it away. "Oe irayo." I am sorry. "I hurt you and I am sorry and I cannot take it back and I know that."

"I built walls," I said, and my voice was breaking apart now, the words coming through the cracks, "I built them so carefully, I was so careful, and you are standing here and they are just—"

"Y/n—"

"I don't know how to trust this," I said. "I don't know how to believe that this is real and not just — not just you not wanting someone else to have what you threw away. I don't know how to—"

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He crossed the remaining distance between us.

I did not finish the sentence.Because his hands came up to hold my face — carefully, the way he did everything, with that maddening deliberate gentleness — and he tilted my face up toward his and then he kissed me.

Not tentatively. Not with the careful restraint of someone testing uncertain ground. He kissed me like something that had been compressed for longer than either of us had understood finally releasing — warm and certain and real, his thumbs brushing the tears from my cheeks with a tenderness that undid me more completely than anything he had said. And I kissed him back. A moment of weakness i thought. For exactly four seconds.

And then my hands, which had been fisted in the front of his clothing with the desperate grip of someone holding onto the only solid thing in a tilting world, went flat against his chest. And I pushed. Not gently.

He stumbled back a single step, more from surprise than from force, and stared at me with those amber eyes wide and unguarded in a way I had never seen on him before — open and startled and completely without the usual careful composure. I slapped him.

The sound of it landed in the quiet evening air like a stone hitting still water. Sharp. Irreversible. My palm stinging with the reality of what I had just done and my chest heaving and the unil atokirina' drifting around us completely indifferent to the fact that I was coming apart at the seams. He did not move. Did not raise his hand to his face. Just stood there and took it with the stillness of someone who has decided, somewhere in the preceding moment, that whatever comes next is deserved. That made it worse.

"You do not get to do that," I said. My voice was shaking so badly the words barely held their shape. "You do not get to kiss me and make it better. That is not — Neteyam, that is not how this works. You cannot just decide — after everything, after the clearing and the sister and the child and every single word you said with that careful, reasonable, devastating voice — you cannot just decide that you like me back and cross a room and kiss me and have that fix it."

"Y/n—"

"I am not finished," I said, and the force of it surprised both of us into silence. "I built walls. Do you understand that? I built them because you told me to. Not in those words, but that is what you meant — you told me everything I had been feeling was wrong and misplaced and I went home and I cried until I had nothing left and then I got up and I built walls because that was the only way I knew how to survive it. And I was surviving. I was actually, genuinely surviving. And then you—" my voice cracked, "you start watching me from across the village and hovering and hesitating and the rumuors about Yofeu and suddenly—"

"This has nothing to do with Yofeu,"he said, sharp and immediate.

"Doesn't it?"

"No."

"Then why now?" I demanded. "Why not three weeks ago? Why not a month ago when I was standing in front of you falling apart? Why now, when I have finally, painfully, expensively started to put myself back together — why is that the moment you choose to tell me you think you like me?"

"Because I was afraid," he said.

The words landed differently than I expected. Quiet and undefended and stripped of the careful composure he usually wore like armor. He said it the way he had said srane earlier — without justification, without the padding of explanation, just the plain thing itself laid down in the open.

"I was afraid," he said again, "and I was confused and I told myself it wasn't real, that it was just — that I was just reacting because you had made yourself absent and I wasn't used to it. I told myself it would pass. I told myself I had been right in the clearing and that the certainty I had felt then was more trustworthy than whatever I was feeling now. I told myself a great many things, Y/n, and none of them were true, and I know that, and I know that my fear does not cost you nothing — I know that my figuring myself out had a price and you were the one who paid it."

"Yes," I said. Flat and raw. "I was."

"I know."

"You do not get to kiss me and make that disappear," I said. My voice had gone very quiet, which was somehow the most dangerous it had sounded all evening. "Whatever you feel right now — whatever this is that you have decided you feel — it does not erase what you said. It does not unknow the clearing. It does not unbuild the month I spent putting myself back together, Neteyam. You cannot make things better just because you have decided to like me back. That is not how this works. That is not how any of this works."

He looked at me.

He did not try to argue. Did not reach for the composure he usually kept so reliably in hand. He just stood there in the bioluminescent dusk looking at me with an expression that I would think about later, in the dark, when I was trying very hard not to think about it — open and hurting and entirely without defense.

"I know," he said, for the third time. Simple and true and completely insufficient.

I looked at him for one more moment. And then I turned and I walked away. Not running this time. I was done running. I walked with my back straight and my hands loose at my sides and I did not look back, and I told myself the burning behind my eyes was anger and not the other thing, the worse thing, the thing I was not ready to name again.

I left him standing in the unil atokirina' in the darkening evening. I did not see his face when I left. I did not know, then, that he would stand in that exact spot for a very long time after I was gone.

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He did not know how he got home.

That was not a figure of speech. He genuinely could not reconstruct the sequence of events between standing in the clearing with the sting of her hand still present on his cheek and sitting on the floor of his hut with his back against the wall and the fire burning low and the village outside going about its evening with the cheerful indifference of a world that did not understand that something significant had just happened. He sat there for a long time.

The slap he had expected. Had known, somewhere in the moment before it landed, that it was coming and that it was warranted and that the correct response was to stand still and receive it. That part he had processed. It was everything she had said afterward that he kept turning over.

You cannot make things better just because you have decided to like me back. That is not how this works.

She was right. She was completely, devastatingly right, and the rightness of it sat in his chest like a stone, heavy and immovable, and he did not try to argue with it because there was no argument to be made. She had built walls. He had told her to build them, in effect, with every word he had said in that clearing — had handed her the materials and the blueprint and the justification and then watched her construct them, and then turned around a month later and been surprised to find them there. He stayed in his hut for three days.

Not entirely — there were duties, obligations, the ongoing fact of being the olo'eyktan's son in a clan that did not pause for personal crises — but he returned to it as often as he could, and he sat with the stone in his chest, and he did not talk to anyone, and Lo'ak left him alone which was either compassion or the tactical wisdom of someone who had already said his piece and was giving it time to work.

On the third day his father found him.

Jake Sully did not knock, because knocking was not something that existed in their family's vocabulary. He simply appeared in the entrance of the hut, assessed the situation with the particular eyes of a man who had spent years reading battlefields and could therefore read most other things, and sat down across from his son without being invited.

"What is the problem," he said. Not a question.

"Nothing, sir."

Jake looked at him.

Jake had a look. Neteyam had grown up on the receiving end of that look and it had never once in his entire life failed to extract the truth from wherever he had hidden it.

"Nothing," Jake repeated, in the flat tone that meant try again.

Neteyam looked at the fire.

"Y/n," he said finally.

The word landed in the hut and Jake was quiet for a moment, which meant he was already assembling context.

"Tell me," Jake said.

And so Neteyam told him. All of it — the clearing, the words he had said, the certainty he had felt and then lost, the weeks of watching her from a distance with something growing in his chest that he had kept trying to name as something other than what it was. Lo'ak and the mention of Yofeu. The evening. The kiss that had lasted four seconds before she pushed him away and said the true thing and left him standing in the dark.

Jake listened to all of it without interrupting, which was not his natural inclination and Neteyam appreciated the effort.

When it was done Jake was quiet for a long time.

"You hurt her," he said finally.

"Srane." Yes.

"And then you kissed her before she was ready."

"Srane."

"And now you are sitting in here."

"Srane," Neteyam said, and something in his voice on the third repetition came out less composed than the first two, rougher around the edges.

Jake looked at his son. Not with disappointment exactly — Neteyam had braced for disappointment and found instead something more complicated, something that looked like a man recognizing a specific kind of mistake because he had made versions of it himself.

"She is not wrong," Jake said. "You cannot fix damage with a kiss. You cannot undo words with a gesture. That is not how Neytiri works. That is not how the women in this family work. And from what I know of Y/n—" he paused, "—she has her grandmother's spine. Which means she will not be won back by accident."

"I know," Neteyam said. "Then how—"

"On purpose," Jake said simply. "You hurt her in front of Eywa and the whole forest. You make it right in front of Eywa and the whole forest.You do something she cannot mistake for impulse or guilt or jealousy. You do something that could only come from someone who has thought carefully about who she is and what she deserves." He stood, unhurried, the way he always moved. "And you do it without expecting anything back. You do it because it is right, not because you want a particular response. Do you understand the difference?"

Neteyam looked up at his father.

"Srane," he said. And this time he meant it differently.

Jake nodded once. Started toward the entrance. Paused.

"Neteyam."

"Sir."

"Your mother would tell you to bring her favorite flowers." A pause. "She would be right." He left.

Neteyam sat with the dying fire and the stone in his chest and for the first time in three days it felt slightly less immovable. He had work to do.

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I was eating.

That was the thing — I was finally, genuinely eating again, sitting in the communal area in the warm evening with food in front of me and actual appetite for it, which felt like a minor victory of the kind that only becomes significant after a period of not having it. I had spent three days after the clearing incident eating nothing and four more days eating mechanically and now, nearly two weeks later, I was sitting here with something that resembled appetite and a conversation with two girls from the eastern quarter that was almost, cautiously, enjoyable.

Progress. I was making progress. And then a small hand closed around my wrist. Tuk.

She appeared at my side with the particular expression she wore when she was executing a plan — focused and bright-eyed and practically vibrating with the effort of containing whatever she knew that I didn't. She was looking at me with enormous intentional innocence, which on Tuk's face was about as convincing as Lo'ak trying to look like he hadn't been involved in something.

"Come with me," she said.

"Tuk, I am eating—"

"Come with me," she said again, with more emphasis, tugging gently at my wrist.

I looked at her.

"What is this about?"

"Nothing," she said, in the voice that meant everything. "Just come. Please. You have to wear this." She produced a strip of soft dark cloth from somewhere with the practiced ease of someone who had been holding it in readiness. A blindfold.

I stared at it.

"Tuk—"

"Please," she said, and something in her voice dropped the performance and became genuine for just a moment — earnest and young and asking in the way that Tuk asked when she actually needed something, not the theatrical neediness she deployed for effect. "Please, Y/n. I promise you will not regret it. I promise."

I looked at her small serious face. I put on the blindfold. I let her lead me.

She guided me carefully — one small hand in mine, her voice giving me quiet instructions about where to step, patient in the way that Tuk was patient when she cared about something going right — and I let myself be led through the sounds of the village and then beyond them, the noise of the communal evening fading behind us as the ground changed under my feet from the packed earth of the settlement to something softer. Grass. The living carpet of the forest floor. The air changed too — cooler, and alive with the low pulsing bioluminescence I could detect even through the cloth, the blue-green heartbeat of Pandora breathing around us.

"Stop here," Tuk said. I stopped.

"Take it off," she said. Her voice had gone very quiet, the particular quiet of someone trying not to disrupt something.

I reached up and removed the blindfold. The world came back in pieces.

The first thing I saw was the fan lizards — a burst of them, spiraling upward from the undergrowth in every direction at once, their bioluminescent scales catching the dark air and scattering it into fragments of living light, violet and gold and deep sea-green, wheeling overhead in the kind of display that looked choreographed and was simply what they did when they felt safe and undisturbed. I had only seen it a handful of times in my life. It stopped my breath the way it always did. Then I saw the ground.

Eltu te vawm — the glowing moss that grew only in undisturbed places — spread across the clearing in a carpet of soft blue-white light, and through it, laid with the particular deliberateness of someone who had thought carefully about placement, were flower petals. The small vivid blossoms of the tìrey aean — the living-blue, the ones that grew at the base of the great trees and only bloomed for two weeks out of every year, my favorite, which Neteyam had no particular reason to know and somehow knew. They made a path. Leading inward. Leading to the center.

And in the center, standing very still in the bioluminescent dark, was Neteyam.

He was wearing nothing ceremonial, nothing constructed to impress. Just himself, in the ordinary clothes of a hunter, standing in a clearing full of flower petals and fan lizards with his hands held carefully in front of him and in those hands — woven with the tight precise pattern of someone who had done it slowly and with attention — a bracelet. Small flowering vines and tìrey aean blossoms braided together with a steady hand, my favorite flowers worked into something meant to be worn, meant to last.

I stood at the edge of it and could not move.

Behind me, very quietly, Tuk disappeared.

For a long moment neither of us spoke. The fan lizards wheeled overhead and the glowing moss pulsed its soft slow rhythm and the forest breathed around us and I stood there with my heart doing something I had stopped giving it permission to do and looked at him across the carpet of blue flowers.

He looked back.

"Y/n," he said. His voice was not the careful composed voice. It was the underneath one — the one I had only heard a handful of times, the one that meant the composure was not currently available. "I know I have no right to ask you to stand here and listen to me. I know I have used up a great deal of what I am owed. But I am asking anyway. Not for your forgiveness — I am not here to ask you to forgive something because it is tidy. I am here because you deserve to hear the true thing said in the right place with the right weight behind it, and I should have said it long before now."

I did not move. Did not speak. He took a slow breath.

"I was a coward," he said. "In the clearing I was certain, and the certainty felt like truth, and I said it with truth's voice, and it was not truth. It was fear wearing truth's clothing. I was afraid of what I did not understand yet and I made you carry the cost of that fear and I called it clarity. I called it kindness." His jaw tightened slightly. "It was neither."

The fan lizards spiraled overhead in the dark.

"You are not Tuk," he said, and the words landed with entirely different weight than the last time he had used them — not as a correction, not as a rejection reversed, but as something seen. "You have never been Tuk. I looked at you and told myself I was seeing clearly and I was not. I was seeing what was easier to see. What required less from me." He paused. "That was my failure. Not yours. It was never yours."

My throat was doing the thing again.

"I cannot give you back the month," he said. "I cannot unknow the clearing or unsay the words. I cannot rebuild what I damaged and call it the same thing. I know that. I am not standing here with these—" he looked down at the bracelet in his hands, briefly, with an expression that was almost self-deprecating, "—flowers and this bracelet and this very deliberate collection of fan lizards—"

A sound escaped me. Not quite a laugh. Something in between.

"—thinking that any of this erases what I did," he continued, and his voice was lower now, more serious. "I am standing here because I needed you to know that I see you. Tsun oel ngati kameie, Y/n — properly, fully, in the way those words are meant to carry. Not as family. Not as something familiar and peripheral. I see you. And I think I have been seeing you for longer than I admitted to myself, and I was a fool, and I was cruel without meaning to be, and I am sorry. I am tìftxey sìltsan sorry — truly, completely sorry, in a way that is not asking for anything back."

The clearing was very quiet.

"And if you walk away from this," he said, steady and clear, "I will not follow. I will not hover or watch from across the village or ask Lo'ak to mention Yofeu again as if jealousy is a substitute for courage. I will let you go. Properly. Because you deserve to be let go properly if that is what you choose."

He held the bracelet out toward me. The tìrey aean blossoms glowed faintly in the bioluminescent light, their blue petals trembling very slightly in the forest's exhale, and his hands were steady in the way that his hands were always steady but his eyes were not, his eyes were the underneath version, open and uncertain and carrying everything he had just said still warm and present in them.

"But I needed you to know," he said quietly. "That I see you. Whatever you decide."

I looked at him. I looked at the bracelet.

I looked at the carpet of my favorite flowers laid across the glowing moss of an undisturbed forest clearing, at the fan lizards wheeling their living light overhead, at the face of the boy I had loved since I was small enough to throw rocks at him and call it hatred — and something in my chest that had been wound very tight for a very long time made a sound like release. I crossed the clearing.

Not walking. Running. The flower petals scattered under my feet and the fan lizards startled upward in a second wave of spiraling bioluminescent color and I closed the distance between us before I had consciously decided to and I kissed him — with everything, with all of it, with the years and the clearing and the walls and the month of gray days and the slap and the devastating rightness of everything he had just said poured into a single moment that I stopped thinking through and simply felt.

His arms came around me instantly, the bracelet still looped over his fingers, and he kissed me back with the same completeness — not careful, not composed, not the Neteyam who measured every word before releasing it, but the underneath one, the real one, warm and unguarded and entirely present.

When we finally stopped I pressed my forehead to his collarbone and breathed. His arms stayed around me. His chin came down to rest on top of my head. The fan lizards settled slowly back into the undergrowth around us, their light dimming to a soft pulse.

"For the record," I said, into his shoulder, my voice muffled and slightly unsteady, "I am still angry with you."

"Srane," he said. The word vibrated in his chest under my ear. "You are allowed to be." "I will probably continue to be angry for a while."

"That is fair."

"And if you ever," I said, pulling back slightly to look at him directly, to make sure the words landed properly, "ever call me your sister again—"

"Kehe," he said, immediately and with complete conviction, and something in his eyes was warm with the beginning of a smile. "Never again."

I looked at him for a moment.

"Good," I said.

And the forest breathed around us, and Pandora pulsed its blue heartbeat through the roots beneath our feet, and the tìrey aean petals glowed softly in the dark, and Eywa — whatever she had been weaving all this time, whatever pattern she had been building that I could never quite see from inside it —

Let us have this.

Let us have this, finally, fully.

Tsun oel ngati kameie.

I see you.

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PART 2!!!!!!!!!!!!!

⚠️ WARNINGS: | Neteyam x Reader | First Person POV | This chapter contains heavy unrequited love and one-sided pining, internalized insecurity and self-doubt, obsessive thought patterns around a love interest, deliberate self-isolation as a coping mechanism, minor public humiliation, the specific quiet pain of feeling invisible to someone who is kind to everyone, an unreliable narrator who is fully aware she is unreliable, emotional immaturity presented honestly and without glorification, secondhand embarrassment, and ends on a desperate decision that will make you want to reach through the page and shake her — no comfort yet, only the setup. Reader discretion advised.

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