nanti

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.

I would be gentle for you. I would change my nature for you. I would communicate for you. I would not listen to my impulses for you. I would bring down the walls and unclench my fists for you.