Maweya @skxawngsstuff - Tumblr Blog

MR. POPULAR

▪︎MIYUKI KAZUYA x F!READER (oneshot)

▪︎ genre : fluff & comedy & corny

▪︎ summary : people who were watching on the field caught your attention, you weren't really that into sports but you were curious why a lot of people watch them. and there it was, Mr. Popular.

▪︎ word count : 900+

▪︎a/n : i just missed ace of diamond :(( new season when kaya?

•18+ Adults Only

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neteyamthinker

to have you

pairings aged-up neteyam x omatikaya!dancer reader

notes slow burn, drunken confession, mutual pining, yearner neteyam as per usual <3, reader is lo’ak’s best friend, groveling (lowkey), smut (p in v), oral (f receiving)

synopsis neteyam had carried a quiet attraction to you ever since lo’ak and kiri brought you home when you were children. growing up, neteyam was many things, but he was never malicious nor was he a liar... so you couldn't begin to understand what possessed him when, in a druken haze, he started blurting out things you would never have dared to dream of— not even in your wildest dreams.

word count 16.5k

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The scraping hiss of stone against the obsidian blade of his arrow was the only sound that can be heard from Neteyam’s corner of their family kelku. He sat cross-legged on a woven mat, his posture unnaturally straight for a twelve-year-old. Before him lay his other arrows, their fletching already perfectly aligned, so he was focused entirely on the tips, although he does this almost every single day.

His bow and arrows are his constant company now that he was preparing for his iknimaya, years younger than most who dared, but that was mainly because even at a young age, he was already a prodigy. He was a sharp shooter, and the council spoke of it in quiet, proud murmurs, how the Olo’eyktan’s eldest son could pierce a moving yerik’s heart from fifty paces out.

Now, with aspirations of being a warrior, he had stopped playing games in the mud a long time ago. He had understood early that being the firstborn of Toruk Makto came with duties and responsibilities that he needed to carry, but he’d also decided a long time ago to wear it like armor.

Eventually, the peace of the hut was shattered.

neteyamthinker

i’m here to stay

pairings aged-up neteyam x mom!na’vi reader

notes reader is neteyam’s wife, workaholic neteyam, temporary separation, their son is the cutest toddler on pandora, groveling (if you squint), smut (p in v), oral (f&m receiving)

synopsis a year ago, you made the painful choice to walk away from neteyam after he proved time and again that his duties to the war party came before you and his son. you knew he was only trying to be the dutiful soldier everyone expected him to be, and that he would have kept going that way... until your son unwittingly reminded his father of everything he was throwing away for the sake of duty and war.

word count 16.8k

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Your hand on your mount’s reins tightened as the sight of the clouded Hallelujah Mountains loomed closer and closer with each beat of your ikran’s wings. The flight from your home clan to the Omatikaya was over an hour long, but you were glad that the weather was nice enough for you to travel. Your other arm renewed its hold on the woven wrap strapped securely to your body, holding your son, his small hands gripping at your woven knife sheath, his large amber eyes wide with excitement.

He was two years old today. Two years since he came into the world, his cries echoing in the vast canopy of a home that no longer existed. His birth was closely followed by the return of the sky people who tore the sky open, burned your forests, forced the people to face a seemingly endless war, and took your husband from you.

“Mama! Look! Look!” Nevan chirped, his tail whipping excitedly against your hip inside the wrap. He pointed a chubby finger at the swarm of flying fkios. “Fkios flying so fast! Like me!”

You smiled, “Yes, sweet boy,” you murmured, pressing a soft kiss to the top of his head. “They are going home, I suppose, just like us.”

He giggled when you tickled his ear with your nose. “Visit Papa?” he asked.

You clamped your mouth shut, pulling his body closer as if he wasn’t literally tied to you at the moment. “Ah, yes... Visiting Papa,” you murmured, but his attention was already back on the flying fkios, his dangling feet wiggling excitedly.

When your ikran glided down onto the landing ledges of the High Camp, the crisp smell of distant rain from high above yielded to the smell of heavy mountain air and some smoke from the resistance’s machinery. You dislodged your kuru from your ikran’s, trying not to look at the man standing at the edge of the platform.

He wasn’t wearing his warrior gear for once, only his chest knife sheath, but he still looked every bit the commander he had become since the sky people’s return. The role he allowed to step over his roles as a husband and a father, you thought cynically, but you immediately tried to quell it. What’s the use of thinking of it when it has already happened before your very eyes and it already ruined everything?

He was standing tall, almost like the pillar that he is to the clan, but the moment his eyes landed on you, his rigid posture faltered, but you tore your eyes off him when your son wriggled furiously in the wrap.

“Alright, alright, sweet boy,” you chuckled, dismounting your ikran and carefully unbuckling the woven wrap.

neteyamthinker

let me earn you

pairings aged-up neteyam x tayrangi!female warrior

notes reader is ikeyni’s daughter, mean neteyam (dw he will grovel for this <3) crybaby neteyam, angst, she fell first and he fell harder, smut (p in v), oral (f&m receiving)

synopsis neteyam has always been the only boy who stirred your heart. as a man, he is everything you’ve ever wanted... and now that circumstances have finally drawn you closer, it feels like the perfect chance to make him see you. but with the looming war, the firstborn son of toruk makto has no room for distractions, and he won’t hesitate to push aside anyone who threatens his focus.

word count 17.7k

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You leaned against one of the massive pillars of the war pavilion, idly braiding a strand of fiber for your new knife sheath. Usually, your senses would be filled with the smell of salt and moss that clung to the cliffs of your home in the Eastern Sea, but here, in the rainforest, it was mostly choked out by the heavy stench of fuel and burning forest, and around you, the war council was deep in debate.

Your mother stood tall with the other chieftains, gesturing sharply at a large map laid on a long table. Beside her stood your brother, the future Olo’eyktan of your clan, listening intently.

And then, there was the real view.

Neteyam stood just behind his father, Jake Sully. He was taller than most of the men in your clan, broad-shouldered, and muscled, taking after his father, even though he had the fierce beauty of his mother. He was listening to the strategy with that maddeningly intense, perfectly disciplined look he always wore. Always the dutiful son, the perfect soldier.

You bit your lip, a slow smirk spreading across your face. He was so incredibly handsome it was ridiculous, especially when he looks like he carried the weight of the entire world on his shoulders. You’ve always wondered what it would feel like to be on the receiving end of that intensity... To be the subject of his focus and determination.

You shivered at the thought of it, and your brother caught your eyes across the table. He noticed where you were staring, rolled his eyes, and mouthed, “Stop it.”

soaring-z

Mine Will Come - Neteyam Sully

pairings: aged up neteyam sully x age up fem omatikaya reader warnings: one-sided yearning-ish, angst, sad neteyam, sad reader, break up w.c: 5.9k summary: your in pain, and neteyam tries to make it right.

Part 1

Neteyam had begun yielding giving you more of himself than he had before. Anytime he caught your eyes across the village, a gentle smile would come to his lips, brightening his eyes. Or whenever stuck in a conversation, spotting you passing by he would give you a subtle wave. He didn’t sit with you at dinners, but he didn’t ignore you like before. Though his stares lingered, more persistent. You would miss them, but Nahìl never did Every time he catches Neteyam gaze on you his arm would tighten around your waist pulling you closer to him, reminding Neteyam who you belong to. Nahìl would meet Neteyam gaze, his head resting against yours, challenging.

Neteyam face remained calm and neutral whenever he caught Nahìl eye, giving a short nod before looking away giving him nothing. The growing tension between them remained unnoticed by you, as the joy of courtship and having your closest friend back blinded you. And Nahìl seeing your happiness coming back now that Neteyam was speaking to you again, kept his worries to himself. Deciding to continue his silent acts instead of talking them out.

It was afternoon, sun shined through the canopy, you made your way through the village making deliveries. Your mother had gathered too much fruit, so now you were sharing it. Nahìl walked behind you, carrying the baskets of ripe fruits his presence steady and protective. His eyes scanning the crowd in quiet search of Neteyam, who was nowhere to be found.

•18+ Adults Only

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percabething

“you better not be drinking and getting pregnant behind my back”

ma’am, I read fanfics on tumblr to fall asleep

almostholyfest

Maybe we get married one day, but who knows?

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.

a-motherfcking-fish

Avatar is crazy on another level when you think about it reversed like could you imagine the uncanny feeling of seeing a human that's just not quite fully human and knowing the body is basically completely empty when it's not being piloted by an alien

Maybe that's why they find Jake uncanny.

neteyamthinker

exes don’t fuck, yawntu.

pairings aged-up!neteyam x omatikaya!female reader

notes literally just heavy smut with a plot... p in v, oral (f and m receiving), kuru play, tsaheylu, angst with comfort

synopsis neteyam and you are exes... but neteyam refuses to be an ex.

word count 17.2k

————————

You contentedly sighed as you meticulously sorted through the day’s forage. Your fingers, used to years of handling rough fibers and sharp roots, moved with practiced ease, separating edible tubes from those meant for weaving while the smell of ferns, rich damp soil, and the faint, sweet perfume of blossoming epiphytes surrounded you.

You were smiling to yourself as you breathed it in, a familiar comfort… Until you were not. The pleasurable smell is now marred with something familiar, something more potent, the smell your brain conjures whenever you reach your climax every time you touch yourself— if that is even possible.

Then, a shadow fell over your work, tall and broad. Your shoulders tensed, a familiar prickle of annoyance rising before you even turned your head. You didn’t need to. The scent of him, that particular blend of wildness and something uniquely him, had announced his presence long before his physical form blocked the dappled light.

Neteyam. Your ex.

Or, rather, the man who refuses to be your ex. A sigh escaped your lips, a tiny puff of exasperation. It has been moons since you uttered the words ‘let’s stop this’ and not a single day had passed without his looming presence. To be fair, he did reply ‘I don’t want to’ to what you said and proceeded to act like you two never broke up.

“It’s late,” he rumbled, his voice a low thrum that vibrated through the air, the vibrations reaching your spine.

You rolled your eyes and gathered everything without the genteel and care you previously had. “It’s none of your business,” you said, standing up so you could walk away.

He reached out, his large hand gently taking the basket from your grasp. His fingers brushed yours, a lingering touch that felt both accidental and deliberate.

You pulled your hand back, a sharp tug. “Do not touch me!” you said in a hiss, your teeth gritted as your sharp eyes snapped at him.

A slow smile spread across his face, a possessive curve that always made your stomach clench, a mixture of annoyance and a traitorous warmth. “So cranky, my baby,” he said, voice filled with humor.

nyctophicbtch

Dangerously Envy - Neteyam

[ Neteyam x fem!reader ]

summary: After promising to spend a day with Neteyam, he finds his patience tested when other males from his clan interrupt your time together to flirt with you. Worst part is, he can't really do anything about it. Not when he has to make peace with everybody as the future Olo'eyktan, and definitely not when they think you're his "sister".

tags/warnings: jealousy, slight angry neteyam if you squint, kissing, making out, lil descriptions of sex, mentions of sexual activity, sexual implications, tension, neteyam being horny (be warned), neteyam yearning, reader isn't specified as na'vi so feel free to picture a human instead

word count: 1,960

yawntutsyìp (n.)- darling, little loved one

‧₊˚.ೃ ࿐

©nyctophicbtch 2025 — do not copy, repost, or translate

═════════════════════════

Neteyam had always considered himself very patient. Even at this moment, even as he stood below a tree while Eykan so frequently rubbed himself on you in excuse of showing off his hunting “skills”. The young man lightly brushed his fingers along your elbow as he let go of your arm, acting as if he hadn’t noticed his future Olo’eyktan wasn't standing right there watching the interaction unfold with pure discomfort. The boy was either blind or stupid.

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neteyamthinker

always, paskalin.

pairings aged-up neteyam x omatikaya!female warrior

a sequel to show me, warrior bcs i’m obsessed with them hehe

notes neteyam is very protective, reader is pregnant but is also very stubborn as per usual, a skirmish against the rda in awa’atlu, smut and suggestive themes, arguments (minor), some atwow and afaa scenes incorporated, reader gets wounded during the battle (she’ll be ok), birth scene.

synopsis you and neteyam visited lo’ak in awa’atlu, but unexpectedly, what was supposedly a moon long vacation had to be extended indefinitely. along with enjoying the way of life in the reef, you also became a witness to the sky people’s increasingly cruel attacks and hunting of the tulkun.

word count 24k

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You smiled to yourself as the salt-laced wind whipped strands of your braids across your visor and provided a hum against your ikran's wings. Below, the turquoise waters of Awa’atlu stretched, an endless tapestry of blues and greens, a stark contrast to the endless green of your forest home. You clung to Frakrr’s neck as your excitement thrum through your veins, a blend of anticipation and the usual rush you get every time you’re in the sky. Neteyam, astride his own ikran, flew beside you, guiding you toward the distant, shimmering village built upon the reef.

It had taken weeks, almost a full moon cycle, for Jake and Neytiri to finally convince and wear you and Neteyam down about going to Awa’atlu, for after all relations with the RDA have relatively been peaceful the past few months except for small encounters that Omatikaya warriors can very much handle. Lo’ak had been gone for nearly a year since he departed for the reef, now a silent sentinel among the Metkayina, bearing witness to the sky people’s escalating brutality against the tulkun.

The last message Jake received from Lo’ak is an information about how the RDA seemed to be expanding the reach of their chaos to the reef clans, killing people who are daring to fight against tulkun hunting. The poor tulkuns, docile despite their size, are being mercilessly killed simply for the gains the sky people would get from them, the same way they had killed many of your people and burned your forest to get what they wanted.

Your parents, brave warriors of the Omatikaya themselves, had fallen in the war against them when you were too young to even remember. You’ve visited memories of them through the Tree of Souls a thousand times before and you’ve introduced yourself many times over, too, because they only have a memory of you as a child. They will never keep any memory of the woman you have become even though they know, in their hearts, that you are the daughter they left behind. You’ve brought Neteyam to them as well and they only remember him as a child, too, so it was the surprise of their life to know that their little daughter is now grown and mated. Mated to Jake and Neytiri’s firstborn son, no less.

m9yaa

⤷ neteyam x fem!metkayina!innocent!sheltered!reader

- an: apologies for how inactive i’ve been lately, i’ve been busy with things outside of writing and will get back to answering and writing for the requests i’ve received soon!! i’ve gotten a handful of neteyam requests which were a big vague so i figured i’d write this, hopefully you guys enjoy!! :)

- cw: not proof read, lower caps intended, smut, aged-up!neteyam, sheltered/innocent reader, first time/loss of virginity, p in v, oral sex, tonowari is low-key the goat, ronal is really overprotective(or controlling), fingering, brief grinding, multiple orgasms, mutual masturbation, masturbation, some sexual innuendos, power dynamic (neteyam is experienced, reader isn’t), a bit angsty at a point (caught), reader is having a sexual awakening/discovery, secret/forbidden relationship, some dirty talk, praise, i forgot to add a tsaheylu scene smh, let me know if i missed out on anything!!

- wc: 17k

- summary: all your life you've been overprotected, sheltered by parents who claim it's a blessing. no boys, no scandal, no sexuality. nothing they deem unsuitable for the chief's daughter. you were content to accept it, until neteyam sully arrived and changed everything.

kiisc0ld

Springsunsets

tw : dark! Neteyam x fem navi reader, dub-con, angst, p in v smut, moral ambiguity, unreliable narrator, hate to love, questionable acts, contemporary fic(?)

wc : 25k of my imagination running wild

ᝰ.ᐟsynopsis: The Olo'eyktan's son only came back every few springs. From the moment you first saw him, you had harboured nothing but resentment towards him. One such spring he brings with him the news of his betrothal── the sight of his promised in his arms makes your hatred take a deeper dive

Your eyes blurred at the sight of the lifeless birds as they formed a trail of blood along the forest floor. They were such innocent creatures , un-deserving of such a cruel fate.

All they did was fill the quiet of the forest with their beautiful melodies and drive away the fears of the young ones just learning to hunt. Young ones like you, who trained her ears to listen to their songs and followed the flutters of their wings, guided by them when there was no one else to guide her.

You carefully dislodged the arrows from their little bodies, blood pooling from the gaping wound painting their bright feathers in a dark shade of brown.

beegomess

Is there a universe where we never met? || Neteyam Sully

Summary: For those who have known you forever, there was never any division. It was that simple. You grew up side by side, learned about the world at the same pace, as if one were the natural extension of the other. A kind of security in knowing that wherever one was, the other would be too. But when something breaks, it's not just the absence that weighs heavily. It's the strangeness of continuing to exist outside of what was always shared, a silent misalignment, as if destiny itself had been interrupted mid-way. Warnings: Cute, established relationship (you and Neteyam are older than in the movie), tsaheylu already accomplished, tragic love? For sure, but I swear it's worth it, descriptions of death and blood. You two are the love of each other's lives, that's it. | Neteyam Sully x Na'vi!Reader - Word count: 15.8k (Sorry, but I swear it's worth it).

A/N: Remembering that my first language is not English, so there may be some errors due to the translation. I hope you like it!!

To his siblings, Neteyam had always been the perfect son. The first to learn, the first to protect, the first to carry too much responsibility for his age. He had an obvious future in front of him. Leadership. Honor. Strength.

But before all of that, there was you.

Lo’ak and Kiri saw the beginning. Back when it was still too small to be called love.

When you were children, he only wanted to be close. He ran after you along the trails, teased you awkwardly, grew absurdly proud whenever you laughed at something he did. You played until late beneath the trees, shared fruit, competed to see who could reach the highest branch. It was light. It was pure. It was almost invisible.

In adolescence, it became different.

There was no touch yet. There was no confession. Only something hanging in the air.

He got too serious whenever you came near. You took one second longer to look away. You walked side by side after training, in a silence too comfortable to be casual. Kiri noticed when your eyes changed. When you started looking at her brother not as a childhood friend, but as a possibility. Even then, it was platonic. Contained. Almost painfully contained.

You were cautious. Neteyam carried too much responsibility to allow himself distractions. You pretended not to notice how fast your heart raced when he came close.

Until one night in the clearing.

The forest was alive under the stars, colors breathing in the darkness. He took you to the river where you used to play when you were little. The place where nothing ever seemed complicated.

He slipped the bracelet he had worn since the beginning of training off his own arm, the one you had noticed so many times without ever saying anything. With his other hand, he revealed another one exactly like it, made with the same care, the same braided threads, the same discreet design that marked strength and promise.

Without theatrics, only with his heart too exposed for his age, he placed the bracelet on you. His fingers lingered on your skin one second longer than necessary, as if confirming that it was real.

Then he pressed his forehead to yours and, with a steady voice despite the obvious nerves, said what he had been keeping for years.

It wasn’t a long speech, and it didn’t sound rehearsed. It was honest. Young. Transparent in the way only someone who loves for the first time can be.

That night, something finally found its place.

After that night in the clearing, you didn’t have to pretend you weren’t paying attention anymore. What had once been contained now breathed freely. Neteyam didn’t look away when you came close; he held your gaze. And you held it back. There was a new steadiness there, a clear choice.

Lo’ak remembers the first time he saw you two flying after you admitted what you felt.

The ikrans cut through the sky in wide circles over the forest, the wind parting your hair. Neteyam flew ahead, but not far—always aware of your position, adjusting his pace so you stayed side by side. At one point, he leaned, and his ikran followed, nearly brushing yours in midair. You laughed out loud, a loose laugh that echoed through the treetops, and Lo’ak, watching while flying behind you, rolled his eyes like he was irritated, but smiled anyway.

It was different now. There was open pride in the way Neteyam landed near you, in the way he offered a hand to help you down—even though he knew you didn’t need it. There was ease in the way you fixed one of his braids after the flight, as if it were part of the routine.

And as time went on, you started slipping away together.

After training, while the others went home, you lingered. Sometimes you went to the river where everything began. At night, the water reflected the forest lights, turning the surface into an inverted sky.

Once, Lo’ak went after his brother, too curious to ignore the long disappearances, and found you both sitting on the bank, feet in the water, talking as if the entire world had slowed down.

Another time, Kiri saw you diving into the river, laughing as the current pulled, competing to see who could stay under the longest. When you surfaced, breathless, your eyes met as if you shared a secret no one else could touch.

You were young and intense. A little reckless in how often you sought each other out, but it was healthy.

Kiri watched in silence, with that deep understanding that seemed to come from somewhere beyond her own age. Neytiri noticed how Neteyam grew lighter around you. Jake noticed how his son, even if still a little rigid, learned to laugh more.

With time, passion stopped being something simple and started carrying other traits.

You began sharing responsibilities naturally. When the younger ones needed guidance, it was the two of you who showed up. When Lo’ak got into trouble, it was Neteyam who spoke firmly. You worked as balance.

That perception only solidified one night, during some ceremony led by Mo’at. The forest seemed especially awake. The connection to Eywa vibrated beneath bare feet, as if the roots were breathing along with everyone there.

After the ritual, when the voices quieted and the natural lights began to pulse more softly, Mo’at called you both. She watched you for a time that felt too long.

She said the Great Mother had shown your paths.She said that wherever one was, the other would be found. That your spirits walked intertwined like roots of the same tree.

In that moment, everyone understood it as a promise of the future. Of a long life built together. Neytiri remembers the way Neteyam looked at you. Not with teenage excitement or vanity, but with a serene certainty. As if it only confirmed something he had already known since the night in the clearing.

You seemed to complete each other in a way that needed no explanation. But maybe it was only fully understandable to those who had grown up beside you, to those who had watched the phases change almost in the same rhythm: the first responsibilities, the first hunts, the first serious arguments with the elders.

When the Sky People’s pursuit began again and the decision to leave the forest was made, you didn’t need to think twice before going with them.

Far from the tall trees and the soft, leaf-covered ground, toward the sea—Awa’atlu, as the Metkayina called that new home surrounded by water on all sides. The salt in the air was constant, the horizon too open for anyone used to the shelter of the canopy.

Not everyone there received you kindly. Some looks were curious, but others were openly hard.

The words thrown at Kiri and Lo’ak—“aberration,” “demon blood”—were said with the careless cruelty of those who don’t measure the weight of what they say.

Jake didn’t relax for a single day after you arrived. And as always, the heavier responsibility fell on Neteyam. Looking after Lo’ak. Making sure he didn’t react to provocation, didn’t confront Aonung, didn’t turn any sharp comment into open conflict with your hosts. You could see how much it tightened him. He was a brother before he was an example, but he had to act like a leader all the time.

Even so, there was something beautiful in the way he never truly left Lo’ak alone. Even after the arguments, even when he had to reprimand him, there was a stubborn loyalty there.

When the two of them got into a physical fight with Tsireya’s brothers, you heard the story first from Kiri, who told it with a mix of indignation and amusement, describing sand flying, clumsy shoves.

You laughed—it was impossible not to laugh at the way she told it—but the laugh came with a tightness in your stomach as you imagined Jake’s reaction. Because if anything was more constant than Lo’ak’s impulsiveness, it was the weight of expectations on Neteyam.

And with that thought still echoing, it felt like night finally settled in.

The sky had that deep-blue tone that comes before full darkness, and the ilu saddles swayed slowly with the calm tide. You found him sitting on the edge of the deck.

You didn’t arrive joking. You sat beside him, keeping your eyes on the horizon line.

“So?” you asked, with a calm that sounded more serious than it really was. “How did your father react?”

Neteyam let the air out through his nose, almost a contained laugh.

“Lo’ak is going to have to apologize to Tsireya’s brothers.”

You turned your face slightly. “Just him?”

“This time… yes.” The corner of his mouth lifted a little. “Dad saw it was Lo’ak’s impulsiveness. That he started it.”

There was a brief silence. Water lapped softly against the wooden structures. You braced your hands behind you and tilted your face toward the same point he was watching.

“Well…” you began, thoughtful. “I saw how Aonung reacted.”

Neteyam turned to you with that light smile and a confused expression, trying to understand where your comment was going.

You finally looked at him too, your smile forming slowly.

“I know it’s wrong to think like this,” you murmured, leaning in a little as if you were about to share something forbidden, “but he deserved it.”

You said it like a precious secret, almost whispered. His eyes brightened with contained amusement.

“You really think so?”

“I do.” You shrugged, pretending neutrality. “Don’t tell your father I said that.”

He laughed low, the kind of laugh that starts in the chest and becomes something lighter.

“Never. He already thinks I encourage Lo’ak too much.”

“And you do,” you replied softly.

“I just… don’t leave him alone.”

The answer was sincere, without irony. And that was what made you soften even more.

You leaned your shoulder against his.

“I know.” A small pause. “And… I’m a little proud of you.”

Neteyam turned his face slowly, as if he needed to confirm he had heard right.

“Proud?”

“A little,” you repeated, emphasizing that it was a minimal amount.

He straightened subtly, his chin lifting just a bit more than necessary.

“Makes sense,” he said, with a fake modesty that convinced no one.

You let out a short laugh.

“Don’t get used to it. This is an exception.” Your eyes shone as you looked at him. “I know you would never start a fight without a reason. And if it was to protect Kiri…”

You didn’t finish the sentence. You didn’t have to.

He held your gaze for a moment longer than usual, something silent passing between you—recognition, maybe. Or the kind of understanding that doesn’t need to be said.

Then his gaze dropped, taking you in with more attention. Not invasively, but curiously. He frowned slightly.

“Your clothes… are different.”

You looked at yourself as if you had forgotten. The fabrics were lighter, braided differently, adorned with small shells and bluish beads.

“I spent the afternoon with Tsireya,” you explained, your smile growing. “She taught me how the women here make their own clothes and accessories. Since we’re staying longer, I need to learn to dress like them.”

You tilted your face, waiting for his reaction.

“Did you like it?”

For a second, he only looked. As if he had forgotten he needed to answer.

“I…” he started, failing to sound casual. “I liked it.”

Just like that. No irony, no teasing. Only truth.

Your smile softened and you tipped your head, as if you expected more of his opinion. He blinked, realizing you were waiting.

“You look beautiful…” he corrected, hurried. “Very beautiful.”

The breeze lifted a few braids of your hair.

“Good that you liked it,” you murmured.

You laughed softly, moving close just enough for your head to rest on his shoulder, an attempt to calm your mind before going back to all the chaos in the house.

In the days that followed, that memory mixed with the growing worry you felt. And then, on one of those still-dark early mornings, you woke again while the house slept.

It wasn’t a jolt, but a slow realization that something inside you couldn’t find room. The air felt heavier than it should have, as if the woven walls had drawn closer during the night.

The sound of the sea, which had so often rocked you to sleep since you arrived, now sounded too wide, almost distant, as if reminding you there was a bigger world beyond that temporary shelter.

You stayed lying there for a few moments, looking at the curved ceiling above, following the calm breathing of the others spread throughout the house. The moon was still high, insistent, and the sky gave no sign that dawn was near. It was one of those hours when everything feels suspended, as if time itself had decided to wait.

You got up carefully, easing away from Neteyam little by little so you wouldn’t wake him, and crossed the space in silence. When you pushed aside the woven curtain, the cold wood of the deck met your bare feet, and the night wind wrapped your skin with the salty, damp smell of the open sea.

You walked to the deck where they kept the ilu saddles, farther from the house, quieter. The ropes creaked softly with the movement of the tide, and the dark water reflected the moon in unstable fragments. The shadows cast by the woven roof moved slowly over the wood, as if the place itself breathed.

You went to the edge and crossed your arms over your body, not because of the cold, but to hold back something you didn’t know how to name. At night, the sea seemed bigger, more honest.

As you watched the horizon, you didn’t realize you had been followed.

Neteyam always noticed when something in you shifted, and that night was no different. He stopped a few steps behind, watching you for a moment, as if deciding whether he should interrupt or simply stay there.

“Are you okay?” his voice came low, but attentive. “Why did you leave?”

You didn’t turn right away. Your eyes stayed on the dark horizon.

“I couldn’t sleep. I just needed air.”

He came closer slowly, each step measured. He stopped at your side, close enough that his body heat contrasted with the cold wind.

“The air here is the same,” he said, with a trace of lightness that gave away the attempt to ease whatever was weighing on you. “It just has more salt.”

You laughed softly, and the sound seemed small against the immensity of the sea. He noticed, and the corner of his mouth curved discreetly, satisfied to have pulled that out of you.

When you turned, your loose hair swayed down your back in waves. You always undid your braids before sleeping, an old forest habit you refused to abandon. He had already told you he liked it better that way, but never explained why.

His eyes traced your face one second longer than they should have.

You noticed and smiled.

“Why are you looking at me like that?”

He tilted his head slightly, the gesture carrying a false innocence that convinced no one.

“Like what?”

You didn’t answer, because it was unnecessary. The silence between you said more than any explanation, and his smile deepened slowly, sure, as if he had just confirmed something he already suspected.

“I’m just looking at you.”

The space between you closed almost without you noticing. It was a natural shift, as if your bodies remembered before you made the decision. You took the first step, maybe because that night you needed something solid, something that wasn’t vast and uncertain like the sea in front of you.

The kiss started soft, almost restrained, as if there were still an intention to keep it simple. His mouth took a moment to respond, as if measuring the limit, but his hands rose to your waist and held there, pulling you slowly closer with a familiarity built over years.

You fit together easily. There was no awkwardness, only the awareness that maybe it wasn’t the best place or the best moment. Even so, the kiss deepened slowly, carrying memories of everything you’d already lived together—the forest, the runs between the trees, the muffled laughter so you wouldn’t be discovered.

But this wasn’t the forest.

The ground was too firm, the space too open, and the sea seemed to watch in silence.

Even so, his hand slid along your back with more intent, as if he wanted to keep that feeling. Your breathing changed first, heavier, closer.

He tilted his face, deepening the kiss, and his hand rose to your face, guiding without forcing. Your body pressed to his, and he responded by leading you gently a few steps back until the wooden structure was close behind you.

There was something in the way he moved—attentive and respectful—that never excluded intensity. He always noticed your reactions, your small movements, the choices you made just to see whether he noticed.

And he always noticed.

The kiss slowed without losing intensity, until you separated only enough to breathe. His forehead rested against yours, and for a few seconds you stayed like that, eyes closed, air mingling, mouths still too close for it to be called distance.

His hand stayed firm on your waist, while yours slid to the back of his neck, feeling his still-uneven breathing.

“I miss you…” you murmured then, your lips brushing his as you spoke.

He pulled back just enough to look at you. His eyes—sometimes greenish, sometimes yellow—caught the moonlight and something deeper.

“You do?” There was teasing, but also a silent acknowledgment of everything you were facing there.

You pushed at his chest lightly, even as you were already pulling him back.

“You’re so full of yourself.”

He laughed low, and the sound vibrated between you before he leaned in to kiss you again. But at the last second you turned your face, laughing, letting his lips catch the corner of your mouth.

When he kissed you again, there was no rush. It was deeper, but slower too, as if every movement had to be fully felt.

You almost forgot where you were.

Almost.

The sound of quick footsteps on the wood cut through the moment like a blade through water. You pulled apart abruptly, breath still uneven. Lo’ak appeared around the curve of the deck and froze when he saw you.

His gaze moved over both of you quickly, but attentively. He was breathing hard too, though probably from the walk or from whatever restlessness had brought him there.

“Lo’ak? What are you doing here?” Neteyam asked, his expression already more closed.

Lo’ak hesitated. Jake had forbidden him from going after the tulkun he’d mentioned. The tension of that decision was still fresh, almost raw.

“I was looking for you,” he answered, but the sentence came out too quickly, as if it had been rehearsed on the way. He cleared his throat and added, trying to sound unconcerned, “I didn’t know where you’d gone.”

His eyes didn’t stay on you. They slipped toward the open sea for a second too long, as if something out there was calling him.

You realized it before he said anything.

“You were going to go out?”

Lo’ak went still for a moment. His jaw tightened. He looked away again, rubbing the back of his neck the way he did when cornered.

“No. I…” he started, but the denial lost strength halfway through. His eyes returned to the two of you, taking in how little space there was between your bodies, the hour, the breathing that still hadn’t fully settled. “I mean… I could ask you two the same thing.”

He crossed his arms, trying to regain ground. The tone was that provocation-with-a-suggestive-smile he always used when he was trying to defend himself.

“Were you… busy?”

Neteyam only rolled his eyes in silence, and you couldn’t hold back a smile, feeling the heat of the joke rise in your chest.

“Nete was just helping me with something,” you said, starting to walk along the deck while they followed you, the sound of your feet mixing with the distant crash of waves.

“Sure… helping with something,” Lo’ak muttered, lifting an eyebrow with that disbelieving smile. “Like the kind of things you used to do in the forest.”

“Skxawng!” you replied, laughing as you gave his shoulder a light shove. “If you tease me again, I’m telling Ao’nung about your crush on Tsireya.”

Neteyam let out a low laugh, looking at you with that glint in his eyes—a mix of amusement and pride. There was something in the way you handled his family that always made him admire you.

Lo’ak took a step back, feigning innocence, but the smile at the corners of his mouth couldn’t hide that he knew he’d been caught in his own trick—and that only added to the night’s lightness, with the salty sea breeze around you and the distant sound of waves laying down the perfect soundtrack for that moment.

It was easy to believe the days that followed would be the same.

But they weren’t.

First came the rumors. Then the strange movements of the tulkun. Then the elders’ worried silence. And, finally, the confirmation: the humans were using the tulkun as bait to draw Jake Sully out.

The lightness evaporated as if it had never existed.

The village seemed to hold its breath that night. After the meeting, after the confirmation that the humans were using the tulkun as bait to lure Jake Sully, no one raised their voice. Even the ocean sounded different — less alive, denser, as if it too understood that something was being prepared.

Kiri and Tuk were already asleep near each other, exhaustion winning out over anxiety. Outside, a few shadows still moved; the warriors discussed strategies in low voices. But inside there was only the sound of the waves and the steady rhythm of Neteyam's heart beneath her ear.

You were lying on top of him, your fingers distractedly tracing patterns on his warm skin, your braids spread like a dark curtain over his firm torso. His hand rested on your back, protective out of habit.

For a few minutes, neither of you spoke. He was the one who broke the silence.

"Lo’ak is going after Payakan."

There was no judgment in his voice. Only certainty.

You felt his body tense slightly as he said it. He knew his brother better than anyone.

"I know," you replied, because you knew it too.

The silence returned, but now heavy with implication.

Neteyam ran his hand through your braids, absentmindedly, the way he did when he was thinking. You slowly lifted your face to look at him.

"And you're going after him."

He held your gaze. He didn't deny it.

"If he goes alone…"

The answer was logical. It always was.

But logic wasn't what tightened your chest.

You propped yourself up on one elbow to hover above him, studying the face you knew so well. The low light highlighted the firm lines of his cheekbones, the concentrated set of his mouth. He was already preparing himself, even while lying down.

"I have a bad feeling about this," you said.

He touched your arm, trying to soften the moment.

"Everyone's scared after today."

You slowly shook your head.

"It's not fear."

You searched for the words, frustrated you couldn't explain what you felt.

"It's like… like something has already been decided. Like we're just waiting for it to happen."

He went quiet.

For an instant, the responsible son, the one who always had a plan, looked too young for the weight he carried.

"You always feel things before they happen," he said, almost in confidence.

"And you almost always ignore it," you returned, without harshness.

A soft laugh escaped him, too brief to ease the tension. You stared at him, steady, as if the simple act of looking could keep him there.

"If he goes after Payakan… and if it gets out of control…"

He already knew. You didn't need to finish.

"Don't play the hero," you asked.

He raised an eyebrow, trying to make a joke to keep things light, even though there was no room for it in your mind.

"I never play the hero."

"Neteyam."

His name in your voice made the lightness vanish.

You lowered your gaze to the bracelet on his arm — identical to yours — and ran your fingers over the tight weave. You remembered the night he made yours, his focused hands, the way he pretended to be calm while the world was already crumbling around them.

"Promise me you won't do anything stupid," you continued, more quietly. "Nothing alone. Nothing just because you think it's your responsibility to fix everything."

He swallowed hard. There it was — the conflict he never showed in front of others.

"I should make you promise the same thing," he said softly, trying to shift the focus onto you.

"Don't try to change the subject, Nete," you said, serious again.

He was silent for a second longer than usual, as if facing the situation head-on.

"I can't promise I won't help my brother," he said carefully.

You closed your eyes for a moment, absorbing the answer you already expected.

"I know."

Neteyam raised his hand to your face, cupping your jaw with a gentleness that contrasted with the rest of his firmness.

"But I can promise I won't go looking for danger."

You kept your eyes on his.

"And if danger comes for you?"

The question hung between you, bare.

He took a deep breath.

"Then I'll come back."

You felt the answer pierce your chest.

"That's not a promise," you whispered.

He brought his forehead to yours, his nose almost touching yours.

"I always come back to you."

The conviction in his voice wasn't bravado. It was belief.

He truly believed it.

You slid your hand back onto his chest, feeling his heart beat steadily beneath your palm.

"I don't want you to come back hurt," you confessed.

"I don't plan on coming back hurt."

You let out a trembling breath, half laugh, half despair.

"That's exactly the kind of thing someone says right before they do something dangerous."

He smiled, more visible this time, and pulled you back down to lie on top of him.

"Trust me."

You closed your eyes against his chest. You did trust him.

But the feeling didn't go away.

It lingered, quiet, like the ocean before a storm. And while his heart kept beating steadily beneath your ear, you tried to memorize the rhythm — as if, somehow, you could keep it for yourself.

The morning began differently.

A fine, persistent rain fell, dulling the usual sparkle of the water and leaving the air colder than it should have been for that season. The warmth that usually wrapped around the village didn't appear. The sky remained closed, too heavy.

Neteyam noticed something was wrong before you did. He tried to hide it. He made light comments as you walked. Nudged you with his shoulder. Tried to coax at least one real smile from you.

But you only laughed halfway. There was a restlessness that had no name.

You sat beside Neytiri under the shelter of the main structure, helping her prepare arrows. The scent of freshly carved wood mixed with the rain. Neytiri's hands were firm, precise. Yours followed.

Your relationship with her had always been natural. She never needed to ask what was between you and her son to welcome you. Even before any touch was exchanged, you were already part of the family.

Then the communicator shattered the steady sound of the rain.

Lo’ak's voice came through, uneven, carried by the wind and urgency. They were in danger, and the world seemed to tilt slightly.

Neytiri lifted her gaze to you instantly.

You were already gathering the arrows, even the ones that hadn't finished drying. The bow found its way into your hands as if it had always been there. Neytiri stepped closer.

"Be careful."

You only nodded.

The rain was letting up when you reached the shore. The sky was beginning to lighten, but uncertainly, as if it hadn't yet decided whether to allow the sun. The sea reflected that indecision, darker than usual.

You called for your ikran, the same way you had in the forest. The call echoed over the open water. You mastered the skies better than the depths; the ilus still didn't respond to you with the same ease. But in the air, you were quick, useful.

When the ikran landed, you were already running. The moment you connected with it, the tightness in your chest sharpened.

The chase dissolved into a blur — you dove and climbed, dodged gunfire, tried to clear a path from the sky as helicopters closed in, until it was just about survival and watching, helpless, as Lo’ak, Tuk, and Tsireya were captured. Time seemed to bend until the moment Jake and the Metkayina gathered before the ship; he even considered surrender, willing to trade his own freedom for his children, but in the last second something shifted — and the decision set the sea ablaze, turning tension into open battle.

The ship was still standing. Though it looked like a wounded animal trying to stay upright out of pride.

From high in the air, you saw Lo’ak, Tuk, and Tsireya tied to the railing of the main deck.

And almost as a natural consequence, your eyes swept across the sea until you saw Neteyam on an ilu, just meters from the hull. He lifted his gaze once, assessing the height, the distance, the time he had before soldiers reappeared.

An almost imperceptible smile touched your face, despite the tension in your chest.

Of course he was going.

The ilu surged forward in a straight line. At the exact moment, Neteyam pushed off, using the creature's back as leverage and launching himself toward the deck above.

The jump was clean. Precise.

You were already tilting your ikran in the same direction, calculating height and distance in a single glance. When you let go, the descent was fast, minimally controlled — the wind tossing your braids before your feet touched the deck.

Neteyam didn't need to look twice at you, only registered that you were there. You both needed to be quick.

Tsireya was closest to him, her wrists bound to the railing. He knelt, the knife already firm in his hand, and cut the tie with one direct motion.

You moved close enough for her to hear your voice over the wind and the groaning of the hull.

"You have to go. Now."

Tsireya nodded without arguing. As soon as her wrists were free, she ran to the edge and dove into the sea, disappearing into the water in a clean plunge.

You were already in front of Tuk. Even with her wrists tied, she smiled when she saw you and her brother there.

"You came!"

"Of course I came," you replied as you cut the binding that held her.

As soon as she was free, Tuk clung to you tightly. You lifted her into your arms, adjusting her weight against your body so you wouldn't slip on the wet metal.

On the other side, Neteyam was already freeing Lo’ak. The blade sliced through the binding quickly.

"Who's the great warrior now, huh? Say it."

You were late, and time had run out. The deck vibrated harder. The tilt was becoming noticeable, and you were moving toward your ikran while Neteyam approached the edge to jump back into the sea.

"Come on, bro," he said urgently to Lo’ak.

Lo’ak rolled his eyes, even while still bound.

"Did you rehearse that line on the way here?"

Neteyam let out a short laugh as the second binding snapped. Lo’ak stood almost instantly, steady again.

Without prolonging the moment, Neteyam put away his knife and assessed the deck's edge. The tilt was becoming more pronounced, subtle but perceptible. The water struck the hull with more force, and the time to get out was shrinking.

You moved toward your ikran, holding Tuk carefully, mindful of your balance with each step. Neteyam was already positioning himself near the edge, ready to jump back into the sea.

He looked at his brother.

"Come on, bro."

The urgency needed no explanation.

When Neteyam called for Lo’ak, you were already moving toward your ikran with Tuk in your arms. The deck vibrated beneath your feet, and the tilt was now more evident, as if the ship were slowly giving up on staying upright.

But Lo’ak didn't come.

You and Neteyam looked back almost at the same time.

Lo’ak had crouched down. His hand closed around a weapon fallen on the wet floor. He lifted it, still breathing fast, his gaze fixed on the dark entrance of the ship.

You felt the chill before the words.

"Spider is still inside."

It wasn't shouted. It was said with urgency — and conviction. The sea struck the hull with more force. The sound reverberated through your feet.

"No," you replied immediately.

Your voice came out firm, but the arm holding Tuk tightened a little more. Lo’ak looked at you as if he didn't understand how this could even be questioned.

"He's with his own kind," you argued, now looking at Neteyam. "He's not in danger with the humans."

You wanted him to hear the logic. You wanted him to hold onto it.

Neteyam's gaze met yours. It was brief. But it was too deep.

There was calculation there, yes. But there was also something you had always known: that need of his to leave no one behind. That thing that made him turn back when everyone else would already be running. An unreasonable heroism, in your opinion.

"The ship is sinking!" Lo’ak insisted, pointing toward the interior, which was already starting to take on water.

You didn't look away from Neteyam.

"He can take care of himself."

The words came out dry, almost harsh, as if you didn't care about the human boy who grew up with you — you always got along with Spider, truly. But that wasn't the issue now.

You swallowed hard before speaking, more quietly:

"Nete, please."

Lo’ak was already motioning with his head, anxious, almost begging for his brother to make a decision.

And there, between the sound of the rising water and the groan of yielding metal, Neteyam was caught for a second between two worlds. You saw when he gave in.

Not to Lo’ak, but to who he was. A low groan escaped his throat, almost annoyed with himself, as if he were forcing himself to do something that part of him wanted to avoid.

He walked toward you.

He approached quickly, but when he stopped in front of you, the world seemed to slow for an instant. The ship continued to vibrate beneath your feet, the water rising, Lo’ak calling in the background — but none of it penetrated that small space between the two of you.

Neteyam tilted his head and pressed his forehead to yours, as he always did before throwing himself into something dangerous.

You didn't pull away.

He felt your uneven breathing even before he opened his eyes. When he did, it was your face he found, just inches from his.

There was a deep crease between your brows, marked by a tension you weren't even trying to hide. Your eyes were fixed on him, too wide, shining with a contained fear.

And that was exactly what made it harder to walk away. So he pulled back to speak to you, but didn't let go of your face.

"Get Tuk out of here," he said, low.

You sighed, a sound that carried frustration, fear, and an inexplicable sense of anticipated loss.

"Quick, bro! This thing is sinking!" Lo’ak urged.

Neteyam still hadn't moved away.

For a second that felt longer than it should have, he just looked at you. There was something there that you two never needed to say out loud. He ran his hand over Tuk's head when he finally turned, and then he ran.

You watched him cross the deck and disappear into the dark entrance of the ship, alongside Lo’ak. The shadow swallowed him too quickly.

"Hold on tight," you murmured to Tuk as you turned toward your ikran behind you.

You mounted the ikran with Tuk in your arms, connecting almost automatically. Your heart beat too loudly to keep pace with the world.

The air cut your face like icy blades as the ikran gained altitude, its wings beating against the smoke-filled sky. You looked one last time at the ship's opening and felt your stomach clench as if a wild animal were nesting there, hungry and frantic.

You circled over the sea once, twice, three times. The water below was a mosaic of dark patches and orange reflections from the fire consuming the ship. Your heart beat a staccato against your ribs. Tuk gripped your waist so tightly you barely felt the contact, but you couldn't afford to comfort her now — your gaze needed to sweep every wave and shadow.

On the third turn, you saw: Kiri emerged on an ilu beside Ao’nung, their heads like small living islands. The decision came even before the thought was complete, an instinct older than words.

You dove through the air.

The sea rushed up to meet you like a clenched fist, and when the ikran leveled off just above the waves, you felt Tuk slip from your arms into Kiri's. You didn't need to explain where you were going. Kiri's look, brief and heavy with understanding, was enough. You were already pulling the reins upward.

The ship was still there, slowly sinking.

An explosion shook its structure, vomiting embers and smoke. The sound reached you like a punch to the chest, stealing all the air you had. The fear, until then a taut thread, snapped. Despair took its place, coursing through your veins like lava.

You flew over, circled, searched. Your eyes burned, but not just from the smoke. The ship below was a labyrinth of iron, the sea around it a dark canvas dotted with debris. Nothing. No sign. No head emerging. No arm waving. Nothing.

Time began to stretch. Each passing second was a silent confirmation of what you refused to name. Gunfire echoed, dry reports that the wind scrambled, coming from everywhere and nowhere at once.

And if they had already gotten out? What if you were there, circling, while he was already safe somewhere? The possibility was a thread of light in the darkness — fragile, but enough to hold onto. You headed for the nearby reefs. If they had fled, they would have gone there. To the rocks, to the shadows, to anywhere that could hide them.

You pulled the reins, the ikran tilting its wings in a curve that cut through the wind.

And then you saw.

Tsireya watched you descend from the sky as if plummeting — not a landing, but a fall. The ikran barely had time to stabilize before you threw yourself from the saddle, scrambling up the wet rock.

Neteyam had just been placed there.

Lo'ak trembled from head to toe, his hands stained with his brother's blood, his fingers still dirty as if he had tried to hold onto his life and it had slipped through them. Spider supported Neteyam's head with extreme care, his hands too steady for someone his age, his face pale.

Jake remained kneeling beside him, pressing on the wound with force, but the blood kept escaping, spreading across the stone in a dark red that violently contrasted with the grey of the reef.

You fell to your knees beside him, pushing Spider aside with an urgent but not aggressive gesture — just inevitable. Your hands slid under Neteyam's head and brought him into your lap. His shoulder resting against you. His whole weight trusted to you.

The blood found your legs immediately. It ran down your thighs in red lines that gleamed in the sun before dripping onto the stone and mingling with the sea water.

Warm and thick.

"No… no…" you murmured, your voice broken, almost childlike in its attempt to deny what your eyes already knew. "Please, no…"

Tsireya saw the exact moment his eyes focused on your face.

It was brief.

But it was complete.

Your body went still for a second — as if every muscle had stopped responding. The blood continued to flow, marking the stone with an uneven trail the tide couldn't erase.

Tsireya noticed how your eyes were overtaken by raw, exposed fear, without any attempt at strength.

Your crying wasn't contained. Tears fell uncontrollably, one after another, sliding down your face and dripping onto his skin, mixing with the blood that still stained your hands. Your body trembled, not from cold, but from something greater, something that seemed to be tearing you apart from the inside.

"I'm here…" your voice faltered, ripping mid-sentence. "I'm here, can you hear me? Stay with me…"

Tsireya watched your shoulders shake as you tried to hold his head steady in your lap, as if stability could mean permanence.

Then Neytiri arrived.

She didn't run to her son — she collapsed beside him, as if her body itself had given way under the weight of what she already knew. Her hands sought Neteyam before they even found support on the rock, sliding over his face, his hair, as if she needed to confirm he was still there.

Neteyam drew a ragged breath. It was a small sound, too fragile for the size of the silence that settled around them.

"Dad…" he whispered.

The word was enough to stop everything.

Jake leaned in immediately, his hand closing around his son's. Lo'ak held his breath. Even the sea seemed to pause for one impossible second.

Neteyam's eyes found his father with effort.

"I want to go home."

There was no strength in the words. No fear. Just a tiredness that hurt more than any scream.

And then his breath didn't return, his eyes lost their life, and his expression relaxed.

Neytiri's wail tore through the air — but Tsireya focused on you at that moment.

Still holding Neteyam. Still waiting.

For a second that seemed too cruel to exist, you didn't react. Your eyes were fixed on his face, as if searching for the next movement of his chest, the next breath, any tiny sign that this was just a pause.

But he didn't breathe. And that's when the despair returned — not as fear, but as rupture.

Tsireya saw your face transform. The crease between your brows deepened, your mouth trembled, and something inside you seemed to shatter audibly, even without sound. Your body slumped over him, as if you'd taken a direct hit to the chest, as if an invisible blade had pierced you in the same spot where he bled.

You pulled him closer.

"Neteyam…" his name came out broken, almost unrecognizable between sobs.

Your shoulders now trembled without any attempt at control. The crying was no longer silent; it became open, raw despair, the kind of pain that doesn't care who's watching.

"My love…" you whispered, vulnerable in a way you had never shown before. "No… come back to me… please… come back…"

You bent further, almost enveloping his entire body, as if the world had become too large and too hostile to leave him exposed.

Tsireya felt tears streaming down her own face without realizing when they started. Because there was something devastating in the way you called to him. Like someone who had lost half of their own air.

And even when the silence was final, you held him against yourself with desperation, your hands pressing him as if there were still enough warmth to hold onto. His blood marked your legs, darkening under the wind and salt water, a physical testament to what your arms already knew.

Beside you, Neytiri was also breaking.

Her lament was not lesser. It was not distant. It was deep, ancestral, a sound that seemed to pierce time and echo beyond that rock. She held her son's face, calling to him, her voice undone in pain.

Tsireya saw the two of you — mother and you — bent over the same body, united by the same loss, but struck in different and equally devastating ways.

And between you, Neteyam remained still, while the sea continued to beat against the rock, indifferent to what, for everyone there, was the end of everything as it once was.

You didn't hear when Jake started talking about Kiri and Tuk still trapped on the sinking ship. You didn't hear Spider respond, or the urgency in Lo'ak's voice trying to argue. Their words existed, but they didn't reach you. It was as if a veil had been placed between your ears and the world, as if all sound had been muffled by something stronger and more final.

You were there, but you weren't there anymore.

Your eyes did not lift from Neteyam's face. They remained fixed, attentive, as if still waiting for a delayed sign, a breath that had hidden itself, a minimal movement that would justify continuing to wait. The world around seemed too distant to demand any reaction from you.

The blood no longer flowed as before, but it continued to mark you. It dried slowly on your legs, adhering to your skin like a memory that couldn't be washed away. Still, you didn't seem to feel the cold wind or the water splashing on the rock. Your entire body was concentrated only on the weight you supported.

At some point, without you noticing, the voices drifted away. Hasty footsteps on the rock. A dive into the water. The sound of the sea reclaiming the space.

When silence finally settled, only three remained. You. Tsireya. Lo'ak.

From Lo'ak's perspective, the world felt wrong. Too silent.

He stood still for a few seconds, unable to approach, unable to leave. His brother's body was in your arms, and you held him with a tenderness that hurt to see, as if he could still feel each gesture.

You slowly adjusted Neteyam's position, propping his head better against your arm, aligning his body as if he were just sleeping uncomfortably. Your movements were careful, almost domestic, too intimate for that scene of destruction.

Lo'ak felt something tighten in his chest. Your expression was broken, your features hardened by pain, but there was something deeply tender in that moment.

As if you were still taking care. As if he still needed it.

You pulled him closer after that, wrapping your arms around him, holding him against your body as if he might feel cold. As if night were about to fall and you were the only barrier between him and the world.

Lo'ak began to feel guilt creeping in, slow and suffocating. Each second of that image seemed to accuse him without words. He realized your eyes never turned to him. Not for a single instant.

Your world was restricted to the body you supported.

In an almost instinctive movement, you reached out and pulled your bow closer, settling it at your side, within reach of your fingers, as if you could still protect him.

Lo'ak swallowed hard, but the gesture didn't ease anything. The air seemed too heavy to enter his lungs, as if each breath demanded more than he had to give.

He couldn't stay there. He approached Tsireya, his voice almost failing.

"Stay with her."

It was a simple request, loaded with everything he couldn't say. Tsireya nodded.

Lo'ak cast one last look at you, but again couldn't meet your eyes. Then he turned and dove into the sea. The water enveloped him immediately, cold, salty, mixing with the tears that already flowed without him noticing. As he swam, memories surfaced in flashes.

And the last phrase echoed endlessly in his mind, because, in the end, he also wanted to go home.

After Lo'ak left, Tsireya remained by your side. She didn't try to move you from there, nor did she say anything beyond what was necessary; she just stayed. And you stayed too.

At no point did you consider leaving. The open crying had exhausted itself. What remained was a thick, almost palpable silence, while your eyes remained fixed on a point that didn't exist. Sometimes, a tear would fall, slow, as if even your body was too tired to continue.

The battle echoed in the distance, but you no longer reacted to the sounds. You waited. You waited until the gunfire ceased, until the sea could breathe again without startlement, until dawn fell over everything and the world became an absolute void.

It was in that silence that Jake arrived.

When Neteyam's body was lifted, the dried blood on his skin became evident. It had run down his arms, his legs, now hardened against his skin. The uneven rocks had left small cuts on the backs of your legs, marks you hadn't even felt. Nothing hurt more than what already hurt.

Everything happened without words.

You followed Jake mounted on your ikran, landing on the beach behind him. There was a crowd there — Metkayina and Omatikaya gathered — but the silence was deep, reverent. When Jake took his son in his arms again, the weight of that image pierced everyone.

Spider saw you before he even realized he was looking. He saw the dried blood marking your arms, running down your legs, hardened against your skin. But it was your gaze that truly struck him — empty, distant, as if part of you had remained in that sea.

You passed by him without seeing him.

Tsireya hung back when Jake continued on with the body, and you followed him to the tsahìk's marui — where Ronal waited. It was there they would prepare him for the return to Eywa.

And only then, for the first time since the rock, reality began to become final.

The following hours were silent.

When they called you for the ceremony, you were already clean. The blood had been washed away, the cuts treated. You wore more formal clothes of the Sea People, light fabrics that moved with the dawn wind. Your hair was tied up simply.

There was something different about you, not just in appearance, but in your posture — upright, contained, as if you were holding your own weight through sheer discipline. Some noticed the bracelets: yours, and his. One on each arm. No one commented, but everyone understood.

When the body was brought forward, wrapped with care, the sea seemed quieter than ever. The entire village was gathered, forming a respectful circle. The chant began low, deep, vibrating in the chest more than in the ears.

Jake held his son. Neytiri stood beside him, even though the world inside her was in ruins.

You walked until you positioned yourself beside Neytiri — not in front, not taking space that wasn't yours. Just present.

When they entered the water, the cold rose up your legs, but you did not retreat.

Lo'ak was the first to approach the body. His fingers touched his brother's forehead in a quick, almost childlike gesture, as if he wanted to memorize the contour one last time.

You waited.

Then, as the body began to descend, your hand moved too — not to interrupt, not to hold onto him for yourself — but to gently adjust a loose strand near his face, a gesture so everyday that it hurt more than any dramatic farewell could.

As if you were just taking care.

As you always had.

When Jake and Neytiri began to guide him into the depths, you dove with them. You placed your hand beneath the cloth that wrapped the body, helping to support the weight for a few seconds, until a certain point, until you realized, silently and inevitably, that that last stretch belonged to his parents. Your fingers opened slowly, allowing the water to take what could no longer be held.

You stayed there for a moment longer, watching the cloth ripple as he disappeared into the deep sea, until the need for air brought you back to the surface.

The following days were not marked by outbursts or screams, but by a constant absence that seeped into every detail of the routine. No one spoke about what had happened. Not directly. Conversations were limited to the necessary, to the day's tasks, to short instructions that kept the village functioning as if life could simply continue.

You also restricted yourself to the essential. You answered when asked, did what needed to be done, helped where you were useful. But there was something automatic in your movements, as if your body knew the way while your mind remained elsewhere.

The mornings were the worst. Waking up without feeling his presence beside you made it seem like you hadn't even slept. Rest didn't come — only a temporary interruption of the pain.

A few days later, you returned to that rock.

The sea had already taken the blood, and the salt had erased almost all visible marks of what had happened there. Still, you knew exactly where you had knelt, where your hands had pressed the wound, where hope had begun to slip away. It was there you helped Jake and Lo'ak recover the weapons that had sunk with the ship. You worked in silence, efficient, without hesitating.

Kiri started accompanying you more often. She didn't force conversation, just stayed close, like someone who understands that presence is also a form of care. You didn't want to talk, and she respected that.

Lo'ak, on the other hand, avoided looking at anyone for too long — but especially at you. There was something between you that didn't need to be spoken: you had tried to stop Neteyam from going, but it was he who had insisted his brother come with him. The guilt moved between the two like an invisible tide, receding and advancing without ever disappearing.

Tsireya was the first to notice another pattern.

The frequency with which you went to the Tree of Souls — the place where memories could be touched — began to stand out. At first, it was natural; all the Sullys went. Jake, Neytiri, the siblings. The connection brought comfort, a way of feeling that he still existed in some invisible current.

But while the others spaced out their visits, you did not.

Almost every late afternoon, when the sun began to set and the water took on deeper tones, you would slip away alone. You stayed there too long.

Tsireya didn't say anything right away.

But she began to watch. Yet, there you go again.

The connection with the Tree of Souls solidifies, and the world around you dissolves until the humid scent of the forest takes the place of the sea's salt. The night is warm, insects sing softly, and the river flows lazily beside you.

Neteyam has his back against a wide log, legs stretched out. You are between them, leaning against his chest, feeling his steady breath rise and fall against your back. His arms rest around your waist, and for an instant everything is simple.

Safe.

He is saying something trivial, telling you how Lo'ak almost fell from a branch earlier, trying to impress someone.

"I told him that branch wouldn't hold," his voice vibrates lightly against your back. "But he made that face like 'I know what I'm doing'… and the next second, crack."

You laugh before he even finishes.

"He fell?"

"Yeah." He lets out a low, warm laugh, that laugh that always started contained and then escaped completely. "And tried to pretend it was part of the plan."

You laugh along, feeling his sound echo in your chest. For a few seconds, you allow yourself to just exist there, grateful — deeply grateful — to hear that laugh again.

His arms tighten a little more around you, and he tilts his face to kiss your cheek. The touch is there… but not completely. It's like feeling through water — close, but not solid.

The difference is minimal, but devastating. Your smile fades. Your body goes still.

He notices.

"What is it?" his voice changes, lower now, more attentive.

You shake your head too quickly.

"Nothing."

He doesn't press immediately. Just slides his thumb along your arm, like he always did when he knew you didn't want to talk.

The silence between you isn't uncomfortable — but it has weight. After a few seconds, he sighs.

"Shouldn't you go back?"

He still has his chin resting on top of your head when you take a deep breath, as if about to cross something invisible. Your voice comes out low. Almost a secret.

"I wish I could stay."

His arms loosen just enough for him to sit up straighter, and you do the same, turning to face him. The forest around seems sharper now, as if the memory knows it's being tested.

He holds your face in both hands, his thumbs resting just below your eyes. His gaze is whole. Tender. Too alive.

"I know," he says, with a half-smile that isn't quite sad. "But this isn't your place."

You frown slightly, as if you're about to argue. He shakes his head before you can even find the words.

"Not like this."

His thumb glides along your cheek, exactly as he did when he wanted you to pay attention.

The connection begins to weaken, not because he pushes it away, but because something inside you understands.

And before the memory dissolves completely, he still murmurs:

"I love you. But you… you belong out there. Where there's still real wind. Where things hurt, but they're real."

The forest dissolves into light and the sea returns.

Your body reacts before your mind. Air suddenly lacks, violently, as if you had forgotten you needed it. Your lungs contract, the water feels denser around you, and for a second you don't know if it's grief or lack of oxygen that burns more.

You rise slowly. Not in panic. Not in haste. But like someone who needs to decide to come back.

When you break the surface, the air enters harsh, uneven, and you stay there for a few moments, just breathing. The sky was already beginning to darken when you swam back to the village, the sun descending in deep tones of blue and burnt orange.

On the sand, a small group was talking in low voices: Lo'ak, Kiri, Spider, Tsireya, and Aonung. The conversation dims almost imperceptibly as you pass them, still wet, your steps slow, your gaze distant.

You don't look at any of them. You just keep going.

The silence remains until you are far enough away. Tsireya is the first to speak, her voice low but steady:

"She stayed too long again."

Lo'ak keeps his gaze fixed on the sea.

"She always does."

"The frequency hasn't decreased," Tsireya sighs, worried. "Actually… it's only been increasing."

Kiri watches you move away, the way your steps seem disconnected from your own body. She lost someone too. She understands the emptiness. But this is different.

It's not just grief.

It's like you left something of yours behind. Like a part too large of you went with him — and what's left is trying to reach what can no longer be touched. Spider watches, more uneasy.

"She hardly talks to me anymore."

There was a hint of guilt there, and he felt it from both you and Neytiri. Aonung, who had until then just been observing, frowns.

"Why did she come with you all?" he asks, direct but not cruel. "She's not your family."

Lo'ak takes a moment to answer. His jaw tightens before the words come out. "We grew up together," his voice is too controlled. "And her and Neteyam… It was always like that. Since we were little. Everyone knew. They were kind of… destined."

He swallows hard before continuing.

"When we started being hunted… her family became targets too. So she came with us. There was no other option."

Lo'ak finally lifts his gaze, but doesn't meet anyone's for long. The silence that follows isn't uncomfortable. It's understanding.

The days didn't change perceptibly, but you began to occupy small spaces within them. You needed to try.

The first time, it was almost by accident. At mealtime, you simply sat down there. No one commented. The conversation continued, the fish was passed from hand to hand, the wind moved through the open structure of the marui as it always did. You ate in silence, listening more than talking, but you stayed until the end.

The next day, you sat down again.

As the days passed, Tuk began to approach you again without ceremony. One afternoon, she brought handfuls of shells, strands of dried seaweed, and small smooth stones she'd found at the reef's edge for you to decorate her hair.

She would sit on the ground in front of you and tilt her head with mute expectation, while you sorted the best pieces, ran your fingers through her hair carefully, and re-did her braids, weaving the shells in.

You also started spending more time beside Kiri again. Sometimes she talked about what she had seen in the deeper waters, about the way light passed through the schools of fish, about something she had felt when touching the bottom of the reef.

You responded with simple observations, added a detail, disagreed mildly. The conversations weren't long, but they repeated with growing naturalness, until they no longer seemed like resumptions — just continuous.

Without realizing it, you began to stay when others stayed. You remained after meals, after scattered stories, after the comfortable silence that came when no one had anything urgent left to say.

Tuk started orbiting you and Kiri again like she always had, dividing her time between the two, pulling one by the hand, then the other.

You were trying, although you knew that tense aura from the others around you still existed. You noticed it when conversations were cut short just before approaching anything related to Neteyam.

Still, you stayed.

The sun was already beginning to descend when you moved away from the village. The more distant rocks were less crowded, smoothed by constant contact with the tide, warmed by the heat that hadn't yet faded. The sea struck there with a deeper sound, constant, almost like a deep breath.

You settled in without much organization — Tuk sitting near the edge, Spider lying back propped on his elbows, Kiri watching the horizon as if she were always listening to something beyond what could be heard. Lo'ak and Tsireya stayed too close to be casual and too distant to be assumed.

The conversation flowed lightly until Lo'ak, pretending to be distracted, let slip:

"You still haven't flown on an ikran."

Tsireya slowly turned her face, as if struck by something invisible.

"And why would I do that?"

The challenge was there, but without venom. Just curiosity and that pleasant discomfort of being provoked by someone specific.

"'Cause you don't know what you're missing," he replied, holding her gaze a moment too long.

You watched them both with quiet attention. It wasn't the kind of thing that needed explaining. It was that awkward beginning, where no one knows exactly what to do with what they're feeling, so they turn everything into a contest.

Tsireya looked at the open sky above you. The blue seemed infinite from there.

"Seems dangerous."

Lo'ak opened his mouth to retort, but you spoke first, without theatrics.

"It's not."

She stared at you. You smiled lightly, simply.

"It's easier than it looks," you said, unhurried, like someone talking about something they've been through many times. "The ikran feels when you hesitate… and it feels when you trust. If you trust, it holds you." The wind passed between you, carrying the salty smell of the sea. For a moment, no one spoke. "And Lo'ak will go with you. You won't be alone."

Tsireya took a deep breath, her chest expanding slowly, as if testing that possibility inside before accepting it out loud.

Lo'ak looked at you in that moment. It wasn't a long look. But there was recognition there — and a contained surprise. After so long avoiding truly facing each other, hearing you say his name naturally had a quiet weight.

"Alright."

Lo'ak was already on his feet before she even finished. His call cut through the air and echoed off the rocks. When the ikran appeared in the sky, descending in a wide curve, Tuk let out an impressed sound and Spider sat up straight to watch better.

The landing was firm, the wings stirring up wind and splashes of salt water. Lo'ak held the animal with familiarity, but the way he helped Tsireya climb up was different from how he would with anyone else. Too careful to seem careless.

"Put your foot here," he murmured, his hands steady on her waist.

She laughed when she almost slipped, and he laughed with her, more nervous than he wanted to admit.

When the ikran took flight, Tsireya let out a short scream that turned into laughter in the air. Lo'ak leaned his body confidently, guiding the ascent.

Up there, Lo'ak risked a wider turn than necessary. The ikran dove too fast before climbing again, and Tsireya's cry echoed over the rocks, carried through the wind like laughter too free to be contained.

The sound hung in the air for a moment.

Kiri followed the movement with attentive eyes, her chin slightly lifted. The sky's reflection illuminated her face, and there was something there — not envy, but curiosity. As if she were trying to imagine the sensation before even experiencing it.

Spider was also watching, but differently. He reacted to the noise, the maneuvers, the adrenaline. Kiri seemed to hear something else in the air.

Another turn in the sky. More laughter.

She tilted her head.

"It must be different up there," she murmured, almost to herself.

The wind lifted a few strands of her hair.

A second later, she added, more clearly:

"I miss flying."

It wasn't a request. It was an observation.

You didn't answer immediately. Your eyes were still up high, following Lo'ak's silhouette against the sun that was already beginning to descend. The sky was open, wide, inviting.

Then you turned your face to her.

"You can take mine."

Kiri blinked, as if unsure she had heard correctly.

"Are you sure?"

You held her gaze calmly and smiled softly.

"He's been needing to stretch his wings."

It wasn't entirely true. But it also wasn't a lie.

There was a small pause. An internal adjustment. As if you had decided something deeper than just lending an ikran.

Kiri looked automatically at Spider.

He tried to appear neutral for half a second — and failed completely.

You stood up to call him.

When he descended, you felt the familiar vibration in your chest even before he touched the ground. You approached, ran your hand along his neck, feeling the familiar texture beneath your fingers. There was a tranquility there that you didn't need to explain.

Kiri mounted with ease, Spider right behind, laughing softly when the ikran propelled into the initial leap.

The sky was full of movement now. Lo'ak risked bolder turns just to hear Tsireya laugh loudly. Kiri leaned her body with surprising confidence, and Spider shouted something the wind stole before it reached you.

Tuk touched your hand.

"Can you take me flying too?"

You smiled, still looking up.

"I'm sorry, Tuk. My ikran is busy." You looked back at her with a reassuring smile. "Maybe later, who knows."

She looked at you, too deeply for a child her age.

"There's still one."

You didn't ask which. You just felt the air enter your lungs slowly.

Maybe it wasn't a bad idea.

The call came out almost automatic, the exact sequence your mind remembered better than you expected.

The time between the sound and the response seemed longer than it actually was, and for a second, almost, it seemed he wouldn't come.

Then he appeared.

Fast and precise, as always. When he landed before you, the creature's eyes fixed on yours without hesitation.

You approached, sliding your hand along his neck, feeling his warm breath beneath your fingers.

Something inside you clicked.

"Let's go," you said to Tuk.

You placed her on first, carefully adjusting her hands.

"Hold on tight."

She nodded, buzzing with excitement.

You climbed up behind her, connected your queue. The bond was immediate — a mutual recognition that required no effort.

The leap came and the world grew smaller below you. Tuk screamed with joy, the sound cutting through the wind, and you laughed with her — a laugh that wasn't forced, that didn't need to be measured.

The sensation returned fully. Your body remembered. The air cutting across your face, the precise balance, the way the ikran responded even before you finished thinking.

You climbed higher, reaching the group.

It was Kiri who noticed first.

"Look," she said, turning her face.

Spider followed her gaze and broke into a wide smile when he saw you approaching with increasing speed. Lo'ak noticed too — and for a moment, he lost the rhythm of his own maneuver.

Tsireya was the first to react. Her eyes widened as you appeared from the side of their field of vision, leaning your body into a quick, precise turn.

You let out a Na'vi cry — loud, clear, vibrant — that spread across the sky as if it had been held in for too long. It wasn't a challenge, nor a provocation. It was pure impulse. Tuk repeating the sound, broken by the wind.

You passed them in a swift arc, so close the displaced air sent Tsireya's and Kiri's hair flying back. Spider let out a surprised exclamation, half laugh, half disbelief.

Lo'ak, for a second, just watched. Partly because of the maneuver — he knew that, but not from you. Partly because of the way you laughed.

Without slowing, you pulled lightly on the natural reins and climbed a bit more before letting the ikran smooth out the flight. The speed gave way to a long glide, the beating of wings slowing until it became almost silence.

The world below opened in shades of blue and green. The rocks where you had been before seemed small. The village was just an arrangement of organic forms floating on the sea.

Tuk leaned forward, completely distracted by the landscape.

"Look!" she pointed, delighted by some coral formation down below.

You smiled, but this time it was a quiet smile.

You let your body follow the ikran's movement, allowing it to choose the most stable current. The wind was no longer an impact; it was a constant presence, gliding over your skin, entering and leaving your lungs in a rhythm that was beginning to align with the beating of wings.

You closed your eyes for a moment.

Just a moment.

The air smelled of salt and warm sun. The distant sound of waves rising against the rocks came muffled from that height. Tuk was still murmuring something excitedly up front, but it seemed far away, as if the world had softened its edges.

You took a deep breath.

After a while like that, you leaned your body and the ikran began to descend in wide circles. Tuk protested softly when she realized.

"Already?"

"We'll go up again another day," you replied, smiling.

The landing was firm and smooth. As soon as her feet touched the rock, Tuk was already talking nonstop, reenacting the moment you had passed the others. You laughed with her, listening, correcting a detail here and there, letting her exaggerate the rest.

The others approached slowly, commenting on their own maneuvers, discussing who had gone higher, who had almost lost their balance. You joined the conversation without thinking much, still carrying the calm from the flight.

The walk back was noisy and easy.

Later, already seated for a meal, Kiri noticed one small thing: you didn't go to the Tree of Souls that night.

She kept that to herself, like someone holding onto a small proof that things could get better.

But it didn't mean a true change.

In the days that followed, you returned to the Tree of Souls with the same quiet constancy as before. Sometimes at dusk, sometimes when the village was almost asleep. It wasn't isolation — you were still present at meals, at training, in the short conversations throughout the day.

Only, there were invisible limits.

You didn't broach the subject. You didn't allow anyone else to, either. When a memory threatened to take shape in someone's words, you would gently deflect, change the direction of the conversation, offer another story.

But some mornings were still particularly harder, like that one. The rain began even before dawn.

It wasn't a storm. It was constant. Fine enough not to frighten, but too persistent to ignore. The sound of water hitting the village structures mixed with the sea in a way that made everything feel more enclosed, closer.

You woke before the others.

The air was colder. Heavier.

For a second, still lying down, you couldn't tell what had changed. Then it came — not as a clear memory, but as a sensation. The same pressure in your chest.

The same fine rain that had fallen on the morning of that day.

Your body recognized it before your mind allowed it.

You sat up slowly, your feet touching the ground carefully, as if your balance were slightly off. That day hadn't started well back then. And it didn't seem inclined to start better now.

In the village, the mood seemed to match the sky. Conversations were quieter. The tasks continued, but with less energy. Lo'ak barely spoke during the morning. There was something withdrawn in him, a tension he carried in his shoulders like someone waiting to be called to answer for something he no longer knew how to fix.

Neytiri's distance was more noticeable on days like this. Jake tried to maintain normalcy, but the silence between them was thick. And Lo'ak felt it — absorbed it all and translated it as guilt.

You noticed, though you said nothing.

The rain diminished throughout the afternoon, making way for a timid brightness. The sun didn't return fully; it only hinted at its presence, breaking through the clouds just enough to illuminate the sea in silver streaks.

Without telling anyone, you walked to the distant rocks.

The air was still humid. The rocks, slippery.

But the place wasn't empty like other times. Lo'ak was there.

Sitting on the same formation where days before you had laughed at the sky and teased Tsireya.

Elbows resting on his knees, gaze fixed on the horizon as if trying to find some answer at the exact point where the sea met the sky.

You slowed your step as you noticed.

The wind blew in a stronger gust before he noticed your presence. And when he did, he didn't seem surprised.

You stopped a few steps behind.

He knew it was you before he even turned.

"Do you mind if I sit?"

Lo'ak shook his head, still looking at the horizon.

"No."

You sat down slowly. The rock was cold beneath your skin. A cold that wasn't just from the weather.

The silence between you wasn't comfortable. But it also wasn't hostile. It was that kind of silence that exists when two people are trying to decide if they can bear to say what's really there.

The sea advanced and receded.

After a time too long to be casual, Lo'ak spoke:

"I'm so sorry."

It wasn't loud. It was almost a leak.

You turned your face slowly.

You didn't ask "for what," because you knew.

The guilt in him wasn't new. It was an animal he fed every day. It was in his tense shoulders, in the way he avoided facing his own thoughts.

"You have nothing to apologize for."

He let out a short laugh. Without humor. Just exhaustion.

"Yes, I do." His jaw tightened. "It should have been me."

That was where something inside you clenched.

Not anger at him, but anger at the idea.

"You tried to stop him." He continued, now looking at his own hands. "You saw what was going to happen. I didn't listen. I always think I know more. I always have to prove something."

The wind passed between you, lifting your hair against your face.

"If I hadn't insisted…" his voice faltered, "he wouldn't have had to."

You felt the unspoken name between you.

You breathed in deeply. The air burned.

"I understand that you think that."

Lo'ak slowly turned his face.

There was something almost childlike there. As if he were preparing to hear that you agreed. That, deep down, he was right.

You held his gaze.

"But that's not true."

You paused, let the words settle.

"He made his choice. Like he always did."

Your eyes hardened slightly there, not from coldness, but from clarity.

"You couldn't stop him. Neither could I."

The sea crashed against the rocks below.

"I never blamed you."

That part you let out whole and emphatic.

Lo'ak blinked slowly. Something gave way in his face — not enough to free him, but enough to interrupt the sentence he had been repeating for weeks.

He looked back at the horizon.

"I should have acted like him, acted like the older one even though I'm not."

You felt the weight of that phrase.

"He wasn't older because he was better." You spoke quietly.

Lo'ak let out a weak breath through his nose.

"He always seemed better."

You almost smiled.

"He always seemed right."

A memory passed through you: that steady gaze, that secure silence, that way of taking responsibility as if it were natural.

"He was too loyal." Your voice softened. "Do you really think he would have let any of us go alone?"

Lo'ak closed his eyes for a second.

"No."

The wind changed direction.

"Remember when I almost drowned trying to prove I could dive deeper than you?" he murmured.

You felt the memory before the image.

"Yes." You let out a weak laugh. "You almost drowned and he jumped in without thinking."

The laugh died quickly.

"I thought the only thing that could take him from me was time." You spoke without realizing you were speaking. "Decades. Wrinkles. Tiredness. Stupid arguments about my stubbornness."

Your throat tightened.

"I thought we were going to grow old together."

The silence after that wasn't light, but it was real.

Lo'ak didn't interrupt.

You swallowed hard.

"And my biggest worry was going to be dying before him and leaving Silpey free to try something."

That made Lo'ak laugh — really laugh this time. A brief sound, but alive.

"She'd still try."

You shook your head, feigning offense.

"I hate her for having the same good taste as me."

"If you had gone first…" he teased, but his voice carried another layer now. "She certainly would have waited very little time."

"I know."

You both laughed, though that laugh didn't erase the pain.

The wind brought the smell of the sea stronger.

After a while, Lo'ak spoke again.

More carefully.

"I'm glad you're coming back."

You didn't respond immediately.

"Sitting with us. Laughing." He continued. "Staying."

You let a small smile appear, but didn't look at him.

"But you still go to the Tree of Souls a lot."

There your chest tightened. Not because there was accusation, but observation.

You didn't turn your face, didn't look at him.

"I miss him. A lot."

Lo'ak watched you in silence. He didn't try to correct. Didn't try to console too quickly.

"I know," he said, and this time his own voice was rougher. "I see it."

You breathed deeply.

"When I'm there…" your hands closed slightly on the cold rock, "it feels like he still exists in some way I can reach."

You closed your eyes and the sea crashed hard below.

"I know they're memories. I know it's not real." The word "real" came out heavy, like a confession. "But when I'm there, the pain doesn't swallow me whole. Things get less hard."

You opened your eyes, hoping the wind would dry the tears threatening to fall.

The sun was already beginning to break through the clouds when silence settled between you again.

You were still looking at the sea.

"I just don't know who I am without him."

The phrase hung there, suspended. Lo'ak didn't respond immediately.

"I don't know who I am without him either," he admitted.

You turned your face, surprised by the raw honesty. He wasn't looking at you.

"He was always one step ahead." His voice was less defensive now. "If I did something wrong, he'd already thought about the consequence. If I fought with someone, he'd already decided how to get me out of it. I always…" he took a deep breath, "I was always the one who needed saving."

The wind moved through his braids.

"And in the end…" he swallowed, "he did what he always did."

You felt the air escape slowly.

"I don't know how to be the older brother," he continued. "That was his thing. He was the responsible one, the example, the protector. I'm none of those things, and I don't even know if I want to be."

He let out a half-laugh, without humor.

"But I know he wouldn't want you trying to disappear along with him."

That made you finally look directly at Lo'ak.

He held your gaze this time.

"He loved you," he said simply. Without dramatic weight. Just truth. "He would want you to be present. Here. With us."

You felt the lump rise again, but different.

It wasn't despair. It was recognition.

"I know," you whispered.

The impact was silent. Your eyes burned and you blinked quickly, trying to contain the shine that was beginning to form. There was pain there, but also something more solid — a kind of emotional inheritance you didn't yet know how to carry.

It was then that the voice arrived on the wind.

"Lo'ak!"

You both turned your faces almost at the same time. Tsireya approached with light steps, her smile already open before she reached you. Her presence brought movement to the scene that had until then seemed suspended.

Instinctively, you looked away back to the sea and passed the back of your hand under your eyes, quickly enough to seem casual. When you turned again, the smile was already in place.

"Is everything okay?" she asked, noticing the quietness between you.

You nodded.

"Yes, it is."

Lo'ak confirmed with a slight movement of his head.

"We were just talking."

Tsireya seemed to accept the answer. She tilted her face toward the village.

"They're calling for you. It's starting now."

There was life in her voice.

You walked alongside Lo'ak and Tsireya as the village returned to its rhythm. Voices, footsteps, the smell of night arriving with the sea salt. Someone laughed near the fire. Children ran between the tents. Life continued with an almost offensive naturalness.

You tried to keep up.

Tried to be present. But inside there was an echo.

Lo'ak's last sentence no longer hurt like a blade. It hurt like absence.

You realized, there, between one breath and another, that you had been confusing two things. Holding on and loving. Staying and resisting.

Maybe truly trying wasn't to keep living as if he were still there, hidden at the edges of everything. Maybe trying was to allow that he wasn't.

The realization didn't come with tears. It came with a deep silence. A tiredness that finally settled.

You needed to see him.

Not to beg him to stay or fall apart again.

But to say what hadn't been said without urgency and without blood.

One last time.

Night fell slowly. The sky darkened in blue tones that seemed infinite. You waited until the movement subsided, until the conversations became distant murmurs. When you left, no one noticed. Or maybe they noticed and didn't call out.

The path to the Tree of Souls seemed more alive than ever. The plants pulsed in soft bioluminescence beneath the surface, as if breathing along with the ocean itself. The light came from below, diffuse, filtered by the water that undulated above like a living ceiling. You advanced slowly, feeling the temperature change as you dove.

The sound of the world grew distant. Submerged. All that remained was the deep murmur of the sea around, the echo of your own blood in your ears.

Down below, the roots of the Tree of Souls spread like inverted constellations, long and luminous, dancing with the current. Each filament glowed in soft shades of blue and violet.

For a moment, you floated before them.

The entire ocean seemed to hold its breath.

Then you reached out your hand.

The fibers touched your skin like gentle currents, and you connected your queues unhurriedly, like someone pressing their forehead to something sacred.

The water disappeared.

Or perhaps it stayed too far away to matter.

The first thing that returned was the sound of the wind.

The wind moved slowly across the meadow, making the tips of the grass brush against your skin. The sky was wide, too blue, as if the world had been made only for that moment.

He was lying beside you, one arm folded beneath his head. You propped yourself on your elbow to look at him better. The light drew soft contours on his face — the arch of his brows, the firm line of his nose, the quiet curve of his mouth.

His hand slid slowly along your back, in a distracted, protective gesture. Too familiar to be conscious.

"You're happy," he said, watching you attentively.

You smiled.

"I am."

And you were. There was a new lightness in your chest.

Your fingers began to trace invisible lines on his arm, feeling the texture of his sun-warmed skin.

"I missed you," you said.

Simple. Without weight.

He frowned slightly, not in pain — in curiosity.

"What do you mean?" his voice came out almost too soft. "I was here the whole time."

There was no provocation. Just a gentle puzzlement, as if the phrase had come from a place he couldn't reach.

You didn't explain.

Instead, you tilted your head slightly, studying his face as if seeing him for the first time.

"Your eyes get lighter when you're lying like this," you murmured, naturally shifting the direction of the conversation. "I never noticed that before."

He blinked, surprised by the change.

"Never noticed?"

You brought your face closer to his, just enough to study him better.

"They're beautiful," you said, with quiet sincerity. "Very."

He laughed softly, almost shy — a rarity.

"You're acting strange today."

"Am I?"

"You are…" he lifted his face a little, propping himself on his elbows to be closer. "Like you're seeing everything for the first time."

You just smiled.

There was nothing to clarify.

Your fingers traced up to his jaw, slowly contouring it. He closed his eyes for a second under your touch — absolute trust, without tension.

"I like your face," you said, almost distracted. "I like how you look serious… but you never are with me."

He opened his eyes again, his gaze softening.

"I never needed to be."

The wind blew stronger, lifting a few strands of your hair. He brought his hand to your face and carefully tucked them behind your ear. The gesture was so delicate it made your chest tighten — not from pain, but from recognition.

You didn't think.

You just leaned in and pressed your lips to his.

The kiss wasn't hurried. It wasn't urgent. It was soft. Lingering. As if it were merely a continuation of breathing.

He responded the same way — calm, present, his fingers still resting on the back of your neck, holding you there.

When you pulled back, he rested his forehead against yours.

"You're different," he repeated, but now smiling. "Quieter."

You let out a light laugh.

"Maybe I'm just paying more attention."

"To what?"

You ran your thumb over his eyebrow, then along the curve of his cheek.

"To you."

He didn't answer with words this time. He just stayed there. Looking. As if that were enough.

And it was.

He was still resting his forehead against yours when he gave a crooked smile.

"You're analyzing me too much today," he said, pretending to be serious. "I'm starting to get suspicious."

You smiled widely.

"Suspicious of what?"

"That you're planning something."

You let out a light laugh, the one that always made his eyes narrow. But you'd barely finished the sentence before he was leaning in to kiss you again, as if to prove he was in control of the situation.

The kiss started soft again. Slow. Familiar.

But you laughed against his lips, and he laughed too, and in the middle of the laughter he tried to say something that got lost because you pulled him, making him lose his balance.

He fell sideways onto the grass, and you ended up on top, bracing your hands on either side of his face.

"I knew it," he murmured, between laughs.

You didn't answer. You just kissed him again.

Now there was more warmth. Not urgency, but life. Your arms wrapped around his neck, and he held your waist firmly, spinning you both until he reversed your positions again. You laughed in between kisses, foreheads bumping lightly.

It was light and youthful. It was the kind of happiness that only exists when no one imagines it can end.

And then—

The wind blew stronger.

This time you noticed.

A different sound passed through the air. A muffled noise, distant. As if something were… deeper.

You frowned slightly, but he kissed the corner of your mouth and the thought dissolved.

The wind blew again — stronger now. Your hair spread across his face.

But it wasn't just wind.

There was something rhythmic. A subtle pressure in the chest.

Very distant, almost imperceptible, a low sound. Like water moving.

You blinked.

For a second — just a second — you felt the air leave you.

He held your face between his hands.

"Hey," he said, smiling. "What is it?"

You blinked again.

The meadow was there. The blue sky. The warmth of his body beneath yours.

"Nothing," you replied.

He brushed his nose against yours, drawing another laugh from you. The muffled sound seemed to fade as you kissed him again.

But it hadn't gone away.

The pressure in your chest increased slightly. As if something were tightening from the inside out. As if your body were trying to call you.

The wind became a gust.

And mixed within it, very faintly in the distance, came a distant crack. A liquid echo. A hollow sound.

Your lungs constricted slightly.

You ignored it.

Because he was smiling that way.

Because his hands were warm on your skin.

Because his laughter vibrated against your lips.

He pulled you closer, the two of you rolling on the grass once more, laughter mingling. The world seemed to spin softly, golden.

The sound of water grew clearer.

A bubbling. A silent invasion.

Your chest burned.

You tried to pull in air — and you could.

There, in the meadow, the air was sweet.

But in the other place, very far from there, your body was beginning to thrash in reflex.

Your fingers gripped his shoulder tighter.

He interpreted it as intensity.

"I should be worried about the family's reputation now," he murmured, almost amused.

You tried to answer.

But your hearing began to fail.

The wind became a roar. The water became a muffled boom.

The meadow trembled for a second. Or maybe it was you.

The air left you again — stronger now.

Your lungs burned.

Somewhere very far away, your body arched beneath the water. Involuntary spasm. Your mouth opening. The salt invading.

But here—

He was laughing. His lips were on yours. His fingers were on the back of your neck.

The last thing you heard clearly was his laugh, mingled with the wind.

Then, the sounds began to fade. The blue of the sky became too vast, too luminous. The sensation of weight in your chest ceased to be pain and became distance.

The body, somewhere deep beneath the sea, still fought by instinct.

But you were no longer bound to it. You were there.

Laughing. And then everything became silently light.

Deep in the sea, your body began to release what it still held.

The tension in your shoulders gave way first, almost imperceptibly. Then your arms, which ceased to maintain any intention. Your hands opened slowly, fingers relaxing until they no longer responded to the water around.

Your legs lost what little impulse remained.

The tide took you with an indifferent delicacy, moving your body in a slow, steady sway. Your hair floated around your face, sometimes partially covering your features, sometimes revealing them under the bluish light of the Tree of Souls.

Your expression carried no tension.

Your brow was smooth. Your jaw, slack. Your lips rested slightly parted simply because there was no longer strength to close them.

It was a deep neutrality. Like someone who fell asleep without knowing they wouldn't wake.

The luminous roots were still connected to you. The water cradled you. And there, in the thick silence of the ocean, you ceased to sustain any movement.

The sea was too calm for that hour.

There was no wind cutting across the surface, no heavy clouds in the sky. Only the constant sound of waves breaking and receding, as if the night had taken nothing with it. As if the world hadn't been rearranged just hours before.

Neytiri watched from the sand with a feeling she didn't want to acknowledge. A cruel déjà vu, too recent. Jake's silhouette emerging from the water brought back a memory that was still raw — the way he had already walked like this before, carrying what remained of a son.

But this time it was you.

Jake approached the ilu first. He made no sudden movements. He touched your body with care, as if there were a risk of waking you if he were too careless. He slid one arm under your knees, the other around your torso, and lifted you firmly.

You seemed light.

Too light.

Your body yielded to the hold of his arms without any involuntary adjustment. Your head fell back as he lifted you, your neck exposed, your hair dripping in wet strands over his forearm. Your kuru swung loose, heavy with water, seeking no connection. Your tail hung suspended for a moment before also falling, dangling without direction.

Jake tried to better adjust the weight, but there was no way to support it all. He did what he could. And what he could do seemed far too insufficient now.

He walked toward the dry sand calmly.

Neytiri walked too. Closing the distance step by step, as if each step confirmed something she was still trying to deny.

Lo'ak arrived in time to witness the scene. He stayed further back, his feet firm in the sand, his jaw clenched. There was frustration in his eyes — a silent rebellion against the cruel swiftness of things. The night before, you had seemed ready to breathe again, to exist without drowning in memories. He had allowed a small hope to grow.

And now you returned like this.

Suspended. Motionless.

Jake stopped when he felt he didn't need to take another step.

Water ran from your body and dripped onto the sand, forming dark patches that were soon absorbed. Your head still hung. Your arm was relaxed at your side, fingers slightly parted.

Neytiri moved close enough to see your face.

There was no pain there. Nor tension. Just a serenity that didn't match the heavy silence around.

A tear slid down her face without her noticing, at the same time as she slowly raised her hand and rested her fingers under your head for a moment, offering the support Jake hadn't been able to give. It wasn't to change your position, but just to look at you.

Her eyes traveled down to your arms. Both with the bracelets.

One yours.

One his.

Neytiri's fingers touched the familiar weave, and for an instant something like pride pierced through the pain. The loyalty between you and Neteyam had been complete. True. Without hesitation.

But soon the thought formed into doubt — perhaps it was that same loyalty that had led you to this moment.

Kiri arrived slowly, keeping some distance, like Lo'ak. She looked at you and something inside her recoiled, as if she had sensed an absence that wasn't visible.

"No…" was all she could manage.

Tuk came running shortly after. As a child, she didn't carry the weight of tacit understanding. She saw you in her father's arms and broke into a smile that seemed to light up the entire beach.

"You're back!" She approached without fear, without hesitation. "Wake up."

It was in that moment that your arm slipped further, escaping the partial support of your torso. It fell limp, your hand swaying slightly with the movement.

For Tuk, that was a sign that you were there.

She wrapped her own arm around yours, hugging it with her whole body, her cheek pressing against your skin, still damp from the sea. Her little legs bent in the sand to steady herself better, as if she were determined not to leave until you responded.

"Come on… wake up."

She waited for an answer for long seconds. But when it didn't come, she frowned. She pulled your hand harder, trying to provoke a reaction.

"Come on…" her voice no longer held the same brightness.

Lo'ak moved before the gesture could become rough.

He reached Tuk and held her shoulders carefully, but firmly.

"Stop… Tuk," his voice came out low, almost hoarse. "She's not… She's not going to wake up."

He didn't explain. He didn't elaborate. He just finished, trying to hold together what remained for his sister:

"It's going to be okay."

But even he didn't fully believe his own words.

Tuk looked at him, her eyes beginning to glisten with confusion and fear. The adults' silence finally reached her. The smile faded slowly. The air became too heavy.

She began to cry.

Not a loud cry — first a tremor, then broken breathing.

Lo'ak picked her up instinctively, holding her against his chest. Kiri moved closer to them, seeking proximity as well, as if physical contact were the only stable thing in that moment.

It was then that Lo'ak truly looked at you.

He let his gaze slowly travel over your face, absorbing details that before would have gone unnoticed: the motionless serenity of your mouth, too soft for the violence this represented; your skin already losing the vibrant glow he recognized; the strands of hair plastered to your temple, heavy with water, tracing a contour he knew by heart.

He searched, even without admitting it to himself, for any minimal trace of tension, any delayed micro-expression that would betray that this was still reversible. But your face was entirely in stillness.

And a harsh understanding took hold of him.

He stood there, holding Tuk while Jake continued holding you with arms too firm, as if loosening his grip would allow reality to fully set in. Neytiri remained close, her hand still supporting your head, refusing to let it hang again.

The sea continued to break behind them, with its usual rhythm.

Your ceremony came with a calm that hurt more than any despair.

There wasn't the raw shock of the first time. There wasn't the sensation of something abruptly torn away. Grief now settled like a familiar tide, advancing slowly, filling spaces that were already fragile. It was different — not lesser, but different. There was, in the depths of each one's eyes, a shadow of recognition, as if part of them had already feared you wouldn't remain long after him.

Your body was prepared with the same care, the same respect. The hands that touched you knew what to do, but that didn't make the gesture lighter. On the contrary, it made it heavier, because each repeated movement carried the memory of the previous one.

When they took you to the reef, the same where Neteyam rested, the silence was almost absolute. The water was clear, transparent enough for light to pass through and draw soft contours around the coral formations. It was a place of rest, they said. A return.

There, in the same space where his body had been given to the sea, you were placed as well.

Not as someone lost adrift, but as an inevitable reunion.

The gentle current enveloped your hair, your tail, your kuru, moving them delicately, as if the ocean recognized what it was receiving. And, for the first time since the beach, the weight seemed to distribute differently.

Grief, this time, was not only rupture, but also a certain confirmation.

As if the love that had united them in life had traced a path that no one there could, or perhaps wanted, to prevent.

And as the sea slowly closed the space around your body, the sound of the waves on the surface continued the same, indifferent and eternal, carrying with it two absences that now rested side by side.

The sea was still dark when Lo'ak entered the water on the night of that day.

There was no ceremony in that gesture; he just walked until the tide reached his chest, then his neck, then the submerged silence took over everything.

The ilu glided beside him when he noticed, but this time there was no urgency in the mount, only purpose.

The surface light dissolved above, replaced by the soft, pulsating glow of the roots that grew on the seafloor, intertwined like ancient veins sustaining the world.

The Tree of Souls didn't stand there as it did in the forest; it expanded. Its luminous filaments undulated with the current, alive, serene, indifferent to what the hearts above were enduring.

Lo'ak dismounted from the ilu and dove down to the roots.

There was something almost cruel in the beauty of that place.

He hovered for a moment before the glowing tendrils, feeling the weight of the choice. He couldn't simply ask to see them. He needed to remember. He needed to choose a moment that had been his as well.

And, without exactly knowing why, he chose that day.

The water sparkled under the afternoon sun as you emerged again, frustrated, your brow furrowed and your pride even more so. The ilu had escaped for the third time, gliding away as if taunting your persistence. You ran a hand through your wet hair, took a deep breath, and began walking toward the sand with steps too determined for someone who would claim not to be irritated.

Neteyam was sitting a few meters ahead on the sand, his forearms resting on his knees, watching you try and fail as if it were a private performance. He laughed when you finally gave up.

It wasn't a loud laugh.

It was the kind that rises in the chest and escapes involuntarily, because he knew you'd try again tomorrow.

You noticed.

And without a word, you smiled and bent down, grabbed a handful of fine sand, and threw it at him.

The sand stuck to his damp skin.

He stood up in a theatrical burst of indignation, and you were already running before he even took his first step.

Lo'ak remembered seeing that for the first time with an almost automatic eye-roll. He had gone to call them — Jake wanted them both.

That afternoon, he thought you were too dramatic.

Now, in the memory, he notices something else.

He notices that Neteyam doesn't run to catch you quickly; he prolongs it. He wants you to laugh a little more.

You look back mid-run, not to escape — but to confirm he's coming.

Neteyam catches you by the waist, and the momentum of both of you is clumsy enough that you both lose your balance together. The sand gives way under the shared weight, soft, warm from the sun. The impact isn't harsh; it's absorbed by the laughter that had already been building in both of you.

But you don't get up.

You just stay.

Lying on your backs in the sand, still breathless from the run, the open sky above as if placed there just for that frame. Neteyam's arm remains trapped under you, not because he can't pull it out — but because he doesn't want to break the natural fit that formed. Your leg, carelessly, has fallen across his, as if your body decided on its own where it was comfortable.

There's no urgency to rearrange anything.

Neteyam turns his face slightly toward you and says something inaudible to Lo'ak, while smiling.

And you laugh loudly, without trying to hold back, that laugh that starts in the chest and explodes freely, as if the world were safe enough for it.

You get up laughing, brushing the stuck sand from your shoulders and hair.

Then you see him. And the change is almost imperceptible.

The laugh doesn't die. It just transforms.

You notice first. Your smile softens, your eyes become more attentive, and you take a step toward him, noting something different in his expression.

"You okay?"

The question pierces him.

Inside the memory, Lo'ak feels his own body as strange. As if he were occupying two places at once: the one who lived it and the one who knows how it ends.

He hesitates, because he wants to say.

He wants to say he's not just there because Jake called. That he's there because he needed to see you together one more time. That he needed to confirm it wasn't his imagination — that you really loved each other that completely.

He wants to say that you chose each other until the end. Until after the end.

He wants to say he doesn't know how to be what Neteyam was. That the responsibility feels too heavy on his shoulders. That he doesn't know how to talk to his sisters the way you talked to them, always noticing first, always staying.

He wants to say that you will be missed on a level he still can't measure.

But the Lo'ak of that afternoon didn't know these things.

The Lo'ak of that afternoon just shrugs.

"Yeah. I'm fine."

Neteyam watches him for a second longer than usual. As if he's not convinced. As if he always saw cracks that others ignored.

You keep looking.

And that's when Lo'ak realizes something he'd never understood: you weren't just part of Neteyam. You were part of his balance. And, in some quiet way, part of the balance of the entire family.

He feels strange inside his own memory. As if he's too heavy for that light scene. As if he carries information that the past can't contain.

But you don't know.

You still belong to a timeline where tomorrow is guaranteed.

You approach him unhurriedly, sand sticking to your backs, hair, hands. Neteyam reaches him first, as he always did when he noticed Lo'ak was too quiet. He doesn't ask immediately. He touches.

His hand slides around the back of his brother's neck and squeezes lightly, jostling him like an old tease, a gesture repeated since childhood, accompanied by that crooked smile that mixed challenge and affection.

"You're acting weird, bro."

The phrase is simple. But the touch lingers a second longer.

Lo'ak feels the warmth of his hand as if it were real. As if he could turn his face and rest his forehead on his brother's shoulder. As if there were still time to admit he was afraid of not being enough. That he'd spent his whole life competing with his shadow and, now, would give anything to keep competing.

He laughs weakly.

Doesn't answer.

Because any word spoken there would break the delicacy of the memory. So he just watches.

Watches the way Neteyam waits for an answer that doesn't come, but doesn't insist. Watches how you position yourself beside him, naturally, as if the trio had its own way of recomposing whenever they gathered.

And then something happens that he only notices now.

Back then, he would have called it calm. Now he understands it was something else.

It was a kind of inevitability.

You didn't seem like two people who had met by chance. You seemed like two lines that had been heading in the same direction long before they crossed. There was something almost silently definitive in the way Neteyam looked at you — not like someone discovering, but like someone recognizing.

He never saw effort between you. There was no hidden tension, no discreet insecurity of someone afraid of losing.

You moved with the naturalness of two things belonging to the same space. Minimal adjustments, breaths that synchronized without noticing, silences that didn't ask to be filled.

And he understands, with a weight the memory can't ease, that this kind of harmony doesn't know how to survive rupture.

Some people continue after losing someone.

He'd never thought about that regarding you two. He'd never imagined the world could separate something that seemed so fixed.

Now, watching, he almost feels it was written — not the end itself, but the quiet intensity of the bond. As if a love so whole wasn't meant to dilute with time.

What hurts isn't imagining fights that didn't happen or words left unsaid. What hurts is remembering how everything seemed too stable to end. How the world had allowed a harmony that he now knows it never intended to keep for long.

In the memory, you continue side by side, walking with that proximity that doesn't draw attention, but also doesn't allow distance. He realizes he was never able to imagine one of you without the other. Not even now.

The memory begins to blur at the edges, as if time itself were taking back what it lent. The afternoon light dissolves first, too golden to last. Then the sound of the water becomes distant, muffled, as if coming from another body. Finally, the warmth of the sand beneath his feet fades, taking with it the shared weight of the three walking side by side.

He doesn't try to stop it.

He stays until the last fragment — until the silhouette of you two merges with the horizon's glow, until the laughter turns to pure memory, until only the certainty remains that it was real.

When the connection breaks, the light disappears without ceremony. The sea is just sea again.

Lo'ak remains motionless for a second, as if his body still expects to see you two walking side by side. But there's no image, no laughter — just the silent pressure of the water around.

He rises to the surface with that certainty, heavy and clean at the same time. What comes isn't the old shock of loss. It's something else. A firm, almost hard understanding.

Your souls were destined to cross; somehow, you would always end up together.

He just didn't expect it to be so soon.

A/N: I know I'm random, but just leave me with my temporary obsessions and have fun. xoxo, bee 💋

Summary: Your father, a good friend of the clan's Olo'eyktan, tries to arrange a marriage between you and the boy you're in love with. Neteyam sully, the oh-so perfect son doesn't like the idea because of your reputation, but what would happen if he gave it a chance?.

Strangers to friends - I

I'm no professional so there will be some off things in this story, but i did try my best….thank you for reading.

_____________________________________________

He heard it as clear as the day. He didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but when Neteyam heard his name, he stopped on his track and hid behind a tree to listen.

“Neteyam must choose for himself, my friend. A bond is sacred; it’s for a lifetime, so his mate must be someone he chooses and who chooses him,” Jake said with certainty.

“Y/N may have made some mistakes in the past, but she has changed, and this arrangement would be seen as strength and hope for our clan. This is what the clan needs. With the return of the Sky People, the people hope that the line of Turok Makto will continue.”

Neteyam saw how his father considered the words of his great friend. With the threat of the Sky People looming in the corner of the forest, he knew that his father might try to talk him into this arrangement. But Neteyam knew you from the past—a girl who declared her love and ambition to mate with him in the future, the girl who tried scaring other girls showing interest in him—and he thought that this union would only bring chaos.

Neteyam had heard enough and quietly left. But instead of walking home, he chose to walk the path leading to a river. As he walked closer, he saw a familiar figure—the very person his father considered to be his future mate. Y/N. And there she sits atop a rock, his potential mate, sharpening the tip of her arrow to perfection.

“It's not good to stare at people,” you suddenly called out, without taking your gaze away from your work.

“I'm not staring…”

“And you're here because…?”

Neteyam sighed as he tossed a rock in the water.

“They're planning a future for us… your father and mine.”

“I know…”

“You know?”

“Yes…”

“And?”

“Are you not gonna protest about it?”

“Why should I? My father is a wise man. If he thinks it is good, then it is good.”

“It's not just about what's good; it's about the future. Don't you want someone you choose?”

“I choose you…”

Neteyam went still. Words he wanted to say were forgotten. He didn’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings. No, he was raised to see the broader view of the situation and to think before saying words so that he wouldn't suffer the guilt of hurting others. But now, all the restraint was gone, and before he could stop himself, he uttered the words in a whisper—but he knew that you heard it.

“I don't….”

But instead of anger or distaste, you smiled—not a soft one, but more like a smirk. And it caught him off guard.

“If you have the guts to say no to your father… why not?”

Neteyam stared at you with a clear expression of restraint. There was disbelief and annoyance in his eyes as he looked at you. And without a word, he walked away, leaving you alone.

When he arrived home, his father called for a family meeting to share his opinion about the said union. Neteyam was quiet throughout the conversation and only nodded at his father's words. He repeated your words inside his head:

“If you can say no to your father… why not?”

If he could say no…

He wanted to, but he couldn't. So he just sat there like an obedient child as his father put a hand on his shoulder and said, “Just give it a chance. At the end of the day, it's still your choice, son.”

Is it really?

If at the end of the day it didn’t work… would i be a disappointment.

For weeks he busied himself with training himself and other warriors. He helped hunt and gather herbs, even joined Lo’ak and Spider on their adventure in the guise of keeping an eye on his brother, just to avoid you. Because he knew in himself that he wasn't ready yet. And the talk of you announcing to the clan that the two of you were to be mated was not helping either.

But when his father suddenly gave him a ‘break’ and said, “Maybe you can use this free time to get to know Y/N,” he knew his hiding was over, and now he must face the reality. You.

Every time he tried to show you what he did in his everyday life, you either said, “It's not fun,” or “It's boring,” and he thanked the Great Mother for the patience she bestowed upon him—for today was the same as the other days.

“I must say I'm impressed…” you said as you watched him shoot the target with his arrow, and he only hummed in response.

“And bored…”

“This is me, boring…”

Stifling silence enveloped the two of you as Y/N stared at him intensely. He lowered her bow and arrow and finally looked at her.

“What?…”

“........ Come.”

Y/N said as she ran away with her own bow and arrow, giving Neteyam no choice but to follow her as she ran through the forest to where their Ikrans were resting.

“Where are we going?”

“Be quiet and follow me…”

They rode their Ikrans to a place Neteyam hadn't considered going. But to please this girl, he had to follow her, so she wouldn’t complain about being bored to her father, and then his father scolding him.

It was a long flight, and when he finally thought they were at the place she wanted to go, she suddenly said, “Now we walk.” By the time they arrived at a tree near the edge of the cliff, it was getting late.

“We have to go back; it's getting late, my father—”

“Shhh… wait and see. Any time now, and you'll see…”

“See what?..”

A roar in the sky answered his question. Its large wings cut through the wind with greatness. Y/N’s heart lifted at the sight of him finally letting go of his duties, marveling at the Toruk with unguarded awe. She had hoped he’d see wonder, not just responsibility, and now he did—and it made her chest ache with something unfamiliar, maybe hope.

He turned his gaze to you, seeing your soft smile and the happiness in your eyes—it was new to him. It was like this was the first time he ever saw you in this light, or maybe you were always like this, but he had been blinded by what he believed.

“This is so great…” you whispered as you watched the great Toruk fly above before finally entering a big cave at the top of the mountain.

You stayed there for a long time. Neteyam saw you in a new light from that day—a girl different from the story, not tempered, not so boastful, but with sparkling eyes filled with happiness and excitement. Your muffled laugh and smile stirred something in him, a curiosity to know more than he knew.

Before they knew it, it was dark. They arrived home and unmounted their Ikrans, still beaming with joy and laughter.

“I'm curious how you know where it lives…”

“Patience is a great ability to harness… and a little rebellion.”

Before he could ask you more questions, he heard his father's voice calling to him. And that's when they knew they were in trouble and had to part ways.

From then on, something changed between them. They spent more time together, mostly flying, challenging each other on who could shoot arrows faster, discovering hidden spots, and exchanging greetings whenever they saw each other—which was a big shock for the people. They knew your past actions and how Neteyam was not happy about it. They expected this talk of union to end right away, but it did not. In fact, it looked like the two of you were comfortable with each other now. Not in a love way, but more like friends.

But happiness didn’t last forever. His father gave him and his brother a mission as spotters for an upcoming battle with the Sky People. And it didn't go well. He and his brother disobeyed orders. They came back injured, a lot of people were, including your older brother. He saw you as you ran over to check your unconscious brother. Soaked in blood, the worry in your face and the look of sadness you gave him drowned his soul in guilt.

If only he had listened, none of this would…

After the scolding he got from his father and treatment from his grandmother, he gathered the courage to go to your kelku, where you watched over your injured brother. When he entered, he saw you sitting beside your brother.

“It's not good to stare at people…”

“I'm sorry…” he whispered.

“For what?” you said, finally looking at him.

“It is my fault. I take full responsibility…” he repeated the words he had said to his father earlier, with the expectation of an agreement from you.

“It is not…”

His heart tightened—your words did not blame him. When you had the right to be angry at him, you only smiled.

“We know the risk of fighting the Sky People…”

“But still…”

“But still, it shook me when I saw him unconscious. I always thought we had more time in this world…”

You stood up and slowly walked toward Neteyam, who couldn’t look in your eyes, his eyes filled with guilt. Slowly, you put one of your hands on his chest, right where his heart is. That’s when he finally looked at you. It hurt to see and hear how he blamed himself, when you knew he had always been a kind-hearted person—a warrior with a soft and strong heart.

“You have a strong heart. Don't forget who to blame in this sorrow… many died and were injured, but it's not because of you. Don't forget our enemy. The Sky People. They are the ones I blame, not you.”

As he thought that the bad things are over and a good day would come next, the demon his parents once fought took his siblings hostage, leading to a bloody fight. His father, shaken by what happened, decided that it was time to leave the forest and everything they ever knew… their home. You, his friend.

It was the hardest goodbye.

The people cried for their Oloeyktan, their Turok Makto, his wife—the fearless warrior who brought them peace—and his family. And you… you stood there with sadness in your eyes. You approached him before he mounted his Ikran.

“Here… it will be a long ride. Another layer of warmth won’t be bad…” You gave him a woven shawl.

“I'll see you again… my friend…”

“I'll see you… maybe I'll get bored and fly to your new home for fun…”

“With your rebellion, I don’t doubt you'll find us…” he said playfully.

“Mostly patience,” you shrugged with a smile.

And suddenly he pulled you into a hug. It was warm and nice. You didn’t know if you’d ever see him again—maybe you would, when you were both old enough, and he probably would have a mate. It ached your heart, but you’d rather have that than a life here with you… where he wasn't safe.

Now he’ll have a choice…

#neteyamsully #neteyam x reader #avatar #neteyam fanfiction #neteyam te suli tsyeyk'itan #fanfic

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