Archive of Our Own ^beta

“Too slow, soldier boy!”

Neteyam pushed to run faster, a burning in his legs that felt as if a fire had been lit inside his muscles. But he kept going anyway, he scrambled up the slick, vine and wood covered arch of the stone bridge faster than even he had thought possible and it was only when he had reached the peak where he leapt up as hard as he could go into the air, spreading his arms wide to the breeze. The massive floating mountain kept groaning beneath like the belly of a beast, but the wind was sweet in his lungs and the sun warm on his face and in that moment, the thrill of the challenge was worth the risk of falling to his death.

Except.

His father's ever-watchful, warning stare was perpetually at the forefront of his mind.

“Wait up!” Neteyam yelled, but it was snatched away by the updraft. “You’re going to slip! Dad said it’s more slippery on the south face!”

“Only if I slow down!”

Your piercing peal of laughter rang louder than the callsand shrieks rising from the ikran nesting in the far, far distance. You were a blue blur ahead of him, facing Neteyam with hands stretched open at the sides and running backwards in challenge -- he had no idea how you did it and managed to still be on the move as if you had eyes at the back of your head. Your queue flew behind you, the braid thick and shiny and the beads of shells and bones threaded through it glimmering in the mid-morning sun. A flash of a smile that burned like a torch in the mist, a beckoning of white fangs.

You reached the ledge of the overhang — a jump that Dad had strictly, explicitly, loudly forbidden them from attempting without spotters — and just launched yourself into the empty air.

“No!” Neteyam screamed, his hand reaching out uselessly to grab your tail, his fingers closing around nothing but mist.

For a terrifying, heart-stopping second, you were just a speck suspended against the vast, crushing eye of Naranawm; then, your fingers clamped onto the thick vine on the other side. You swung up, using the momentum to flip your body over the edge, landing in a crouch. The grace of a palulukan stalking its prey in the long grass.

You turned back to him, chest heaving, a wild, triumphant grin splitting your face. Your eyes were bright, alight with the dangerous thrill of survival. Somehow, you stood there, utterly unharmed. The world cannot touch you. For a moment, you seemed forged from the mountains themselves, part of the unyielding earth, unbreakable.

Neteyam skidded to a halt at the precipice, stared at the gap between the two ledges, and back at you, tail lashing behind him.

“See, big brother?” you called out, dangling your legs over the abyss, kicking your feet back and forth in the empty air as if you were sitting on a tree stump in the village. You leaned back, spreading your arms wide to embrace the open sky, the wind whipping your hair into a halo of chaos.

“You can’t catch me,” you promised him, breathless and glowing. “I’m never coming down!”

I’m never coming down.

The wind from the memory died, replaced by the wall-mounted floodlit nighttime at High Camp. Neteyam was standing with his shoulder pressed against the rough weave of the healing tent’s exterior wall, his head bowed, trying to regulate his breathing so he could hear the conversation inside. The clamor of people in pain in the healing grotto and the soft chatter of those watching over them had faded to a muffled murmur in the background of his thoughts; even the sharp tang of blood and the bitter sting of ointment that once twisted in his nose, now hovered only as a dull irritation.

It wasn’t just him lingering outside, either.

Mom had said, not an hour ago, that the last thing you needed was to be overwhelmed. And Dad had said — several times — that they were all to stay back home to allow you some time to come to yourself, but Neteyam’s siblings had about as much regard for Dad’s orders as the wind had for the shape of the land, especially after Kiri had went “There’s something wrong,” with that intuitive pensiveness of hers — and now, as always, Neteyam stood at the intersection, trying to contain the worst of his family’s chaos.

They were huddled around this dark blindspot that wouldn’t give them away. Lo'ak had become compressed into a crouch, elbows pinning themselves to his knees as his chin dug into the cradle of his palms, his gaze a burning ember aimed at the healing tent's entrance. Against Neteyam's wisdom, he'd stalked the flaps like a skittive pa'li calf throughout the afternoon, and every one of his attepmts to glimpse his sister had been met with the cold stone of their mother's stare until he retreated with scoffs that had gotten progressively huffier. Kiri sat hugging her knees, her eyes boring through a small tear in the weave as if she could command her vision to penetrate the barrier between worlds — and knowing Kiri, she probably could. Poor Tuk had long since collapsed against Kiri's side, her cheek mashed into her sister's shoulder.

“. . . So the bullet was a dumdum, we know this. Mo'at and Kiri did one hell of a job trying to pick those pieces. You're saying some are left in there?”

“No, no, the MRI is clean. The soft tissue approximation is holding, and the healing paste is mitigating the sepsis risk,” Max was saying, the blue light of a holographic scanner spilling out through the weave. “But the nerve roots exiting the spinal column here, at the L5 and S1 levels...”

“Ugh,” said Kiri, rolling her eyes and letting her head drop back to thunk against the support pole. “I told you there was something going on, I felt it, I—”

“Shh,” Lo'ak snapped. He was leaning forward now. His braids dangled in his face like a bead curtain.

“. . . The fragments hit the lumbosacral plexus — the junction where the nerves leave the spine to form the sciatic nerve. That explosion severed the roots that carry the signal to the lower leg,” Max kept going, the scanner ticking as he adjusted the projection. “The nerves that control her thigh, uh, the femoral group, come from higher up the spine. They were shielded. That’s why she can still somewhat lift her knee. But the roots lower down, the tibial and common fibular branches, are gone. There’s no pathway to transmit the signal from her brain to the muscle.”

What did all that even mean? What in the world was lumbosacral… plexus? Femoral? Tibial — fibural. . . What?

A rustle of fabric. Dad shifting his weight, the heavy creak of leather. “Is it permanent?”

Neteyam could feel it: something else moving beneath the conversation, a second current swirling under the first. His Dad — it was like he already knew what Max would say, the answers folded up inside him, yet still he kept asking. Max, too, had the knowledge, but he kept winding around it, circling, stalling.

None of it made sense to Neteyam.

He wanted to believe it was for your sake.

You were the elephant in the room, not the truth they were dancing around.

And it made Neteyam sick to his stomach to feel your silence so tangibly, the sister of his who had never met an authority she wouldn't challenge, who would argue against the very color of the sky if it suited her, who could make their father grind his teeth with defiance and then stand tall through the whole scolding. He knew that you had to understand at least half of what was happening. If nothing else at least the tone of the situation. You had to. That's why your lack of presence was the most unsettling of all to Neteyam, hovering at the edge of things now, a ghost where you’d always been a wildfire.

You were either being petulant about the fact that you had to be the center of attention in the worst way possible. Or. . .

Who was he kidding.

Of course you were terrified.

Especially after Max's response, “If she were human, or if we had access to a full medical suite, we might have tried a nerve graft, but the biology isn’t compatible. Even trying to grow a new nerve fiber using DNA. . . the integration complexity is... frankly, it's beyond us. The synaptic pathways would never form correctly.”

“Max,” their Mom's voice cut across the firelight like an arrow loosed in darkness, and her hissing made Lo'ak and Tuk flinch so hard that Neteyam had to pat the latter on the shoulder. “What does that mean for my daughter?”

“It means—” Max began to say in a tone that was as pained as the wound in your middle. “From knee down, she won't be able to feel or move properly. The foot will drag, um, we call that foot drop since the ankle isn't functioning. Normal walking... without some kind of support, it's impossible.... And this is... this is permanent. I'm sorry.”

Lo'ak's breath escaped in a single ragged exhale, like he'd been storing the air in his lungs since Max first spoke. He sagged back against the rough-hewn support beam, his usual restless energy suddenly drained away, ears flattened low against his skull. Tuk stared up at him, her small face a pale oval in the torchlight, her eyes wide and uncomprehending. Kiri’s hands were pressed flat across her features, a shield.

“We're being punked, right?” the boy's question snagged on the fabric of the tent as he looked from sibling to sibling. “This is some kind of sick joke. How is she even supposed to...”

Live like that.

Neteyam's fist gathered fabric, knots, and wood, knuckles bleaching to a stark chalky blue as he pressed his forehead harder against it, ears rotating to pick up on any sound or reaction coming from you, but you were so very silent.

Just as you had been while laying down unconscious between the border of life and death.

Intrusive images invaded Neteyam's mind, then. The sheer wrongness of them tightened around his throat. His sister, whose very essence was in perpetual motion, now earthbound. A creature of roots, not wings.

He saw you as a child, scaling trees while other kids barely mastered the lowest branches, your laughter echoing down from heights that made their mother's heart seize. You disappearing into the canopy at dawn, returning at noon with feathers in your hair and mud on your knees, eyes alight with some secret triumph.

He envisioned you now, left behind, watching as the clan took to the skies, the once familiar and welcome rush of wind against your face replaced by the sting of dust kicked up by departing ikran. He pictured your hands, strong and calloused from climbing, idle in your lap as others mended their gear for the next hunt. The muscle memory of rope and vine, of finding purchase on sheer rock faces — what would those hands do now?

But Max wasn’t done.

“I have an idea, if you’ll let me finish,” he said — was that hope? “On Earth, we’d use a fixator or exoskeleton to stabilize the limb. Here, with the Shack’s 3D printer, we could make a dynamic AFO — that’s ankle-foot orthosis, basically a brace. . . Custom for her shape and gait. We use a hybrid polymer, or carbon fiber. It’d lock her ankle and support her foot every step. She could even run that way. It's not. . . It's not the end of the world.”

“She will not wear your human metal cage around her leg,” Mom immediately shot back with her teeth bared in a snarl that made everyone’s ears flatten. She sounded like a nantang ready to pounce. “It is Eywa's law that we do not touch metal! It poisons the soul.”

“We touch their metal every damn day now, Neytiri,” He sounded so. . . detached again. Not all there. “Their guns. The comms. The tools. This isn't that different.”

“It is different! Those things we use for survival — for battle! This is putting the poison inside her! You would have her walk with Sky People bones?”

He looked left. Lo’ak was staring at the ground, the lines of his face drawn tight with an anger that had nowhere to go. Kiri had pulled her knees up, hugging herself so tightly she seemed to shrink inside her own skin. Tuk was making small, hungry noises, the kind that meant she was about to start crying for real, and Neteyam put his arm around her, felt the tiny tremor as she pressed her face into his shoulder.

“The brace would be just a tool — a way for her to move, to live. You could paint it, carve it, make it part of the People,” Max said.

“You do not understand. She will be cut off from Eywa. You would rather she walk like a Sky Person than crawl as one of us?”

And suddenly the argument seemed less about the brace and more about losing you.

Dad’s voice was hard as stone. “Don’t put that on her. Wanting your agency back is not a sin.”

“You do not know what you ask. You do not know what you do.”

“I know exactly what I’m doing,” Dad said, and Neteyam could picture his face in that moment, the way his jaw locked and his eyes went cold, just before he made one of those choices that changed everything.

Mom’s hiss was a whine of pure hopelessness.

Tuk's whines had started as a small whimper for a while now, which quickly turned into a full-blown wail.

There was movement in the tent, the attention drawing entirely to their eavesdropping spot outside.

The flap of the tent opened, and Mom's head soon was peeking over to them. One look — and she saw Lo'ak, pale as river stones; Kiri drifting, her eyes fixed on nothing, as if she were carved from the same cold rocks; Neteyam clutching Tuk, who sobbed into his chest — and something in her expression softened at once. She knelt, both hands coming down to cradle their heads in quiet reassurance. “Oh, Tuktuk...”

Then Dad was there, filling the entrance behind her, broad shoulders swallowing the fire’s glow behind him just as Neteyam gently passed Tuk into Mom’s arms. His shadow loomed over the siblings as they stood, shifting under its weight, a little guilty. “I told the lot of you to stay back home,” he said. “This was not a conversation meant for children.”

Neteyam felt a hot, prickly flush rise to his cheeks. “I’m sorry, sir. We didn’t think—”

Dad cut him off with a sharp shake of his head, thick ropes of hair swaying. “You didn’t. I’m not happy. But since you’re here…” He stepped forward, tail lashing, hands bracing his hips with a tension that transferred instantly to the siblings in front of him. His gaze swept over them, as if re-taking inventory of his battered, fractious brood. “How much did you hear?”

It was Lo’ak who answered — always too quick, never patient enough to think before he spoke. “Pretty much everything.”

“Can we go in, now?” Kiri asked in annoyance, which Dad didn't expect and raised his eyebrows at. Anger had been so quick to snap her out of her previously closed-off state. “All of you have been talking as if she's not there, and I don't know how she's putting up with it. She clearly needs someone by her side who cares about what she has to say.”

Dad and Mom exchanged a grim glance.

“And you haven't even mentioned Eywa's blessing to her. She’s intervened directly, Dad. It's crucial for her to understand that Eywa is with her, rather than. . . rather than being left to despair!”

His dad gave her a soft side-eye. “We weren’t keeping her in the dark. Sometimes, in a state like this, hearing too much, too quickly, makes things worse. We needed time to—”

“You keep talking out there! It's not like I'm going anywhere, right!?”

The ripple of shock that moved through everyone was almost absurd. Lo’ak jerked back, ears up and mouth open, and Kiri let out a bark of incredulous laughter, half sob, half relief. Even Dad’s jaw dropped, if only for a second. Mom’s hand went to her mouth, but her eyes shone, wet but bright.

They all heard the clatter of something dropping to the floor, then the unmistakable sound of your cursing. Neteyam couldn’t help it; a relieved, relieved smile tugged the corners of his mouth, even as the knot in his belly stayed stubborn and tight.

Mom gathered herself first. She reached out, one hand on each of their shoulders, squeezing them in turn. “Enough,” she said, both command and comfort. “Go in. All of you. Tuk... Don't cry. Your big sister is fine.” She wiped away the tears streaming down their baby sister's face. “She is. Let her see that. Be the strength she needs right now, okay?”

Mom set Tuk down, and Tuk tottered, blinking, then ran straight into Neteyam’s legs, gripping them tight. He scooped her up, propping her on his hip. Lo’ak and Kiri exchanged a loaded look, then led the way.

You were sitting upright, propped against a stack of woven mats and soft, tanned hides, hair not matching Neteyam, Lo’ak and Tuk in braids anymore, but now twisted in thin, newly started locs, adorned with a scatter of new beads and sinew-lashed stones, distinct from both their father’s thick war-braids. The style sat somewhere between the Omatikaya usual and something made just for you. Hours of patient hands had gone into it.

Neteyam remembered stepping into the tent in the dull blue shift of false dusk, two nights ago. Kiri sitting cross-legged behind your unconscious propped-up body, hands moving with bizarre tenderness as she parted your hair into even lines with two different combs and sealed each one with sun-warmed yovo oil. The air then had smelled of fruit skins, sweet and resinous, while Mom hovered close, working on undoing the matted, tangled up braids for more protective locking. Kiri’s fingers had been so gentle, even when working through the worst mats and clots at the back of your head and nape from being bed-ridden for so long, especially knowing that she liked to wear her hair loose with little to no braids peppered inbetween. Mom must have taught her, he had concluded. She had been the one to do Dad’s hair, after all.

Tuk got to you first, slamming into your side with a squirmy, puppyish affection that drew a flinch and even, after a second, a twitch of a smile.

“You are awake! You are awake, you are awake!” Tuk was chanting it, nearly sobbing again. Your larger hand covered Tuk’s head, flattened softly, like you’d grown too tired to throttle her and so settled for affection.

Someone had dragged in the battered wooden cot from the supply hut, and the old army-issue blanket was half-tucked around your waist. Your legs, swaddled in a mess of padding and cloth, were splayed awkwardly in front of you, but you held yourself upright with a kind of angry dignity.

Max was there, too, perched on a low stool beside you, clutching a glassy dataslab with both hands. The holo projected above it was a model of a leg, complete with a gaudy skeleton and glowing nerves, spinning in slow, hypnotic rotation. You had been staring at it before Tuk had attacked, face like a stormfront, eyes narrowed and very, very awake. And alive.

“Nice look,” Lo’ak said now, a brittle smile tugging at his mouth. “If you needed an excuse to get pampered, you coulda just asked. Didn’t have to get shot.”

Neteyam scratched his head at the tasteless joke, and watched Lo’ak visibly stiffen immediately after he spoke without thinking. Again. And stew in the liminal awkwardness of a heartbeat’s worth of silence before you kissed your teeth and snarled at him, “Ay, shut up, asshole. At least I smell like yovo. Why do you think I called out just now? Clocked your stink all the way from here.”

A collective, internal sigh of relief.

“Man—”

“Okay,” Max clapped his hands, “I'm guessing everyone is caught up on the situation. No need for me to rehash it, huh?”

“No,” Kiri confirmed, crossing her arms in front of her chest. “We're not stupid.”

You weren't looking at any of them. Your focus was trained on your lap. A bowl of soup and a spoon lay beside you on the ground, forgotten.

“That's it for me, then,” Max looked at Dad, who nodded. “Radio if you need anything else.”

He gathered his stuff and his bag. Then left. Everyone's attention turned to you, the silent, brooding figure on the cot. The only sounds were the crackling of the little fires inside and the distant echo of the camp's activity,

“How are you feeling?” Kiri asked. Tuk’s behavior was acceptable because of her age, and you were always soft on her, but Kiri being bold enough to sit on the floor next to you and pull the covers down a bit to look at the bandages better was new.

Neteyam caught Dad grimacing and looking away at the question, his jaw working.

And you snorted, laughing shortly and slapping your hands on your thighs, the sound entirely swallowed by the blanket. “Peachy,” you replied in English, then turned back to Na'vi. “Are you all going to stand around like we just met and stare like you're seeing a human for the first time?”

“Hey,” Dad rumbled in warning with all the sternness he could spare at the moment. “Mind yourself now. We're on your side here — the only side. No need to turn those claws on anyone, especially not your family. Your siblings have been chewing on knuckles and jumping at every shadow until we got you back.”

You looked down, bottom lip trembling.

“I'm sure she didn't mean that,” Mom cut in, casting him an admonishing glance as she sat down with Tuk across from where Kiri was. Her hand came to rest on your shoulder. “It's okay to be upset. This is a hard lesson to learn but it will make you a stronger person. Eywa is with you.”

You shrugged off her touch. “If Eywa was really with me—”

Shifting around uncomfortably, Kiri let out a pained, “Oh.”

And though it was sharp and filled with anger and resentment, the rest of the sentence just trailed off. As if you didn't have the energy to scream and rage anymore. “Please don't say that. Please. I know you mean to be helpful. But it's not. Why would — why would the Great Mother let this happen to me and not the sky demons who hurt so many of our people? What did I do to deserve this?”

“Do not speak this way,” Mom responded, firm as the stone beneath them. “Eywa does not will pain on her children — or decide to inflict it, it is not her way.”

You looked away, and Mom's tail lashed once, her ears pinning. She leaned forward, the golden beads in her braids clicking together as her fingers gripped your shoulders. “We do not forsake Eywa for the evil brought upon us by those demons, we treat them as a test of our will. A call to draw on the courage of our ancestors to bear what is to come and honor them. That is her blessing. That is her grace. To give you the strength to overcome.”

Lo'ak quipped again, “So much for that, huh.”

Your eyes flickered to him, narrowed. It was the most life you had shown since the group had arrived. Lo'ak's mouth snapped shut, hands flattening to his sides in sudden shame. Maybe he had intended to bolster you. Maybe to voice a shared sense of betrayal. But it somehow backfired, because you were always quick to burn; it seemed even the edge of death couldn't douse that.

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Uh,” he floundered.

“You think I'm not strong enough to 'bear what is to come'? Is that what you're trying to say?”

“No!”

“Then what?”

“Nothing. I was just. . . I didn't—”

“Okay, okay, enough,” Dad finally stepped in and put himself in the middle of the argument. He had a heavy palm on each of you, one on Lo'ak's shoulder and one on your head. Lo'ak didn't take kindly to the gesture and pushed his hand away in a huff. “We're not gonna fight about this. Your brother didn't mean it like that and you know it.”

“He started—”

“And I'm finishing,” he said. The finality of that was a vice clamp on the room's atmosphere. No one dared to breathe. Dad took a deep breath and pinched the skin between his eyebrows. “You've gotta stop doing that.”

Neteyam's hand found its way to Lo'ak's shoulder, but Lo'ak shook it off as if the touch was a brand, not comfort. He fixed his gaze on a loose thread in the woven floor mat, the small imperfection suddenly the only thing worth seeing in the entire world. Though the admonition hadn't been aimed at him, he was still reacting as such.

“I'm not! I’m not doing anything!” you exclaimed, swinging your arms at every emphasis. “I'm not. Doing anything! For once in my whole life. Because I can't. Do. Anything. Anymore. I'm stuck. In. Here. I'm not allowed to be mad because that's being a brat and I'm not allowed to want to be alone because that's selfish to those who care about me and I'm not allowed to...”

Dad's ears lowered against the back of his skull, his tail lashing behind him in an uncharacteristically violent motion. He had the biggest frown on his face Neteyam had ever seen, but he didn't say anything back to you.

“...to not believe Eywa is on my side,” you finished with a defeated sigh. You were staring at a corner of the tent again. It was as if the wind had been stolen from your sails and all that remained was a small boat lost in a sea of despair. “What am I allowed to do? What's the point of living if the Great Mother is punishing me like this?”

Their parents both simultaneously opened their mouths, but — “No, sister, she saved your life,” Kiri argued.

Your gaze snapped toward Kiri where she crouched at your bedside. Her delicate features had drawn themselves into a tight knot across her brow as she shifted closer on the woven floor, restless fingers worrying the furred edge of the blanket draped across your lap. “We lost you that day. Right after you landed back in camp.”

“What? What do you mean lost? I died?”

Blink. Chaos on the landing, two people hunched over someone thrashing on the ground, ikrans whinnying in fright and scattering about. Blink. Red on blue. Blood. It was blood. It was Dad pressing on the gaping maw of it so hard that it looked like he was trying to dig an organ out with his own fingers. Blink. It was you. You were the one on the ground. His sister. But it couldn’t be so. Your face. There was so much wrong. All of your color was gone. Your eyes were fluttering, rolling back to the whites. So much screaming to stop. Stop! Stop! Please!

Blink. Neteyam was throwing himself over your legs, holding you down with all his weight, praying, apologizing, praying and apologizing to Eywa. This was his fault. His fault. If only he had listened to the twisting in his gut when he'd first suspected perhaps you could have gone somewhere else, if he'd only adjusted course and informed his father earlier, if only he had found you before you could have reached the ikran nest at the peak. Blink. Blink. Blink. This was his fault. His fault. His fault. His fault. Hisfault. Hisfault. Hisfault. Hisfaulthisfaulthi—

The light in your eyes went out.

“Yo, Neteyam?”

Lo’ak’s voice snapped the memory like a dry twig.

Neteyam flinched, a violent, full-body jerk that jolted him back to the present. His chest was heaving, heart thundering, sweat beading at the nape of his neck with a soft tremble at the tip of his fingers. Lo'ak was peering at him with a concerned frown. Neteyam looked over at you — breathing, frowning, alive — but directly layered over your face was that terrifying, empty stare from that day.

He couldn’t stay here. Those eyes—

“I need air,” he choked out.

He didn't wait for a response, turned and shoved through the tent flaps, stumbling out into the cool night, desperately scrubbing his hands against his thighs to get the feeling of your death off his skin.

His father found Neteyam sometime later at the edge of the caves, staring off into the unspooling patterns of floating clouds, occasionally sipping from a waterskin to get rid of the aftertaste of bile in his mouth, trying to get some feeling back in his limbs after all that shaking.

He put a large hand on the back of the boy’s shoulder blades, and patted.

“I’m sorry,” Neteyam said.

His entire vocabulary consisted largely of that phrase, offered over and over again. He carried a lifetime of apologies at the tip of his tongue for his siblings. But now and forever, it would never be enough anymore. It could never be enough. Neteyam was coming to a realization that he’d never known what ‘sorry’ was in his life before this. What an empty word it was. How useless, how infuriating.

“Shh,” Dad answered.

They stayed like that until it was time to go back.

You couldn't shit by yourself now.

It was the lowest ring of hell, and you were chained up in it, a grown girl with the mortifying needs of a newborn.

Was it worse than the pain? Absolutely. The pain was sharp, fire-bright, but it was pure. Pain could be screamed at, bitten down, spat out through gritted teeth or wild curses at your idiot brothers for looking at you like you’d already died. Pain, you could weaponize. You could make it someone else’s problem. But this indignity?

You tried to convince yourself that the bandages would come off, that the numbness down your right leg was just swelling, that the shakes and dizziness were the medicine, not the new reality. But every morning, waking up to the same dead weight and the same damp suffocation of your own body refusing to obey you, made the hope die a little more. What if this was you forever? What if you’d never again run the ridge-trails with Tuk or wrestle Lo’ak into the river, never race Neteyam through the floating mountains, never again climb towering trees before the others, never fly an ikran at breakneck speeds over the floating rocks like everybody could easy as breathing? What if the only way you’d ever see the world again was from a litter, or clinging to Dad’s neck like a sack of roots for the rest of your short, useless life?

No one said it out loud, but you could see it in their faces: the knowledge that when a Na’vi can’t move, can’t fend for themselves, can’t hunt or ride or fight, their time is done. The old stories were full of brave cripples who became wise, who learned to see things others could not, who inspired the strong to keep fighting. . .

But you didn’t want to be a story. You wanted to be whole.

You wanted to be able to fucking relieve yourself on your own, damn it!

The first time, way before you properly gained consciousness and got that speech from Max about the permanence of the paralysis, you had barely recognized what was happening. Everything after the battle — the fall, the crash, the fire and screaming — blurred together in a kind of waking dream. There was no context for the moment you woke up, flat on your back, mouth like sand, and Mom was pressing a damp cloth to your face, gently shushing the pulse of words trying to leap out of you. She asked if you had to go, and when you didn’t answer, she just nodded to Kiri, who rolled you upright and pressed a pot between your legs, the motions so familiar and practiced that for a moment you thought maybe you were still a child. Your bladder let go before you could protest. There was the dull roar of liquid, the sound so loud in the tent that you felt like everyone in the clan could hear. You locked eyes with Kiri, who smiled a small, sympathetic smile, then looked away.

It was only later, when the fevers broke and you could keep food down, that the real horror began. The shame, the helplessness, the way every gesture of care felt like someone slowly stripping the skin from your bones.

By the second or third time (it's difficult to remember, the days are all blending together in the same soup of fever, exhaustion and pain), however — as the haze of drugs wore off and the realization of the new reality sank in — the disgust and embarrassment had you wailing. You tried to shove the hands away and crawl out of the bed. You didn't get very far. Your father held you in place with an ease that only made the shame burn hotter.

“Stop it,” he hissed at your ear. “Just let us help. We've done this many times since your birth, this is nothing, there’s nothing to be ashamed of. It’s just us. It’s just us.”

“No!” You struggled and cried and begged for him to just leave you to die instead. Death was better than this. “I don't care! I'll do it myself. I’m not doing this—!”

“You can't do it by yourself, baby. Not now. Please. Just. Stay still and let it go. Let your mom and me clean it up. It's alright. Shhh. We'll be done soon. You'll feel so much better after.”

I’d rather die, you thought. I’d rather die. I’d rather die. I’d rather die.

The fourth or fifth or sixth. . . It was the same song and dance routine.

The same humiliation ritual.

Over, and over again.  

You woke to laughter. A child's, bright and hiccupping and so utterly ordinary that it carved something open in your chest before you'd even fully surfaced from sleep.

For a moment you just lay there, suspended in that gray space between dreaming and waking where your body didn't have a shape yet, where it was still possible to believe you were whole.

The laughter came again. Closer now, or maybe you were simply more awake. A woman's voice joined it, and then she began to sing.

Your breath caught.

It was a children's song. One of the old ones every Na'vi child learned before they could properly pronounce the words. The melody was simple: four notes climbing, three notes falling, repeated in a gentle loop that was designed to be easy for small mouths and clumsy tongues to follow. The woman sang the first line, then paused, waiting, and the child's voice piped up to mimic her — stumbling, half a beat behind, swallowing the ends of words in a way that made them come out round and soft and wrong.

It was the most ordinary sound in the world. Someone was teaching a child to sing. That was all. The sun was up and the camp was alive and somewhere just outside, life was continuing its unremarkable rhythm, the same as it always had, the same as it always would, with or without you in it.

You pressed the heels of your hands against your eyes and breathed.

None of this was cruel. That was the worst part. If it had been cruel — if someone had been singing it at you, or near you, with the intention of reminding you of what you'd lost — you could have been angry. Anger was easy. Anger was familiar; it sat in the center of your chest like a hot coal you'd been carrying since you were old enough to understand that your father's name had the biggest shadow in Eywa’eveng, that your mother's grief had a shape, that being the eldest daughter of Toruk Makto came with a weight no one ever warned you about. You could have worked with anger.

But this was just a woman and a child, and they were just singing, and it wasn't about you at all.

The child stumbled over the third verse, the one about the seeds that ride the wind, and the woman laughed, gently correcting. You knew the correction before she made it. You knew where the child's tongue would trip, knew which part always came out sideways, because you had been exactly there before, kneeling in the family marui with the afternoon light warm on your shoulders, holding the smallest hands ever, listening to the most determined voice you had ever heard butcher this exact song.

Tuk.

She was four — or was she five? You couldn't hold the number in your head. Small enough that the top of her head barely reached your hip. Small enough that when she stood on your feet to practice the dance, her weight was nothing, less than nothing, a warm pressure you could carry without thinking. She'd wanted to learn the song because Kiri had been humming it while gathering plants, and Tuk — who wanted to do everything Kiri did, everything you did, everything anyone in the family did because she loved so fiercely and so indiscriminately that her heart had no room for boundaries — had marched up to you with her chin jutted out and demanded you teach her.

Not Kiri. Not your mother. You.

"Teach me, teach me," she'd said, and you'd looked down at her and felt that particular softening in your chest that only Tuk could produce, that gentle undoing of whatever armor you'd built up that day, because Tuk didn't know about armor. Tuk didn't know about defiance or rebellion or the way your father's disappointment jabbed in the space between your shoulder blades. Tuk just knew that her biggest sister was tall and strong and could climb higher than others, and that was enough. That was everything.

So you'd knelt down in the dirt and taken her hands — so small, Eywa, so impossibly small, each finger barely as long as the first joint of yours — and you'd started the song. The first line. Four notes climbing.

"Again," Tuk had demanded when you paused, her brow furrowed in concentration so intense it made her look like a miniature version of your mother staring down an enemy. "Slower."

You'd bitten back a grin and done it slower. And slower again. And slower still, until you were practically speaking the melody rather than singing it, breaking the stops apart like cracking open a seed to show her the soft center. Tuk's tongue worked visibly behind her lips as she tried to wrap it around the words. She got the first line on her third try — not perfect, but recognizable, and the look of pure triumph on her face had been so radiant that you'd lifted her straight off the ground and swung her in a circle just to hear her shriek with delight.

The dance had come after. The song had a dance. All Na'vi children's songs did, because the People believed you couldn't separate the voice from the body, that music lived in the muscles as much as in the throat.

This one was simple: a gentle stamping of feet to mark the rhythm, arms lifting overhead on the climbing notes, swooping down on the falling ones, and a spin at the end of each verse. Tuk had been terrible at it, naturally — her coordination was still developing, her limbs too new to her, her tail swinging wildly out of sync — and she'd stomped on your feet more times than you could count and nearly toppled into the dirt twice.

But she'd kept going. That was the thing about Tuk. She had that stubbornness, that Sully stubbornness their father talked about like it was a virtue when it manifested in himself or Neteyam and a problem when it showed up in you or Lo'ak. Tuk had it too, but in her it was still uncorrupted, pure determination without the bitterness, without the anger, without the years of learning that sometimes the thing you were fighting for wasn't going to bend.

She'd kept going, and eventually, after a solid hour, after your knees ached from kneeling and your voice had gone rough from singing the same four lines over and over, she'd gotten it. Well enough that when she sang it through from beginning to end and performed the dance with her whole body committed to the movements, arms sweeping, feet stamping, tail swishing in something approaching rhythm, you'd felt your eyes sting in a way that had nothing to do with the dust.

"Were you watching?" she'd asked breathlessly, looking up at you with those enormous eyes. "Did you see me?"

"I saw you, Tuktuk. You were perfect."

She hadn't been perfect. But she'd been Tuk, and that was better.

That day, you had taken her small hand and led her to where your parents sat beneath the shade of the towering trees. With a deep breath and your encouraging claps, Tuk had launched into the song, and you swayed together as she danced, her little limbs moving with all the enthusiasm she could muster.

Your parents had beamed at her, pride shining in their eyes, despite Lo'ak and Kiri snickering softly at the side. "Look at her go!" Lo’ak teased, nudging Kiri, who feigned a dramatic swoon. But their laughter was light, filled with affection rather than malice. In that moment, the world felt right, and Tuk was the brightest star in your family's sky.

Outside the healing alcove, the child landed the third verse on their second attempt, and the woman praised them with a warm hum of approval. The melody continued, fourth verse now, the one about the rivers, and your fingers, without your permission, began to tap.

Left hand first. Your fingers found the mat beside your hip and drummed out, one two three, one two three four, matching the beat that drifted in from outside. The pattern came back to you like breathing, like something your body had memorized so deeply it didn't need your mind's consent. Your thumb marked the downbeat. Your other fingers filled in the spaces. You tapped through the fourth verse and into the fifth, and for a handful of seconds, you felt almost like yourself.

You hummed, a bit whispery, low, not wanting anybody to hear, but the melody shaped itself in your throat with an effortlessness that startled you. The notes climbed. Your fingers tapped. The child outside sang. And for one bright, fragile moment, the walls of the healing alcove dissolved and you were back in the clearing with Tuk on your feet, her weight warm against your shins, her voice a half-beat behind yours, the sun on your face and nothing, nothing, wrong with the world.

The dance. You remembered the dance.

Your left arm lifted, slowly, tentatively, but it lifted, the muscles protesting only a little, and traced the first sweeping motion overhead. Your right arm followed, and that one hurt from physical inactivity, but you gritted your teeth and pushed through because you needed this. You needed to feel your body do something other than lie here and be broken.

Your torso shifted, your abdominal muscles engaging through the pain to twist you slightly to the right, mimicking the rotation of the dance. The movement was a disgrace of what it should have been, but your arms remembered. Your arms remembered Tuk's weight when you lifted her, the swing of her body through the air, the way she'd thrown her head back and laughed and screamed so hard her whole body had vibrated with it.

Your arms swept down on the falling notes. Your fingers tapped. Your voice hummed. And you were smiling, actually smiling, something cracking and desperate in it, but real, because for this one suspended moment you could almost trick yourself into believing the rest of your body would follow suit, that the rhythm would spread downward like warmth from a fire, that if you just kept moving, kept singing, kept believing—

—Now the right leg. . . Bend. Lift. Stamp. Woo!

Your right leg did not bend.

It tried. You felt it try. Something fired in your hip, a flicker of intention that traveled partway down your thigh before meeting a wall of resistance so absolute it might as well have been stone. Your knee twitched with a pathetic jerk that moved the joint perhaps a finger's width before the muscles seized, locking in a spasm that sent a bolt of white-hot pain from your femur to your ankle and ripped the humming clean out of your throat.

You gasped. Your hands flew to your thigh, pressing down, as if you could physically push the pain back in, shove it back beneath the surface where it belonged. But it kept unfurling, hot and vicious, pulsing in time with your heartbeat — one two three, one two three four — and the cruelty of the rhythm matching the song you'd been tapping was so precise, so perfectly terrible, that a sound escaped you that wasn't quite a cry and wasn't quite a laugh but lived in the horrible space between both.

Bend. You tried again, quieter this time, your jaw clenched so tight your teeth ached, your abdomen on fire, stitches tightening. Bend for me. Just this once. Just enough to stamp once. Just enough to finish the dance.

Nothing.

Outside, the child completed the final verse. Their voice rang out high and clear on the last note, the one about coming home, about Eywa welcoming all her children back, and the woman clapped, and the child laughed that hiccupping laugh again, and you heard the unmistakable sound of small feet stamping the final part of the dance against the packed earth.

Stamp, stamp, stamp. Spin.

You lay perfectly still. Your arms had fallen back to your sides at some point, sweat gathered along your hairline, the memory of their sweeping motion already fading from your muscles like heat from a stone after the sun went down.

The silence that followed the song was worse than the song itself. Filling it was every dance you would not finish, every verse you would not stamp your feet to, every time Tuk might run to you and say "Again! Do it again!" and you would have to find the words, or worse, the smile, to explain that again wasn't something your body had left to give.

You stared at the conic ceiling of the tent. The woven panels swayed gently, indifferently, in their unfelt breeze. The medicinal herbs pressed their sharp, clean scent against your face like a hand trying to be comforting that only succeeded in being present.

You held it in the way you held everything in — with your jaw locked and your eyes brimming with saltwater and your hands gripping something, anything, to keep them from shaking.

But right hand lifted from the mat and pressed flat against your right thigh. Against the leg that had been yours, that was still yours, that had once stamped in time with Tuk's delighted shrieking and carried you up the floating mountains in the dark and gripped the sides of your ikran as you soared through a sky that had belonged to you.

You pressed your hand against it and felt the warmth of living flesh, the steady pulse of blood still moving through veins, the small involuntary twitch of a muscle that had no idea what it was supposed to be doing. The crescents your nails pressed almost broke skin. Your leg was alive. It just wasn't yours anymore. Not really. Not in any way that mattered.

"Were you watching?" Tuk's voice echoed in your memory, her face tipped up, her eyes bright, her small body still vibrating with the final stamp of the dance. "Did you see me?"

You'd seen her.

You'd seen her, and you'd called her perfect, and you'd meant it with your whole heart, and now you lay in this Eywa-forsaken pit and the ghost of a children's song fading in the air and your right leg lying beside you like a stranger, and you could not — could not — get up and find her and dance with her and make it true again. She was so fucking sad because of you, and you had no way of making it right.

The child outside had moved on to something else. The woman's low responses faded as they moved away from the alcove, and then there was nothing your own breathing, the body going on about its business of being alive regardless of whether you'd asked it to.

You closed your eyes. Behind your lids, Tuk spun in a circle with her arms outstretched, tail flying, four notes climbing, three notes falling, and the sunlight caught in her hair like something Eywa had placed there on purpose.

Your hand stayed on your leg. Crescents pressed harder. You lay there and held what was left of yourself together and listened to the silence where the music had been, and you thought: I taught her that song. I taught her the dance. She stood on my feet and I didn't even feel her weight because it was nothing, it was nothing, and I didn't even know.

The breeze shifted. The ceiling panels swayed. Somewhere across camp, Jack—your Jack, your dusk-orange impossible stubborn boy, let out a low, keening cry that you felt in the hollow of your throat more than you heard with your ears.

He'd been doing that. Calling. Waiting for you to come to him the way you had once gotten to do it. Only once. Bounding across the rocks and launching yourself onto his back like gravity was a suggestion and the sky was yours.

You pressed your hand harder against your silent leg and let the pain sit where it was, holding you together even as it crushed you.

Four notes climbing. Three notes falling.

You kept humming.

Kiri came in sideways through the tent flap, one hand holding it open. You watched her from your mat, still half-propped against the rolled bedding someone had tucked behind your back while you slept. She was looking at the bundle cradled against her chest, wrapped in broad waxy leaves and tied with a thin vine, and her luminous eyes were doing that half-focused thing they did when she was listening to something no one else could hear.

"Your tent smells like death," she said.

You blinked. "Well. . . That happens, I guess?"

"Not you." Kiri settled cross-legged at the edge of your mat, placing the bundle between you with a gentleness usually reserved for wounded animals. "The air. It's stale. Sick air makes sick bodies." She paused, tilting her head, then amended, "That's not — I don't mean you're sick because the air is sick. I mean the air isn't helping."

"You could've just said you brought me something," you murmured, and the corner of your mouth twitched. It was almost a smile.

Kiri unwrapped the bundle with careful fingers, peeling back each leaf layer to reveal what she'd gathered: a handful of pale seeds like tiny sunbursts, sprigs of dried leaves that crumbled at their edges, a twist of root bark, and nestled at the center, a small clay dish holding a thick smear of something that caught the dim light and held it.

Bioluminescent sap.

"I want to make the air feel alive again," Kiri said softly, already beginning to crush the dried leaves between her palms, letting the fragments fall into a shallow bowl she'd pulled from somewhere in her satchel. "These are from the old grove near the eastern ridge. And these seeds—" she held one up, rolling it between thumb and forefinger, "—if you crack them, they release this warmth. Like breathing in sunlight." She smiled at you then, and it was so earnest, so Kiri, that something in your chest ached with wanting to deserve it.

She reached for the sap.

Her fingers scooped a small measure and began working it into the crushed leaves, and the scent unfolded into the tent like a living thing — wet earth and mineral sharpness, something that smelled like the underside of broken yarna branches pulsing with phosphorescent light as your body tore through canopy on the way down—

Your hands locked around the edge of the mat. Your lungs forgot how to work.

The smell thickened. It was everywhere. It was the mist between the floating mountains, it was the crushed greenery under your knees when they forced you down, it was the sap that had smeared across your arms when you'd grabbed blindly at vines to stop your fall and they'd ripped free one after another after another—

"—good for the lungs, and if I add just a little of the root bark—"

Kiri's voice came from very far away. From another life. Because you weren't in the tent anymore. The crack of the gunshot punched through your memory like it punched through your body. You felt it again — the searing, tearing wrongness of the bullet entering you, the way your legs stopped being yours, the way the world tilted sideways and Jack was screaming, your ikran was screaming your name in the only language he knew, in shrieks that sounded like something being unmade—

And then you were falling.

The branches breaking under you. The canopy shredding. The bioluminescent plants exploding in sprays of light as you crashed through them, their sap coating your skin, their smell filling your nose and mouth as the ground rushed up to meet you, the air tasted like this, exactly like this, and you couldn't—you couldn't breathe, couldn't scream, couldn't—

Quaritch was standing over you in his Na'vi body, sneering and sneering and sneering, and his mouth was moving, saying something about your father, always about your father, and the soldiers that had you surrounded in a circle had their weapons drawn and their hands were reaching for you—

"Sister!"

Something touched your arm. A hand. An enemy's hand. You didn't think. Your body thought for you, the way it had been trained to think in the space between falling and dying, and your arm swung hard and connected with something soft, something that cried out in a voice that wasn't a soldier's voice, wasn't Quaritch's voice, was—

Kiri.

The world snapped back.

Kiri was on the floor of the tent, half-caught against the support pole, her hand pressed to the left side of her face. The clay dish had overturned. Bioluminescent sap pooled across the woven floor, glowing faintly blue-green, and in the dim light it looked like blood. It looked exactly like blood.

You stared at your hand. Your fingers were still curled into a fist.

Kiri looked up at you, and — and she wasn't angry. She wasn't afraid. Her eyes were wide and glistening and full of something that looked like understanding, like she'd already forgiven you before the bruise even formed, and you wanted to scream at her to stop, stop looking at you like that, stop being kind when you'd just—

"I'm—" Your voice cracked. Broke. Died in your throat like everything else you tried to hold onto. "Kiri, I didn't — I wasn't—"

"It's okay," Kiri whispered, and her voice was the gentlest thing in the world, and it destroyed you.

The tent flap ripped open.

Dad.

His eyes swept the scene in the way they swept everything: tactically. Assessment first. Emotion after, if ever.

You watched him see Kiri on the ground. You watched him see her hand on her face. You watched him see the overturned dish and the spilled sap and you, sitting there with your hand still frozen in the air like a weapon.

He kissed his teeth, then went directly to Kiri.

Of course he went to Kiri.

He crouched beside her, one hand cradling the back of her head as he tilted her face to check the damage. His thumb brushed the edge of the mark that was already darkening on her cheekbone. He murmured something low, something you couldn't hear, and Kiri shook her head and started to say your name — started to explain, to defend you, because that's what Kiri did, she defended everyone, even the people who hurt her—

But your father's hand was already on her shoulder. Already guiding her up. Already turning her toward the exit with his body between the two of you like a shield.

Like a wall.

He didn’t spare a glance back.

If it wasn’t for that, him checking Kiri’s face with a tenderness that was alien to your relationship with him would have remained unaccounted for. The hand on her shoulder pushing her in front of him and removing her from your line of sight wouldn’t have registered. He did all that without a word. Without even a glance that might have told you he still recognized the girl on the mat as part of his world.

You understood, then. He was protecting Kiri from you.

Of course.

Because you were the danger now. You were the thing in the tent that needed to be moved away from, the unpredictable thing whose hands didn't know the difference between an enemy and a sister. He'd looked at you and seen — what? Not his daughter. A disgrace. A failure.

But that wasn’t fair to your father.

He hasn't actually turned his back on you, has never turned his back on you — has always turned his back on you, remember? — so you couldn’t pin that on him.

Except you could. Because the tent flap snapped back into place, and the silence he left behind was so complete it had a high thin ringing in your ears that might have been your heartbeat or might have been the last thread of something between you and him finally snapping clean. That was unacceptable wasn’t it, hitting your sister like that?

The bioluminescent sap on the floor was dimming. Fading, the way all light faded when you were near it.

You lowered your hand. Looked at your palm. The same hand that had once clutched the amber bead your father made for you, the one still tied to your wrist with a cord so old it was barely holding. You pressed that hand to your mouth and bit down on the inside of your wrist to keep the sound in, because you would not give him the satisfaction of hearing you, would not let anyone hear you, would not—

The tears came anyway.

I’m sorry, I’m sorry, Kiri, I’m so sorry.

You pressed your face into the woven fibers and breathed in the stale, dead air of the tent, and the sap's glow guttered out entirely, and in the darkness you were finally what your father saw when he looked at you.

Nothing worth turning back for.

The world was wrong, and you knew it was wrong, but knowing didn't help. Heat crawled through your skin like something alive, burrowing into your bones and settling there with a weight that made your limbs feel like stone. You were shaking, you could feel that much, shaking so hard your teeth clicked together, and somewhere beyond the trembling and the fire eating you from the inside out, there was a presence.

Jack.

You turned your head — or tried to. Your neck cracked and snapped, did a full twist even in your mind’s eye, and when you finally managed it, the marui walls dissolved like smoke and there he was. Fiery colors rippling in the half-light, those four luminous eyes fixed on you with the steady, unblinking attention that had made you love him from the very first moment he'd chosen you on that cliff face in the dark. His crest was folded low. That small, animal concern cracked something open in your chest.

"Hey," you whispered, it came out like something scraped across stone. "Hey, Jack, boy. 'S okay. I'm okay."

A sound came from him. Low, throaty, not quite a chirp. You'd know that sound anywhere. That was his sound, the one he saved only for you, the one no other living thing on Eywa’eveng had ever heard. You reached out, and your fingers found warm skin that almost matched your own feverish burn. You pressed your palm flat against him and felt a pulse beneath the surface.

"Knew you'd come," you mumbled, curling closer. The world tilted dangerously, the edges of everything smearing together like wet paint, but Jack was solid. Jack was real. You hooked your fingers into what you thought were the ridges along his flank and held on. "Knew you wouldn't leave me."

Something cool and damp pressed against your forehead, and you flinched. Jack's tongue? No — he'd never done that before. Ikrans weren’t known to lick people. But you decided it didn't matter. It felt good. It felt like someone was trying to pull the fire out of you, one careful press at a time.

You closed your eyes, and behind your lids the world reassembled itself into the floating mountains. Wind roared in your ears. The sky was violet-black, pricked with stars you'd memorized on the night you'd made the climb alone, the night everyone told you not to, the night your father had explicitly forbidden. You'd gone anyway, because that's what you did — you went anyway, always anyway, and the cost of it only ever became clear when you were already falling.

But you hadn't fallen that night. Jack had caught you.

You remembered the tsaheylu — the full-body shock of connection, how it felt like being seen for the first time in your life. Not the version of you that Dad, the obedient daughter, not the future warrior molded in his image. It was just you, raw and terrified and defiant and enough. Jack had looked into you and had been happy. Hadn't tried to fix you or control you or make you into something more palatable. He'd just opened his wings and said, yes, you, exactly as you are.

No one in your family had ever done that.

Well, Maybe Neteyam.

"I hurt her," you said suddenly, and the words tasted like bile. The floating mountains wavered, threatening to dissolve. You pressed harder against Jack, anchoring yourself. "I hurt Kiri. My sister. And she was just trying to—"

The cool pressure returned to your forehead, and you leaned into it, chasing the relief.

"Not like — when we fight," you whispered. "You know… You know how you fight with your siblings? Do you even have siblings? You’ve got to… tell me sometime.”

The sound that came from beside you was sharp, almost human in its distress. A wounded, clipped noise that was too high in the register. But you were beyond questioning it.

"I'm always hurting people." Your fingers tightened on the warm body beside you. Did ikrans have skin this soft before? You couldn't tell anymore. "Everyone I love, I just — ruin it. I ruin everything... My parents... so tired of me. My younger siblings... shouldn’t have to be… Afraid."

You stopped. Swallowed something that might have been a sob.

"My older brother too. He probably hates me. I'd hate me. I do hate me. I probably did something to him. It’s better that he doesn’t visit."

Something wrapped around you then — tight, encompassing, pulling you against that broad warmth until your cheek was pressed to a surface that thrummed with life. A wing, folded protectively around your shaking body. That's what it had to be. Jack's wing. Safe. You were hidden from everything that wanted to destroy you.

But wings didn't have fingers. Three?

Eh, who cared.

"‘m happy you’re here," you told Jack, and your voice had gone small, younger than your years, stripped of every layer of defiance and fury that you wore like armor. "When we flew together… that was the only time… I felt like I was… like I wasn’t just… a problem, you know? Just something… someone had to fix. Wanna fly again with you…"

A sniffle.

The fever crested, and the world went white at the edges. You felt yourself being gathered — lifted or shifted, you couldn't tell — and the warmth rearranged itself around you until you were indeed flying again, whooping and hollering into the endless night.

You hurt Tuk as well, eventually.

Three days later. Maybe four. It was getting harder to keep track. When you were awake and not hallucinating about riding the floating mountains on an ikran that didn't want to kill you, you were doing exercises to get your limbs working. As much as you could anyway, from where you laid down. Max and Norm had a whole program planned for you, but that was for when you were able to sit up properly and move from the bed. Which wasn't now. Even though it should be. You should be healed by now. But apparently bullet wounds took a while to recover from. Especially ones to the abdomen.

So. Exercises. In the morning and afternoon. Lift a leg. Bend a knee. Roll a foot. Stretch an arm. Clench a fist. Open a hand. Over and over and over. Until the effort left you gasping and drenched in sweat. Then sleep. Then wake up. Preferably not get humiliated. And start the cycle all over again.

Tuk had a habit of crawling onto the mat beside you and curling her tail and feet close to her small frame so she could watch, and at times, aid by body doubling the movements. She was in a phase where she liked to mirror others. If she was in the cooking area of the camp she'd pretend to stir and chop and knead at her height. Or if she was out gathering plants or hunting smaller prey she'd mimic her mother's stance and her father's or brothers' grip on their weapons. Lo'ak was more prone to playing along with her games and exaggerating his expressions or poses. So was Spider. Sometimes the two of them would wrestle or have an intense debate in either language or in both languages and Tuk would stand on the sidelines and imitate their mannerisms or their facial and bodily cues.

Neteyam had a little chat with the boys a few months ago about the inappropriateness of their subject matters for a young child's ears. Since that day the three of them had a new game. Whisper. It involved the boys cupping their mouths and speaking to each other in hushed tones and exaggeratedly tiptoeing and sneaking around while Tuk would giggle and cover her mouth to hide her grin and sneak and tip toe and mock-whisper with the. . .

Yeah, so easy to reminisce about Tuk now, after hurting her so badly.

You'd snapped at her.

She was sitting on the far corner of the mat and stretching her arm out like yours. She kept asking questions about why you were doing these stupid things. What they were for. When you would be better. If you could dance soon. Would you teach her that song. Where was the ikran you brought back. Would he be okay. Why didn't dad and mom let her go see him. Would she have an ikran one day. Would she look silly flying. Could you take her on yours when you were better. When would you be better. How long until. . .

It wasn't her fault. You'd never tell her that. It wasn't. She didn't deserve to have a pillow thrown at her or to hear her sister snarling that, “There is no better! There is no better, ever again! This is it! Don’t be stupid, Tuk, how can you act this oblivious? Do you think you’re helping? You’re not! You’re just being annoying! Just leave! Don't show your face to me ever again if that's all you are going to talk about!”

Tuk had stood frozen in shock, her tail lashing behind her, and her eyes were wide and shining. Her lips were parted in an attempt to form some sort of reply, and you hated the look on her face. You'd never yelled at her before. Never. Not in that tone. Not with that amount of vitriol.

Oh, the way she had wailed when she ran off. The way the tears broke from her eyes. Neteyam had tried to intercept her in the commotion. To hold her. But she was a tiny ball of fury and shoved him away and raced out of the tent. Your eldest brother had looked from the entrance flap to you and had walked towards the mat. He'd knelt and placed his hands on his thighs and looked at you. You'd turned your head and hid in the shadows. You didn't want to face him. Didn't want to see the expression in his gaze. The judgment and the disappointment and the condemnation that would have mirrored your own feelings at the time. The shame. The disgust. The self loathing. It was best to ignore him. Ignore the problem. Bury it deep down. Pretend. That was the solution to all the issues in this family. Pretend and deny and dismiss and repress.

He'd sat there, though, and waited. For a long moment. Eventually you couldn't handle the silence and the weight of his stare, so you'd spoken in a flat, monotone voice, "Do not lecture me. Please."

"You hurt her."

"Yeah. I know."

"She is a child."

"Well observed."

"Do not do that again. She just wants to hang out with you like the usual, and doesn't understand what is happening to you. She is not being insensitive. She has not developed that level of empathy and social awareness yet. At her age her main concern is to play, and she doesn't have many friends to begin with, so--"

"I'm not in the mood for this, Neteyam."

"Neither am I. But you are not the center of the universe."

"Excuse me?"

"Your problems are not the most important thing here. Do you have any idea what's been happening out there? How many raids that have gone wrong after that night? And those dreamwalkers, Quaritch, how close they've been getting to the Tree of Souls? Mom and Dad are spread so thin. We're all stressed. All of us. But we don't take it out on the little kids."

"Look who's taking it out on who, now, big brother," you said softly, after observing his clenched jaw and the flaring of his nostrils.

You didn't have to say much else. The stone-wrought anger on Neteyam's face crumbled, the sharp lines softening back into the familiar planes of his own. The rigid set of his shoulders yielded, slumping beneath an unseen weight. His tail, moments ago a stiff whip of azure fury, now drooped, the feathery tip brushing against the dusty ground. He pushed himself to his feet in a single, weary movement. Sighed. His fingers found the tense cord of muscle at his nape, kneading it slowly before trailing up to fidget with the intricate beads braided around his neck.

"I'm sorry," he muttered and then exited the tent. You hadn't moved since. You stared at the spot where your eldest brother had disappeared and replayed his words in your mind.

You should have been the one to have apologized. He hadn't even been wrong in what he said.

So much had been going on, and all you were doing was moping and moaning and crying. Selfish. Useless. Good-for-nothing.

But at least you'd been good for getting Neteyam to lash out a little. Let him vent a little. Yeah. At least you were useful for something. . . right?

You waited for the marui to empty the way a hunter waits for the clearing to still.

The tent pole was two arm-lengths away. It rose from the woven floor mat to the curved ceiling like the trunk of a young sapling, and you'd been staring at it for hours, running calculations in your head, measuring the distance, the angle, the likelihood of success versus the cost of failure.

You were going to stand today. You had been doing your exercises. The pain was managable — You are the hunter, you’re in charge.

This wasn’t for anyone else. Not to prove anything to anyone watching, because nobody was watching, and that was the entire point. You just needed to know that you could.

You shifted first. Drew your good leg beneath you, bracing your palms flat against the floor. The movement sent a ripple of heat through your iinjury that bloomed outward like fire catching on dry brush, and you clamped your jaw shut so hard your teeth ached. Fine. Fine. You'd felt worse. You reached for the tent pole.

Your fingers closed around it, and you pulled. The muscles in your arms screamed from disuse. Your good leg pushed. A burst of pain in your middle. But — you were rising, the marui tilting around you as the world reoriented itself to vertical, and your chest swelled.

It was then your right leg buckled after you decided to try distributing your weight around.

One moment you had leaned on it a bit and the next you didn't, the knee folding sideways like a joint that had forgotten its purpose, and your hand slipped from the pole and you went down twisting. Hard. Your hip struck the floor first, then your shoulder, and the impact punched the air from your lungs in a sound you didn't recognize as your own — someplace between a grunt and a cry that you smothered against your forearm as white-hot pain detonated through your stomach and radiated in all directions, into your spine, your ribs, the space behind your eyes.

You lay there.

The floor was cool against your cheek. The woven mat smelled like root tea and healing salve and faintly of your mother's skin. You tried once to push yourself up. The rush of the moment had your heart galloping and arms shaking violently, so they gave out, and you ended up on your side with your numb leg stretched at an angle that would have been something to ugly laugh at if you could feel anything other than the crushing, stupid, furious shame of it.

So this was it. This was what you were now.

"Hey, I forgot my—"

Lo'ak stopped at the entrance. You could hear the exact moment his momentum died. You didn't look up. You couldn't look up. The silence between his aborted sentence and whatever came next lasted approximately seven hundred years.

"Hey, uh." A cautious step. "Do you want me to—"

"I can do it."

You tried to push yourself up again to prove it. Your arm trembled and held, barely, and you managed to get your torso off the floor before the pain flared again and you had to stop, propped on one elbow like some grotesque parody of ease.

Lo'ak hovered. You saw his feet, five, maybe six paces away, and the uncertain way they shifted, weight moving from left to right and back again. How wonderful. You wish that was you.

Then he retreated. Several more paces, until he was nearly at the entrance, as far from you as the marui would allow without leaving entirely.

The silence that followed was unbearable.

"So, uh," Lo'ak said, and there it was — the desperate attempt to fill the void, to make this something other than what it was. "You'll never guess what happened yesterday. Me and Spider were on border watch. Out at the old grove. And—" his tone brightened artificially,"—and the whole area's flooded from the rains. We're talking waist-deep in places. So we're stuck on this one hillock and Spidey's trying to balance on a fallen trunk. He's standing there, looking all proud of himself, and then bam!"

His hands clapped together, the sharp sound punctuating the story.

"The whole thing slides out from under him and dumps him right in the mud. And not a little splash. I mean a full-body submerge. Head to toe. Everything." He paused. "Then he tried to do an impression of Neteyam if he'd been the one to fall in. You know that voice he puts on? I bet he'd have been better if his mouth wasn't full of swamp."

You sighed.

Lo'ak's shadow on the wall lost all its animation, the wild gestures and the enthusiastic bounce, all of it died down.

"That's, uh." Lo'ak cleared his throat. "Spider's an idiot, obviously. We all know that." A weak laugh. "It's stupid. Nothing exciting about rolling around in the mud, anyways."

Fuck. You hadn't meant to make him feel bad, it was just, this position was so uncomfortable—

"I'll just, I'll just go," Lo'ak said. There was a rustle of movement. The entrance flap lifted. Then fell. You could picture his hand hovering above the fabric and hesitating. "I'm gonna go get someone."

"Yeah, okay," you mumbled. It was the best response you could manage.

You'd never imagined you would miss the thunder of your father's temper. Or being yelled at by him.

This calm... It should have tasted like victory, this quiet compliance. Your comfort, your prize.

But this wasn't even the Dad you knew from way, way before.

It felt as if he'd simply vacated the premises of himself.

No, not vacant — he was there, physically present. By your side, skirting the premises, he was there. But something essential had been hollowed out, a cavity where the man you knew should have been, and that emptiness radiated a distance that was meant to isolate you. When he spoke, the words felt polished. Rehearsed. As if he was reading a script to pass the time. To fulfill his role.

That’s why the anger and the shouting were welcome. At least his anger was authentic. At least in those moments, the man before you wasn't a stranger in your father's skin, but the unmistakable, difficult, genuine parent who had raised you.

He was adjusting the blanket again. Tucking it around your legs — your useless, treacherous legs that lay there like they belonged to someone else, like borrowed things you'd forgotten to return. So very gently. But he was Toruk Makto. Jake Sully's hands were built for gripping weapons and hauling children out of danger by the scruff, for flailing accusatory fists around as he scolded when the anger got too big for his body to hold. Those hands had dragged you out of rivers, caught you mid-fall from branches, once closed around your wrist so tight you'd hissed at him and he'd barked watch your mouth and you'd bared your teeth right back because that was the language you spoke, you and him, a language made of friction and flint.

Now those same hands smoothed fabric over your knees with a delicacy you didn't recognize. That wasn't his. That wasn't him. The tenderness was unfamiliar and unwanted. It wasn't his. It wasn't yours. You didn't want it.

"You need more water?" he asked. Soft. Careful. Even that was wrong.

"No."

He nodded. Set the water gourd down anyway, within reach, angled so you wouldn't have to stretch. Everything was within reach now. Everything was positioned and arranged and calculated so that you, in your diminished state, would never have to want for anything. Except the one thing you actually wanted, which was for your father to stop pretending. He asked permission now — can I move this, do you want me to, is this okay — when six weeks ago he would have just done it, barking orders and expecting compliance, and you would have complained and he would have said tough shit and you would have hated him for it and loved him for it in equal measure because at least, at least, you were still the kind of daughter worth ordering around.

You used to be able to push against him and feel something solid push back. Wall against wall. Immovable forces meeting. It hurt, always, the fighting — but it was real, and it was yours, and it meant you belonged to him in the way a river belongs to its banks: shaped by the collision.

Now there was nothing to collide with. Just open air where your father used to be.

"When are you going to punish me?"

The words left your mouth before you'd fully decided to say them, which was, if you were being honest, how most of your worst decisions started. Your tail curled tight against your thigh — the one part of your lower body that still obeyed you, though barely — and you kept your gaze fixed on your father's profile.

His brow creased, and he turned to look at you properly for the first time in what felt like days. "What?"

"Punish me," you repeated, slower, harder, tasting it like you were biting into something. "For that day. You haven't said anything about it."

The crease in his brow deepened. You could see him sorting through possibilities, trying to land on your meaning, and the fact that he had to try at all made something hot and furious curl behind your ribs.

"The Iknimaya, Dad. The night I ran." You let the words hang there, sharp-edged and deliberate. "The night I disobeyed a direct order and snuck out alone and got myself —" your voice hitched, just barely, but you powered through it, it was worth it if he was making you spell it out loud on purpose, "— and got myself shot. And captured. And led Quaritch straight to our family."

One of his ears gave a sharp, sudden twitch. A flicker of muscle gone as quickly as it appeared.

"You haven't said a single word about it," you pressed, and now your hands were clenched in the mat beneath you, knuckles aching. "Not one. You haven't yelled, you haven't grounded me, you haven't done the face or the voice or any of it. And I know you want to. I know you're holding it in."

His head had tilted to the side the longer you went on, like the slow canting of a tree in the instant before the axe meets its trunk. Those eyebrows of his were lowered as he stared at you, the intensity in there undiluted. You could hear his breathing in the silence, the steady, controlled rise and fall of his chest that had no business being that fucking calm.

"What are you waiting for, exactly?" You were picking up momentum now. The world was tunneling around the place where his gaze met yours, the two of you locked in, and the words poured out of your throat like water from a broken dam. "I don't understand. What are you getting from this? Because if you're hoping I'll break and apologize or whatever —"

"I'm not." That was a new voice. Low and flat. No edge to it, no blade, no bark. Not him.

"Well, good, because I'm not apologizing. If that's what you want, you can forget it. I won't." You were digging into the fibers of the woven floor mat. Pulling. "Because guess what? I'm not sorry. I'd do it all over again in a heartbeat. Yeah. Every stupid decision that brought us here. I'd do it a thousand times. So if that's your game, if that's what you're after, you can just —"

"What are you doing?"

Soft again. Gentle. A hand on a newborn's forehead. It wasn't a tone you'd heard from him since you were small. Tiny. Before the fighting and the fury. It was a sound from a time that didn't exist anymore. It had no right to come between you now.

"You must want to say it too," you continued, and you were aware, distantly, that you were baiting him, that you were casting line after line into water and praying for teeth. "You must want to say I told you so. You told me I wasn't ready. And look —" you gestured at your legs, at the blanket he'd tucked so carefully, and your voice cracked down the middle like green wood. "Why aren't you saying anything?"

He shook his head, and there was a heaviness to the motion that was different from his usual frustration as he stood up and turned his back to you, one hand coming up to keep rubbing at his face. You could see the tension in his shoulders. His tail was lashing behind him. He was angry. Good. This was good. This was familiar. Predictable. Expected. This was how things were supposed to be. He'd turn. Any moment. Open his mouth. Let the fury spill out. Tell you in that voice, that specific voice, that he knew better. Always. That you were a disappointment. A problem.

And maybe, this time, you wouldn't fight him on it. Maybe this time, you'd admit that yeah, he was right. Right every time. Right from the beginning. You weren't a warrior, and you never had been, and even if your legs healed tomorrow, you'd always be that little girl scrambling to catch up to everyone else. Nothing changed. You'd needed him to protect you then and you needed him to save you now and that would never change.

"I can't," he whispered.

"Huh?"

Then, he walked right out of the tent.

Walked out on you.

You were just a burden now, weren’t you? Couldn’t do anything.

Couldn’t do anything right.

This was some cosmic lesson in humility, wasn’t it? That Eywa hadn’t allowed you into her arms. That you were being shown your true face right now, and that was why she had sent you back. Or was it punishment? Maybe it was for your hubris, the sin of flying too high and thinking yourself equal to your brothers.

Maybe it was disobeying Toruk Makto. Was that truly why? Were you realy dead on, provocation or not? Was Eywa angry with you for going against her favorite child?

Mom would have said, That’s not who Eywa is.

Then why? Why? What was the reason for being made to come back this way and keep hurting people? This was no blessing!

You started fantasizing about the old stories, where the sick would wander away into the forest and never come back, their bodies joining the roots and their spirits returning to the great cycle.

But you were too cowardly for that.

You knew where that path ended: a predator would find you, or your body would rot in the mud, and someone from the clan would have to risk themselves just to drag your bones back home. It was selfish. It was weak. But the thought of being found like that, of making things even harder for everyone, was. . .

Then you were back to hating yourself most of all for not being able to just die, for clinging to life with animal desperation, even as you told yourself it would be better for everyone if you just slipped away. It was sick. It was sick how you still wanted to breathe, still wanted to eat, still wanted to sit by the fire and listen to Tuk’s stories, even as you begged Eywa every night to please, please let you go in your sleep so no one has to suffer anymore.

The self-disgust was its own kind of fever. You’d watch your hands shake, hear your voice warble and break, and feel so utterly foreign in your own skin. The dreams kept getting worse: you kept falling and falling, but always there was a moment at the end where you’d hit the ground and shatter, and when you tried to scream for help, nothing came out but the laugh of the wind — of Quaritch and his men. The ground would open up, the roots would pull you down, and the last thought before waking was always a relief — Thank you. Thank you, Eywa, for finally letting me go.

Except Eywa never let you go.

You’d wake to the same ache, the same faces, and the same suffocating sense of having been resurrected for the sole purpose of making everyone around you miserable.

The wind at this altitude chewed at the exposed skin of Lo’ak’s arms and rattled his braids like dry bones, a constant, low-level irritation that matched the itch under his skin, screaming through the hollows of the floating mountains with a mournful, hollow wail that had become the soundtrack to their exile — a never-ending song dedicated to how they were far from the shelter of the forest floor, living exposed in the throat of the sky.

He was currently dangling by three fingers from a limestone overhang, his feet scrabbling for purchase on the wet, rock face of the floating island’s underside. Below him was a drop into the white void of clouds that would turn a Na’vi into paste. Above him was High Camp, and safety, and his father’s suffocating rules about “perimeters” and “keeping a low profile.”

But right in front of him, sprouting stubbornly from a fissure in the rock where no life should be, was a solitary, twisted vine loaded with blue moon fruit.

“Bro, you are actually going to die,” Spider’s voice drifted down from the ledge above, tinny through the exopack but heavy with genuine anxiety. “And then Jake is going to kill me for letting you die. Seriously, dude, come back up already! It's not worth it!”

“Shut up, Spider!” Lo’ak grunted, swinging his weight to the left, testing a flake of stone that crumbled under his touch. He cursed, digging his nails deeper into the crevice, ignoring the way the sharp stone tore at his skin and the burning strain in his shoulder. “I almost got it.”

“It's just fruit! We have rations! Nobody is starving!”

“She hates the rations! Ate two bites of that gray slop yesterday and threw it up. Mom looked like she was going to cry. We can keep living on that shit until Dad figures out when to raise the hunting ban, but she can’t.”

He lunged. His fingers closed around the thick, fuzzy skin of the largest fruit swollen with juice. With a grunt of exertion, Lo'ak snapped the stem and shoved the prize into his woven pouch. He grabbed two more, smaller ones, before his grip on the rock face slipped.

For a heartbeat, gravity won. He dropped, stomach lurching into his throat.

“Lo'ak!”

His tail whipped out, slamming against the rock for balance, and his hand caught a thick root protruding from the cliff. He hauled himself up, muscles burning, breath sawing in his chest, until he flopped over the ledge onto the flat stone where Spider was waiting, pale beneath his mask.

Lo'ak rolled onto his back, panting, staring up at the belly of the floating mountain above them with a grin on his face. He clutched the pouch to his chest like it was a bag of unrefined unobtanium.

“You're a dumbass,” Spider said, though he was already offering a hand to pull him up.

“Yeah, well.” Lo'ak took the hand and hoisted himself up, dusting the rock dust off his loincloth. He peeked inside the pouch. The fruits were unbruised. Perfect. “I may be dumb of ass, but I also am bad of it.”

“Great. Now we just have to sneak back without Neteyam seeing us.”

“He’s busy patrolling the north ridge. He won’t even—”

“Lo’ak.”

Yeah, there it is. The ‘He’s right behind me, isn’t he?’ moment.

Lo’ak didn’t react, mostly because his soul had already left his body. He squeezed his eyes shut for a second, let out a long, defeated sigh, and turned around.

Neteyam was standing on the upper pathway, arms crossed, looking down at them with that specific expression that was fifty percent 'I am the future olo'eyktan' and fifty percent 'I am going to strangle my little brother'. It wasn’t at maximum strength, though. The gold in his eyes was dull, and his posture, usually perfect, slumped.

“Below the perimeter?” Neteyam asked. “Really?”

“I didn't go to the ground,” Lo'ak defended quickly, holding up his hands in surrender. “Technically, I was still on the mountain. Under-part still counts as High Camp territory, right?”

“Ah, yes, because ditching Kiri and defending technicalities are always signs that you’ve done nothing wrong.” Neteyam dropped down to their level, his braids flying everywhere. His gaze landed heavily on the pouch clutched protectively against Lo’ak’s side. “What were you after this time?”

Lo'ak hesitated, his grip tightening on the woven fabric. He felt stupid and childish suddenly. It was such a small thing, risking his neck for a snack, especially when their sister was lying in a tent unable to feel her legs, dealing with problems far bigger than hunger.

But he opened the pouch anyway, revealing his prize.

The blue skin of the blue moon fruit seemed obscenely bright against the gray rocks all around. It looked like something from their old life, a piece of a memory where they were all happy and whole.

Neteyam stared at it. His ears twitched, lowering slightly, the lecture dying on his tongue. He blinked, the mask of the responsible, perfect boy slipping for a fraction of a second.

“It's the sweet kind,” Lo'ak mumbled at the first sign of a positive reaction. “Not the sour ones that grow near the vents. She... remember when she fell out of the Hometree when we were kids? And she scraped her whole side? Mom gave her these. It was the only thing that stopped her crying.”

He looked up, challenging Neteyam to mock him. “And I mean... We haven’t had these in forever. If she tastes something good, maybe she'll remember there's good stuff out here. And Mom too. She’s so sad lately. Said something like they used to only ever get these on their date nights with Dad, since they would be flying around here and everything. I dunno...”

Spider shifted awkwardly. “I told him it was dangerous.”

“Yeah, I know. In challenge, probably,” Neteyam pointed out without looking at the human, though there was no real heat in it. He kept his eyes on Lo'ak. The hardness in his face fractured, revealing the same helpless, gnawing grief that had been eating at all of them for weeks. Lo’ak perked up at the sight, though it was because of the words swelling up in his chest that were piling up there ever since his brother had begun to become distant as much as you had been — only, his was in silences where you were loud.

Neteyam reached out. For a second, Lo'ak thought he was going to confiscate them, to cite some protocol about unauthorized foraging. Instead, Neteyam gently adjusted the strap of the pouch on Lo'ak’s shoulder, brushing off a stray piece of twig with a touch that was surprisingly tender.

“Wash them first,” Neteyam said quietly, then knocked on Lo’ak’s temple with the back of his knuckles, which the latter pushed away. “Make sure you get all the grit off.”

Lo'ak blinked, surprised by the conspiracy. “You're not gonna tell Dad?”

“Dad has enough on his mind. He doesn't need to know his sons are idiots.” Neteyam turned away, looking out over the clouds towards the distant horizon where their home used to be. “Don't mess it up, baby brother. It’s fool proof.”

“I'm not a baby,” Lo'ak muttered, but the tension had bled out of his shoulders. “You not coming?”

“No,” he said. “Got stuff to do.”

“What, like more hiding?”

“Lo’ak.”

“Nah, I get you. She’s worse than an ikran. You just haven’t seen it in action because you don’t come around often.”

“Lo’ak.”

“Okay, okay… Here.” He took one blue moon fruit from the pouch and threw it at Neteyam, who caught it perfectly. “For your troubles.”

“Get out of here, skxawng.”

The tent was empty. A rare, terrifying mercy.

Mom had gone to the rookery — Jack was apparently refusing to eat, screeching at anyone who came near, another broken thing you were responsible for. Dad was in a strategy meeting with the olo’eyktan of the Anurai clan who had flown in. The siblings were scattered.

For the first time in weeks and weeks, the “watch” had dropped.

You lay on your mat, listening to the wind rattle the supports of High Camp. Your leg throbbed with that weird, phantom electric buzzing that felt like fire ants crawling under your skin. It was a constant, screaming reminder: You are stuck. You get people stuck. You are stuck. You get people stuck

You turned your face to the far wall, where Dad’s crate rested in the corner like a fat, sulking animal. It was so incongruous, so absolutely out of place among the pantry of jars of herb paste and racks of bone tools and bundles of woven bandages, as if the brute rectangle of human tech had invaded the tent and squatted there, refusing to leave. It was stamped with RDA serial numbers, battered and gouged from a thousand drops, and on top of it sat a monitor humming blue-green, displaying running graphs and vital signs — yours, you assumed, though you’d stopped looking days ago. He regularly took out heavy guns out of it for cleaning and oiling as he took seat beside you while you rotted away.

You knew the combination. All his rules, all his paranoia about Lo’ak or Spider getting to the contents, but he’d never once considered you a risk.

The crate beckoned to you now. In your head, a small, dry voice made a calculation:

It would be easy. It would be so fucking easy.

You closed your eyes. In the dark behind your eyelids, you could see your family, whole and unbroken, the way you remembered them from the time before. Mom, humming at the cookfire, her eyes bright and fierce even when she was angry. Dad, strict but warm, always ready with a dumb joke, always able to fix anything — except this. Kiri, the only one who really understood silence, who could sit for hours weaving or reading without needing to fill the air with words. Tuktuk jumping around and dancing, wanting to be included in everything, nose always in everybody’s business. Even Lo’ak, ever the pest, whose laugh used to annoy you but now sounded like the only real thing left in a world gone hollow. Neteyam—

Just make it stop, that voice whispered in your head again. It sounded logical. You’re a liability. Dad can’t lead the clan if he’s worrying about carrying you. Mom is wasting her grief on you. You keep hurting your siblings. They can be happy again. You’re holding them back.

You rolled over onto your side, the movement setting a spike of pain through your stomach. You bit your lip, tasting blood, and dragged yourself inch by inch across the abrasive mat, weaving through the forest of empty bottles, bound herbs, spent bandages, and the bowl of untouched soup someone had left you. The distance was so little, but it felt like the longest crawl of your life.

When you reached the crate, you slumped against it, forehead pressed to the cold metal. For a second, you just stayed there, breathing, smelling the mix of old gun oil and the faint, ever-present scent of Dad. It soothed you. Was as though he was there to encourage you.

Click. Click. Thunk.

The lid opened. Inside was the usual collection: decades old avatar-fitted rifles, a couple of sidearms, a mess of grenades and ammo, neatly packed in foam. There was a zippered pouch of medical supplies, and a sheaf of hand-written notes tucked between the layers of gear. You ignored all of it. Your hand moved straight to the rifle, the biggest one. The newest. That avatar’s that you’d clung on for life.

It was heavier than you remembered, or maybe you were just weaker now. You dragged it out, dropping it across your lap. Your hands shook as you checked the chamber. Loaded. Dad had never once left a weapon unready, not even in exile, not even when everyone around him was supposed to be an ally.

Leaning your head back against the crate, you flicked the safety on and off. The click was louder than you expected, but the tent just swallowed it, the sound vanishing into the blue-white gloom of the flourescent lights scattered around the camp. Your vision blurred with the effort of simply existing. The only thing that felt real was the gun, its impossible solidity.

You sat there for a long time, maybe an hour, maybe only a minute. Time had lost meaning days ago, and chanted in your head: You’re the hunter, you’re in charge. You’re the hunter, you’re in charge. You’re the hunter, you’re in charge.

Every fight you’d had with Dad about “the greater good” came back through his voice in your head, then. About the numbers. About what it meant to make a sacrifice. You’d always thought it was bullshit, a way of making hard things sound noble. But now, staring at the ceiling of the tent, it seemed so simple, so clean.

For one final push of strength, you looked around the tent. Your eyes lingered on the little piles of stuff that had accumulated: Kiri’s carved bone animals, a half-eaten packet of fruit paste Lo’ak had left, the woven bracelet around your wrist Tuk had made for you out of shed feathers and fronds. . .

You reached for the bracelet, pulled it free and looked at it for a moment, the blue and yellow beads pressed together in a pattern that only made sense to a child. You gripped it, tight, until your knuckles ached. Propped the butt of the rifle on the ground between your legs, lifted the barrel, and pressed the cold circle of metal against the underside of your chin, tilting your head back — a thumb on the trigger.

The tent flap swished open.

You didn't have time to hide it. You froze, eyes locking with the intruder.

Lo’ak.

He stopped dead in his tracks, holding a bowl of fruit. His eyes went from your face, to the gun, and back to your face. The bowl dropped from his hands, the contents clattering loudly across the floor.

“What are you doing?”

His voice was so small. It was of the little brother who used to hide behind you when Dad was angry.

“Get out,” you whispered, trembling. “Lo’ak, get out. Go away.”

“Put it down,” he said, stepping forward, hands raising slowly. “Bro, put it down. Are you crazy? Put it down!”

“Just go away please!” you snapped, the sob ripping out of your throat. “I can’t do this anymore, okay? Just give me this!”

“No!” He lunged, threw himself at you, grabbing your wrist with both hands.

“Let go!” you screamed, thrashing against him. You were weak, so weak, but desperation gave you strength. “Let go!”

“You fucking idiot! Stop it! Stop it!” He was crying now, wrestling your arm down, his weight pinning your bad leg, sending spikes of pain through you that made you see white. “I'm not letting you! Give it to me!”

“I hate it! I hate this!”

“Give! It! To! Me!”

He twisted your wrist. Your finger slipped.

BANGBANGBANGBANG!

You'd never heard anything so loud. The rapid thunderclap report of the rifle blind-sided you, popped your ears, even. The recoil snapped both of you back, and for a split second, you tasted blood and cordite and the inside of your own mouth. The bullets ripped through the tent wall, tearing neat, round holes in the woven fabric. Somewhere, impossibly far away, you registered the sound of glass shattering, metal clanging, maybe even a distant scream.

Silence. Ringing, high-pitched silence.

You both froze, panting, tangled together on the floor, panting, staring at each other, pupils blown wide. He wrenched the rifle from your limp hold and scrambled back, holding it away from you like it was a viper.

Then came the shouting.

“Clear! Clear the perimeter!”

The tent flap was ripped open so hard it nearly tore off its hinges.

Jake Sully filled the doorway, all muscle and death, a lightning bolt of intent. He had his own rifle at the ready (of course, always ready), eyes scanning for threats before his brain even had a chance to register what he was seeing. His chest moved in deep, rapid heaves, the corded arteries at his neck bulging with the effort of not killing something right then and there. Behind him, Mom ghosted in — bow strung, arrow nocked, her expression already halfway to a scream.

Dad’s flat gaze traced the room in a practiced sweep: the jagged round holes punched through the tent wall, the fresh burn scars left by bullet ricochet, the smoking rifle in Lo’ak’s clutch. Your own body, twisted on the floor, clutching a handful of braided child’s bracelet in one hand, the other forming a claw around your thigh as if you could physically squeeze the pain away.

The gun never left his shoulder, but there was a moment — a single twitch of his jaw and a narrowing of his eyes — where Marine gave way to Father, and the temperature in the tent dropped to absolute zero. He let out a sound, a low, guttural snarl like the opening note of a Thanator’s hunting song.

“What,” he said, and it was not even a question, it was a death sentence, “in the ever loving hell do you two think you’re doing?”

You opened your mouth. You wanted to say, It was me. I wanted—

“I...” Lo’ak’s voice wavered. He looked at you. He looked back at Dad, swallowing hard. He gripped the gun tighter.

“I was messing around,” Lo’ak said.

Your head snapped up.

“I was showing it to her,” Lo'ak continued, his voice gaining a shaky, defiant strength. “I thought this was the dreamwalker’s. . . The one she brought back that day. I thought maybe seeing it would help her somehow, the nightmares. . . But it. . . it just went off, sir.”

Your dad’s face turned a color you had never seen before.

“You were playing,” he whispered, dangerous and soft, “with a loaded weapon? In the healing tent? With your hurt sister lying right there?”

“Yes, sir,” Lo’ak lied, staring at the floor. “I'm sorry, sir.”

“Lo'ak, no,” you croaked, reaching out. “Dad, he didn't—”

“Quiet!” Your father barked at you, making you flinch. He didn't even look at you; his fury was on his son. He yanked the rifle from Lo’ak’s hands, checked the chamber, flicked the safety, and slammed it into the crate so hard the whole tent rattled.

“Get up,” Dad ordered.

“Dad—”

“I said get up!” He grabbed Lo’ak by the wrist, and pulled him up so hard that he stumbled, then spun him toward the door. “You want to play soldier? Let’s go play soldier. Outside. Now.”

Mom moved to intercept, her arms reaching for Lo’ak, her lips already forming your brother’s name, but Dad blocked her with a single outstretched arm. “Not a word, Neytiri. Not. One.” The look she gave him could have cut metal, but she stood down.

Lo’ak glanced back at you, his eyes enormous and wet, the kind of look you remembered from when you used to treat his scraped knees in the old Hometree. You managed a tiny shake of your head. Don’t do this. But it was too late.

“Dad—” you tried again, but he was already halfway out the tent, dragging Lo’ak behind him like a sack of laundry.

The second their feet cleared the threshold, the storm broke. Dad’s voice, unleashed from the constraints of the sickbay, rose like a battle horn: “WHAT THE HELL IS WRONG WITH YOU? You have any idea what you just did in there? That weapon could have killed your sister. That weapon could have killed you!”

“Lo'ak!” you screamed, trying to drag yourself after them, but you stumbled, paralyzed leg a dead weight, anchoring you to the spot.

You collapsed on the floor, listening to Dad’s voice rising outside, shouting about discipline, about safety, about how stupid and reckless Lo’ak was. You heard Lo’ak taking it, mumbling “Yes sir, sorry sir,” over and over.

And even though Mom was outside as well, and there was nobody to stop you from re-opening that crate and just going for it, you couldn’t attempt it again after seeing the scattered blue moon fruits.