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leftingbadly · 3 months

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Chapter 3: Fwäkì ke Fwefwi

Diana Quinn was an English professor back on her dying earth before she became the English teacher to a native people called Na'vi on the moon Pandora. After a shockingly horrific incident that caused the school to shut down, a newbie marine by the name of Jake Sully presents her another opportunity to reconnect with The People.

Pairing: Tsu'tey x OFC

Rating: PG13

Themes: Enemies to Lovers, Friends to Lovers

Other Tags: Fluff, Angst, Slow Burn, Betrayal, Revenge

Chapter 2: Reconnection with Ommaticaya

He looked at her through the foliage of her mind, the edges were dull and a haze possessed what clarity was known to her, and through that darkness eyes stared back at her. Wide, green eyes, slanted upward- as were the rest of his features. Angular and daring in all the ways a predator would be, she felt her heart shudder for it was not a predator’s gaze that looked towards her- but a friend’s. The look of a friend betrayed and forsaken into the hollow parts of the world, where the firefly lights and moon beams could not reach, a darkness settled- then a hiss and a sneer and a warmth was snatched from her as bullets pounded through the air once again.

Diana awoke with a gasp; sweat clung to her body the way she clung to her chest with a tattooed hand, desperate and scavenging, searching for a lost thing that had run away. She was used to dreams- she had had to get used to the dreams; though like a guest that had overstayed its welcome she lingered at the door of her mind, waiting, praying that this pain- this haunting would leave with a smile and never return to her again. But still it sat, still it festered and waited for her to leave the archway of the front door, still it waited for her to close that door and let it make home in her.

It was the first time in months Diana had dreamt of those betrayed eyes that stared down at her, the first time in months she found it hard to swallow for the lump in her throat had grown too heavy and thick to push down. And when it finally fell from her throat to her stomach she wished it had just stayed there, because that descent reminded her of the emptiness that had made home in her bones- the very marrow of it seeming to leak out from her, as if the essence of herself was betraying her. She knew, deep down she knew, that she wasn’t responsible for what had happened at that school, she knew also that she could not have done anything else-except make things worse-by going back to them after the shooting like Grace had tried to do.

But a regret festered in her heart as was the oh so inherent nature of humans, and it was in those many moments of regret when she held herself up in her room for days, neither speaking or hearing of another human or creature, that the festering of that regret thrived. It was the third week since Jake had reintroduced humans, in Na’vi form, to Hometree once again, and the first month of his three month expiration date. Diana wondered if that countdown ran through his mind at all as he leaped and bounded from the long roots of Hometree or rode on the back of the pa’li in the fields. She wondered what went through his mind at all because, she hoped, he could give her some clarity as well.

“It’s been four days,” A knock sounded on the door to her room, and Diana turned her head from the scrunched up blankets she had buried it in to see Grace standing in the archway, “It’s two in the afternoon,” the older woman reminded her gently, “Are you joining us today?”

Diana shut her eyes as she looked from the woman and buried her face into the blankets again, her head already being filled with the list of things she had to do due to putting it off for the past four days.

“I should,” She told Grace as she slowly sat up, keeping the thinner side of the blanket on top of her head to block out the blaring sight of the sun that cascaded through the open windows.

“It would help if you did something,” Grace agreed, “But not if you don’t feel up to it.”

“No, no,” Diana gave a deep, meaningful sigh as she put one heavy leg out of the bed after another, and then reached her hand out to Grace for help as she shut her eyes tightly and tried to combat the dizziness that was beginning to grow in her mind. In hindsight, shutting herself off from the only three people available to her for miles probably wasn’t the best idea she’d ever had. But she’d rather endure the hours of silence, in company with the machine hums, than face the headstrong irritability that would rear its ugly head when she would do, well, anything.

“What’s Jake been up to?” Diana heard herself ask as she settled at their small kitchen table and Grace warmed her up one of the refrigerated meals they had brought with them. Grace handed her a package wrapped in various layers of plastic and wrapping paper, the front and back both unlabelled with only a singular word on the side, QUINN.

“Linked in already,” Grace answered her question as she put both the package and meal down in front of her, but smacked her hands away when Diana first reached for the package, “Take a bite first. And drink this,” She placed a strong smelling liquid in front of Diana, to which the younger girl scrunched up her nose and stared in disgust. Grace only stared back, challenging the younger woman not to drink the protein shake.

“Damn woman,” Diana relented as she took a large gulp, “Looks deadly enough to make a palulukan run.” She muttered as she pushed the package to Grace, telling her to open it as she continued to eat her premade meal.

“It’s a note from Quaritch and… oh shit,” Grace threw out the contents of the table, spilling it in front of Diana to see. When she turned her head and rifled through the pictures she saw it was more of the same pictures she had seen earlier that week, writings and drawings of the same colour and texture she had seen from the two previous mining dumps, bolder and clearer than before. This time, however, in brilliant white sketched across one of the large walls of a basecamp, was her name.

Diana began choking on her food as she saw her name written, in perfect English, across the human settlement. She looked to Grace who was looking back at her with equal mortification, and then grabbed the note Quaritch had sent with it. There, scribbled in untidy handwriting in large bold letters were the words; fix this, or I will. Clear, concise and with no room for argument. Shit.

“Shit,” Grace voiced Diana’s own thoughts again, “Well that’s direct. If you didn’t think they were trying to get your attention before, we know it for sure now.” Grace massaged her left temple as she took a drag from her cigarette.

“You’ve got to get a handle on this, kid,” Grace suggested, “If it weren’t for you Quaritch might have already taken some of his damn ships and guns to the Tawkami Hometree already.”

“He won’t attack Tawkami, as selfish and egocentric as Selfridge is he won’t do more unnecessary damage, it’s the Omaticaya Hometree they want,” Diana rubbed the sides of her head, “But that’s not enough to stop him from attacking any of the clan members outside of Hometree and by the looks of it they’ve reached well outside of their territory already.”

“So what’s the plan?” Grace asked as she took another drag of her cigarette. Diana eyed the object between her friend’s fingers, having noticed their presence a lot more in the past few days than she had previously. The stress of integrating Jake into the Omaticaya clan and culture, on top of keeping Selfridge and Quaritch pleased wasn’t an easy task to do, she didn’t envy the doctor for her responsibilities as head of this programme; but she wasn’t going to let her shoulder the burdens alone either.

Diana patted Grace’s shoulder as she finished her food and told Norm to link her into her pod. It had been a week since her confrontation with Tsu’tey and her reintegration to the clan; it was finally time to get some real work done.

“And what are these?” Diana asked as she pointed to her ears resting higher on her head than where they rested on the human body. She looked between the concentrated faces of the young Na’vi children, each of them standing at 6ft tall and above at less than a decade and a half old. Diana hummed as she asked her question again, repeating the words slower so the children, who had not been practicing English for some time, could fully understand what it was she asking.

“A ear!” One of the children shouted loudly, proudly declaring their answer.

Diana laughed as she clapped her hands in celebration, praising the little girl for her correct answer, “Very good, very good Syanan!” Diana let out a breath as the girl giggled and ran into her, celebrating her victory over the dreaded English language as she whooped to her friends who, in turn, shouted back. “But,” Diana continued, which made the girl pause and stare down at her with the rest of the children, “It sounds funny, doesn’t it? Something is missing?” She hinted to the children and watched as they began thinking again.

Akwey, Syanan’s younger brother, raised his hand as he hollered for her attention, “I think your brother wants to help you, Syanan,” Diana goaded the girl gently as she helped her climb off her lap and rest again onto the ground with the other children, and then called on Akwey to answer.

“An!” He said proudly, puffing his chest as he gave the proper form of the words, “An ear!”

Diana found herself smiling brightly down at the boy, proud at how quickly he was catching on despite not having been allowed to attend the school like the other children. When Grace and Diana had opened the school a long ways away from Hometree, she remembers Syanan speaking of her youngest brother, and his passion of learning new and strange things, however he was never allowed to leave the safety of Hometree and was forbade by his parents. Diana found herself frowning at the memory, and remembered the cautious nature from many of the parents of the clan as they worried for the safety of their children due to arrival of humans. As she looked between their expectant faces, she wishes she could quell the worry of the older Na’vi, but that was not something she could promise.

“Is it… wrong?” Akwey’s question broke her from the depressive thought process she had somehow managed to spiral herself into and quickly shook her head as she told the boy he was correct and congratulated him as well. He responded to her with a large, gap-toothed smile. The young Na’vi boy hadn’t even grown into his canines yet, and Diana’s heart fluttered as he smiled up at her with those large eyes the Na’vi possessed and then began explaining the rule of definite and indefinite articles. Her attention was caught not a moment after she had finished by Jake, as he hollered for her while being pestered by another group of rowdy, older children. Diana nearly gasped as one of them pulled on his tail and nearly made him trip on himself, she tried to hide her laugh behind her hand as she stared at him, but he had already seen it.

“Yeah, yeah, laugh all you want you blue woman- these buggers haven’t left me alone since Neytiri went off somewhere and I can’t shake them!” He turned to her as he bent his head and his ears lowered, pleading with her, “I beg of you Diana, make them go away.” She pushed Jake away from her by his face, telling him to not get so close with that stupid look on.

“They’re just curious about you.” She told him as she waved in greeting to Grace’s half of the class, wondering where the other woman was and why she wasn’t taking better care of her kids. A small part of her wondered if she had intentionally stuck the children on Jake in revenge for him eating her food the previous night.

“About what?” Jake asked exasperated, “I’m about as blue as them aren’t I?”

Diana gasped as she hit Jake on the head, shocked at his somewhat rude remark, “They’re curious about you, you idiot, because you’re wearing the same clothes as them.” She motioned to the singular loin cloth he was wearing, then to them as they wore the same. At the tilt of Jake’s head in confusion, she rolled her eyes and explained, “In Na’vi culture clothes are less about coverage and more about status. The higher ranking you are the more clothes and accessories you adorn, your clothes tell your story, so-“

“So they’re following me because I’m a grown ass man dressed like a baby.” Jake finished as his shoulders slumped.

“Ass man!” Diana and Jake both gave each other wide-eyed stares as they looked from each other to Akwey, who had been listening in on their conversation unlike the rest of the children and smiled his broken smile at them.

“Akwey, don’t say ass!” Diana reprimanded him on the improper use of the curse word, gently telling him it wasn’t a word children should use. When he gave her a nonchalant shrug and rolled his eyes, much like the way she did with Jake, he left a gaping mouthed Diana and a laughing Jake alone as he went and played with the other kids.

“Takes after you, that one.” Jake snidely told Diana as he pushed her lower jaw up to help her close her mouth. She surreptitiously gave him the middle finger. Diana glared at his smirking face before both of their attention was caught by the thundering of hooves, and when they turned their head to the side they took note of Neytiri riding up to them on her pa’li, another one in hand attached to a leash. All of a sudden Diana burst into a snicker as she greeted Neytiri, then clapped Jake on the back hard once before muttering to him as she stared at the rider-less pa’li.

“And that one’s for you,” She laughed as he sneered at her with his fangs on display, and saluted him when Neytiri yelled at him to follow her. Making tsaheylu for the first time on the back of a pa’li was something she didn’t need to re-experiencing; wincing as she remembered the bruises she had gotten after multiple falls from the large horse-like creature. Tsu’tey hadn’t had the slightest sympathies for her as he had barked at her to continuously get back on and stop acting like a child. She found herself smiling fondly at the memory despite the pain that it had brought at the time and, as though he appears whenever thought about, made eye contact with the male in question as he looked up from his companion.

Diana tilted her head as she watched Tsu’tey speak with Mo’at at the base of the tree and began slowly walking up to the two high ranking clan members. But Tsu’tey, who was watching her as he continued to speak with Mo’at, noticed her coming and bowed his head to the Tsahik before dismissing himself just as the woman arrived. Her shoulders slumped when he didn’t so much as regard her approach and left the two of them alone.

“Oel ngati kameie, Tsahik,” Diana greeted the older woman with a slight bow of her head and the touch to her forehead. When she raised her gaze again, Diana noticed the woman stared at the place Tsu’tey had been and followed his trail as he left, then downward toward the woman who greeted her with a soft smile.

“He is not yet forgiven you,” The Tsahik spoke, stating the fact Diana was all too well aware of, “But he will, it has been foretold.” The spiritual leader rested her hand on Diana’s shoulder, gently trying to reassure the woman as she guided her towards the stairs hollowed out from the tree’s base.

“I don’t suppose it’s been foretold when exactly that will be?” Diana tried cheekily, trying to gouge a response from the woman that was lighter hearted before she tried to brave the questions that have been hanging over her since that morning. The woman only smiled and patted her on the shoulder, never giving her a reply as they walked around Hometree until they reached the very top of the large, ancient tree, giving them both a wide view of the area around them. From here Diana could see the pa’li grazing in the fields, the warriors training near the dummies as they practiced their archery and close combat skills but most of all, she saw Pandora as it stretched before her wide and clear.

She heard the ikran whistle and screech below them as they played and wrestled amongst each other. The older ones sat higher in the trees where the two women were now standing, not wanting to bother themselves with the worries of the youth and Diana watched as Mo’at walked closer to the thinning of the large branch they stood on and inspected one of the branches of the tree.

Diana lifted her head and stared up at the sky, the purple lightened sky that seemed to stare back at her, and watched as the brilliant and iridescent hues of Pandora’s planet stared back at her and despite her 10ft height within the Na’vi body, she felt utterly eclipsed in the shadow of the planet, and she wondered if there were any scholars among the Na’vi people who studied the planets and stars. She wondered if they knew about her own earth, and the moon that had belonged to her once, and the stars and constellations she would wish upon.

“You wish to ask me something child,” Mo’at spoke to her, “But you doubt if you should bring this to my knowledge.” Diana would have been astounded at the woman’s intuition, but she knew it was not intuition that guided her words but whispers. The whispers all Tsahik of each clan hear, spoken to them by Eywa herself as she commands the flow of the forests and streams and the very air that surrounded them.

“I…” Diana didn’t know where to start or how to start or whether she should begin at all, so she spoke from the end, “Why is it that the will of life is etched in stone and not oceans?”

She watched as the Tsahik’s lips lifted slightly, never regarding Diana directly but focusing intently on the leaves of the tree and the way it was caressed by the wind. Diana continued, “Why is it that… that despite the most honest intentions the,” Diana grit her teeth, “will of life deems them not enough? Why does it have to be as hard and cold as stone and not as accepting as the seas?”

“Are the seas so accepting?” Mo’at asked in reply, “Do the depths not frighten you, girl?”

“I am not frightened by what I do not understand.”

“Then perhaps it is more of the world that you should try to understand.”

Diana shook her head against the woman’s words, “It is the world that is not trying to understand me.” She shut her eyes against the words she spoke, berating her own words for how childish they sound coming from a grown woman’s mouth.

“There is no understanding,” Mo’at walked towards her, placing her hand on the woman’s chest, “Here,” and then to her mind, “and here.”

Diana tilted her head to the woman, a pained glance in her eyes as she understood what Mo’at was telling her- but she could not reach the Tsahik in a way that mattered, she could not know what it was like to understand the world the way the Na’vi do. Not in her human body, and not in the body that was created in a lab, “Tsahik,” She whimpered as she gripped the woman’s hand on her head, “Fwäkì ke fwefwi.” A truth that was not hers to keep in her heart, although pained to admit, although ashamed to claim to her, she spoke the words in the tongue that was not hers, to the member of a people she would betray, “I am not strong enough.”

“Tsu’tey has taught you well,” the woman nodded as she approved of Diana’s words.

“Words that do not desire to be hollow are never easy to articulate,” Diana whispered in her own tongue, “But it is words that escape me when,” She sighed as she remembered the reunion of her and her former teacher, then of the way she had frozen upon meeting Neytiri again. Despite her degree, despite all those long years of studying and learning and honing her speech and linguistic talents, words had escaped her.

“Perhaps it would aid your heart to reclaim a gift that was promised,” The Tsahik offered Diana once again, and the younger woman shot her eyes up from the downcast position they had settled in, not believing the words of the woman before her.

“I could not,” She whispered, “He would not accept me again. I… I am no warrior, Tsahik.”

“We will all be tested before the end, child,” Mo’at took her hands from Diana’s as she began to walk away, “Your destiny has already begun.”

“Your destiny has already begun?” Grace asked as she slammed the fridge door closed, putting the milk on the table in front of Jake and sitting across Diana. The woman being addressed shrugged as she took another spoonful of cereal into her mouth and grabbed the sugar from Jake before he could take a spoonful himself.

He held his hands up to her, as if asking what the hell her problem was, but only watched in disgust as she dished three tablespoons into her meal without a word, then addressed Grace again, “Those were the exact words, Grace. And I have no idea what the hell they mean.”

“Maybe it means you’re destined for greatness,” Jake mocked, “Or type-two diabetes.” He jabbed as he stole the sugar back from her and added it to his own meal. It earned him a punch in the arm from Diana, who winced in slight discomfort when all she hit was solid muscle, in which case Jake made a mocking face back to her at her reaction.

“Children, don’t fight at the table,” Grace reprimanded, “What did she say about the pictures and the Tawkami clan?”

Diana shook her head, “Nothing. The Omaticaya aren’t as advanced as the Tawkami when it comes to linguistics. In the sense that the latter is literally the only clan we’ve come to meet so far that have any sort of writing system and the Omaticaya focus on,” Diana threw her hands up in the air, “textiles!”

“Textiles?” Jake asked through a mouth of porridge, which Diana made a disgusted face at and Grace rolled her eyes as she explained.

“Decorative pieces, Jake. Some even make musical instruments. The point is the Omaticaya won’t be much help in figuring out what exactly the Tawkami want with Diana.”

“Okay, so why not just ask them?” Diana scoffed at Jake’s question, but shrunk back when Grace gave her a look of warning and raised her hands in defence.

“The Tawkami welcomed us once, the same way Omaticaya did. And then just like that,” Diana snapped her fingers in front of her face, “Without warning or prompt they turned violent against us, the RDA-though who could blame them- and started attacking every human-touched thing within sight.” Diana sighed as she massaged her temples, “It’s a wonder they’re even trying to communicate now after all this time.”

“Well whatever their reasons where,” Grace decided, “They’re trying to communicate but also keep us away from their Hometree, for now we’ll take what we can get.”

Chapter 4: Tell Tale Heart

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leftingbadly · 3 months

Text

Chapter 2: Reconnection With Ommaticaya

Pairing: Tsu'tey x OFC

Rating: PG13

Themes: Enemies to Lovers, Friends to Lovers

Other Tags: Fluff, Angst, Slow Burn, Betrayal, Revenge

Chapter 1: The Will of the World

The sun still slept on Pandora when Grace barged into the sleeping bunkers, blaring and loud as she clamoured for Norm and Jake to wake up from their deep sleep. The two men had barely been asleep for two hours before they were forced into packing and tidying up the place under Grace’s orders.

Diana herself had never been able to set her head down on her pillow since the night before. It had been two weeks since Jake had made a reconnection with the Omaticaya and a week since Grace herself had been allowed back into Hometree. Diana hadn’t been back yet; she was still too busy trying to decipher the coded messages of the Tawkami clan.

Since the first one had been carved into the mountain side of the mining dump near Highcrags another had been painted onto the many bulldozers that littered the second mining sight at the base of the mountains. The characters were different, but the same image of the flower appeared on both writings.

She looked up from her papers as Norm came back into the bunkers twenty minutes later, “Where are we going?” She heard herself ask him, and she nearly flinched at Norm’s overly enthusiastic reply.

“The Hallelujah Mountains!” He proclaimed as he lifted his arms into the air.

Diana raised her eyebrows at the exclamation, turning to Grace as she entered the bunker as well with a pack already strapped onto her shoulders.

Diana had informed Grace about what she witnessed between Jake and the Colonel, and the two of them decided not to act on anything until they knew what the two of them were really plotting together. It wasn’t until another one of Grace’s assistants told her about the meeting they had in the Operations Systems room where Jake had informed Quaritch about the exact layout of Hometree did Grace finally make a decision.

“We’re going to be running out of the camp at the Hallelujah Mountains,” She told Diana, “So pack up whatever you’re going to need for you and your avatar.”

“My avatar?” Diana questioned, she hadn’t been linked to her avatar in months, not since the incident with the school. She had no need to be and there was no particular rush to get back into the body that only reminded her of the massacre of children.

“The kids have been asking for you.” Diana found herself chewing on her lip as she considered Grace’s words and her mind was occupied with the images of her avatar and the wilds of Pandora. She wasn’t sure she was ready to go back into that world yet, or if she would ever truly recover from what happened the last time she was there, but she packed a bag anyway and followed Grace out to Trudy where she waited for them.

“Does Colonel know you’re the one hauling our asses out of here?” Diana laughed in greeting as she embraced Trudy in a tight hug.

“Even if he did, you think that’d stop me?” The shorter girl smiled as she chewed on her gum and hopped into the Sampson, flipping switches and turning on levers as she readied to take them through the Flux Vortex and to their campsite at the revered Hallelujah Mountains.

“Is that right?” A new male voice spoke up from behind them and Diana and Trudy turned around to see the smug face of Lyle Wainfleet standing behind them, “Well I’m make sure to tell the Colonel you said that, pilot.”

Diana seethed at the large man, eyeing him down despite the short difference in their height. Diana was a tall woman and despite her linguistic profession had a capably strong body to withstand the vast amounts of exercise and physical fitness the avatar programme had put her through, given these facts, she was more than certain she could land a few good punches on Wainfleet before he managed to take her down.

She would not mind the defeat though, not if she could finally knock that smug smirk off of his bald face.

“Yeah?” Diana challenged.

“Yeah, and while I’m at it why don’t I tell him that you’re back on this blue lizard bullshit when,” Weinfleet tapped his chin, “I’m pretty sure I heard him say there wasn’t any more use for you, seeing as the hippy freaks didn’t want any of you near them.”

Those words really had Diana’s gears locked and ready to throw a punch to his face, but she settled for her words instead, “Well all that hair must have been blocking your ears,” It was a cheap shot, she knew that, but she was frustrated beyond belief with the man’s ignorance, “Because what the Colonel was implying was that I’d be out of a job if the avatar programme was no longer in need of their English teacher and, what do you know, a need just arose with our good friend Jake here who re-established communication, so why don’t you go ahead and play good dog to your master and tell Colonel Quaritch that some of us are actually doing their jobs.”

She turned around and left the sneering man as she heaved herself up onto the Sampson. “You alright there, Prof?” Trudy asked from the pilot seat as she began flipping through various switches.

“If I see him again I think I might just kill him.” Diana admitted truthfully, eyeing the slowly diminishing figure of Lyle Wainfleet as the Sampson ascended into the sky.

“So you decided to come back?” Grace asked her as she buckled herself into the seat.

“One thing at a time, Grace.”

Once they had managed to secure the containers that held a few linking pods and setting it up in the campsite far into the mountains, Jake was the first one to link up and begin another day of training for his iknimaya. It was a tradition amongst the blooming warriors of the Omaticaya clan that they have graciously allowed him to participate in.

Grace was the second one to link up into her avatar later in the day with, after much deliberation and coercion from her partner, a hesitant Diana.

She awoke in her avatar body moments after she had settled into the pod, and all at once her senses were overloaded with sights and sounds the body of a Na’vi allowed her to access. The colours of the world were far more vibrant than what her human eyes allowed her to see. She remembered seeing samples of what the Na’vi eyes were capable of seeing through one of the many testing projects the RDA commenced, but even with her human eyes the overwhelming sights had caused her to get a headache.

In the body of her avatar however, everything from the sounds and smells even to their fullest potential, felt correct. As if everything existed in the world with a purpose she wasn’t able to see in her human body. And that was before she even exited the container that housed her body. Once she was outside of the enclosure everything crashed into her ten- no, a hundredfold.

Diana found herself speeding through the forest on her bare feet, the hardened skin beneath them from playing games with the children still rested there and allowed her to move freely on the branches and beneath leaves. And even the memories of the jungles of Pandora still remained in her mind as though she ran on auto-pilot, remembering the way through trees, foliage and streams as her many journeys with both Omaticaya and Tawkami had led her deep into the jungles of Pandora.

When she reached the Omaticaya Hometree she was breathless and winded and holding enough anxiety to last a lifetime. Grace met her on the border with some of the children from the school and they rushed to meet her as soon as they saw her. Some squealing in glee as they stood beside Grace while others down right attacked her in excitement.

“Tsmuke!” They called out to her; sister. And Diana had never felt her heart as full as they made their way towards the base of Hometree to pay her respects to the elders and, above all, ask for permission to teach once again.

Neytiri was the first to see her, and Diana noticed her the second she did. Her body was taller than Diana remembered, leaner and more defined by the muscles she used as she climbed down the tree roots towards them, Jake following her closely behind. Something about her had changed, Diana thought to herself, the air around her was different to the child she had known during those teaching days at the school.

Her footsteps were still as light as air and her braids flowed off from her shoulder as she manoeuvred through the bodies of the other Na’vi to reach her. And once she did, the two of them stared at each other as they regarded the other, turning their heads and swishing their eyes from each other’s features.

“Oel ngati kameie,” Neytiri whispered as she held onto Diana’s shoulder, “Oel ngati kameie, tsmuke.”

Diana choked a sob as she laughed at the nickname, “I see you,” she declared as she gripped Neytiri’s shoulder as well and watched as her eyes fell over her own face, down to her neck and then to the large scar wounds on her lower abdomen. Diana winced as Neytiri’s fingers grazed over the healed bullet wounds.

“It is not healed,” Neytiri said as she never looked up from the marks on Diana’s avatar body.

“This wound is deeper than flesh,” Diana admitted ruefully as she shook her head to Neytiri in dismissal of the concern in her eyes, hoping she could understand the regret she felt.

“Ngaytxoa,” Diana whispered hotly, trying to force the words out of her throat despite the tightness that slowly began to grow there. The barbed wire in her throat was not for idle words to know, and even the English apology could not reach the sorrow that was felt. Diana wouldn’t dare insult Neytiri or her parents for apologising for the death of Sylwanin in the language of the monsters that murdered her.

Neytiri shook her head profusely through Diana’s unending apologies, shaking the woman by her shoulders when her own words failed to aid her. She wanted to say, it is not your fault. She wanted to say, you saved my life, I am indebted to you; you are one of The People. But she did not know the words in English, and so she hugged the woman to her body and held her tightly.

Mo’at approached them next and Neytiri moved aside to allow her mother to stand in the position. The Omaticaya Tsahik regarded Diana for a shorter time than her daughter did, having insight from Eywa herself as she saw things many others did not. She circled the woman, and Diana’s eyes lifted to the two other approaching figures ahead of them, it was the Olo’eyktan himself Eytukan and beside him on his guard the fiercest warrior of the clan; Tsu’tey.

Diana held his gaze for a moment, and a sneer grew on his face as he realised who the new comer was. Her attention was stolen from his when Mo’at grabbed her queue and held it to her eyes, as though she was looking for a truth between them she could not see.

“Oel ngati kameie, Di’ana,” Mo’at spoke in a hushed whisper, “I have seen you, child, in a dream within a dream- Eywa has told me many things, and so has my daughter,” Mo’at stood straighter as she looked into Diana’s eyes, “One you could not save, but one you did. Irayo,” Mo’at bent her head slightly and the human woman’s eyes widened at the gesture.

“Oel ngati kameie, Tsahik,” Diana greeted back as she touched her forehead. When she lifted her head from its bent position she noted the upset look on Tsu’tey’s face and watched as he walked away from the crowd as it began to disperse.

Once the reintegration was over and Neytiri had shown her all she was able to before she had to claim her responsibilities with Jake, Diana had taken to teaching with Grace beneath the canopies of the lower hanging branches.

They were settled a little ways away from the training dummies where the warriors practiced their archery skills.

“Mo’at seems to have approved of you,” Grace spoke up as they watched the children playing around, happy to have a break from the rigorous English lessons the two had put them through today, “Neytiri seems to be happy you’re back too.” The red haired woman suggested further when Diana said nothing.

“Grace-“ Diana started, but the older woman didn’t let her finish.

“After that incident do you remember how you kept telling me it wasn’t my fault?” Diana nodded, “When are you going to learn to listen to your own words? You’re pretty good at them.”

“I just,” Diana started, “I just keep thinking about if I had moved faster-“

“You saved Neytiri’s life, Diana,” Grace shook her head; “You don’t get to feel guilty about that.” Grace nodded her head in the direction of the warriors, “And don’t think I didn’t notice you greeted everyone but one.”

Diana looked in the direction Grace was, and noted a particular warrior already staring at them. When he noticed their attention, he turned his face and walked away.

“You have to continuously move forward Diana,” Grace told her, “You can’t let yourself hang in the past.”

Diana sighed as she got up and followed Tsu’tey to where she thought he had gone, up the branches and off through the hanging leaves into a smaller alcove, it was the entry way to one of the landing pads where the ikran were housed. The leaves rustled around her as she heard the sniffing and growling as the ikran slept and waited for their riders and she looked down beyond the thick branch she stood on at the high altitude she now sat at.

She let out a shaky breath as she stepped further from the edge of the branch, then something above her moved loudly and within seconds a furious ikran was before her, screeching at her as it barred its fangs and wings.

Diana gasped as she fell back, trying not to make eye contact with the beast, when a large hand reached out for her and steadied her against a bare chest- and then a knife was pressed to her throat.

“Ngaru lu fpom srak,” Diana felt the hot breath of her captor against her near as she heard the generally peace-intent words seethe from his mouth, “tsmuke?” Her body froze as she heard the nickname used mockingly and knew who it was exactly that held the weapon to her throat.

“Tsu’tey,” she gasped as he pulled the knife closer to her most vital part, restraining her left arm against her side as he held her close to him by her torso. Diana held onto the forearm of his right hand with her free one as she attempted to keep the weapon still, but it was no use against his strength.

“What are you doing?” She asked him in shaky breathes, eyeing his ikran as it stared at them both with caution, waiting for his rider’s command.

Tsu’tey must have noticed her staring, because the next thing she knew he was whistling loud into her ear and the large body of the ikran began moving forward. She shut her eyes as the beast attempted to make eye contact with her and she thrashed against Tsu’tey’s chest, “Stop it, you skxawng!” She yelled at him, “Are you trying to get me killed?”

When he laughed mockingly in her ear, Diana’s eyes flew open in alarm. Was he actually trying to kill me? She thought, would he go that far? Quickly her mind began to run a mile per second and she tried to figure out a way to get him to release her.

“And how exactly do you think Mo’at would take that?” She challenged him, “What do you think she’d do to you when she finds out you killed the woman who saved her daughter’s life?” He hissed in her ear as she began talking, and an idea popped into her head as he tried to readjusted his grip on her, moving his hands across her torso to secure his grip, “Even worse, what do you think she’d do to you if she found you like this, groping an unmated female alone in the trees?”

That seemed to be the last straw; Diana almost didn’t mind the noise of disgust he made when he threw her away from him- or maybe it was the fact that she slammed the back of her head against his face.

She gripped her neck automatically, running her hand over it and trying to tell herself that she was safe, for now. Diana watched as Tsu’tey regarded her with a heated hate festering in his eyes, and followed his actions as he clicked his tongue to dismiss his ikran.

“Woman?” He laughed at her, “You are a child,” He spat at her.

“Well that’s mean,” She retorted as she coughed out, standing on the branch again despite her shaky legs, “And I thought we were friends.”

He shook his head at her in disbelief, wondering how someone could make jokes after being threatened with a knife to their throat. Diana watched as he wiped the blood from his bleeding lip and looked at it on his hand, as if he couldn’t believe she managed to hurt him.

She stared at the blood on his hand too, and made a disgusted face as her hand went to the back of her head, “You better not have gotten blood on my hair,” She grunted as she felt around in the braided strands.

“You hit me!” Tsu’tey argued as he flung his hand in the air towards disgusted facial expression.

“You were literally going to slice my throat,” She deadpanned.

“I would not have killed you,” He clicked his tongue at her in irritation, “It was a warning.”

“Oh yeah?” She asked when she finally relented and gave up on searching for any blood in her hair, “Then I guess that,” She gestured to his bloody lip, “Was a warning too, don’t fuck with me Tsu’tey.”

“Prrnen,” He seethed at her as she walked passed him, “Your species is like an infant,” He continued to goad her as she walked down the stairs leading to the base of Hometree.

“Oh, the entire species, is it?” She rolled her eyes as she continued to walk away from him.

“An infant who abandons its toys,” He shot at her, and she froze on a landing that led out to another passageway before the stairs continued, “An infant who breaks everything it touches.” His words were heated as he shot them at her, intending to hurt; intending to kill. And a piece of her broke at the sound of the accusations in his voice. She turned to him, but he wasn’t done with her either.

“You have no… no fpom,” peace, “It is not fpomronga’” healthy. He motioned onto his head as he spoke the last part, and she shuddered as the truthfulness of his words hit her. What he said about humans were true, there was little humanity left in them these days, coming to Pandora solidified that fact for her.

“Txìng,” Tsu’tey seethed the word to her, but they both knew the word didn’t do justice to what she had done. There was no word for forsake in Na’vi, even their language did not know how to reach that level of abandon. But English did- humankind did, they had abandoned themselves a long time ago.

For the second time that day Diana’s throat closed, and all the words in the world escaped her.

“You want to help The People?” Tsu’tey asked her as he approached closer, “Go.”

Diana let out a shuddering breath, her eyes were unable to rise from the ground and she could not even force herself to look at him, “If I leave,” She began to say, “If I leave, your people will…” But she could not say it, she couldn’t tell him about the mass armouries of guns and bombs the RDA would rain down on him and his people, for some reason she couldn’t admit to being the monsters he thought they were. Because she knew what humanity was capable of, and she knew they could reduce entire stars to dust with the press of a button.

So she lifted her eyes to meet his in hopes that he would see her and understand, but there was hatred in his eyes that blinded him.

“Is everything alright here?” Jake’s voice broke them from their staring match, and Diana looked to the side to see him approach the two of them with caution. Tsu’tey said nothing as he stared at both of them and growled in frustration as he pushed passed Diana to leave.

“Why’s he got a stick up his ass?” Jake asked Diana as he approached her, but she just shook her head at his question.

“How much of that did you hear?” She asked him.

“Not much, just from the part where he was calling you a baby and accused you abandoning them.” Jake said casually. Diana groaned and rubbed her hands down her face, knowing it wasn’t going to be an easy reintegration into the clan if Tsu’tey continued to publicly dismiss her, “Did you?” Jake asked curiously.

Diana bit her lip as she continued to stare off into the space Tsu’tey had walked away into and nodded her head, “Yes.”

Jake found Diana eating clumpy yoghurt in the kitchen half an hour after he had unlinked himself for the day, wheeling himself into the seat beside her as she grabbed her yoghurt and began eating it.

She rolled her eyes at the marine’s bad habits and got up to fetch another cup, “That’s disgusting you know, eating from someone else’s food like that.”

“I bet you wouldn’t mind if it was your best friend though,” Jake mocked through a mouthful of yoghurt.

“My best friend?” Diana asked.

“Tsu’tey.”

She rolled her eyes as she sat down, “Hey why does he hate you so much anyway? I mean I thought he had it out for me but damn, he hates you, like he literally hates your guts, I mean,” Jake stopped rambling when he looked at the deadpanned look on Diana’s face.

“Yes, thank you for that, Jake. I had no idea.” She replied sarcastically.

“So?” Jake pushed.

“So what?”

“So why does he hate your guts?”

Diana groaned loudly in irritation and Jake raised his hands in the air, “Hey, Neytiri said I should get to know the world around me in order to understand the clan, and I don’t know if you two noticed but you’re really bumming the mood around Hometree.”

Diana groaned again as she held her palms up on the table in exhaustion, “God, I know! Even the kids asked me about it earlier! Does he not see that we have to at least try to get along? Can’t he fake it?” She asked Jake exasperatedly, to which he replied with a shrug of his shoulders.

She stabbed at the yoghurt in her hand as she explained the situation to Jake, “I don’t know if Grace told you, but something really bad happened that made us not have any sort of communication with the Omaticaya clan for a few months- before you came,” She looked at Jake as he nodded along, “Grace and I tried to stop it but Quaritch- that self-loving egocentric tit- pulled us out of the linking pod and grabbed our avatars before we could, said he had a right to do it since they attacked first.” Grace shook her head as she explained.

“So if it was you and Grace, why isn’t he up her ass about it too? I mean they don’t talk that much but he seems… decent, with her.” Jake asked.

The woman huffed as she turned to look at Jake, wanting to see his expression when she told him the next part, “She wasn’t his student.”

She watched in amusement as Jake’s expression turned confused, then morphed into graphic cringe as the realization dawned on him, “He was prepping you for iknimaya.”

“Ding, ding, ding,” Diana muttered as she took a bite of her yoghurt.

“But how- I mean,” He stuttered as he tried to get his words across.

“Mo’at offered it to both of us; it was an olive branch of sorts when the English programme was going well. Tsu’tey was chosen to be my teacher since Grace refused, she said she was a researcher not a warrior, but that it would be too disrespectful if both of us declined so-“

“So he took your betrayal to heart.” Jake finished.

“Wouldn’t you?” Diana raised her brow at him.

Jake slumped back in his wheelchair as he let out a deep breath of air and ran his hands over his shaved head, “I mean, shit- that’s…you’re-”

“Really, majorly fucked,” Diana finished.

“Yeah,” Jake agreed, “So what are you going to do?”

Diana shrugged at his question, “There’s not much I can do, really,” She winked at Jake, “Besides win them over with my charm.”

Jake snorted, “Yeah, good luck with that.”

Chapter 3: Fwäkì ke Fwefwi

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leftingbadly · 3 months

Text

Chapter 1: The Will of the World

Pairing: Tsu'tey x OFC

Rating: PG13

Themes: Enemies to Lovers, Friends to Lovers

Other Tags: Fluff, Angst, Slow Burn, Betrayal, Revenge

Diana considered herself a patient person. In fact, if Dr Grace Augustine was the one to write the book on the Pandoran botany she discovered, Diana Quinn was going to claim she wrote the book on patience.

At least- that’s what she tried to convince herself at six in the morning when a new recruit for the avatar programme was causing a ruckus throughout the sector and knocking over things left and right. She tried to control her rapidly rising anger as she attempted to withhold herself from screaming at the newbie for knocking over her linguistics books and almost making her spill her coffee on them.

“Hey Dick-For-Brains!” She could not, however, control her anger, “Watch where you swing that tiny blue ass of yours!” The former university English professor had become quite adapt at adopting a marine’s mouth. Being stationed on a moon years away from your own dying planet on a solar system that was not even your own would do that to a woman.

A prime example of bad habits adopted in the Alpha Centauri System bristled passed her in a flurry of red waves; the one and only Dr Grace Augustine. The bad habit in question was nestled between her two fingers as she took one last drag of her cigarette before hopping into her pod to link with her avatar, no doubt to chase after the newbie causing havoc outside.

It had been nearly five years since Diana had joined the RDA at the request of Grace and there was not a moment where something went smoothly in those (give or take) one-thousand-eight-hundred-and-twenty-five days.

The woman rolled her eyes as she stared at the panicking scientists at the sudden exposure to the air outside and watched from behind a glass pane as they quickly attempted to close the breach in the unit. She was shocked to hear of Tom’s sudden death earlier in the month, and even more shocked to learn not weeks later that they were going to be replacing Tom’s scientific mind with a marine’s one in the form of his twin brother.

She remembers snorting rather loudly in Grace’s face when she was informed of the switch.

“You’ve got to be joking,” Diana laughed loudly in Grace’s face, but quickly sobered up at the look of dismay on the red headed woman’s face, “You’re serious.”

“As a heart attack. These airheads are giving me another gun when what I need is people actually capable of using what’s in their heads! It’s like they’re pissing on this whole entire operation after creating the damn fire to begin with!”

“Okay, Grace, again with the analogies- you are going to have to speak slower for the rest of us to catch up.” Diana laughed as she raised her hands in the air, submitting to the scornful gaze the Dr sent her way.

“Be honest with me Diana,” Grace took a stressed drag from the cigarette between her fingers, “Do you think we’re just wasting our time here? I mean honestly I feel like there’s nothing we could ever do to make up for what happened at the school-“

Diana cut the woman off before she could continue speaking, “What happened at the school was a horrific thing, Grace. But you can’t keep blaming yourself for it. You helped as many kids as you could, alright?” She stared and waited at the woman until she gave a nod in understanding, “You did everything you could.”

“I just wish I could have done more.”

Diana’s brows furrowed as the memory was pushed to the forefront of her mind. Cold, smoke infused fingers pressed against her forehead to release the tension was what brought her back to the present.

“We’re going out to run some errands; I’m taking Norm and the newbie with me, you up to stretch your legs?” Grace was unlinked from her avatar and drinking coffee again while simultaneously smoking another cigarette.

“You’re going to give yourself a problem with that,” Diana said as she eyed the cigarette ruefully.

“Yeah well, better the devil you know. Speaking of which…” Diana followed Grace’s line of sight until she reached the towering figure of Colonel Quaritch, or in Diana’s terms; the ugliest piece of man you would ever lay your eyes upon.

Colonel Miles Quaritch was one of the RDA Security Operations commanders and served as the chief of security on Pandora, he had arrived on Pandora in the early 2150s and had been in a pain in Grace’s backside ever since, and Diana a while after that.

“They do say if you speak the devil’s name, you can summon him.” Diana whispered to Grace as he walked by her station.

“Do you think he wakes up extra early to style his hair and pray to Satan or do you suppose it comes naturally to him?” Grace questioned as they both continued to stair obviously.

“No on the hair thing- because what hair? As for the Satan prayers… those are definitely ingrained in his DNA, no effort needed- whoops!” The two of them quickly turned around and pretended to busy themselves with the various papers and books that lay strewn across the table as he turned around to face them.

They snickered quietly to themselves as they kept their eyes down and backs turned to the Colonel.

“But seriously, we’re going out to gather some things, you in? I could really use some help with the newbie.”

Diana snorted at the obvious plead for help, but shook her head in disagreement, “No, you don’t need me there. Besides, my expertise remains in the teaching of the English language- not with machineguns and helicopters.”

“Oh, bullshit,” Grace groaned as she pulled on her friend’s arm, “Come on you’re the best pa’li rider this side of the linking.”

“Yes and you and I both know very well we haven’t even seen so much as one pa’li since-“

“Yeah, yeah,” Grace waved her off as she rolled her eyes and relented, “Just so you know, if anything happens out here it’s on you.” The red headed woman taunted as she turned her back on Diana’s rolling eyes.

After Grace left her alone with her papers and books once again to try and analyse more of Na’vi linguistics, another recruit came up to her and directed her to the armour bay- Colonel Quaritch’s orders.

Diana groaned aloud as she made her way down to the metal hell.

“I want you to gain their trust,” Diana heard Colonel Quaritch’s voice above the loud machine murmurs as she approached them; “I need to know how to force their cooperation or hammer them hard if they won’t.”

“Am I still with Augustine?” She heard Jake, the newbie, question.

“On paper.” Came Quaritch’s reply, “Yeah, you walk like one of her science pukes,” Diana flinched at the lack of decorum with his word usage, and rolled her eyes as she figured he probably didn’t even catch his mistake, “-you quack like one, but you report to me. Can you do that for me son?”

Diana narrowed her eyes at Jake’s smirking face, his head bent low as he tried not to smile at what Quaritch said, and responded with an enthusiastic, “Hell yeah, sir.”

“Well alright then,” Quaritch smiled as he looked down at Jake, as though he were looking down at a younger version of himself, then moved to punch the air with the connected arms of the meta-machine, “Son, I take care of my own. You get me what I need, I’ll see to it you get your legs back when you rotate home. Your real legs.”

“That sounds real good, sir.” Jake nodded to the high standing machine that held Quaritch in and Diana jumped from behind one of the other still standing ones as she made her presence known to the Colonel.

“Someone said you wanted to see me, Colonel Quaritch?” Diana heard herself yell at the older man in an attempt to make her voice heard over the loud whirring of machines and rustling of heavy artillery.

“Yeah, sweetheart,” Diana gritted her teeth together at the name, “Some of my men were attacked at the base near Highcrags.”

“And that’s my problem because?” Diana folded her arms together, not liking where the conversation was heading, knowing exactly who and what was situated closest to the mining dump at Highcrags.

“Well as you know the operations at the Floating Cave aren’t exactly being fully accepted by some of your little smurf friends-“

“Considering you used explosives to clear the entire place to rubble and ruin I wouldn’t exactly expect a gift basket, Colonel.”

Jake snorted from behind Quaritch at Diana’s statement, but tried to cover it up as a cough when the older man’s gaze turned to him.

“Look, I don’t particularly care what you or your savage sweethearts seem to think you have control over,” And he adjusted a large mechanical firearm in the hands of his AMP suit, “Look over the pictures, translate what it is your precious Tawkami clan is trying to tell us and then report back to me; because I have a message of my own.”

“And if I don’t?” Diana retorted to the retreating back of the AMP suit.

Quaritch turned his back to face her again as he yelled out, “Then seeing as though your plans for cooperation with the other clan of savaged blue lizards failed- I fail to see your use here anymore, Professor.” He sneered her title like an insult as he smirked and turned away.

“You two sure do seem to get on well,” From beside her Jake snorted his amusement, but Diana paid him no mind as she rolled her eyes and began briskly walking away from him.

His face fell at her cold behaviour and called after her, “Hey,” But she ignored him, “Hey!” He pushed the wheels of his wheelchair faster and turned to position him in front of her, blocking her from going further, “Have we met before?”

She did nothing but stared down at him, and then turned away as he raised his eyebrows expectantly.

“Did I do something to upset you or…?” He pushed, and she let out a frustrated groan.

“You know you aren’t the only one who lost something in that war.” She told him hotly.

“What are you talking about?” Jake stuttered at her statement.

She rolled her eyes at the marine again, “Earth’s intercontinental conflict in the twenty-second century? It kind of created a global energy crisis and left the earth in the great demand for natural resources? Ring any bells, marine?”

This time it was Jake who rolled his eyes at her sarcasm, “I know what you’re talking about, what has that got anything to do with-“

“You lost your legs in the war serving your country, others lost their lives,” That shut him up quickly, “And those who had to live with that loss, don’t you think they’d do everything they could to bring them back?” Her face fell for a brief moment, and Jake saw it- as well as the hard fury that came after, “Everything that is, except genocide.” And she pushed passed him.

This time Jake didn’t go after, but only yelled at her, “So it’s my fault for wanting to get my legs back? I’m the selfish one?” She turned around sharply at the accusation.

“You’re trading your legs for the extinction of an entire people for some rocks and dirt!” She argued back, but lowered her voice and walked closer to him when she noticed the attention of onlookers.

“I’m not killing anyone,” Jake seethed, quickly becoming irritated at the accusations she was throwing at him.

“No, you aren’t. But I suppose supplying Quaritch with information about the Omaticaya and the ways best to hammer them down is all in innocent fun?” This time it was her seething to him, “What exactly do you think he meant by that? Look around you Jake,” Diana waved her hands around them, to the vast amount of AMP suits, guns and artillery as well as helicarriers filled with bombs, “The entire avatar program is a sham, and everything Grace and I are trying to do means nothing to them.”

“Then why do it?” Jake challenged, “If it’s so pointless, why try to communicate with the indigenous at all?”

Diana sighed as she ran her hand down her face, “Because not trying makes me just as bad as Quaritch, and it makes me just as bad as you.”

“You did what?” Diana shrieked in horror many hours later once Grace and Norm had returned with Trudy, their pilot- without the newbie. Of course, while the body of Jake Sully was alive and well resting in his linking pod, the tall three metre long, blue avatar body however was left to the wilds of Pandora, alone and defenceless with no real training or preparation of what the moon held.

“We lost the kid.” Grace said as she stared off into the distance, as though she herself were coming to terms with what they did as she was explaining the experience to Diana.

“We were just inspecting some samples when all of a sudden we hear Jake standing off with this huge hammerhead titanothere! And then all of a sudden this huge thanator shows up and scares the hammerheads away! And then all-“

“Okay, okay Norm I get it, slow down,” Diana laughed as the tall man tried to catch his breath, “So you lost Tom’s avatar. Great.” Diana mumbled a series of incoherent profanities as she sighed heavily. Diana gathered her hair in a bundle at the back of her head and attempted to tie it with the small hair tie resting on her wrist, but once she tried to make the second hoop around the elastic snapped and broke.

She groaned in frustration, letting her hair fall back to its original position. Not only was she frustrated about the entire avatar loss situation, but the air inside the containers they had built Hell’s Gate around was humid and still.

“Maybe it’s a good thing,” Diana offered, trying to find the silver lining in the loss of an avatar body, “The last thing you need out there is another trigger happy marine anyway, never mind a three metre tall one.”

“We just keep taking blow after blow, don’t we?” Grace’s question was rhetorical as they all stood around Jake’s linking pod, waiting for him to wake up as the hours passed by. And when he finally did, he told them something none of them would have expected.

They were all in Hell’s Kitchen when Grace recounted the story again, “The last thing we see is this Marine’s ass disappearing into the bush with this angry thanator coming after him!” She turned her hand upside down and made grabbing motions into the air, as if mimicking the thanator’s fangs and Diana found herself laughing loudly along with the rest of the group.

“Well, it’s not something you can teach.” Jake boasted smugly around a mouth full of food.

“You know, for reasons I cannot fathom, the Omaticaya have chosen you. God help us all.”

Jake found Diana hours later in the linking room where her small office was set up. She was situated, as she normally was, on top of a large desk with various papers and books about her, each of them held written pieces of a language he was unfamiliar with.

“What are these?” He asked as he approached her on his wheelchair, taking a book from beside her as he inspected one of the books with what seemed to be words and vocabulary.

When she didn’t respond to him, he only continued to pester her, “How do you even read these?” He tilted his head from side to side, and she rolled her eyes as she grabbed the book from his hand and flipped it upside down before handing it back to him.

“Oh, right, right… it makes so much more sense to me now.” He joked, and she shook her head at his foolishness. “What does this one mean?”

She looked at the word he pointed to and laughed, “Skxawng, it means dumbass.” She raised her brow at him, “Fitting that that’s the one you’d be drawn to.”

“Sk’awn,” Jake tried.

“Skxawng,” Diana corrected him, but shook her head when he repeated it wrong again, “Sk-xaw-ng.” She said it slowly a third time and nodded her head once he finally caught on.

“I think one of the Na’vi called me this last night,” Jake wondered aloud which caused Diana to laugh softly, “Real nasty looking bastard.”

She nodded her head as he described the Na’vi, “Wooden neck protector? A braid dangling in front of his face that he thinks makes him look cool?”

Jake gasped as he clicked his fingers in front of Diana’s face and pointed, “Exactly! God what an asshole.”

“Tsu’tey,” Diana supplied, “He was one of the students at the school too, albeit very reluctant to join at first, loves his analogies in Na’vi but could never get passed the longer sounding words in English.”

Jake snorted at the new information about the warrior who seemed so frightening on top of his direhorse with his bow and arrow.

“Wait, you were at the school too?” Diana raised her eyebrows at the sudden question and Jake clarified for her, “We went there today on the recon mission for Grace’s samples… were you there when…?” Jake couldn’t ask the question, but his mind flashed with the memory of the bullet holes through the wooden panelling of the small house.

When Diana said nothing, Jake continued, “That’s why you were so up my ass a day ago.” He realised.

She shook her head as she responded in a whisper, making eye contact with his eyes, “I can’t betray them again Jake.” And it was a rare moment of vulnerability he hadn’t seen otherwise in the weeks he had known her.

Diana watched tightly as Grace walked into the room and began to prepare Jake for another day in the Omaticaya village, going through the list of known Na’vi and their respective roles in the clan.

“T’su’tey.” Jake stated as he lifted himself up into the pod.

“Tsu’tey,” Grace corrected, “He’ll be the next clan leader.”

Diana smiled fondly at the name, and sniffled her nose before she added on, “He’s not going to be fond of you,” She nodded her head to the picture of Tsu’tey on the screen.

“He’s their best warrior,” Norm added on, “So expect some passive-aggressive tendencies from him.”

Diana shrugged, “-or aggressive-aggressive.” She offered, and he nodded his head in mock thanks.

Diana’s attention reverted back to her notes, looking at the writing from the images Quaritch had forwarded her and the limited amount of translations she had left from the Omaticaya clan after the purge of the school. She couldn’t make sense of some of the characters labelled there, but being the only clan with any form of writing system she was at a loss for what the words meant or where she could find a translation.

Her ears perked up when Grace mentioned Sylwanin.

“I got a date with Sylwanin too,” She stared hard at Jake as he winked at Norm, bragging about something he didn’t know anything about.

“She’s dead.” Grace told him, and the room enveloped in a tense air. Grace and Diana shared a long, sorrowful look before she pushed Jake into the pod and started linking him up back to his avatar at the Omaticaya Hometree.

Diana shook her head at the now linked up male before turning her attention back to her notes at hand, “Grace,” She called over the scientist, “Do any of these letters look familiar to you?”

Grace came over and inspected the papers in the younger Professor’s hands, “No, not really. Are these the markings from the Tawkami attack?” Diana nodded her head as she held her hair back from her face with one hand, eyes drooping slowly as she attempted to focus her eyesight.

“Have you slept at all since Quaritch gave you these?” Diana shook her head to Grace’s question.

“He’s so hell-bent on reclaiming the Highcrags and the damn mining site near the Floating Caves he won’t just take no for an answer, and if I don’t come up with an answer he likes who knows what he’ll do to that poor clan.” She groaned in frustration.

“Look, I know how important this is to you but tiring yourself out and passing out from exhaustion isn’t going to help anyone, you need to sleep.”

Diana only grumbled but made no move to go towards the sleeping bunks.

Grace sighed and pulled up a chair, “I don’t know what the runes say, but look at this; they drew something near the end of the first sentence.”

“What is that?” Diana heard herself ask in a low mumble, “A flower?”

“Pseudocenia Rosea, also known as the chalice plant.” Grace told Diana as she identified one of the many floras that decorated the ecosystem of Pandora.

“Why would the Tawkami draw something like this for the RDA to see?” Diana asked Grace as she looked from the screen showcasing the image to her partner.

“Maybe it wasn’t meant for the RDA,” Grace offered as she handed the tablet back to Diana whose mind only filled with more questions than clarity.

Chapter 2: Reconnection with Ommaticaya

10 notes · View notes

leftingbadly · 3 months

Text

Chapter 9: What Else Have We Abandoned

Pairing: Tsu'tey x OFC

Rating: PG13

Themes: Enemies to Lovers, Friends to Lovers

Other Tags: Fluff, Angst, Slow Burn, Betrayal, Revenge

Chapter 8: We Fell in Love Once at the Start of The Universe, And Our Souls Never Forgot One Another

She didn’t know where she stood with him. They weren’t friends, but the small fact of her having had saved his life once meant they weren’t exactly strangers, either. There was so much history between the two of them that had gone unwritten it made little room for the space that existed between their lives other than awkward, fleeting glances, the unsure stumbling from right foot to left foot– and at the end of it he still stood there, his towering form, his glaring eyes.

Perhaps, if she were honest with herself, Diana would have agreed to take part in the notion that he may have saved her, too. Perhaps if she were honest with herself she would have said that he saved her still, every day moving forward.

But Diana was an honest woman to everyone but herself, and so she would not admit something like that– because, as she would put it, it would simply not be true.

And because of that, Diana now found herself in the situation she was currently in.

The Na’vi around them seemed to still whenever Diana and Peyral were within proximity to one another. The warrior woman’s eyes were a dangerous thing, confident and searching, seeking for an opportunity to pounce. Beneath her gaze Diana felt no less something of a prey, something that was hunted, something that was long being sought after and in the hopes of being attained—it brought a thrill throughout her body. Her mind began to sing with the possibilities she had long since forgotten and not let into her mind for so long, and yet here Peyral was, confident as a hunter, bringing that grace and agility and threat to every aspect of her life. Diana was used to scholars, she was used to wit, she was used to playing mind games and word games and dancing around topics and subjects until her feet bled. Here, now, Peyral whose hands wrought the blood from greater, more vicious, and dangerous things than metaphors and analogies, was staring point-blank and raw at her. This thrilled Diana beyond the things that words could carry, and her own smile was wide and vicious as she stared at the female in front of her.

The other warriors themselves seemed to feel the same way Diana did, their tails swishing behind them back and forth, back, and forth, back, and forth. In amusement, in anticipation, in wonder and intrigue. They had not seen such a bold declaration of a choosing before, usually these things were done so discreetly and within the privacy of the leaves and the shade of the trees and the caverns of the caves anywhere, they thought, anywhere but here out in the open. But Peyral was a hunter, the best of them, save for their future Olo’eyktan with his savage stare and caustic demeanour—Peyral seemed to match Tsu’tey in that regard. And in that way, she was in every way and thought and sound and sight deserving of the title as his second. Diana laughed to herself, begrudging herself for the way that even now, even as Peyral stared at her with that upward stare as her head tilted down, that dangerous, dangerous fucking stare, she seemed to think only of Tsu’tey. But still, Peyral was in front of her now, and he wasn’t.

“Eyktanay,” Peyral teased, her voice lilting and challenging and friendly yet, yet, still, advocating for the contest of sparring. A whisper of something began in Diana’s belly, something she had not felt since ages-no, lifetimes-ago. She was reminded of her days on earth, out in the battlefield, those days when she had pushed past the grief and the anguish and the horrors of it, when she was in the thick of it because yes, if Diana was truly, brutally and unapologetically honest with herself, those days in the trenches and the fights and wars when her body moved so grand and dignified through the throngs of battle, was when she felt the most alive. Perhaps that was it, too, where the burning came from—was that despite the throbbing aches that overtook her, deep down, she knew she felt no more useful and deserved of her body and her life other than when it was being used in the throes of such uninhibited danger.

Maybe she was fucked up for thinking that. But no one else needed to know that besides her. Maybe that was why she battled so, with Tsu’tey-ah, there was the thought of him again-because she knew he saw that in her as clear as the skies and the winds and waters and the wilds of Pandora.

“Will you give in to me, first?” And Diana’s heart skipped a beat at the second meaning behind Peyral’s words, her legs wrapped around Diana’s midsection at the pause in the human woman’s movements, and for a moment she was stunted, for a moment the breath was knocked out of her so quickly and so perfectly, in all respects, that she could only laugh loudly out into the air. The others, who watched them spar, laughed too. They knew Diana, they had seen her fight before, and those words they came to understand were nothing if not fuel to the flames that had sparked inside of her gut. Diana bit down onto Peyral’s thigh, not above playing dirty, and instead of the groan in pain or the seething of air sucked between her teeth at the foul play that Diana expected, Peyral groaned as she pulled at Diana’s hair, forcing the woman back from her exposed skin and toppled them over, so that their bodies flung apart. Diana’s mouth didn’t leak Peyral’s blood, but there was enough there on the tastes of her tongue to allow for the sensation of blood to flood her mouth, and sickly enough, Diana felt some sort of… not pride, but, the sibling enough to it, at the sight of her bite mark on Peyral’s thigh. There was a murmur of something in the crowd, and if either of the women had taken their eyes off from one another for a moment they might’ve seen Tsu’tey standing there, staring at them with a face blank of expression, but body and mind and soul in complete juxtaposition to what his body was explaining. Perhaps otherwise would have thought he held contempt to the two of them for disrupting the practice of his warriors. They would have been wrong. They would not have known that the anger in his gut, boiling there, raging, and claiming every atom of his body and settling deeper than the marrow of his bones, was something else entirely. Something he was not ready to admit, even to himself, even to Eywa as she beheld him throughout all the expanse of his existence.

No, he thought. Not her, never her.

And yet…

Oh, so lovely, so weak the mind, so fragile the heart so—so…

He shut his eyes. He walked away. Diana’s laugh rang melodious and bold behind him, and he walked away. Something in his chest tightened and twinged, and Diana’s, her eyes still focused on the woman in front of her, held something open and blooming.

“Come,” Peyral said as she opened her arms, ready for the attack Diana was preparing to make, ready for anything Diana would have given her in that moment. “Come, come, come, little thing of a warrior—show me the way your body speaks.” Diana’s eyes became alight with fire and flame and a brighter light than what had been known to her in the past years of her life. She flung forward, jumping on a large root of a tree that surrounded them, a yip sounded from somewhere in the crowd, and she was quick enough to catch a dagger that was thrown at her. She pounced onto Peyral who in turn held a dagger in her hand as well, it moved quick enough in her hand to stop the one Diana held from reaching her throat. The stakes had been raised. The fight now turned from sparring to first blood, and both their ears began to ring with excitement, Diana could barely hear the yips and grunts and yells of excitement from the Na’vi around her. Peyral smiled only, a wicked and sinister and gleaming thing that excited Diana beyond measure. This, she realised, was something too innate, too inherent in her, for her to do any less greatly than what her years and years of training and title afforded. Diana would not insult Peyral by going easy, by being soft, by trying the absolute best she could. Their heavy breathing sounded still between pushed-against chests, before Peyral smirked, fang glinting in the light of the sun, and pushed hard and fast against Diana.

Because yes, at the end of all things, Peyral was second to Tsu’tey, and Diana was only in the body of an avatar. She showed the human woman, then, what it meant to be second. What it meant to be fierce, and a hunter and, above all—she showed Diana what it was to be prey.

Two knives pressed against her, Peyral’s—and her own.

Fuck.

Fuck!

When had she even managed to grab it! Diana’s thoughts ran rampant as she laid flat out on her back. For a moment all she could think of was the way Peyral’s body was pressed against hers, the way the knife against her throat and the knife against her stomach could have ended her borrowed life, her avatar’s body, so quickly if this had been a real fight. But this wasn’t a real fight, and Peyral stood up, and Peyral threw the daggers to the ground, and Peyral lifted Diana up and held her face in one hand and shook her head with it. Gleaming, bright, satisfied and fulfilled—Peyral nodded to the woman as she steadied her breath. As though she came to make up her mind on something in that moment, as if Diana had passed some test, she was not even aware was taking place.

“Sìltsan,” fucking hell, “sìltsan, Di’ana.”

The crowd began to chatter around the two females, their yips and yells and loud declarations of satisfaction. In all the commotion Neytiri had found herself slipping away, following the untraceable footsteps of her oldest friend. She did not need tracks to follow him, she knew by heart where he would go, and she found him standing there in the midst of the pathway that led back to where their hurt still grew from.

“You do not approve.” Neytiri said as she came up to them.

“They act like children,” he seethed. “Fighting amongst themselves as though all of this is a game.”

“They only spar, it is–”

“It distracts,” he spat. “It makes my warriors lower their guard.”

Neytiri clicked her tongue at her friend, knowing full well that he was angry at more than just the two women having a friendly spar, more than just the fact that his warriors were watching and cheering them on. Tsu’tey had never been one to admonish a little bit of friendly fighting.

“Why are you angry, truly, my friend?” She asked him as she walked closer.

“She is an enemy!” He proclaimed, but Neytiri shook her head gently.

“She suffers.” Neytiri confessed.

“Our people suffer!”

“And she is not?”

And oh, oh, there it was.

There it was that question, like a serpent’s hold, like a lover’s kiss, binding him to the earth beneath his feet. Neytiri always had this habit of ripping his skin right off its bone, she was much like Swylwanin in that regard. Her strong hands, nimble, but strong, ready to sink into his skin and bare his bones to the cold, harsh air that surrounds him always. A tundra of a thing too harsh for his heart to weather. His body did not have the opportunity to sink into itself. His body weathered the storm.

“Is she not of us?” After everything? “Does she not belong here?” After everything? “Have we not fought together? Rested together? Ate together?” After everything! And there was that saying, that saying, that saying– blood, something about blood– blood, water, womb, thick. And there was always blood in the story, always a keening, always a suffrage linked to the womb, always the water that drowned them.

“You speak of… abandoning,” the word felt foreign on Neytiri’s tongue, “yet you… abandon yourself first.”

And perhaps had half his heart not died with Sylwanin, and the other not still held in the unknowing hands of Diana, he might’ve lost even more of it with Neytiri’s words. And he wondered, for a short moment, how he had been so blessed and yet so cursed at the same time for the women he had met. They were shadow and flame all encompassing, holding a love that could regrow the razed fields of a conquered homeland. And he knew in his heart he did not deserve it.

And so he lied instead. “You have allowed your fondness for the male to outshine your wit.” And had she known him any less perhaps Neytiri would have been hurt. But she did know him, perhaps, more than he knew himself. But this was not her fight, she would not be the target of the war between him and himself. And so she turned instead, and she allowed him to burn alone, because this was not her fight.

Just as she did, another figure approached.

Eyebrows, eyes slightly too human-like, queue beginning oddly– an avatar. Diana.

“He is–!” Neytiri placed her fingers to her head, making an irritated gesture as she shot Tsu’tey one final look before she left the two of them alone.

The two of them, alone.

It had felt like ages had passed before they had seen each other like this again. No anger this time, only a dull ache in the air. Diana stared at him, and he looked at her with a bent head, looking up, his shoulders raised, his feet itching to move but his body stayed. Everything about him screamed flight, everything about him screamed that he would rather be anywhere but near her– shatter, ache and throb. The organ in her chest thrummed. Dull, dull, dull, dull is the blade in their backs.

Her mouth ran dry, and for all she thought she could not voice what she felt. And so, instead, he spoke.

“Your movements were slow,” it was a routine conversation. Some part of him hated himself for even speaking to her, the other part hated him for taking so long to do this.

“She is much more skilled than I am.” But what she really meant was, perhaps you should teach me better, perhaps you should speak to me again like before, when the things between us had sung the same.

“Your movements were slow,” he repeated. But what he really meant was, I cannot. I cannot love you without betraying myself.

Her eyes softened, and her feet moved to a dangling vine. “There are… teachers on earth who believe in the sort of things you do,” he scoffed for a moment, his eyes rolling to the side as he forgot himself, forgot who he was speaking to. “Merwin said that the recognition is there, the recognition of the connection. It’s the sense that we are connected to everything absolutely, we can’t turn our backs on that fact and survive.”

Diana shook her head. “Many of the old teachings are gone now.”

“Gone where?” Despite himself, he asked her a question.

“Abandoned.”

Ah.

He took a step back. His hands came to tighten the strap on his chest, he was fidgeting. She didn’t even have a weapon to his throat and she was making him nervous. He wanted to leave, to run away, to swear at her, to yell at her, to throw all the angered, hated parts of himself that he felt for himself at her. Maybe that would justify it, maybe that would justify just how much he still seemed to lo–

A twig snapped, and his eyes shot up just in time to see the object fall from her hands. She was staring at him with a purpose, as though she had known he had allowed his mind to carry him off to a place he did not want to go. Like a kidnapped thing he did not even realise his mind had been screaming at him to notice. She did, however, notice.

“Neytiri told me what you and Peyral had found,” she spoke. “Tracks?”

“That is of no bother to yo–”

“Is it Tawkami?” She asked before he could finish his sentence. “Could it be… Tawkami?”

“And what would you know of them?” Tsu’tey demanded, and no longer was he a man in front of a woman, but a warrior now before a potential threat to his homeland. He saw her again as she was, as she had always been; a threat.

“Surely Mo’at has told you by now?”

“Has told me?” He asked, and there was a vulnerability in his voice that shocked them both.

Because, as they now both realised, Mo’at had not told her strongest, most fierce warrior about the dealings between the woman before him and their neighbour clan. But why?

What had she seen, what had she sensed, about him that she would not have told him this?

And it was something neither of them would have understood for a long time, that the man they both knew had long been forgotten somewhere. That Tsu’tey had been lost for some time, that Mo’at had not told him because it would not be him she was speaking to. Yes, that was it, because Tsu’tey te Rongloa Ateyo’itan had not yet come home from that school shack, and he had not yet come home to himself since that day.

Diana took a step back now, her eyes wide as she looked at him, as though she was seeing a glimpse of this truth. That a shred, perhaps a sliver, of that angered she had seen cover him now fell to the ground. Beneath it she saw an atom of what was truly behind it, and she shut her eyes and looked away, and she refused to look any further, and she refused to let herself be witness to that.

Because what she would see was not his broken soul, but a mirror.

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leftingbadly · 3 months

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Chapter 8: We Fell in Love Once, At the Start of The Universe, and Our Souls Never Forgot One Another

Pairing: Tsu'tey x OFC

Rating: PG13

Themes: Enemies to Lovers, Friends to Lovers

Other Tags: Fluff, Angst, Slow Burn, Betrayal, Revenge

Chapter 7: I Open My Heart to Kinder Days, And Only Bats Flutter Forth

The webs of dreams covered her eyes; a warning, waning and drought-filled harbour. Everything is real here, the ocean would abandon its shores were it to learn of the sorrow she wept—it would quake, ashamed, in all that it was unable to have wrought from its depths. There are more vicious monsters walking, step, step, step by inch by precious little crunch of leaf and turn of stone than there are bastardly creatures that lurk in the dark deep depths of the ocean bed. Here, we know our monsters by name.

Here, they know ours, too.

Quaritch spoke. “Quinn, you told me you would have this problem gone by end of month.”

“You told yourself that.” She was unshaken.

He persisted. “I expected it done.”

“Evidently.” She didn’t care.

His large fist fell onto the metal table in front of them. She didn’t move an inch, there were louder things and scarier things in the world than an angered man, she had learned this lesson too late—but she had learned it and she had been empowered by it. He was just a man in a world of gods; he could not leave her broken in any way that mattered.

“August 3rd, 1835.” Diana said.

“What?”

“Two years after the abolishment of slavery, two men came together and decided that in order to pay for the freedom of slaves they would loan the British government £15m, with the government adding an additional £5m later.”

“Are you giving me a history lesson, professor?”

“The money didn’t go to the former slaves, mind you. Do you know where they went?”

Quaritch wasn’t a stupid man, “the slave owners?” And he wasn’t the type of man to act stupid, either.

“The slave owners.” But then again, Diana definitely wasn’t a stupid woman, and she was above acting a fool to make a man feel comfortable. “The amount of money borrowed for the Slavery Abolition Act was so large that it wasn’t paid off until 2015.”

There was not a brief moment of silence between them, no thoughtful humming, no questioning gazes. Diana met Quaritch’s hard, unblinking stare with her own, each of them unwilling to step down to the other.

“I’m no slaver, girl.” Quaritch said.

“Of course not,” Diana agreed to his surprise. “You only partake in the casual genocide of an entire race, yeah?”

Quaritch stared down at her, thin lipped and gazing, his eyes, neither imploring for any hidden truth her own might hold. He held all of his truths in the scars on his body, he believed, and wasn’t it a dangerous thing for a scarred up man, a marked up man that held locations of hurt and war and the brutality of a fight he had wrought from his own pride and grief and hunger for things that were not owed to him by the world, to believe he held any semblance of the truth. Diana held his gaze and he commended her for it, she had lived an interesting life he would give her that, he would give her that she had survived horrors no casual citizen would have had to face. He knew she would be trouble the moment he laid eyes on her, her silver eyes that had darted around Pandora with too much intrigue and too much wonder. Her books that recorded things that would not matter once war fell upon them, language did not matter, Quaritch was sure of it, language delayed the inevitable—language lied.

Quaritch believed that his scars held the truth, there was no lie in the brutality of the natives though their weapons were not made from metal or laced with gunpowder, theirs was an inherent brutality, too. Something he knew the members of the avatar programme seemed to not want to believe. They were kind people, he knew they believed this fallacy, they were a people that held no semblance of brutality that humans did—Quaritch knew better than to believe these lies. Because despite not being human, there existed still those characteristics that every predator held within them, he saw it in their feral eyes, when their canines hissed at him before he drilled his truth into their skin—blood and bone and marrow it splashed into the dirt beneath their bare feet and a wicked smile, wide and honest and gleaming overtook his features as he regarded himself something of a herald.

Diana regarded him as well, and a shrill of something cold and empty passed through her as she stared at him. Arthur Koestler once said that the history of thought is full of barren truths and fruitful errors, she saw in Quaritch’s eyes that he held only barren errors. A lifetime of war and ruin that was claimed by a man too small to shoulder the weight of that pain, it was dreams and hope, she realised, that were absent in him. Quaritch represented every aspect of the human self that held no trace of those things.

“Umniya,” a voice called out to her.

Her own laughter rang out. “What?”

“It’s Arabic, it means hope, wish or fancy.” The man’s voice-for it was a man’s voice- explained to her. Diana shot a questioning gaze to him.

“That’s a lot of responsibility to place on an unborn child.”

“I think she’ll be strong enough,” he assured. “I think she’ll have her mother’s strength.”

They had been robbed of their hope, her and her love, taken when the cells in her womb barely attached itself to her. It-she-didn’t even have a chance.

Diana watched as Quaritch stood up with a sigh, an uncharacteristic display of frustration from him, and crossed his arms behind his back as he stared at her. “Why do you always insist on saving something that’s already dead?”

“He’s dead! Diana he’s dead! Stop!”

Her hands pressed on, harder and rapid into a chest that had long since stopped caring for the heart that had resided in it.

“Right now you’re only fighting a losing battle,” Quaritch’s voice sounded like rumblings distant and claiming. “Can’t you see that?”

“Even if you could get his heart beating again, you’d only be reviving a corpse! Can’t you see that?” Her heart hammered in her ears where his had abandoned hers.

“You should stick to your guns and knives, Colonel,” Diana said as she stared straight, her eyes not giving him the respect of meeting his. “You’re not very good with speeches.”

She lifted her head just as he scoffed at her, a shake of his head in disbelief as he stared for another moment longer, and then he was walking away.

Sometime later, the sound of a wheelchair squeaking caused Diana to lift her head from her palms and interlace her hands together. She placed her chin on her hands as Jake wheeled up to her, his own expression one of forlorn and discontentment.

“Quaritch—”

“He’s such a pussy,” Jake declared, and Diana felt her brows raise. “I mean if he actually just took five seconds to realise everything we’ve accomplished out there, we—we’ve learnt so much from the People and… God, it pisses me off how ignorant he is.”

Diana chuckled as she leaned back in her chair, crossing her arms over her chest. Jake watched her as she watched him and then rolled his eyes. “Yeah, yeah, look I know I wasn’t much better than that meathead but—”

“You were,” Diana declared immediately, stopping him from thinking too little of himself so quickly. “Never compare yourself to him, he’s an ugly person.”

“But you’re a very pretty person, you know.” She whispered his name, “I think it’s because you have a lot of existence left for life, I think some people run out of existence too soon in life and don’t know how to live anymore."

“Like you?"

“I don’t think I ran out of existence,” she said, although she wasn’t entirely sure herself, “I think I’m the type of person who borrows existence from others. Like a leech."

He laughed at that. Flabbergasted. He had never heard someone refer to themselves as a leech before, he told her as much. She hummed again, knowing that this was something he could have possibly said. Of course it was, she was a strange person who said stranger things.

“Anyway,” she whispered, “we move.” She was already growing tired of having to explain herself. This was always what happened. But she didn’t want to leave yet, at least here she was being observed.

She came to realise that in that moment. She liked to be observed. Was that it? Was that why people went to art galleries and read books and visited museums? Did they think the art was always staring back at them? Admiring them?

A deep sigh left her, and she was telling the silence to speak for her again.

Jake whispered her name as he called for her attention, the vulnerable look in his eyes nearly knocked her from her seat. “What are we going to do?”

Diana felt her brows furrow together as a memory came to mind.

Diana was reminded suddenly of a scene she had witnessed some days prior. Something that had been clinging to her like bacteria. She had been in Hometree, waking up to a sore body stiff and pulled from the rigorous brutality of what training amongst the warriors of the clan entailed. Her neck was stiff when she had twisted it left, just in time to see Jake staring wide eyed and opened mouthed, he was yipping and yelling at something in the skies. When she had approached, Diana had heard the second voice—Neytiri.

Her body moving on the wind like it was a second skin, she was atop her ikran and the two of them rode the rays of the sun that glistened behind them, as though she were apollo bringing forth the light to Pandora. She looked infinite in all the ways Diana knew infinity to be held, not in the palms or upon the shoulders of some distant god but in the eyes of someone who beheld love.

Her heart froze in that moment—yes, that was the look in Jake’s eyes. It was love as he looked at her, his wide mouth open, canines gleaming as his tail swished and flicked behind him in excitement. Diana was too shocked in that moment to confront him, too stunned and at a loss for words to become angry at what she witnessed in front of her.

But if she were honest with herself, she had witnessed this downfall long before it had reared its head this day, in front of her now. Diana saw Jake running through the trees, she watched him as he rode atop the pa’li and hunted with the clan, gods, she witnessed him fall in love with not just Neytiri but the forests, the clan and its people herself, and she said nothing.

How could she?

How could she tell him to stop, to not become attached, to hold those walls up inside of himself and not forget that he had a mission to do, when her very own walls had rotted and crumbled inside of her as well? Yet Diana knew what future lay ahead for Jake, she had seen it happen once before, and like a movie in slow motion she could only watch as an observer and do nothing as Pandora wrapped itself around her friend’s heart, too.

And she’ll watch, too, as he chokes on the smoke and bullets.

She blinked and she was back inside that cafeteria. The smell of disinfectant and sanitizer fresher than the memories of the clear and crisp oxygen of Pandora’s forests. The contrast never failed to shock her core.

“It’s love, then?” Diana wasn’t sure what she was asking. Why would she ask something like that? Love was a stranger to her; she wouldn’t recognise its face if it showed up at her door waiting to be let in. Love was the stranger you walked by in the street, the one who stole your favourite seat at the coffee shop, the one who checked out the library book before you did; one centimetre away across lifetimes of existence.

“What do you mean?”

“You and Neytiri.” She clarified, and if she were even that little bit less perceptive perhaps Diana wouldn’t have noticed the way Jake stilled.

After a heartbeat he spoke again.

“You don’t believe in love?” Jake asked, and he was almost shocked at the insinuation. He had heard stories of Ernesh, he doubted there was no existence of love there with the way either Diana or Grace spoke of the man.

She confessed. “I don’t believe in imported love.”

“What does that even mean?”

Diana shrugged. “It means if you really want something, if you really want to love someone, you can make it work.”

“Not all the time, sometimes life gets in the way. Sometimes your flight gets delayed, and you miss birthday parties, sometimes your flight doesn’t get delayed, and you miss them anyway.”

“That’s not true.”

Jake scoffed. He had thought she was being ridiculous; people had their own lives to attend to and that was perfectly alright. “You can’t possibly—”

“Making it work doesn’t just mean showing up,” Diana spoke, and Jake paused, “you can show up, but your love can be missing. It’s about calling and saying happy birthday anyway, even after you missed your flight. It’s about asking for pictures of the cake and the birthday outfit and about what kind of presents you got and who was being the most inappropriate during the happy birthday song and whose dumb, fucking baby is asleep on your bed.”

“Making it work doesn’t just mean showing up; it means I couldn’t make it, but my love did.”

“We never stood a chance,” he asked her. “Did we?”

Her own shuddering breathed was stolen from her, a gulp of air that abandoned her in replace for the grief that sucked into her lungs like water beneath the surface. This grief that felt it held more purpose, more privilege, inside of her lungs than oxygen. She thought that too, for so long that there seemed to be no other ultimate truth besides it. An imperative truth. Her hands grasped his and she pulled him closer and yet for all of it this seemed only to greater the distance between them.

“We can make it,” she whispered a lie to hold them. A smile crossed his lips that she did not see, this one so open and daring that if she had, she would know he hated her for it, just a little.

There was a beat of silence between them, neither knowing what the other was thinking. They didn’t stare at each other, no, they were both far too proud and too resolved in their stance to be able to witness this exposure—this vulnerability. It was like that between good friends, it hurt raw and open when kindred hands held you. They hoped to God kindred hands held them. They knew it did when neither moved, nor did the other speak, and for the rest of the night they stayed in that blissful silence.

Jake left sometimes to get something to drink, other times Diana would leave to use the bathroom, but they both came back to sitting at that too small kitchen table where the containers of their pre-made meal sat in front of them. Grace joined them eventually; grace, grant, grave, grasp—grasping hands reaching out to hold Diana’s across the cold metal table. A tight squeeze, a reassurance of existence and then a smile so flickering and fleeting Diana’s tired eyes could not catch it.

But she recollected the next morning, when she put one heavy foot out of her bed after the other, and a warmth spread through her the same way the sun warmed her skin as she linked into that na’vi body of hers and raced through the warm day on Pandora.

Across the world, it seemed, a discourse was taking place that had been brewing for some time.

“She is not yours to student,” Tsu’tey clicked his tongue at his second. The two of them encased around tree and vine as they walked through the jungles in search of something. Those were the na’vi man’s first words the minute he had a moment with the woman who now trailed behind him, the letters, and words always on the tip of his tongue as his mind never seemed to allow him to forget the interaction between Diana and Peyral. He tried to tell himself that it wasn’t just her, that having his warriors fall in love with Diana the way they so obviously seemed to be was not good for any of them. She was a traitor, after all.

“She is not yours, either.” Peyral answered back without a moment’s thought, and Tsu’tey whipped his tall, slender body around to narrow his eyes at his second. The woman raised her hands in defence, but her eyes were challenging. “Tsahik had told me of your refusal to teach her.” The clarification of what she had meant, of Diana being nothing more than a failed student of Tsu’tey, did nothing to settle the unspoken words between them. Peyral had known what she had said, and Tsu’tey was no stupid man. He clicked his tongue again, the swish of his tail behind him seemed to speak louder than the look in his eyes, but he held no claim here—this he knew and this she knew, as well. Diana was free to choose from whom she would gather her training from and… she was free to choose other things, too, once her iknimiya would be complete, once she would be seen as a woman in the eyes of the People, once she had been granted the title of woman and warrior and all that seemed to settle in between and over and below.

“You would choose her?” He spat. “She is a traitor, not of our kind, she walks in the skin of—”

“She would be accepted in the eyes of Eywa,” Peyral pushed, her feet taking a singular step closer to the fierce warrior. “She would be accepted as one of the People.”

“Never,” he crosses his arms over his chest, open eyes glaring and challenging. “Never again.”

There was a hurt here that had scarred over bloodied and infected, something that seemed to breed inside of his bones closer than marrow was allowed to tread, his entire body sung with it. This time, the woman clicked her tongue, a tilt of her head and swish of her own tail behind her begrudged the man in front of her—“You would still bind that to her, she—”

“She is the reason Sylwanin had died.” The words came out of all the angered parts of him—chattering teeth and shattered soul. He spoke from a place of childhood panic.

And there it was, the name of a woman he had not uttered since lifetimes ago, or at least that was what it felt like. And it felt so strange to speak of her existence when there was so little of it left that lingered around him in the world—he had heard his Olo’eyktan in conversation with Diana that day, his ears sharp and attuned to what they had been speaking about. He wished to believe that the words he had said were true, that Sylwanin’s light still lingered through the trees and the wind and the dirt and all else that Eywa was comprised of so too was she—but he could not.

Tsu’tey spent hours, days even if he were truthful in his admittance, believing that the linking between him and all else around him had blurred. The world was dulled for so long after the death of his betrothed and friend-gods, his most dear and closest friend- that he would not eat or sleep, and yet wandered only through the trees in search of the soul that had once walked beside him, looked like him and fought like him and breathed like him—Neytiri had found him in the river once some ways from the Tree of Souls where he had submerged his body, every expanse of himself up until his chin.

Grief shall pass, she had said. This too, shall pass, she had assured.

Yet there was something, some way, in which she had spoken of the grief in that moment. As if the grief had ended with her, too—as if the grief was confined to that school, those four broken wooden walls that could barely hold bullets from its enclosure—how could she even begin to think that it could withstand the pounding force of grief?

No, no the grief was not confined to that singular plot of land. That was a human concept, he thought in those moments beneath the water with Neytiri. It was an all too human thing to think that grief held a set boundary because grief, pure and undiluted and as omnipotent as Eywa herself was recreated each and every moment, second and minute, by the hour and day that continued on without her. And it came again, over, and over and over.

Because that is what people-humans-do not know about grief. Or perhaps they do, perhaps they lie to themselves, perhaps when they are suddenly hit with such exponential pain during their walks or their sleeps or when they are eating or doing whatever it is that they humans do and wonder why this pain exists, where this burden of a thing had reared its head, they wonder where it had come from because they do not understand that this grief is being reborn again and living again in all the moments that would have held the existence of that life that had been lost.

And so no, no he could not believe Neytiri when she had said that this would pass and no, he could not accept Peyral’s words that Diana did not deserve to be bound to this consequence of her own actions.

Tsu’tey said nothing to his second as his tail swished behind him, he turned from her and continued their search through the forests. Peyral, knowing better than to anger her captain, followed behind silently until he dropped from the large branch of a tree all the way down to the ground. She was careful where she landed, and Tsu’tey’s gaze was cast too curiously downward for her to ignore what had caught his attention.

“Footprints,” she called out. “We do not patrol this area.”

Tsu’tey nodded his head, agreeing with his second. This area was too far away from Hometree for any of Omaticaya to have ventured here on foot, Tsu’tey and Peyral’s own pa’li rested only some leagues away themselves and even then, this is not somewhere they would have come if not for a purpose. The na’vi male leaned down, his fingers grazing over the dirt of the imprint, slowly as if he willed the earth that rubbed beneath his fingertips to divulge all its secrets to him.

They weren’t human, they were too small to be human, which meant only one thing. His eyes lifted to stare at Peyral as the realisation came to both of them simultaneously. Another tribe had sent spies into Omaticaya territory.

Chapter 9: What Else Have We Abandoned?

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leftingbadly · 3 months

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Chapter 7: I open my heart to kinder days, and only bats flutter forth

Pairing: Tsu'tey x OFC

Rating: PG13

Themes: Enemies to Lovers, Friends to Lovers

Other Tags: Fluff, Angst, Slow Burn, Betrayal, Revenge

Chapter 6: We are the Ghosts that Haunt our Graveyard

Diana found herself stopping in the large clearing she had become accustomed to in the past weeks. The vines hung delicately from the lower hanging branches of Hometree, it seemed even the vines had vines of their own, and she found herself taking note of each of those tendrils for a moment. Finer details she knew she would never have been able to see with her human eyes. Even the way they smelled was gorgeous, ten times better than the smell of after-rain back on Earth. How was it that something could smell so divine and so pure?

Grace watched as her friend’s chest rose, expanded, and then caved in again on itself over and over again. It felt good to see Diana take deep breaths like that again. The moment was short lived however when the younger woman’s eyes snapped open, her ears twitching in irritation as she realised what was wrong with the image before her and why she had never taken notice of something so loud as the vines hanging, there were no—

“Where are the kids?” Diana asked loudly, an agitation growing slowly in her at the lack of punctuality from her class. Her kids were always here on time, tails flickering and bright eyes eager. It was of the few things she prided herself on having those kids so ready to learn from her.

“I was going to tell you before we got here, but you walk so damn fast that—” Grace’s words were cut off when Diana turned to her with a too serious expression for her young face.

“Grace, where are they?” She asked again, headstrong, and stubborn about not being able to be distracted. Grace watched as Diana’s own tail swished back and forth behind her, the black hairs on the end of it practically sweeping the dirt off the ground. Her hands were placed on her hips as she stared at Grace, an expectant look on her face.

“Tsu’tey thought—”

“I knew it!” Diana growled as she began to walk towards the way they had come, ready to pick a fight with the man. Grace’s mouth dropped at the way she had barely gotten more than two words out before Diana was walking away ready to start another war.

“Diana!” She groaned and jogged up to the avatar’s body, standing in Diana’s way, “You didn’t even let me finish.”

“You said ‘Tsu’tey’,” Diana repeated, “I didn’t need much more than that—ow!”

Her wide eyes stared up at Grace in mock hurt as she rubbed her forehead, nursing the spot where the older woman had flicked her forehead. “Don’t be childish, he asked for my permission before he took them.”

“Where did he take them?” Diana asked as she blew out her cheeks.

Grace hesitated. And then she spoke, “To have some extra training.”

A moment passed. And then another, and Diana blinked at Grace as she tilted her head, slowly coming to an understanding as to what that meant.

“Diana, it’s not what you’re thinking, so don’t even go there.”

“It’s not?” Diana asked turning around. “So, the extra trainings, the heightened defences around Hometree—I’m just imagining all of that?” Grace stayed silent. It was then that Diana knew everything she had witnessed happening around Hometree within the last few days hadn’t just been in her head. Tsu’tey was preparing for something to happen, or at the very least he was trying to prevent that something from happening.

“Jesus,” Diana breathed out, and her entire body enveloped in sudden regret as her words from before came rushing back at her. She hated what she had said to Neytiri about her sister the minute they had left her mouth—but it felt so good to… to just say something, anything! About all the messed-up things that had been going on in her head. It felt good to make it the wind’s responsibility to carry them away.

“Can you blame them?” Grace asked after some time, to the surprise of Diana. Diana’s eyes shot up to meet her friend’s, confused, as the woman continued to speak. “If they were human—”

“They aren’t.” Diana shot back quickly, shooting her friend a dangerous look. But Grace only nodded as though she understood and continued speaking anyone.

“But if they were human, they would have done a lot worse things than simply tighten their defences.” This wasn’t something Diana needed to be reminded of. She had spent her fair share of too much time in the trenches to know what it is exactly humans would have done if they ever felt backed up into a corner. Hell, their very presence right now was enough proof of that. But this wasn’t the same thing. They weren’t at war.

“Aren’t they?” Grace asked, and it was only a moment later when Diana registered the woman’s words did she realise she had said those thoughts out loud. “Maybe not between themselves, but certainly with the beings that had invaded their home.”

“We’re invaders now, then?” Diana huffed.

“We’re stealing from them, Diana.” Grace’s voice was softer than what Diana had heard in a long time. It was one of those very rarer moments that she had pushed aside the scientist brain of hers and replaced it with her normal one. Diana had witnessed it much more than the average person when Grace was around Ernesh, too. When she was home and in her sleeping clothes, fuzzy slippers and all—when the days were kinder.

“What happens when we don’t succeed, Grace?” It was an impossible question. It was an unkind question to ask a friend. “What happens when we go home and we have to face all those families, the sick, the elderly, the kids—when we tell them there’s no hope for them anymore?”

“The evil things,” Diana breathed out, “all those harsh and malicious things, we do it, so they don’t have to.”

“Or do we do it because we are afraid?” Diana’s breathing halted. And then she breathed out an airy huff.

“I don’t see where fear lies in any of this.” Diana retorted.

“Yes, you do. It’s because fear lies in everything that you don’t want to accept it. All you know is fear, Diana, all you’ve known is fear—and you believe it’s all you will know.”

“Grace—”

“And instead of waiting for it to come to you, you think you’re protecting yourself by going out to look for it. And when you don’t find it, you create it.”

Diana huffed, a straggled breath of air barely escapes her lungs with how quickly she stood up and began walking away from the woman. And a heavier weight was placed on her breast now that she had not known before, ironically, the weight of truth always that much heavier than the lies we tell ourselves. But first before the recognition of that painful truth the clouds sprang first, quick, and harsh as the winds of Pandora as they straggled her mind. Denial was one such thing as deadly as the tip of an arrow, yet the metallic taste in her mouth was not of the arrows edge this time, but her own selfish desire to live within the glass house she had created for herself.

From behind her the fingertips of the doctor twitched. Grace had to hold herself back, this wasn’t Jake or Norman that she could holler after, it wasn’t one of the other interns that she could so easily quip at or make a joke about their situation. This was Diana. Her Diana—her Ernesh’s Diana. She wouldn’t allow herself to be so careless with her words when they were the only thing that held Diana to this place for so long. But no—also, that wasn’t true. There was something else holding the woman here, but the knowledge as to what that was stayed hidden from Grace. It stayed hidden from Diana, too.

And still Grace struggled, the pained look bleeding from her eyes, the urge to understand, to dissect and put under all the magnifiers and microscopes she could find that grief that resided within her dear friend so desperate within her that she wondered what it was that held her back from doing just that. Bodies she could create, languages she could understand from a sub-human species, books she could write on the flora and fauna of the moon of a planet in a galaxy that held no trace of her in it—and yet for all these things the grief of her most dear friend she could not lessen.

There was no greater humbling thing in all the universes that expanded between them.

That’s what it was sometimes, some days, Diana would be universes away from everything and everyone. And Grace’s mind flickered to younger days, when there was pain in the air that they could carry in their hands alone, a laughter flickered like a candlelight—the wick swayed by the wind, and those embers danced in the air and roared like a pyre. Sylwanin’s image flashed before Grace’s eyes, a memory, two others accompanied her as she bounded through the forests. It seemed as though Pandora was made in their image, in those kinder days.

Grace sighed and made her way up to the sleeping area, she had a long day ahead of her being human and didn’t intend to stick around in the wilderness of Pandora for too long. She had just hoped she could have contained the flames of Diana’s wrath when delivering the news—she should have known better. Shutting her eyes the woman made the neural-transference from her avatar body to her human one. She breathed in deeply as she opened her eyes.

The walk to Diana’s office was a slow one, her legs shaky as she took long drags of her cigarette nestled between her fingers. Grace hadn’t spent more than ten minutes going through the items seamlessly strewn about when the door opened behind her and Norm walked through.

“Looking for Diana?” Grace asked as she turned to look at the man who had entered the professor’s office. He was standing on a few lose pages that had managed to fall on the ground, but then again, it would have been easier to accidentally step on a piece of the ground that wasn’t littered with papers.

Diana was studious, for sure, she was also a highly intelligent woman. But tidy, she was not. Pages and pens littered not only the various amount of surfaces but the floors as well, where even some of the stacks of books that had probably neatly been piled up at one point were toppling over. Grace was only lucky Diana had taken up the rule not to eat or drink in her study. She didn’t want to even imagine the havoc that that would ensue.

“No,” Norm said somewhat breathlessly, “I was looking for you, actually. Trudy brought another package from Hellsgate. For Diana.”

That seemed to pique the doctor’s interest, though she would bet top dollar on who exactly it was that was sending Diana packages.

“From Quaritch?” She asked.

“Yeah, it’s about the Tawkami clan—why didn’t you tell me this was as bad as it was?” The doctor raised a brow at the avatar driver and began placing some of the books in their correct positions again.

“You opened it?”

“I had to!”

“Did you?”

Norm stuttered for a moment at Grace’s question, “No one is telling me anything! And then I open this package, the fourth one Diana’s received since we left to come here, only to find out that the Tawkami are planning an all-out war because they want to see her?”

“They aren’t planning an all-out war, Norm, don’t be dramatic.” The woman rolled her eyes. “Right now the tensions are just high, but it’ll cool over in about a week and—”

“And what happens if we don’t have a week?” Norm asked as he walked forward. “What happens when Quaritch or even Selfridge grows impatient?”

Grace raised her brow at the man, not sure what he was asking exactly. But she didn’t like the tone Norm had been using with her through their entire conversation too much, either. “What’s your point, Norman?”

“She’s a burden, Grace!” He exclaimed. “She’s putting this entire operation in jeopardy because of her attachments. Not only to Tawkami, but you can’t deny that it’s straining the relationship with Omaticaya too.”

“No, she isn’t.” Grace slammed her book down onto the table. “A burden is something you have to carry alone, Norm. A burden is grief, it’s the losing of someone you love—that is a burden. That is something you carry around with you alone. Existence—her existence, is not a burden. You never have to carry existence alone. She,” Grace emphasised, “never has to carry her existence alone.”

The doctor turned her head away from the man who worked under her, a hint of great disappointment took hold of her disposition. Her shoulders sagged as she lit the cigarette already in her mouth, as though there were no other place it was meant to be, and she lifted strong eyes to him quickly again.

“If you still think your teammates are a burden to carry around by the end of today then I suggest you improve your work ethic,” She picked up the files that he had brought in with him and slammed them into his chest. “Or better yet, find a new place to work. I’m sure Quaritch would love this sort of mentality behind his goons with guns.”

“You have to come to your senses, doc.” Norm said as his own shoulders sagged. He knew he had crossed a line with Grace by pointing out these facts about Diana, but someone had to. “Diana is—”

Grace cut him off before he could finish his sentence, “Diana is being scouted by not one, but two na’vi clans.”

That put a pause to what Norm had been saying.

“What do you mean?”

Grace sighed as she pinched the bridge of her nose. “I’m not sure on the specifics exactly, but their patterns and traditions all point to the same conclusion. Mo’at offered Diana a chance for iknimiya again, she told me.”

“You think it’s linked.” Norm stated, “that Tawkami trying to reach her and Omaticaya are both trying to bring her into their folds. Why?”

Grace pressed her tongue against her cheek as she shook her head, shrugging her shoulders she only stared at the man in front of her. She didn’t know either, but she was going to figure it out.

“She’s protecting them.” Norm stated.

“She’s protecting all our asses,” The doctor before him clarified, “It may not look like it to you, or to many members of the Omaticaya, but Diana is just as part of The People as Tsu’tey—even Neytiri.”

Grace continued, “Being accepted into Omaticaya is one thing, we have a history with them. Joining forces with another clan would wield outcomes we may never have thought of. We’re still trying to understand the minds of the natives, if we open it up too widely too quickly…”

“We might get swallowed in.” Norm finished the doctor’s sentence. “That’s—that’s impossible. They would never consider her, I mean, she’s barely done iknimiya! She hasn’t even properly trained for it and—”

“Norm,” Grace began again, slower this time, “Get your head out of those books and open your eyes to the world that’s actually in front of you.”

There was a long moment that stretched between them when neither of the two spoke. Norm was too embarrassed to speak up again so soon after being reprimanded by his superior-let alone someone he admired so greatly- and Grace… Grace didn’t know what else to say. There wasn’t a moment in her life she could say that she had ever doubted Diana and her actions, she wasn’t going to start now. But she did wonder though what the woman’s plans were for the future.

If the Tawkami clan were s desperate to speak with her it will only be a matter of time before they stop sending their messages and come and get her themselves. Then Grace really didn’t know what she’d do. A confrontation with one na’vi tribe was enough, they didn’t need to add onto the stresses of Quaritch bearing down on them and the fate of an entire clan on their heads.

“What do we do?” Norm asked finally, a sense of hopelessness to his tone that somewhat mimicked Grace’s own feelings.

“Trust Diana,” she said sternly. It was the only thing she was sure about at that moment, “She knows what she’s doing.”

Diana did not, in fact, know what she was doing.

Her avatar’s ears twitched as they trained into the sounds of the snickering beside her. Some of the na’vi males had taken it upon themselves to be particularly annoying that morning when she had gone out in search of Tsu’tey to give him a piece of her mind. But instead of finding him, Diana had somehow been roped into a game of throwing sticks with some of the warriors near the base of Hometree.

“Can you not do it, Eyktanay?” One of the males laughed at her, his body slightly bent down as he jeered the words. There was no malice behind them, the others laughed, and Diana felt her eyes roll at the nickname they were incessant on calling her. The title deriving from the many stories she had told them once of her war-days, they had quickly taken to that nickname both in a teasing and appreciative tone. Diana found herself hissing at the na’vi who came up behind her to correct her arm poster causing laughter to combust around her.

The game in question was spear throwing, and while Diana was talented with the bow, her throwing arm was barely present at all. Even more so when being watched and judged. But they had challenged her, and she was stubborn. So, taking a deep breath she let the air fill her lungs and braced not for the throw, but for the humiliation that would undoubtedly come once she failed to throw the spear farther than legs would jump.

But it was as if Eywa seemed to show pity for her in that moment a voice called out to the group that caused them to straighten themselves up a bit. “Fìskxawngìri tsap’alute sengi oe,” a na’vi woman called out to Diana and the human woman turned her head as her right arm lowered the spear in her hands. One of the younger males hissed jokingly at the new companion that had joined them, but she only raised her hand threateningly and pretended to swat the air around him.

Diana knew they were siblings, a younger brother and older sister, she had seen them around before but had never formally introduced herself. The na’vi woman who had approached them now was the second in command of Tsu’tey’s group, if she was here then it meant he wasn’t far off. Diana’s eyes began fluttering around the area in search of the male who had stolen her students some hours prior but couldn’t find him. Instead when her eyes moved back to the group the males who had been spectating her and the woman was staring at her.

There was an amused smile on her lips, a tilt to her head as her eyes gleamed at Diana. She was waiting for the human woman to speak first, and suddenly Diana felt conscious of even the way she stood in front of this woman’s gaze.

“What is your name?” Diana asked the woman in front of her, a tilt of her head, a swish of her own tail—intrigued, curious and, above all, waiting. Waiting for that scale to tip, the plates failing beneath the weight of something that danced between them. It felt like a tendril, a hand’s length of something new, strange, even, outstretched and grasping.

“Peyral,” The woman answered, a slow dip of her head, and yet her eyes never lowered. They moved as they maintained their hold with Diana’s and from the small, thin haired lashes of the na’vi people Peyral stared at the avatar woman in front of her. Her head still bowed—that smile still on her face. Oh, Diana thought, that is a dangerous thing indeed. Diana had to break her own eyes away first, not yet confident enough to match the warrior woman in front of her. She paid attention to anything else for a moment before she met the woman’s gaze again. Her hand came to grasp the back of her own neck as she rubbed at it sheepishly, her mind straining to remember if she had seen the hunter before.

Peyral was an attractive woman, her head full of hair as she tied it in an intricate pattern. There were vines weaved into it, and other plants Diana didn’t know the name of but she was sure Grace would get a kick out of it. There were other things that decorated the woman’s body too, some scars on her arms from hunting trips, various straps and knife holders on her thighs and hip. There was also two straps on her back that told Diana she had just come back from scouting, no doubt those sheathes had once held deadly weapons just moments ago.

“You wonder if we have met?” Peyral asked as she walked around the woman, grabbing the bow that sat nestled in one of the grooves of the large tree behind them. Diana turned to move and follow Peyral’s movements, but when she turned left the woman was gone from where she had been a moment ago, and when Diana turned right again at the slightest feeling of something on her leg where Peyral stood. Bright eyes staring at her with mirth, a curious smile on her lips as her fangs stood showcased. Sharp, white, and taunting.

Diana huffed out a sigh of something she hadn’t felt since ages ago. Was it relief? No, not something so soft, and yet something lighter than she had felt in some time. Why was this woman’s presence so comforting?

“We have not,” Peyral said in answer to her own question. It was only then did Diana realise she had been staring at the woman. Peyral, it seemed, had noticed as well if the look on her face had said anything.

“I have seen you,” Diana blurted out in an attempt to get anything out instead of just staring at the woman in front of her. Peyral gave her another curious look.

“Have you now?” Diana was thankful her skin wasn’t a lighter colour, if it had been then Peyral might have seen the vicious red glow that would have overtaken her cheeks.

“But we haven’t spoken before,” Diana continued, trying to brush off the moment that had just happened and feigned confidence. “You have always seemed too busy for conversation.”

Peyral shook her head with a smile as she walked up onto one of the roots that were nestled snugly into the ground. Then she looked down at Diana before the professor followed her up. “I have not been too busy for conversation.”

“Why have we not spoken before, then?” Diana implored, her inquisitive nature taking over and causing her to be more bold with her questions. Peyral’s next words shocked the woman.

“First I must grow to learn the meaning of my own words before I am able to speak them to you without stuttering.” Flutter.

“What is the meaning of this?” And then chomp!

The women’s eyes both snapped to the male that entered their space now, Tsu’tey with his eyes wide and mouth open, not in the taunting way of Peyral, but in the menacing way of an over-bearer. Diana rolled her eyes, about to open her mouth to retort before she sensed something moving from in front of her.

Diana’s head turned, and her attention was caught by Peyral who moved closer to her own body. The movement wasn’t too shocking in and of itself, to the natural onlooker it seemed she was only readjusting herself and her position. Yet to Tsu’tey the meaning of Peyral’s movements were as clear as the air that he breathed. His second was laying claims.

He eyed the short distance between his second and the woman who had once been his student. The woman who, for all her intelligence, was blind to the underlying tone of what was happening in the area she occupied.

“A conversation, Tsu’tey, is happening here.” Diana said as she turned her gaze back to the man with a role of her eyes, “Though I can see why you would have trouble knowing what that is.”

Diana was ready for a retort, or a sneer, or a hiss. Anything that would tell her of Tsu’tey’s clear disgust of her very presence. But to her shock none of those things came. He only continued to stare open eyed at something else, not her, no—never her. Then his gaze flickered up and there was something else in his eyes she had never seen before.

“We leave. Now.” He told Peyral, and without another glance towards either of the women he turned around and walked away.

His curt actions only made the professor scoff at his retreating figure, but a feeling on her arm quickly caused her to lose interest in the man and turn it back to the woman in front of her. Peyral had grabbed her arm gently, running calloused fingers down her arm and eventually squeezing her hand lightly as she nodded her head in greeting.

“It was a pleasure having a conversation with you, Ektanay Diana, have another with me soon.” And with another, last nod of her head the second followed after Tsu’tey into the dense foliage of the forests around them.

Chapter 8: We Fell in Love Once at the Start of the Universe, and Our Souls Never Forgot One Another

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leftingbadly · 3 months

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Chapter 6: We Are the Ghosts that Haunt Our Graveyard

Pairing: Tsu'tey x OFC

Rating: PG13

Themes: Enemies to Lovers, Friends to Lovers

Other Tags: Fluff, Angst, Slow Burn, Betrayal, Revenge

Chapter 5: Alone at the Edge of a Universe, Humming a Tune

“Fyape syaw fko ngar?”

There was a ringing in her head, like an old haunt come to claim her again. Long hands extended their reach to her, the tips of its fingers dyed red—clay. Red clay of that she had seen in the wilds of Pandora, the harsh rains would bring it forth from the river banks and streams.

Ch. 6 We Are the Ghosts that Haunt Our Graveyard

“Fyape syaw fko ngar?”

The streams… more than the looming figure of those hands she could smell with it the scent of fresh water. Salt licked the back of her throat so harshly that she began coughing, grabbing at her own throat in an attempt to breath better—more freely.

But those hands from before had wrapped themselves around her and that voice that had spoken to her spoke again, louder this time, adamant on not being pushed aside.

“What is your name?” It was the only time it spoke to her in English. Every other word that she heard after that, though they were few and whispered to only the back of her mind, was in pure unfiltered na’vi.

She opened her mouth, and chalk coughed out. White, open dust fell through her throat and she keeled over in pain. Her eyes dried up, the tears that had been there only moments prior turned to ashes in their ducts. It stung and flooded her head until her eyes forced themselves shut.

“Kìyevame,” the voice told her, and those soft clean hands reached for her beneath her chin and lifted her eyes up to the open moon. It was split in half, and her tears poured out from the opening. And then Diana’s eyes snapped open.

It was just a dream.

Breathe, she told herself, breathe and calm down.

Her hand trailed from the side of her soft comforter to her chest, where she rested it over her heart, and tried to calm the thundering that was nestled there. It wouldn’t stop for a long time, so instead she lifted her led inlaid legs up and out of the bed.

Grey eyes stared back at her as she looked at herself in the mirror, as though a storm was raging there, and yet for all the turmoil she felt her mind was somewhat clear. No, clear wasn’t the right word. It was silent. Like the silence before a storm, or the silence in a room that would slowly begin to build tension. She could feel the tension building on the very follicles of her skin. The hair on her arms were arise with the thought, like electricity crackling in the air.

Her eyes drifted down her body and followed the various trails of tattoos that littered her arm and exposed stomach, traveling down her torso to her legs. And then they trailed up again, over her thick lips, her dark, clear skin and up to the large mass of hair on her head.

She sighed, her arms were weak already thinking about braiding them down.

“Hey,” She turned to see Jake standing in the open entrance of her bedroom door, “I was gonna make breakfast, you want some?”

Instead of answering his question, she only narrowed her eyes at him. This action had the man in the wheelchair giving her a cautious look in return.

“We need to talk.” Diana told Jake. The marine had spent his entire day prior out with Neytiri, training in the plains with the pa’li and practicing his bow and arrow. She had hardly seen him sit down for even a single moment before he was up again and working on a new regime.

Jake had told her once that he preferred it that way, he had said it somewhat depressingly though. Diana knew what he meant when he said this—he was trying to live the life he couldn’t in his human body.

And while Diana didn’t begrudge him for this, she even supported him, Jake needed a reality check. They were now well into the second month of his three-month na’vi trial run and Quaritch’s patience was wearing thin. As if it couldn’t get any thinner.

“You know the last time a girl told me that she broke my heart, and I lost my left shoe.” Jake joked, but Diana had come to learn very early on that he said many serious things in a joking way. She raised her brow at him.

“Are those two things mutually exclusive?”

“Embarrassingly so.”

The woman sighed before she spoke. “I spoke with Eytukan the other day,” Diana told Jake before her shoulders jumped at the loud banging of the cupboard behind her, she froze for a moment before quickly turning around to the source of the noise and saw the marine hold his hands up in apology, “He said some pretty interesting things.”

“Yeah?” Jake asked absentmindedly as he wheeled himself around the small, cramped kitchen of theirs. The woman watched on in amusement at the man’s rushed movements, and barely contained her own laughter as he began choking on the yoghurt he scarfed down. She raised a brow at him in question, and he offered a guilty look as he slowly began eating at a moderate pace again.

She questioned him on his behaviour, but he gave a less than honest reply, “I’m just hungry, that’s all,” Diana knew that was a lie- in fact, she knew he was going to give an untruthful answer as the question slipped from her mouth and being as nosy as she is—she prodded him for the truth, “Okay- Neytiri said I’m getting a lot better at this warrior-clan stuff, I just don’t want to waste any unnecessary time here when I could be making heaps of progress there.”

“Does this so called ‘unnecessary time’ account for eating food to maintain your health and sleeping to maintain your sanity?” Diana quipped back at him and he made a characteristically childish face back at her in turn, “I’m serious Jake, you have to take care of your human body just as much as you do your avatar—if not more.”

“Yeah, yeah, look you’ve been at this a lot longer than me okay? You’ve had plenty of time to see and do everything, I only have three months.”

Diana scoffed, “Hardly,” Dragging a plastic chair from out of the table where Jake sat she started fiddling with some of the many rocks Norman had brought in from his excursions, “There’s still so much I want to see and do out there, it feels like torture being cooped up in here for even an hour, let alone days.”

Jake turned to her and let his yoghurt rest on the table unattended, turning his body as he leaned on the hand that rested on the arm of his wheelchair, “So why don’t you?” He asked curiously, “Why do you and Grace sometimes just not come to Hometree for days?”

The woman shook her head as she placed the rock down, sliding it over to him and watched as he caught it with his free hand, “It’s different for you.”

“In what way?”

“You…” She sighed as she tried to explain the situation, “They accept you in a different way they do us, to them there is a reason you’re there. Grace and I have to be a lot more careful than you do, there are a lot of Omaticaya that still don’t trust us.”

“Like Tsu’tey?” Jake questioned innocently to which Diana nodded, “I doubt leaving love bites on his neck was the best way to get him to open up to you again though.”

Diana threw one of the smaller rocks at his chest, hard. She rolled her eyes at him, but somehow she wasn’t at all surprised at the way he would joke about her relationship with Tsu’tey. However fragile and cracking as it is.

“They weren’t love bites.” She defended.

“Sure, and Toruk is as harmless as a butterfly.” Diana let out a breath of air from her nose at his slight joke.

“We don’t belong here Jake,” Diana spoke up after a long moment of silence. It was a statement she would have fought against once, but not wanting to believe in something doesn’t make it any less true.

Jake’s face fell as the seriousness of the situation came rushing towards him. “If we leave them now Diana, they’re going to get killed.” She knew this was right too, and it was like one of those old English sayings about being stuck between a rock and a hard place. Diana worried her lip as she stayed silent, the dense, humid air within the container had always been stiff but she noticed it now more so than ever. Her lungs burned to feel the fresh open air of Pandora again, something her avatar body could only allow. But Diana had taken the week off from teaching the kids at the school, she and Tsu’tey needed time to recuperate, to digest all that had been done and said on that forest floor.

She stood from the kitchen table and walked towards where the linking pods were settled not mere steps from it. Jake turned around as he watched her, but he didn’t move from his place in the kitchen.

“The war will end, and leaders will shake hands. That old woman will keep waiting for her martyred son. And those children will keep waiting for their hero father. I don't know who sold our homeland, but I saw who paid the price.” Diana ran her hand over the metal surface of the linking pod, the soft pads of her fingers rubbed over the dents of the old machine and her mind wandered as she stared at Jake. It was unusually quiet on Pandora that day, the hoots of the animals had settled into a soft hum that ran in tandem with the machinery as they powered down and a long sigh escaped her.

She looked up from the rocks she was playing with to Jake. “Who said that?” Jake asked and she answered him.

“Mahmoud Darwish,” She supplied, “He was a Palestinian poet, regarded as the national poet of Palestine, actually. The piece was… well, all his pieces actually, it… spoke about such anguish and disposition. He was a foreigner in his own homeland.” She shook her head. “It was war too, then, there was a wound there that would never scab over.”

“Palestine, that… that’s um,” Jake tried to rummage his brain for where the country was on the map—or where it had been.

“It’s lost now, it’s been lost for a long time. Not enough people cared enough.” She looked up to Jake, “We’re ghosts of history Jake, we haunt our own graveyards.”

“How do you do that?” Jake asked her. Diana shot him a questioned look.

“I heard you when you were yelling at Tsu’tey, when he said that humans deserved not to survive. You said that there was still good left, and yet I’m looking at you now and you just seem so…” He waved his hands towards her in gesture to her entire being.

Diana laughed as Jake trailed off. “Irritating, isn’t it? I feel like a contrarian. Like a hypocrite. I guess that’s the state of human consciousness, we are each both ends of the spectrum.”

She gritted her teeth as she thought over their options; continue working with the avatar programme and witness more impending destruction on Pandora and her clans or leave now and don’t. The second option sounded easy, it sounded safe. For her at least, she would be worlds away before the first bulldozer arrived at the base of Hometree, deep in cryogenic sleep, suspended in time and not-time ages away from all the war and strife that had followed her so loyally throughout her life.

“Neytiri changed a lot you know,” Diana offered to Jake, “Maybe you wouldn’t have noticed it but… she did.” A shake of the woman’s head as she pushed herself off of the linking pod and walked towards the window and took a seat there, “Grace had told me something was… off about her after what had happened at the school.”

“I mean,” Jake supplied as he wheeled himself to sit near the table closer to her, “Her sister did die.”

“No it was more than that; grief yes, but… suffice to say if she had killed you in that forest instead of save you I wouldn’t have been surprised. The Na’vi are a brutal people yes, but Neytiri was never like that.”

“So what, you’re saying I should watch out for her?”

“I’m saying she trusts you, Jake. I’m saying she’s allowing herself to trust you.” Her head tilted as she turned it around, cracking the sides as though to relieve the tension that had built there. Then she stared down at him through half-lidded eyes and regarded his expression closely, “We have to tell them.”

Jake startled at that, shifting in his place as he fidgeted with his hands and refused to make eye contact with her. He knew she was right, he knew their charade wouldn’t last long- the first month was already over and what limited time was given to them was running out, “Not yet.” But still her refused to acknowledge it, refused to see the situation for what it was; not yet, he seemed to plead with her, give me more time.

She sighed. “One more week, then you have to decide where you really stand, whether it’s with the RDA or the Na’vi.”

Diana sighed loudly, her shoulders slumping as she took a long and hard look at Jake. He in turn was only staring at her with wide eyes, hopeful eyes that she would grant him this one reprieve for so long as he could have it. It was a selfish request from him, they both knew that, but the war on earth had taken so much from them Diana couldn’t begrudge him for acting a little bit selfish.

“Everything you fought for back on earth,” Jake asked, “Why did you do it?”

“I didn’t.” The answer came to Diana as naturally as air, Jake looked at her with shock.

“What do you mean?”

She sighed, “I didn’t fight for anything on earth, not the war, not the aftermath. Ernesh did though, he was a lo tlike you actually-maybe that’s why Grace likes you so much-but… he wanted to fight and he wanted to protect and I…”

Jake was still staring at her, his expression open and honest as realisation danced in his eyes. He watched his friend shake her head dismayed. And then he smiled, “You couldn’t let him go alone.”

“I wouldn’t.” Diana clarified, “I wouldn’t let him go into that war ravaged cities without me, wherever he goes I go, that was my promise. He hated me for doing that though.”

She scoffed a laugh out, “Figures he’d end up dying and going to the only place I couldn’t follow.”

“Jesus, that’s dark.” Jake breathed out and Diana cracked a small smile and shrugged her shoulders.

Hours later Diana found herself in the forests again. The hard string of her longbow shot passed her ear and across her cheek as she let loose another arrow. This one flying fast and farther than the one prior. She was beginning to regain her bow strength again.

Diana could feel the strain in her arms, the tightness of her stomach beginning to form again due to the various exertions she had put her body through. Na’vi bodies were naturally tall and slender, but maintaining that muscle and stamina was a hard thing indeed for a body that had been asleep for almost half a year.

The coldness of the air was a harsh bite to her lungs as she would breathe in and out, the smell of rain and the wet dampness of the soil beneath her toes exhilarated the woman beyond belief. She felt as though she was in her element here. Diana found herself again thinking about how different Pandora was from Earth.

“Enjoying the fun?” Diana turned her head to the side swiftly, the rustling of some leaves now finally catching her ears as she saw Neytiri walk towards her with a wide smile.

Diana laughed as she nodded her head, giving her friend a breathy answer as she jumped down from the post she had been sitting at. The high tree branch had allowed Diana an accurate view of all the targets she had managed to create in the forest, each varying degrees of difficulty and sometimes disturbed by the wind.

“You do not have such things in your home?” Neytiri asked, taking the bow from her friend and adjusting the strings with her expert eye. And suddenly Diana’s smile fell as she watched her friend, and she shook her head staring up at the open sky that was clouded with thunder clouds.

Neytiri looked up from her friend, staring at her through the small, thin lashes the Na’vi possessed as she waited for her friend’s answer. “No,” Diana supplied, somehow breathlessly, “We don’t have forests like this on Earth.”

“Why not?” Neytiri asked again, and Diana herself could sense the confusion from her friend. Why not indeed. Diana supposed that in her grandmother’s time there were great forests like this, but not anymore. Because, well, because; “Maybe because of us? Although, there was not a single indication that the world had shut us out.”

Maybe that was a lie. Diana thought, that was most definitely a lie. There had been indications, so vast and plentiful in between. One after another as it ravaged the world and told the occupants that the planet was sick, the planet was dying. Plagues came, heatwaves and earthquakes ravaged every corner of culture and civilization. And yet still, no one dared to heed any warnings.

There were some who tried to stop it, some who had spoken out and tried to heal the earth. They launched campaigns, staged protests, created riots and yet… and still, it was in vain. And now humans have come to another planet, another home, to ravage it as well so that they may too survive to… to what? All humans knew how to do was outlive planets.

“Why have you fallen to your knees?” Diana hadn’t even noticed her legs had given way beneath her. But the soft and damp soil on her legs now was as clear an indication as any.

“A terror has entered my heart; it has stolen my strength away.”

“What is such a terror so painful?”

“Lonesomeness.” Lonesomeness? Why was it lonesomeness? Diana feared that it all always came back to that, didn’t it? She wondered if the earth had as much a neural connection as Pandora did, and that humans simply weren’t designed to know of it. According to those old religions, earth was meant as a punishment, was it not?

“I have not heard this word before, it is of your tongue, yes?”

“Yes. It is to be without anyone.” Was that what the earth felt, then? As it choked on metal and mine.

“But I am with you.”

She shook her head. “It is not the same as aloneness. You are here but I am still lonesome.”

Neytiri was silent, and then she too fell to her knees. “Explain it to me.”

Diana laughed a small laugh. There was no joy in it, Neytiri found this strange. Why is it they laugh even when they are in pain? She thought this but held silence before Diana spoke again. She reached her hand out to hold the woman’s hand in the dirt.

“When Sylwanin died,” Diana whispered. Neytiri took her hand back. “When you screamed out into the air so raw and shattered, when it felt as though the bullets rang through your heart along with hers,” Diana looked up, she felt a sort of sick satisfaction at the teary-eyed look in her friend’s eyes. “That was lonesomeness.”

Diana hated herself for feeling good at the shock on Neytiri’s face. But it wasn’t that, it was more than that, if she thought about it more maybe it was the fact that Neytiri could understand her somewhat now. She could understand what lonesomeness was.

“It is a wretched thing to hold with you always.” Neytiri said despite this. Despite the squeezing of her heart or the unfelled tears in her eyes. She could see the discourse raging in her human friend’s eyes and reached to her despite it all.

Neytiri knew humans held within them far greater hurts than they themselves could carry alone. Her father and mother had told her of these hauntings when her sister was killed.

Diana choked back a sob, and yet she didn’t as well, and so it came out as only a desperate gurgle of a noise. “It is,” She nodded continuously, “It is an awful, wretched thing.”

“It eats at me…” She looked up to the sky, into the eyes of her friend.

“What does, my friend?”

“The way he looks at me.”

“In which way?”

“The way I look at myself.” Diana admitted.

When Diana looked up to Neytiri after her admission she saw her wide, open eyes staring at her in a wonder she couldn’t place. Self-loathing, Diana had learned, wasn’t a common trait among the na’vi. She’d seen it in Tsu’tey once or twice but that was Tsu’tey, he was a strange man from the get go.

“Diana!” The woman in question turned her head at the call of her name, and she saw Grace was standing beneath the large branch of the tree the two of them were sat on.

“I guess that’s my cue, duty calls.” She gave her friend one more smile, before letting herself fall from the branch and onto the large leaves that broke her fall.

“Everything alright?” Grace asked, but Diana only shook her head as she dusted herself off and walked towards the weapons rack at the training area. No, things weren’t alright. And she had a sickening feeling that it was only going to get worse from here on out.

Chapter 7: I Open My Heart to Kinder Days, and Only Bats Flutter Forth

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leftingbadly · 3 months

Text

Chapter 5: Alone At the Edge of A Universe, Humming a Tune

Pairing: Tsu'tey x OFC

Rating: PG13

Themes: Enemies to Lovers, Friends to Lovers

Other Tags: Fluff, Angst, Slow Burn, Betrayal, Revenge

Chapter 4: Tell Tale Heart

Diana recognised something in his eyes then as he stared at her atop his strong pa’li, and as he stared back at her she knew he saw something there as well- a recognition of something that had been long growing and slumbering in the back of both their minds. It was a yanking, more than a nudging- more than a slight prod, something unnerved him. And an unnerved Tsu’tey was an unnerved Diana. For as long as she had known him, albeit it was only a handful of months, she had known the warrior to be strong and capable, which meant that if something made him nervous, she should be too.

Only this time, unlike her first months in the wilds of Pandora with him as her teacher, she knew what it was that unsettled him so much. Grace had spoken to her that day about the uneasiness amongst the warrior members of the Omaticaya clan, she had seen them speaking among themselves in quiet seclusion and in hushed whispers, there was a growing unrest within the clan about their safety and the safety of their home; and at the root of it all stood Tsu’tey. His disdain for the avatars was no secret to any one, and he had gone out of his way to either evade or mock Diana and the other members of the team, it didn’t help with the mending process of their alliance with the Na’vi if their greatest warrior and future leader didn’t show he would ever trust them again.

So Diana sighed, and pulled back against the words that sat on the tip of her tongue as she slid down from atop her pa’li, patting Niwin’s side as she spoke with the creature while simultaneously eyeing Tsu’tey, he rolled his eyes at her antics, and threw his hand up halfway as if to mock her gestures as she unmade tsaheylu with her mount and stared at him, as if asking him to do the same. He only lowered his own head at her expectantly, as if asking her where exactly she thinks she stood, she tilted her head in response, I’m here, it said, I’m staying right here.

He groaned in frustration, and Diana smiled as she watched him unmake his own tsaheylu and slide effortlessly down the side of his large pa’li. Diana watched his shoulders move, the way they stayed rigid and tight, then to the way his tail flickered behind him; agitated and impatient. She knew he was angry, she also knew he was frustrated at not being able to do anything at the obvious threat to his home, and for a small moment a piece of her heart thrummed for him and the rest of the warriors she had seen, dismayed and forlorn. It was no secret the damage the RDA had made on Pandora in the mere number of years they had been here, the culling and cutting of every breathing thing that they deemed a threat. Diana shut her eyes for a brief moment and her head twisted to the side, as though she were in pain at the memories that forced themselves forward, and of the faces of those warriors who could not even defend their home.

She knew if the roles had been reversed and the Na’vi had come to earth, humans would not have been so patient.

“You still ride like a child,” Tsu’tey’s words cut her out of her reverie, and brought her back to the warm day on Pandora where previously her mind had taken her back to the cold ones, she let out a laugh as he walked forward, and she walked in the opposite direction of him.

“You still insult like a teacher,” She shot back, and she watched as his ears flickered back and forth. They were circling each other now, one never laying their eyes off the other, until Tsu’tey’s attention was caught by Niwin who he now stood in front of, and Diana’s own vision was lined with his mount.

They were quiet for a long time, and the woman cherished the silence that had used to envelope them so comfortably. Though she knew now his ears were trained on every sound she made, and even the hairs on his arms were tuned to her as she was to him. They were, in that moment, both more and less than friends; a hurt lay imbedded and settled into their bones, a haunt deeper than marrow adjusted to their souls, there were ghosts here and she was accustomed to their tune.

“Tsahik spoke with me,” Diana turned around when Tsu’tey began to speak, shifting her attention from pa’li to rider, “She wishes for you to continue your training.” The words felt like poison in his mouth -she knew he was thinking it by the way he spoke them- nose scrunched up, mouth turned into a snarl that showcased his fangs and the lines on his forehead pulled down into enraged eyes. But he was keeping himself still, holding onto the antennae of Niwin as if to hold himself there. Diana wondered what else Mo’at had told him. She pondered over what to say next, words rolled on and off her tongue as she decided to choose her next words very carefully.

“She… said I could choose not to,” She spoke slowly, trying to gauge his reaction, “if I did not want to.”

“Choose?” Now those words really were seething. He abruptly turned his entire body to her where previously he only regarded her over his shoulder, and she noted now the tenseness of his shoulders had run its course throughout his body, and she thought he might start vibrating with the anger he exuded, “It is not for you to choose,” he spat, “you have no choice here.”

Diana felt her heartbeat begin to thrum again, steady and fast as he approached her like a hound of hell, and vengeance was his to claim. Tsu’tey grabbed her at the wooden necklace she wore around her neck and pulled her face close to his, “You will refuse iknimaya, you will refuse this clan; the people do not welcome you.”

Diana felt her eyebrows furrow and her face contort into a grimace. Grabbing onto his wrist that held her close she seethed her own words to him, “Who are you to tell me where I belong?” She tried to pry his arm away, but she couldn’t match his strength.

“Who are you to demand space where you cannot stand?” He yelled at her as he grabbed at her queue, dangling it between them before her eyes, “This,” he motioned to the pink tendrils that spun and twirled, searching for a place to interlock and make home in, “it is not of Eywa.” Diana gasped as he tightened his grip around the base of it, and shock ran down her spine as she felt tingles run through her at the pain. Then she seethed and pushed him off of her with all her might.

“You have no right!” She screamed, “You know nothing.”

“It is made by humans!” He seethed, pointing his fingers in her face as though to solidify his point, and then his voice grew softer as he stared at her head-on, as if he knew his next words could not be denied, “All things made by humans,” He shook his head as he gazed down at her, “they are made to break.”

A harsh jab to her shoulder came before she could retaliate with her own words, “Small,” another jab, “broken,” another, “unlived things.” A final push had her tripping over a large root and on the ground before she could catch herself.

Diana felt the air wash out of her as she stared up at him, at this Na’vi male so unlike herself and any living thing she had met. It was then that that realisation had finally washed over her, and it was like instead of being surrounded by the ghosts of her past and the hauntings of her present, she became them and intertwined their vision with her own. As she looked up at this creature, this strange, inhuman creature- a reality dawned on her; he was right. She didn’t belong here; none of them did. And so who was she to try and prove that truth wrong?

“You creatures,” Tsu’tey spat down at her, moving his hands through the air as if to mimic a nothingness he could not describe, “are without.”

And there it was.

That one single word he would not stop repeating to her; without, hollow, abandoned. Empty of all the things that made them worthy of living, and like that she realised that the ghosts and hauntings that had surrounded her were just pieces of her, for all the while she had labelled them as species of an unknown origin. She thought of earth then, of that ravaged planet that bled metal and steam; the one that had been so betrayed and wrung of all inherent things it had been made of, and she realised why she had had a fondness for that planet, and it was because she saw her image in it.

But it was like Selfridge said, earth was dying, and she wondered for a brief moment if sucking the life out of another beating thing, out of Pandora, was the only way to keep it from death- was it really worth saving?

I beg you. Her eyes shot wide as a memory rushed forward, a fleeting sound echoed with the wind and she twisted her head to hear it, she noted the rustling of the leaves with the gust, and with her Na’vi senses it was as though the ground beneath her thrummed under her fingertips. I beg you to survive. And then the flash of an image she had thought lost to time, a man with his thick curls and brightened smile enveloped her mind, “Ernesh.” A sobbed cry escaped her dry mouth and glazed eyes stared off at nothing- and everything all at once.

Tsu’tey watched the woman before him in confusion, eyes that seemed to look at him but were cut off before her vision saw anything from the world, then on her shoulder- something moved. White, and as pure as the oceans he had once visited as a child, long tendrils of pure light floated before her, luminescent and burning even in the heat of the sun, and he took a step back in shocked amazement; atokirina. Woodsprites of the Tree of Souls rested on her now, tracing the lightened dots and speckles on her skin and the warrior’s eyes widened to see their actions. Her eyes danced with their white luminescence, as though dreams ran through them- he wondered what they showed her now, he wondered if Eywa would finally rid his home of these invaders that sought to steal it from him.

And before he could open his mouth and call out to her the sprites began to float away, and he watched as the emotions in her eyes changed from that broken hollowness to a fiery rage, she crouched onto her hands and feet, and before he could have any time to register the change in her demeanour; she attacked.

He let out a loud gasp of air as she tackled him down to the ground and tried to rip her off of him. Confusion laced his mind at the sudden attack, and he could barely register her words as she screamed at him on top of trying to get away from her hard punches.

“You complete! Dickhead! Prick!” She slammed her balled fist down harder onto his back, and he let out yet another gasp of air as she had slammed it into his lungs, “Ugly! Ugly warrior man! Horrible manners and-!” She gasped as he lifted her up off of him by her hips and threw her to the side, finally clearing his mind enough to be able to focus on getting her off of him and under him, he used his legs to restrain her own and his hands to hold down her arms, but before he could solidly hold her down she thrusted her pelvis up hard enough to sway his unbalanced body to the side, and the two of them rolled a small slope.

Above them Diana could hear the stomping of their pa’li as they watched the two Na’vi wrestle on the forest ground, and a brief moment of clarity washed over her as she realised what she might look like tackling with him, but it was soon replaced with that unhinged fury he had slowly been brewing inside of her. She continued to curse at him as they rolled down that slope.

“You think you’re so high and mighty!” She gasped as she tried to catch her breath and wrestled to get free of the grip he had on her ankle, “As if you’ve never done a terrible thing in your life! As if –gah, let go! – you had never made mistakes!” She eventually stopped struggling to release his grip on her and used it to propel herself forward, landing her knee on his chest as she sat on his torso, “As if humankind has nothing else to offer the world!” Images of Ernesh flashed through her mind, images of Grace and the school, “You don’t know shit about what I’ve seen, you have no fucking clue about what we’ve survived,” she pressed down harder onto his chest, “we deserve to carry on just as much as anything else.”

She looked down at him as he seethed back up at her, his fangs bared and threatening as he retaliated, “If this is the way, you do not deserve.” And he used that brief moment of pause within her to attack, flinging himself to the side and twisting her arms in his grasp he held them behind her back, and in a moment of sheer panic and desperation, Diana turned her head painfully to the side and sunk her teeth into his neck. She felt his neck twitch and pulse in her mouth, and relinquished the bite of her canines when he pushed at her.

Tsu’tey let out a loud yell of pain, and Diana tasted his blood in her mouth as she was pushed forward and free of his grasp. Her legs tangled with his as she was pushed forward and she watched as his wide, angular eyes shot to her- then to the hand he held in front of him laced with his own blood. Diana brought her hand to her wet lips, where upon retracting them and holding it up to her eyes noticed a large spot of blood on them. They stared at each other for five intakes of breath. One, in shocked horror, both at being bitten by and having bitten the other; two, the appalling act of trying to wash out the blood from her mouth; three, the harsh grip against a punctured neck to stop the bleeding; four, more shock; and finally five, blasphemy.

“You bit me,” He started, clutching his neck.

“I didn’t mean to-“

“You didn’t mean to bite me?”

“Diana!” Her head whipped to the side as Jake called out her name, and she stood up from the ground and untangled herself from Tsu’tey as he slid down the slope they had previously rolled down, “Are you alright?” He reached down to her to help her up, glaring down at Tsu’tey as he did so and Diana could pinpoint the exact moment he saw the canine marks on Tsu’tey’s neck from the expression on his face. He turned from the male to her with a raised eyebrow and a slight upturn of his lips, then let go of her hand as she stepped away from him.

“Did I inter-“

Diana slammed her hands over his mouth before he could say anything, then dragged him away without sparing the warrior on the ground another glance and walked away and back to their mounts, “Not a word from you Jake Sully or they’ll be laying your body in the ground with atokirina surrounding you.”

It was hours later that Diana found herself near one of the many fires the Omaticaya had lit that night, a cluster of them each sat around the warmth of the blaze as they weaved their crafts and added minute details to already completed works. She herself had been working on her own design, rather than being able to create instruments of music or clothes, Diana had settled on something she deemed wholly human; a dreamcatcher.

Her skill of sewing and weaving expanded just as far as her skill for the sciences or medicines, which was, in fact; null. So she set upon creating and introducing something to the children of the clan that she had held in reverence back on earth.

“I do not recognise this weave,” A deep voice sounded from beside her, and Diana turned her head to notice the figure of the Olo’eyktan approaching. When she made to stand in greeting, he raised his four-fingered hand to stop her, and instead settled his staff beside her on the ground as he sat next to her beside the fire and reached out to her workmanship, asking to hold and inspect the item. She gave it to him with cautious hands.

“It is a custom from my home, from a clan long lost, but not forgotten,” she introduced it to him, “They were called Ojibwe, and this is called asabikeshiinh; dreamcatcher, a woven web like a spider’s.” Diana watched as the male ran his fingers over the webbed design of her dreamcatcher and through the feathers that hung from it by thread. The rough material of the wood she had used contrasted the smoothness of the small pebbles tied to it, and she prayed silently she had not insulted his customs of weaving by intertwining it with her human ones.

At his silence, she began to explain, “It is named after Asibikaashi, Spider Woman, she who cares for the young children of the clan and the people of the land. Mothers and grandmothers would weave these things to protect her people.”

“What does it protect from?”

Diana shrugged, “All things. Bad things,” She tried to explain to him in words they could both understand, but the true meaning of the piece had been lost through time even to her, even on earth, “It is a simple tradition now, not many believe in it anymore.” She took the dreamcatcher back as he handed it to her, and she rubbed the birds’ feather between her fingers.

“It is such a small thing to carry all that responsibility,” His accent was rough and shaky as he spoke the English language, and Diana marvelled at the pronunciation as he spoke, ghosting the sounds over her own tongue in silence, analysing the way he spoke and the way the words were known to him.

She smiled softly at his words, “Are all things not burdened with such responsibility?” She asked lightly, and he nodded his head slowly in understanding, a glint of something in his eye as he stared down at her. Diana shifted beneath his gaze, straightening her back as she tried to replicate his straight posture and turned her neck to the side to avoid that piercing look.

She forgot, momentarily, who was sat next to her beneath the burning glow of the fire. The Na’vi male before her was the Olo’eyktan, chief of the clan, highest and most esteemed within the entirety of Hometree and she just joked with him about duties and responsibility!

It was another slap in the face, she thought, to their customs back at Hell’s Gate and here. Selfridge or Quaritch, hell, even most captains wouldn’t be caught dead sitting with new recruits. And yet here he was, captain of some of the most fiercest creatures she had ever seen in her entire life, who rode dragons (ikran, same difference), twenty foot horses and tackled creatures bigger than elephants on the daily, sitting with her talking about dreamcatchers!

“Yes, all things are burdened with life,” he spoke to her softly amidst the cackling of the flames, “And yet it is not life that is burdensome.”

She shook her head, “I think it might feel burdensome sometimes.”

“For you, maybe,” He agreed, “But here all things are connected, we do not carry such burdens alone, although some may carry more weight than others.” Diana looked to Eytukan then at the brief pause in his speech, and found his gaze to be held by another, and when she followed it she found with slight dismay that he looked at the previous victim of her assaults earlier that day.

“The burdens of being an ignorant fool, maybe.” She muttered under her breath and she felt a harsh sting on her exposed thigh from where he hit his palm against her, she hissed at the pain and glared at the Olo’eyktan, but her ears fell flat and her head lowered once she made contact with the piercing look he shot down at her. Even sitting, the man was frightening.

“He is the greatest warrior among us,” Diana chortled softly, rolling her eyes at the free praise Eytukan gave the male she had managed to bite in the neck not five hours ago, “Because of this, especially because of this, the clan’s failures fall harder on his shoulders.”

Diana blinked hard, understanding that he was trying to tell her something, but not quite figuring it out quickly enough. And then-

“Omaticaya’s losses… are more easily felt among its protectors.” There it was.

Sylwanin.

Her eyes floated from the faces of the Na’vi males and females she had been staring at, to the now rigid body of the male beside her, and her grip on her dreamcatcher tightened as he continued to speak, “More was lost that day than a future my mate had foreseen,” Diana knew he referred to the match between Sylwanin and Tsu’tey, of their potential union and ranking of Tsahik and Olo’eyktan, “She was his greatest friend.”

Diana swallowed hard, that previous lump she had grown so fond of had appeared again that made her throat raw, “For that, though, a thanks must be given. A father would have lost two daughters that day, if not for Diana of earth.”

She grit her teeth together, “If not for the people from earth, you would not have lost any.”

Her grip on the fragile wood of her dreamcatcher only tightened the more their conversation progressed, and she worried she may break the precious object if it persisted. Still, her knuckles were unwilling to unclench themselves from its tight grip. Eytukan placed his hand on her shoulder, and she noticed the way it had risen so high up and so tensely situated.

“As chief, I must do what is right to protect what is left of my people. A father’s anger still wails inside me,” he used his other hand and placed it over his heart, “But it is your people who have suffered more than mine, this is what my mate tells me.”

Diana lifted her head and tilted it in confusion, as if to ask what he meant by those words and he only nodded his head, as if to assure her they were the correct ones he would use.

“The dead are not so far from us,” he grabbed the queue that rested on his shoulder and brought it to her face, and Diana was reminded of their connection to Eywa and of the souls of those that had passed, “But your dead are gone from you to a place you may not visit.”

The words shook Diana to the core, a truth that struck home- and yet, “We remember them in other ways,” She told him, “We may not be able to see them whenever we would like but… memory is enough.”

“Memory is not always faithful to the bearer of those images.”

And suddenly a question surged itself to the forefront of her mind, and even Diana was taken off guard by the words that rushed from her mouth before she could stop them.

“Do you hate us?”

His response was not immediate, and Diana noticed him as he digested her words- then, “No.”

Her response was immediate, “But Sylwanin-“

“Held love for you,” He stated this firmly, “As she did for everything she saw, and she saw many things, in many ways far beyond her age. My daughter’s beauty radiated from her body- but now,” Diana watched as he tilted his head up towards the canopies of the trees and looked around him, as though he saw something none of them else saw, and she saw a light in his eyes that had not been there previously, “now the forests are alight with it. Taronyut yom smarìl, it was the Will of Eywa. It is done.”

He gave her exposed shoulder one last tap, light and unburdened; as he stood from the ground they both sat at and walked away.

Diana watched as he left, regarding the male as he spoke with other members of his clan, and she wondered what faith one might have to place such trust and loyalty into a God so unwavering that even the death of your child would not shake. And as she looked around her at the various members of the clan, each young and old and thriving within this single connected faith she realised they all shared his ideologies, they would all die for Hometree, and they would all go to war should anything arise that would threaten their home. She made eye contact with Jake and the gears in her mind began to turn.

Chapter 6: We are the Ghosts that Haunt our Graveyards

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leftingbadly · 3 months

Text

Chapter 4: Tell Tale Heart

Pairing: Tsu'tey x OFC

Rating: PG13

Themes: Enemies to Lovers, Friends to Lovers

Other Tags: Fluff, Angst, Slow Burn, Betrayal, Revenge

Diana picked at the canned fruits in her hand as the three of them continued to eat in silence, each going over the events of the day before. Diana’s mind ran rampant as she thought about the words of the Tsahik, trying to understand them to the fullest of her capabilities, but she knew something- something vital, something that didn’t belong to her- was missing and she wasn’t sure whether she was able to retrieve it. Something that existed in the Na’vi way of living that didn’t exist in the human one or maybe it did a long time ago, but Diana wasn’t a part of that- a part of whatever her ancestors might have been.

So far she had gathered very few key points about what the Tawkami was telling her, the most vital of them all being the flower Grace had named for her ; Pseudocenia Rosea, otherwise known as the chalice plant. But getting close to that plant for an inspection would be next to impossible, the plants are completely carnivorous and are made for digesting large animals, she may as well try to ride a Palulukan on its back. Even the Na’vi children know not to go near that thing, so why the Tawkami would be telling her about it at all is beyond her understanding. Were they really trying to get her killed?

“I mean what about you?” Diana’s attention was pulled from her mind when Jake asked his question as he turned from the light green dim of the lamp in front of them, the buzzing of it had encompassed the air around them for long enough before he finally gave in to the raging questions that banged on his mind, ever since that day they first met one singular questioned had lingered with him, begging to be answered.

“What about me?” Came Diana’s nonchalant reply, unknowing of what exactly was on the Marine’s mind in that moment.

“You told me that everyone lost something during the war.” He clarified.

She shrugged her shoulders, “Everyone did.”

He nodded, and then pointed at her as he tried to drive his point home, “Yeah, but you said it like you lost someone.”

Diana blinked at him once, then twice. Whether she was trying to supress the memories that tried to resurface or was trying to battle back the sleep that tried to overtake her, she wasn’t sure. Either way, due to her tiredness or not, Diana’s mind became flooded with memories she would sooner forget.

Diana focused her attention on Ernesh, it wasn't like all the other times she'd looked at him; it was different in the way that when she looked at him now, everything seemed so much darker. She saw herself in him now.

Every vile, horrible, heinous act she had committed, willingly or by omission wrapped themselves around her like a cloak during a downpour, and the rain was her sins, she was a believer in the church of war and bloodshed and she sees him in the front row, teeth barred, arms like ivy that wrapped themselves and held her close and whispered in her ear things that made the devil blush.

"Does it come from the soul or the heart?" He questioned, he was teasing her, she knew, and she loved him for it.

"You could switch it off with a heart," was the beginning of her nihilistic reply, "without a soul it would always be off." Of course, she was referring to their humanity. To the thing that tied them to their friends, the thing that tied them to being people. He nodded, although she knew he was barely satisfied with the answer.

"I tried it last night," he was referring to their friend’s suggestion, of course, "it didn't work. It only made my headache worse." Crying came easily enough, the act of tears falling from his eyes was useful in many situations, but the feeling of grief never came with it. He turned to her with the eyes he always saw her with and he was grateful she was looking at him, now, the same way.

She questioned him about it and he told her that it was not pity, or a holier-than-thou glance. It was not something she had ever been glanced at like, he informed her that it was something far worse than pity; it was an understanding. It was the sort of look you see on a stranger's face and realize you battle the same monsters; she realized then that he noticed her first. He saw her. And now she saw him, too.

"Do you see me now?" She did, as she had realized, see him now. The shadows wrapped around him, like purity to an angel it was drawn to the very essence of what he was, of what he had come to be. He stood before her raw and unfiltered, and he hated himself for it. His nails dug through his flesh and wetted the soil beneath him with a sinner's blood. With a boy's blood. 19 Years’ worth of life experience and not one of the books he had read could explain what he saw in her eyes on that day, in that greenhouse between the belladonnas and white roses.

"I think I love you." It was all she could think to say, simple and to the point. He asked her why she would think that, to which she replied, "I think I love you because of the way your hair looks in the morning. I think it's because of your smile that makes my heart glow like the sun, I think this is what the roses feel, or the sunflowers or the daisies, when the rain has stopped and the rays of sun meet them again."

She took a step forward, and then held his face in her steady hands, because she was not nervous in front of him. Standing in front of him felt like taking a test on a subject she knew greatly, it felt like the way she patted down the soil after she'd planted another flower. When she stood in front of him she felt like she'd grown ten feet. She felt powerful.

"I think I love you because if I were to lose you, if I were to really lose you, then my soul or my heart, whichever part of me was responsible for loving something this much-maybe it’s all the parts, all of them in tandem-would scream. It would call out to yours and follow you wherever you’d go, leaving me alone. I think I love you because my own spirit would abandon me to the arms of death to be with you."

What could he say to that but reply with a kiss?

But he did not, he only spoke the truth they knew in their hearts, "We are not capable to love each other, heart. We are not fit to take care of each other as the sun takes care of the roses and the daisies and the sunflowers. Our love would ruin us as the thunderstorms lay waste to your sunflower fields and rip your flower beds from their roots. Would that I could allow my lips to yours, but I would not gift you such a pain as to love you. Yet I beg of you one thing," from her grasp he released his face and held her face in his hands, as gently as he were holding a faun, "I beg you to survive, because you hold my heart in your hands."

Diana shut her eyes to the memory, and when she reopened them Jake stared back at her. It seemed in that moment Diana’s life was destined to be encompassed in war; war on Earth, or war on Pandora. Death that followed her like a lover’s trail, gentle and welcoming in all the ways she would rather not, and it seemed that men of war, men of fighting in wars they play no part in, were in plenty supply and fast to surround her.

She smiled lightly, mockingly, at Jake, as though she knew something he did not; she did. “His name was Ernesh,” Diana gave forth the information, despite the clamp on her heart that seemed to tighten. It had been so long since she spoke his name aloud, not even to Grace who had known him better than anyone, not even to herself who had loved him without abandon, “The origins are Indian, and ironically,” She laughed a pained laugh, “His name means ‘Battle to the Death’.”

The laugh died on her lips in that moment and something else died in her eyes. Or was it already dead? Jake watched her as she spoke, her body rigid and her hands white as she gripped the can of fruit in her hands, her eyes glared downward, as though she were damning the white plastic table for its very existence. Grace saw something else though, Grace knew her vision didn’t meet the surface of the table- she knew the woman’s sight stopped before even the rim of her cornea, and she knew her eyesight was trained on that battlefield as she had looked at it so many times- over and over, scanning the bodies of the bloodied and bruised for a man who would never come home. A lover, a nephew- Grace shut her eyes too, turning from Diana’s own ones that were bearing down into her. They both lost something that day, and every day forward.

Jake looked between the two of them, sensing something had shifted, sensing there was more to what was being told and he wanted to pry. He wanted to ask the two strongest women he knew, having faced predators both human and inhuman, on a planet that was not even a planet in a solar system that was so different to their own and day in and day out continue to thrive and fight for a people- no, a race that had hated them so fiercely, what could possibly break them in this way?

He knew the look in their eyes though, when they turned to him and he saw his own reflected there; those sad, weeping eyes, so akin to what he had seen in the mirror not weeks ago, when he had seen the body of his dead twin brother. It seemed earth, ravaged and betrayed as it had been, only had place for loss and grief. It seemed they had brought that grief with them to Pandora.

Diana grit her teeth as the silence prolonged, how had they managed to carry this grief, through stars and solar systems, as though it were something as a second skin?

“His name also meant sincere,” Grace spoke up after a long time, “It also meant honest.” She nodded as she wiped away the quietly fallen tears, and spoke to Jake with the confident smile he knew she harboured, “He was honest until the day we lost him, he fought for something he believed in and we both loved him for that. Very much.”

Jake watched in silence as Grace gripped Diana’s shoulder with her right hand, and massaged the woman as she spoke, as if to say she was there- as if to say she still had her. And he watched in awe as Diana seemed to escape her memories simply by having Grace with her.

She sniffed, and then spoke again, “I found him, God, what must have felt like years later. Out on the front lines and in the thick of things, as always, gun in hand and bullets in- well, everywhere.”

Jake shut his eyes against the image that pushed through his mind, knowing full well what seeing the dead bodies of fallen soldiers could do to someone, and then asked another question out of curiosity.

“You were on the front lines?”

Diana nodded, “A nurse. Well, back then when the bodies started piling up anyone who could bandage some stab wounds or pluck out a few bullets and stitch them up were nurses, really. It wasn’t until well into the war when I joined though, it was damn near finished too but,” She shrugged, “I guess I waited too long; back then I figured it was best to leave it to someone with more experience.”

And it was like the final piece to understanding her appeared and all her actions and words up until now finally made sense. And just when Jake finally thought he understood the woman before her the minute he put that piece down, it was like that board expanded into a much larger, more complicated puzzle before him and she was a labyrinth he couldn’t find the way through even on the back of an ikran.

“I’m sorry about what I said before,” And she surprised him once more, “About your legs I mean. I’ve never experienced something like that before, not even close, it was wrong of me to tell you that it was the same as losing someone because it isn’t-“

Jake interrupted her, “Diana, no, you were right-“

And she interrupted him, “No, it wasn’t.” She sated so firmly Jake was caught off guard by the finality in her voice, “I may not have agreed with your views or your way of going about trying to get back what you lost, but I had no right to tell you what getting your legs back means to you. Jake,” Diana sighed deeply as she prepared herself to say her next words, “You should see the way you look running around Hometree, or riding the pa’li, or swimming.”

“Like a damn idiot?”

They laughed.

“Yes, well,” Diana shrugged, and then spoke seriously again, “Jake, you look happy. You look free.”

And Jake’s shoulders slumped at the words, because he knew it too. That weight that hung over him like gun holsters and machine equipment, the cramped feelings of his mind like hunkering down in the trenches or being stuck inside a heavy-duty armoured car or tank- all that fell away when he was in the jungles. Running through the leaves with Neytiri or resting in the hammocks at Hometree. He knew she was right.

“And because of that, Jake, I need you to figure out where you stand. Whether you’re with Quaritch or with us; with the Na’vi,” She put her hand on his to make him meet her strong gaze, “Because whoever’s side you’re standing on, whatever their beliefs are, you have to make sure you support that, because those become your beliefs too.”

The next day, they had all managed to link up in time for first rise. Neytiri was usually the first to awaken within the clan with the rest of the hunters; which meant Jake and Diana were among the group of early risers that day as well. Diana, in particular, had been requested to join Neytiri and Jake on their pa’li rides after she had finished teaching with the children that day. It wasn’t until later when the three of them had met up again, along with an -unsurprisingly-irritated Tsu’tey.

“The alien’s smell is in my nose,” Diana watched with a cautious eye as Jake and Tsu’tey came in contact once again, and this time, like many others, Jake seems to have irritated the warrior beyond belief. She began walking up to them slowly, wondering if her own presence would cause more of a disturbance than anything else.

“Yeah?” Jake challenged as he hopped off from the back of his pa’li, disregarding the warnings of Neytiri as she followed behind Jake and jumped from her seating as well, standing behind Jake as Diana stood behind Tsu’tey both monitoring the situation in hopes they wouldn’t have to intervene. Once Neytiri saw Diana the Na’vi woman’s ears lifted on her head and she tilted her head in greeting, smiling at the woman before they both turned their attention to the males in front of them.

“Well your fragrance is anything but satisfactory to my proboscis as well, if anything I think it’s incontrovertibly vexatious.” Jake spoke smugly, his hand on his hip as he used his left hand to point at various parts of Tsu’tey’s body as he gave him the unnecessarily long-worded response.

Diana’s mouth fell open. Of all the imbecilic-

“Jake,” She reprimanded hotly as she watched Tsu’tey stutter, his mind trying to comprehend the long English words quick enough to be able to form a response. But Diana’s wasn’t even sure if she knew what proboscis meant- hell, did Jake even know what it meant? And where would he have even heard that word? Diana’s eyes widened when Tsu’tey turned around sharply at the sound of her voice, and she stared at him for a long moment as he stared back at her, wondering if they were going to greet each other like civilised people or-

He clicked his tongue at her, and glared hard before he turned to walk away from the small group.

-or that. She sighed loudly as she walked up to Jake and Neytiri, shaking her head at the former as she raised her hands and pointed at him, “What the hell was that?” She asked astounded.

“You said he didn’t like long sounding words,” Jake shrugged as he caressed the side of his pa’li.

Diana’s mouth stayed agape as she stared at the marine, “Jake you don’t even like long sounding words!” She gasped as she pointed an accusing finger at his face, “You learnt those words on purpose, you did it out of spite!” She hit Jake on the arm when he just flashed his charming canine smile at her, as if to say yeah, yeah I did. She shook her head at the marine, wondering if he knew just what he got himself into by irritating Tsu’tey further. Diana noticed Neytiri watching their exchange with lowered eyes, staring up at them as her shoulders were slumped and her tail swished softy behind her.

“I hope he isn’t this irritating when you’re teaching him, Neytiri,” She addressed the younger woman, and watched as her ears raised from their lower set point to a higher one, eager to join in the conversation and talk about Jake’s training. Diana had noticed a change in the Na’vi woman as the days went by, and her training with Jake had made her more confident than her previous uneasiness towards avatars. On some occasions Diana had even joined the two when they would go out riding on pa’li, and she relished in the way it felt to be riding through the forests and across the more open plains again, the feel of the pa’li’s strong legs and the weight of its breath as she pushed them harder, faster and more daring than before.

Diana watched as Neytiri shook her head as she looked at Jake and threw her hands in the air, “He is like a child,” she pointed to him with one hand, “Always falling from pa’li. Never steady, not like you.” Diana laughed loudly at Jake’s bewildered face, and held onto Neytiri’s arm as they both walked towards the grazing pa’li near the river bend.

“Perhaps we should show him how it’s done, then?” Diana asked, and watched as her old friend’s eyes widened in excitement. Neytiri gave her arm a squeeze before letting go, and yipped at her direhorse before she rushed off in a direction Diana knew well. When she turned to Jake, she saw him positioning himself on the back of his pa’li; once he was situated he gave her a triumphant smile.

“Who’s showing who how it’s done?” Jake asked arrogantly as he placed his hands on his hips, and Diana shook her heard at him as she and Jake both heard the thundering of hooves approaching.

Neytiri showed up again from where she had disappeared off to, and gave Diana a single nod before she told the woman, “Call her, tsmuke, she will come.” And Diana gave Jake a confident stare before she let out a series of inhuman noises Jake had never heard come from her mouth before, it was almost the same sound Neytiri had made when she had called her ikran, but something was different, as if he could feel the meaning behind the sounds rather than comprehend them. And then the thundering came, hard and fast, and Jake felt it not with his own body, but through the body of the pa’li he had made tsaheylu with, and he felt the his nervousness and his unsteadiness as he shifted between each of his six legs, and then Jake saw it.

Greater in its muscle than all the others he had seen, it seemed to leap from the shadows as it bounded towards them. Jake felt the thundering of its great hooves on the ground and yet, he did not. As if it came like a thunderstorm, softly first and then hard all at once, the pa’li that raced towards them was something different than the one he rode on now. Like ikran, pa’li themselves held different shapes and sizes, even some of their colouring was different, but this one was as black as a palulukan, and if it were not for the bright yellow stripes on its body he might have mistaken it as a shadow all on its own.

The lean direhorse came to rest in front of them, circling Diana as she did the same and the two of them stared off as they stared each other down, “Pa’li do not bond with its rider,” Neytiri said as she came to a halt beside Jake on her own pa’li, “But like us pa’li may have preference of its rider. Niwin was a… feral, you call it. Wild and free, Niwin would not make tsaheylu.”

“She belonged to the wild grasses. Olangi, the Horse clan of the Plains had tried to tame her, but she had been ravaged by a sickness,” Diana held her hands up as she approached the pa’li, then stepped back as she stomped forward, threatening the avatar woman, “And had lost a foal to an air raid.” Jake watched in awe as Diana tilted her head, regarding the pa’li the same way it seemed to regard her, and grabbed her queue from behind her back. Then, faster than he had seen her move before, Diana struck forward as hard as she could and launched herself to the side, evading an attack from the pa’li and jumping onto its back. She let out a breath of hard air as she slammed onto its armoured back with her bare stomach, and connected her queue to its antenna as fast as she could.

“You know me, Niwin,” She braced her strong legs against the armoured side of the direhorse, holding tightly onto the antenna she curled around her arm as she stroked the pa’li’s neck. She watched as her eyes dilated and an understanding bloomed in its mind the same way tsaheylu made understanding blossom in hers, and Diana felt, more than the earth and the trees, the breath of Niwin and all her fears and confidence, the same way Niwin felt all of hers, and an understanding formed between them once again where previously it was lost, “But there are some things, once you understand them and care for them,” Jake watched as Niwin trampled the dirt beneath her hooves and shook her head in excitement, “All it takes is a reminder.”

Jake let out a breath of awe, something he seemed to be catching himself doing a lot whenever he witnessed Diana out in the wilds of Pandora, and his eyes widened when she gave a loud yip to the restless thundering of Niwin’s hooves and the direhorse shot from her position like a lightning strike, leaving dust in her wake as she bounded through the thick leaves of the forest floor. With his avatar eyes Jake saw Diana call back to them, a look of challenging on her face, and before he knew it Neytiri had bounded off behind her as well, shouting and yelling as she raised her bow in the air.

Diana let out a loud scream from her lungs as she exhaled all the air resting there, her hands were thrown up in the air as her bare feet found home on the back of her most faithful pa’li, “Ler, Niwin, ler.” Steady, steady. She told the direhorse, her leg muscles straining as it tried to remember the way her body used to move on the bareback of a pa’li, for safety Diana held onto the long antennae of Niwin with her left hand, but her right hand grabbed at the leaves and foliage of trees that rushed passed them. To her side she saw Neytiri, hunkered down on her own pa’li as she focused steadily on beating Diana at whatever race they seemed to be taking, and not far behind the two of them was Jake, wrestling to keep up but making steady progress.

Diana scoffed at their antics, and spoke to Niwin as she sat down again, “Come now, we can’t let the foals best you, can we?” And it seemed the direhorse had the same idea as her, because it seemed Niwin’s eyes widened at the challenge, and her already tight leg muscles contracted even harder as she plunged her legs deeper into the ground, and Neytiri’s face fell shocked before it became a blur, and all Diana could see around her were the flashes of greenery and shrubs, and the ending was in sight-the ending to whatever race they seemed to be racing- and it was almost as if Diana could taste the sweet taste of victory. Until Niwin pulled a harsh stopped by burying her six hooves in the ground and let Diana fall face-first into her thick neck. Her own neck strained from trying to stop her head from rolling off her shoulders and the laugh died in her stomach- or what was left of it after it felt like it dropped to the bottom pit of her gut.

The culprit of this action was none other than Omaticaya’s best warrior, standing in front of a harsh breathing Niwin on the back of his very own pa’li. Diana scoffed. Figures he’d be riding the most sturdy male pa’li from their herd, he was large and demanding in his presence even her dear Niwin had trouble disregarding his demands, Diana hated to see her wild mare submit to the will of an obnoxious foal barely past his milking days, but there was no doubt Tsu’tey’s current mount was anything but capable enough to lead the local herd as well as hold his own against a decent threat. Which is why Niwin had halted the minute he had showed up, not out of any sense of duty that might have bound her- but of respect. The long gashes across his body had signified the young pa’li had deserved that much.

As for its rider, Diana wasn’t sure whether she wanted to greet him or goad him.

“Something wrong, dickhead?” Involuntarily, she chose the latter.

Chapter 5: Alone at the Edge of a Universe, Humming a Tune

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