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Chapter Text

Neteyam had never taken to the water the way his siblings had. It did not come naturally to him to dive beneath the waves and hold his breath until it burned or grasp the ilu and force a shallow bond that only served to hollow out his chest.

Seeing through the water was like looking into his sister’s polished metals and trying to find familiarity in warped faces. The seaweed would dance in the waves, and for a moment he’d mistake it for the the sway of the leaves back home. Then a fish would part the weeds and it was back to grasping at shadows of the forest where none lingered. The ocean did not come easily. Not like the forest had.

Back in his family’s marui he keeps a rucksack under the loosely twined wood of the floor. Inside is smoked meat and string and a photo he had taken with him when they fled. He thinks his mother is aware it’s there. He thinks if he left, she would not be far behind. That, more than anything, keeps his feet buried in the sand. He will not make his mother chose between her duty and her spirit. He will not make this transition any harder on his family than it already must be.

The ocean’s water is nothing like Eywa’s forest air, but when he opens his eyes, he almost mistakes the cold of the waves for a mountain breeze. He takes a breath, missing the air so strongly he thinks nothing has ever hurt like this, and then water rushes in. For a moment he does nothing but choke and writhe, before training that had never properly settled begins to rear. Through the soft light of his sanhì he can make out his bound hands, not tight enough to hurt but too strong for him to break. His legs are the same, and feeling much like a fish, he peels himself from the reef that almost reluctantly releases him and tries to twist himself towards the surface.

He is deeper than he normally swims, fearing his breath will not hold long even with all the practice, and he begins to flag under the gentle rocking of the waves. He will get nowhere like this.

There was a pond Neteyam first learned to fish in. Though hardly reaching his shoulders now, he remembers staring down into clear water, the rocks at the bottom sharper than any knife his father owned. It was him, his large hands coaxing Neteyam to join him in the frigid water, who first taught him to swim. Before he learned how to hold his breath or move his limbs to propel him through the water, his father taught him to fear drowning. You will want to panic, his father had said. You’ll want to thrash and open your mouth to scream.

His mother had stood on the outskirts on the pond, Neteyam and his father wet up to their knees and thighs respectively. He would come to learn, his ear pressed up against the outside of their hut walls with Lo’ak hiding by his side, that she refused to be left behind when their father taught them things like this. Things like sharpening a knife or holding a gun even if it’s only with the intention of turning on the safety and removing the magazine. But she had merely watched, her tail flicking behind her, as his father placed his hand to Neteyam’s chest.

But you will stay calm, he had said, and swim up, towards the light. Always towards the light. Let Eywa guide you.

Moonlight filters through the water in ribbons. A beam splays itself on a cluster of coral, shy pink like the beginnings of a sunrise. Neteyam has little air in his lungs, even less energy to spare, but he swims downward, slow and jagged until he brushes his twined legs against the sharp edge of the coral. Threads give until the twine breaks on the edge, slicing cleanly into the soft skin on the inside of his ankles and the bottom curve of his foot. He hisses and watches bubbles of air bead past his lips and float to the surface. He follows after them, his arms bound in front of him. He does not have the energy to free them, too. It will have to do like this: tied like a animal set to roast.

Neteyam can feel his breath wither inside his chest like it’s trying to escape without him. It’s getting difficult to move through the water. The moons do not get any closer. Neteyam grows tired in the cold water, feels his limbs grow lax and weak. He will sink to the bottom. The water will drag him down and sand will cover his still body, and maybe, if he is lucky, his parents will find him washed upon the village shore and keep his siblings from seeing his sightless eyes.

It would be so easy to fall into Eywa’s waiting arms, to finally let himself rest. Sometimes Neteyam thinks he has been fighting his entire life. He was born too early, his mother said. She said she could feel that he was not ready, that he still had some growing to do inside her. He had come to the world not crying nor screaming, but blinking afterbirth and blood from his eyes. And from then on it was slicing his palm open on the arrows modeled after his mother’s and keeping the tears from falling. And then racing after Lo’ak and taking his brunt of punishment because he could not bear to see his younger brother’s will shattered so easily. And then it was hunting the Sky People but never doing enough to keep his family safe. And finally, it was leaving his home and life behind, and fighting the desire to bury himself among Hometree’s roots and refuse to flee. Neteyam has been fighting his entire life. What is once more?

He breaks the surface.

The swim to shore is not any easier, but Neteyam remembers little of it. Sand catches against his feet and the still bleeding cut, leaving behind crimson footprints as the shore turns to the wooden panels connecting the marui.

The curtain is pulled across the opening, and Neteyam brushes past it, careful to keep quiet.

Laying at his feet is not his parents or his siblings in a cluster packed tightly like nesting ikran. He doesn’t recognize the Na’vi sleeping inside his family’s marui. Their skin the color of the ocean and their hair loose in soft curls like its waves. They are wrapped around each other like lovers and through his confusion he turns sloppily on his heel and nearly wakes them.

On his way out he cuts the ropes binding his arms with one of the knifes fixed to the walls, his absent from his hip. He doesn’t know why he was embedded in the reef, or why he was so deep that not even the animals of the sea would be found, but his lack of knife is the oddest. He hardly likes to sleep without it, preferring instead to keep it unsheathed beneath his feathered pillow.  

He sets back out along the curving path, aimless. It would be smart to wait out the night on the beach, the sand still warm from the day’s sun. Someone will come to take in the fishing nets before light reaches the horizon, and he can ask after his missing memories then. Thoughts of the ocean churn his stomach, and he continues on the path.

In the low light of the moons, the string of beads and stones hanging outside one of the marui reflects little light, but Neteyam recognizes the pattern, strung together by his own hands. He touches the soft dip of his throat and finds his necklace missing.

There is no curtain over the door, and Neteyam lets himself in.

Lo’ak sleeps alone in a pod too big for one. Neteyam doesn’t know why his brother is not with their family, or how he has seemingly stolen the necklace from Neteyam’s throat without him noticing. But he sleeps like he is trying to be larger than he is, as though he did not already inherent not just their father’s temperament but also his broad shoulders and towering frame, and this is something Neteyam remembers.

Neteyam will ask questions tomorrow. He will ask after the shape of the marui and the weapons on the wall he doesn’t recognize and the new style of hair he can faintly make out under the low glow of the moonlight that streaks in through the wide windows. With exhaustion laying heavy on his shoulders like a bundle of furs, the only thing he wants now is to lay by his brother and fall asleep under their shared heat like children.

Neteyam creaks across the blanketed floor, and Lo’ak is on his feet in the space between a heartbeat. He recognizes the knife at his throat as his own, and smiles as Lo’ak lowers it with a gentle exhale.

“Oh. It’s you,” he says. He tosses the knife to the ground and then sits with his knees bent in front of him. Neteyam joins him.

“So rude, little brother,” Neteyam says with the beginnings of a smile. He mirrors Lo’ak, pulling up his knees to rest his cheek on. His head feels fit to burst, paradoxically like it is both stuffed to the brim with feathers and weighed down by anchoring rocks.

Lo’ak huffs and settles deeper onto the floor. The Metkayina village is too warm for blankets, even at night, but Neteyam wrestles with the urge to wrap his brother in something soft. He looks small like this, as though he is battling the gravity of the very planet.

“Thought I had finally gotten rid of you,” Lo’ak says. The corner of his mouth does not tick up, and Neteyam feels himself tumble off-kilter. His brother sounds wary and age worn. He sounds a little like their father.

“Gotten rid of me?” Neteyam asks. “Where would I go?” Where would he go that is not the calling forest of his home? Nowhere else pulls on his soul like the forest does, and has Neteyam not proven through days and moon phases that he will stand by his family’s side?

Lo’ak closes his eyes. “Away. With Eywa. Anywhere else. It doesn’t matter.”

“I—I don’t want to go,” Neteyam says. When he speaks Lo’ak opens his eyes to watch, and Neteyam finds himself battling his gaze. “I do not want to go anywhere that is not with you.”

Lo’ak laughs, the sound almost hollow. “You’re being nice.”

Neteyam doesn’t share in his laughter, but he feels something stir in his chest. He hides his smile against his knees. “I’m always nice.”

“And talkative,” Lo’ak says. This, Neteyam finds he can’t disagree with, and Lo’ak’s laughter blooms into something almost genuine. It dies quickly. Lo’ak traces a finger though the furs on the floor. “Do you visit anyone else? Do you haunt them, too?”

Lo’ak had been the first person he came across, though not because he had been looking. Neteyam never has to look to find Lo’ak.

“I found you first,” Neteyam says and watches Lo’ak frown at the floor.

“So, you’ll move on, then?” Lo’ak asks. “Go and bother someone else?”

Lo’ak’s words are cruel, but he only sounds weary. Tired, and Neteyam can’t find it in himself to get upset with him.

”I told you. I do not want to go anywhere without you,” Neteyam says. He cannot remember a life that did not have Lo’ak lingering in the background. His brother is a fixture as much as the sun or the air or the branches of the forest he ran along. Though if Neteyam was able to lose one so easily, what is to stop the rest of his constants from slipping past his fingers like the sand he has come to hate?

“Didn’t always seem like it,” Lo’ak mutters. Ah. Through the fog growing in his mind, pieces begin to fall into place. Neteyam has tried to hide his distaste for the water and the salt on his skin and everything else that was not born in the forest. But it is hard to keep things from Lo’ak. He is able to read him like Neteyam is script carved into stone.

“I’m sorry,” Neteyam says haltingly. Lo’ak’s eyes slash to him. “I was never going to leave.” No matter how much he wanted to.

Lo’ak looks at him, and Neteyam feels like a specimen in Norm’s lab. “Are you going to stay here all night?” he asks after a moment of stiff silence between them.

“I’d like to.”

Someone walks past their pod, Lo’ak’s ears flicking towards the sound before Neteyam hears their footsteps. They pass, and soon it is just Lo’ak and Neteyam and this awful, uncomfortable air festering in the marui.

“Did it hurt?” Lo’ak asks. He does not look at Neteyam. “I—I wanted to ask earlier; I swear. But, well. You never really talked much before.”

“Did what hurt?”

But Lo’ak just frowns and burrows deeper into himself. “I’m sorry, you know? Fuck, Neteyam, Eywa knows I’m sorry.”

Neteyam finds himself lost in Lo’ak’s words. He is dizzy, either by what Lo’ak will only talk around or his own muddled mind.

“Lo’ak,” Neteyam says. “Sorry for what?”

Lo’ak shakes his head. “C’mon, man. Don’t make me say it.” Lo’ak apologizes for little. He does not let sorry cross his lips if he does not mean it, and Neteyam has found he only acts if he can throw his entire conviction into it. And Lo’ak has never apologized for something he put his heart into.

“Whatever it is,” Neteyam begins, because Lo’ak looks small and fragile and nothing like the warrior Neteyam has watched grow by his side, “you are forgiven. You always shoulder the guilt for things that are not your fault.”

“Dad would say otherwise,” Lo’ak says. “You know he’s hardly been able to look at me, even after all this time? Or sometimes when my back is turned, he’ll call me by your name and I’ll turn around, and then his face will just break, like I gutted him and took his liver.”

Lo’ak curls his arms around himself, and suddenly he is barely past his six years, hiding himself behind Neteyam’s legs though he hardly stands taller. “He blames me. Mom hasn’t said anything, but I know she does too. Kiri won’t let me touch your visor, and Tuk won’t go swimming with me anymore. Even fucking Aonung won’t be alone with me. He’ll make up stupid shit just so he doesn’t have to be in the same room as the Na’vi that—”

“That what?” Neteyam asks, the pounding in his head that begs him to lower himself to the ground and let sleep take him confounding him until Lo’ak’s words run together. But the hurt that strings them all along, that is something he could never miss. “Lo’ak, what are you so sorry for?”

“I was wrong,” Lo’ak says, his voice barely above a whisper. “You’re not nice. I liked you better when you were taking me down to the bottom of the ocean to drown with you.” He clutches at his chest, five fingers curling over his beating heart. “At least that didn’t hurt as much.”

Lo’ak’s curled body and the dying light of his sanhì do not invite touch, but Neteyam cannot help himself.

He crosses the scant distance between them and takes Lo’ak’s face in his hands. The dark lets him see little, but the tears briming in his eyes are clear. “Don’t cry,” he pleads. He has not seen Lo’ak cry in years. Not even their grandmother’s death made him weep like this.

“Little brother, tell me how I can help you.”

Neteyam is close enough to watch Lo’ak’s eyes blow wide. He catches Neteyam’s hands and pulls them from his face, but he does not take them far. He holds Neteyam’s hands in front of his chest like is not sure whether to pull them closer or cut them off.

“You’ve never touched me before,” he says, awed. He looks up at Neteyam. “Or blocked the moonlight or flattened the carpet fur.”

Lo’ak stumbles to his feet, and slower, Neteyam follows. The world spins, Lo’ak’s frantic eyes pulling him back to focus. Moonlight has a funny way of warping the world. It makes the forest Neteyam had known his entire life look dangerous. It can make the water surrounding their marui dance with beasts that will not exist come morning. And now it makes Lo’ak tall enough to loom over him, dark shadows on his face that stay stagnant as he cuts through the moonbeams.

“I—I need to get Dad,” he says. Moving like he cannot help himself, Lo’ak twirls a bead entwined in Neteyam’s braid. “Don’t leave. Please.”

Neteyam does not argue, sinking to his knees as his strength leaves him in a great breath. He is so tired he feels his bones ache with it. Lo’ak walks backwards towards the open mouth of the marui.

“Don’t leave,” his brother says again, his eyes roaming over Neteyam until they settle somewhere on his chest, and then he is disappearing into the night.

Neteyam lowers himself to Lo’ak’s feathered pillow. It curves around his throbbing head, the soft, downy paddings of the bed cradling him like a child. He can almost imagine his mother’s arm around him. Or his sisters tucked on either side of him. He can almost pretend the weight building in his chest is Lo’ak’s sharp limbs digging into his skin.

Footsteps thud outside the pod, his brother’s voice slowly making itself known. Neteyam feels his eyes slip closed under its familiar cadence.

“I swear, Dad, he’s in there. He’s moving and talking and breathing—”

His father’s voice joins as a sigh. “Lo’ak,” he says. Neteyam has never heard his father speak so gently, not even when they were children. “We’ve been over this. Your brother isn’t coming back. Go back to sleep.”

The softer wood at the mouth of the pod creaks, and someone sucks in a sharp breath.

“What have you done?” his father hisses, and Neteyam has never heard him speak so angrily, either. He hears thudding footsteps that stop before him. “I don’t care how much you miss him. You can’t disrespect him like this. You cannot pull him away from Eywa—”

“I didn’t do shit! Just listen to me—”

“No,” his father shouts. “I’ve put up with this delusion of yours for long enough. Heard you talk about your brother every morning like he’s still beside us and then you do this?”

Hands, so careful he almost doesn’t recognize them, brush his hair from his face. Neteyam cracks his eyes open under their touch.

“Dad?”

His eyes open to his father kneeling beside him, his brother hovering carefully behind him.

“You see him too, right?” Lo’ak asks quietly. “And—and you can feel him?”

His father cups his cheek, and Neteyam finds himself leaning into the brush of a thumb beneath his eye. “Yeah. Yeah, I can.”

And then Neteyam is being crushed against his father’s chest. He feels the pounding of his heart before he hears it. “Oh, kid,” his father says. To Neteyam’s growing horror, something wet lands on his cheek, and he realizes his father is crying. His father is crying for him, and Neteyam does not know how to stop it.

His father buries his face in Neteyam’s hair. “Oh, my Neteyam, I’ve missed you so much.”

“Don’t cry,” Neteyam says. He is going to wear his voice thin begging his family to keep their tears at bay. Lo’ak comes to join them, his hands reaching for any part of Neteyam their father is not curling around. He too, has begun to cry again. “Please, tell me how to help.”

His father gives him a watery laugh. “My sweet boy,” he says. “You’ve always been too kind for us, haven’t you?”

Like everything in their life, his brother is like their father. And like everything else, Lo’ak would not believe him if he said they cried the same. Even the path each tear makes down their cheeks is the same, and soon Neteyam thinks he could trace them with a finger long after they’ve dried.

“Dad, Lo’ak,” Neteyam whispers. “Please let me help.”

“You’ve come back to us,” his father says. “There’s nothing else we need.”

Neteyam’s eyes fall closed again. “I didn’t go anywhere,” he says. Lo’ak holds the hand that is not caught against his father’s chest, and he holds him so tightly blood has begun to run from his fingers.

“He keeps saying that,” Lo’ak whispers. But he does not move from Neteyam’s side, and it as though he is speaking into his ear. “It’s like he doesn’t know.”

“Know what?” he mumbles against his father. Everything is slipping sweetly into softness, and Neteyam is inclined to let it go. He need not keep himself awake and vigilant when his father stands and holds him so gently against him. Lo’ak does not part from them, his hand still threaded into Neteyam’s own, and when sleep comes calling, Neteyam finds himself inclined to answer.  

“I’m tired, dad,” Neteyam whispers.

His father hums, and Neteyam feels it rumble against him. “I know, kid.” To Lo’ak he says, “get Tsireya. Ronal, too. Tell them to meet us at your mom and I's mauri.”

The second pair of footsteps studders but does not fall away. “What if he falls asleep and doesn’t wake up?” Lo’ak asks. He tightens his grip on Neteyam’s hand, and Neteyam is too tired to soothe his worries. “What if he—”

“Lo’ak,” his father says. “I’ve got him.” And Neteyam lets himself be pulled under.

Lo’ak wakes him up. His voice is so much more familiar like this, angry, not at anyone but himself, or maybe the world for not bending to his will. It makes Neteyam smile against the downy pillow he lays on.

“I won’t leave,” he is saying. “You can’t make me.”

“You are not olo’eyktan yet,” a feminine voice says. “If I say you are to leave so I can take care of my patient, then you will leave.”

“Tsireya,” his brother starts before falling into silence. “I—I’ll wait outside. If anything happens—”

“We will call for you,” Tsireya says. Neteyam can hear the smile in her voice. “Go, be with the rest of your family. They need you now.”

His footsteps fade into the soft wind.

“I know you are awake, young Suli.” Even after all these months, Neteyam does not know if Ronal has accepted him into their clan. Aonung would laugh if he could hear him. My mother doesn’t do things in halves, he would say. If she dislikes you, you’ll know. She does not call him demon like she did to his brother or sister, but when he would sit with Aonung on the pier, their feet kissing the water, her ears would lie flat against her head and her lips would curl. Neteyam does not think that is kindness, either.

Neteyam opens his eyes to Ronal’s severe face looking down at him, Tsireya’s soft smile peeking over her shoulder.

“Neteyam,” she says. She smiles with her entire face. “It is so good to see you again.”

Tsireya is like him, he thinks, because they are both nothing like their brothers. Aonung would not greet him so kindly or speak as softly, even if the emotions sitting in his chest were the same as his sister’s. He would not cross the pod and lay the delicate skin of his wrist against Neteyam’s forehead. He would not peel back the bandages crossing up his chest that he had not noticed and shush him softly when he hisses at the raw skin the bandages pull with them. Tsireya does, and she smiles again when he looks down at himself in confusion.

“The wound opened up,” Tsireya says, her mother stepping back from Neteyam’s bed to mix some herbal smelling liquid in a stone bowl. “Not as deeply as before, of course. But deep enough that we’d like to keep an eye on it.”

“Before?” Neteyam asks, his voice hoarse as though he has drunk the salt water from the ocean. He tries to sit up, but Tsireya guides him back down. It takes very little force. “What—what happened before?”

Red seeps through the wrappings on his chest. The blood is close to his heart, settling right between the concave of his ribs Tsireya and Ronal were not there to clean while he slept.

“What happened to wound me like this?” he asks. “Or scare my father and little brother so badly?”

Tsireya shares a concerned look with her mother. “I think you family should be the ones to tell you this.”

“Tell me what Tsireya? What is being kept from me?” He feels ashamed to speak to someone so kind so harshly, but he feels like a child stumbling around in the dark. Worse, he feels like a child unmoored without his family to anchor him.

Ronal nods to her daughter and then pushes the white curtains from the mouth of the marui and leaves.

“You were hurt pretty badly, Neteyam,” Tsireya says. She turns from him to dip a rag into a basin and then wring the water out. It’s cool against his forehead. “We were all rather worried about you.”

Neteyam throws his mind back to last week, to last night, but there is little to grasp. He feels like he is beneath the water once more, fish running from his searching hands. He remembers Lo’ak diving into the ocean in search of the tulkun and running after him because his body would do nothing else, and then his mind catches on a memory like a crater. There is nothing to be found there.

Neteyam tries to rise, but Tsireya’s strong hands stop him. “My family, everyone—are they okay? Did we win?”

Tsireya will not meet his eyes. “Yes. We won,” she says. Neteyam watches her swallow. “Everyone is fine, now.”

Neteyam collapses back into his pillow, all of his energy leaving him. “That’s good,” he says. “That’s good.”

He hears footsteps pound, hears his father call, “Tuk!” in a way that Neteyam has learned is not reproachful but bemused, and then someone small runs to his side. But not as small as he remembered.

Tuk has grown. If Neteyam were to stand, if lethargy had not grabbed him so strongly that he could stand, he thinks the top of Tuk’s head would brush his shoulder. He is stuck on her hair, longer now, her braids studded with beads and the occasional seashell woven in.

“Neteyam,” she says, and then she is falling against his chest to cry, his bandages waterlogging beneath her.

Neteyam groans at the added pressure, but he wraps his arm around her back and tugs her closer.

“Hello, Tuk,” he says.

His father is at his side in a moment, gently pulling Tuk from his arms. “He’s still a little hurt, babygirl,” he says. “We’ve got to be careful.”

Tuk wipes the tears from her cheeks. “Sorry, ‘teyam. Didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“Neteyam is strong,” Kiri says, entering their marui slower than their other sister, but with trepidation. Her feet are light against the carpet. “You won’t hurt him.”

Lo’ak had come in quickly after Tuk, but he does not come closer like she does. In the daylight the breadth of his shoulder is so much wider Neteyam had almost mistaken him for their father. He is packed with muscle that Neteyam does not remember, his body no longer lean but powerful. Most damning of them all are the tattoos stretching from his wrist and over his collarbone, reaching up to curl over a single side of his face. He is riddled with shadows that do not disappear under the sun. Neteyam does not know what they mean, what stories they tell or histories they symbolize, but whatever has happened has occurred without him.

Kiri kneels next to him, brushing his hair from his face and pulling his attention to her. “Oh, Neteyam,” she says softly when he smiles at her in thanks. “I’ve missed your smile.”

Neteyam wants to tell her she saw it yesterday. He wants to pull his other sister close and call for Lo’ak who still hovers near the mouth of the marui and tell his siblings that there is nothing to worry over. He wants to tell them everything is fine. That he is fine, but he has never liked to lie to them.

“Neteyam.” His mother waits by the entrance, two long fingers over her lips like she is holding back a wave. “My baby.” And then she is rushing to his side much like his sister.

His mother cups his face, pressing her forehead against his. “Oh, my sweet, sweet baby.” She lays a kiss on his forehead, and then another over the bridge of his nose and one on each cheek and on the cusp of his chin until she has kissed every sanhì that litters his skin.

“I did not want to believe them at first,” she whispers into his hair. “I did not think I could survive if they were wrong, if I had to live through losing you a second time.”

“Lose me?” Neteyam chokes, finally finding his voice. “When—when did you lose me?”

His mother pulls from him, but she does not go far. Her strong hands come to hold his own against her beating heart. His mother is warm, and he is struck by the childish desire to curl into her and let her breathing lull him to sleep.

“He doesn’t know,” Lo’ak says, his voice rough. He clears his throat and looks away when Neteyam tries to catch his gaze. “He doesn’t remember the final battle with the Sky People.”

His mother brushes the gentle hollow beneath his eye. “They killed you,” she says, her eyes growing wet and wide with rage. “They took you from me.”

His father kneels next to his mother. He rests his hand on theirs, and Neteyam can feel his warmth, too. “And you were so brave, kid,” his father says. He doesn’t stop the tears that well and roll down his cheek. “You protected your younger siblings. You fought for our family, and you were so, so brave. And we buried you in Eywa’s reef three years ago.”

His hearing tunnels down to his own heartbeat thumping in his ears. “Three years ago? No—no it was yesterday. I—I got lost in the battle, lost in the ocean and I found my way back, but it was yesterday. I haven’t been gone for three years. I wouldn’t leave, I promise you, I wouldn’t—"

His mother hums softly, the beginning of a song he has heard since before he could walk. “I know, baby,” she says. “We know you wouldn’t.”

“Three years?” he asks. “Three years. What—what happened?”

His parents share a look. Ronal beats them to it. “We don’t know,” she says. “Your brother brought us to you last night, and then the wound on your chest opened up while you slept. We were hoping you would be able to tell us more.”

Ronal approaches his other side, nudging Kiri and Tuk out of the way to tilt Neteyam’s head up to help him swallow sickly orange liquid. It tastes of sea berries and something that leaves a heavy tang in his mouth after he has swallowed.

“I think I know even less than you,” he admits. “I don’t even know how—how I died.”

Something clangs against the floor. Neteyam peers around his parents’ shoulders to see Lo’ak picking his knife from the ground. Neteyam’s knife. His mother is wearing his neckpiece, and distantly, with the taste of laughter in his throat, Neteyam wonders if he should ask for it back. There is no son to mourn, not anymore, yet his mother has worn the memory of his death every day.

He looks around the room, from Lo’ak’s shaking hands that have yet to re-sheath the knife to his sisters curled at his side to his parents who look as though they will never let him leave their sight again and thinks they all mourned the boy in front of them throughout those three years.

Neteyam grips his parents’ hands tighter. When he smiles at them, he can almost see the weight from their shoulders lift. “As long as everyone is alright, I suppose how doesn’t matter.”

A crack rings through the air, and Lo’ak stares down at the two halves of the knife in his hands. Tsireya is by his side in a moment, and moving like Neteyam has never seen him, he peels her hands from his shoulders and leaves the marui, his kuru snapping behind him.

The three years do not make themselves known all at once.

First it is their marui, not by the fledgling forest but resting near the middle of the village. Neteyam walks into the wrong pod so often he has taken to carrying seashells with him to give to the young girl who lives there.

Then it is his knife that he has repaired until it is stronger than it was before, the two metals melding well together but their colors opposing. He will never be able to look at it again without knowing it was once split down the middle. He had no need for it out here in the reefs. He will catch no fish with a blade the length of his forearm. He struggles to catch anything with a spear honed for nothing else. But he had kept it strapped to his side, holding on to the slowly dying hope that he would one day find himself back in the forest, where his knife and tail and yellow eyes find purchase.

Then it is his parents who no longer leave him with his younger siblings at his feet, their tiny lives in his hands. Neteyam is hardly alone, Kiri or Tuk accompanying him to wade in the shallow waters. His mother applies the thick salve Ronal gave him to his chest as his wound festers and seems to refuse to heal. His father braids his hair slowly but with little precision down his back when his chest strains too much if he tries to fix them himself, his mother swooping in moments later to do it again as his father sits by her side and choses the pattern of the beads.

And finally, he feels all of the three, aching years in Lo’ak. His brother that has always been a thousand things more, his soul and his confidant and always the brightest star in his sky, now runs from him when their eyes meet. Neteyam cannot stand it. He thinks dying could not have been as painful as this.

He finds him alone in the middle of the ocean. Neteyam has kept far away from rising waves and water so clear he can see to the bottom and think it shallow, and he thinks his brother knows this.

His ilu moves slowly through the water, their bond hastily made. She is not his usual ilu, but when he had called for Tsu, nothing had answered. Neteyam did not have time to earn this one’s trust, and the discomfort shows in her jagged movements through the ocean.

“You shouldn’t be riding yet,” Lo’ak says. He holds a spear steady above his head, waiting to strike. He doesn’t look at Neteyam as he draws his ilu close and scares the pod of fish he had been tracking. “Your wound is still bleeding.”

Neteyam sets a hand over his chest. “I think it will bleed for the rest of my life,” he says.

He has taken to wearing a dark slash of fabric over the right side of his chest and dipping it in the ocean to clean each night. It is easier than asking Tsireya for new bandages each time his run redder than the feathers in his hair. Lo’ak was never there when he came to visit, though Neteyam has learned they live together. Mates often do. That had been a surprise. Not that Lo’ak would fall for Tsireya, that had been evident the moment he stood back and watched their eyes lock. Tsireya’s returning feelings for his brother were not a surprise, either. But their bond, the vulnerable intimacy he had to be willing to submit himself to in order to mate in front of Eywa? That had been surprising.

As olo’eytakan, Neteyam had been in courtship with women back home, feeling little connection with any of them. But a few would make willing tsahìk, and that had been enough to convince Neteyam. They seemed to share his sentiment, and with the knowledge that no hearts would shatter, he had chosen Saeyla. Tall and strong and lovely Saeyla, he thinks he could have come to care for her, if he had the time.

Now he thinks of curling hair and salted skin and sanhì scattered across cheeks like the constellations in the sky and a single soul being split only to find itself again, and he cannot imagine bonding before Eywa under anything less than what their mother calls fated love.

“Still,” Lo’ak says, his spear held aloft as though he intends to hunt from the empty ocean below them. “I’m surprised Dad let you out alone.”

Neteyam hums. “Dad isn’t my keeper,” he says. He flicks his tail into the water. “I can do things without his allowance.”

Lo’ak lowers his spear, keeping his gaze on the stilling water. “When.”

“What?”

“When have you ever gone against Dad’s wishes? When has Dad ever asked you to do something and you didn’t jump to it like a tsurak?”

Lo’ak must not remember their early years. When he would follow after him like a stray pet and Neteyam would run fast enough over the winding branches that his legs burned in the hopes his brother would get lost behind in the forest somewhere even when their father said look after him. He must not remember how he loathed sharing their parents’ attention. Their love. He must not remember the way Neteyam cut his hair at the soft curve of his skull before Lo’ak was old enough to know the extent of contempt the act held. There, Neteyam had said as his parents stared on in horror at the fistful of hair in his hand. Now he is not fit to be olo’eyktan. He must not remember the anger in their father’s eyes, the rage of a warrior that only ever aimed itself at Neteyam.

Lo’ak must not remember that it was their mother who set a hand against their father’s chest as Neteyam ran from their home and said let me. That is was her who took Neteyam for a ride on her ikran as she held him close to her stomach.

Lo’ak is your family. Your blood, she had said. Your brother. She took them between the slow-moving Thundering Rocks. We cherish our family. We protect them.

I don’t like him, Neteyam had said, hiding his face in her arm and hoping his voice got lost in the wind whipping past them. He’s too loud, and he follows me everywhere. And it is meant to be just the three of us. I want him to leave.

Neteyam, his mother had said. My sweet Neteyam, you don’t mean that. He is loud because he has so much inside him, so much wonder for the world. She dropped a kiss to the crown of his head. He follows you because he loves you, and he wants you to love him, too.

I don’t, he had said. I won’t ever love him.

His mother had taken them back then. Neteyam’s feet had barely touched the ground before thin hands wrapped around his stomach. I’m sorry, Lo’ak had wailed against him. Please don’t leave me again.

Lo’ak must not remember that it was him who first asked Neteyam to stay, and it is only him that Neteyam will listen to like a blinded man.

He stays quiet and keeps these memories to himself.

Lo’ak coaxes his ilu to finally face Neteyam. “Dad says, ‘catch a yerik’ and you bring him back two. Dad says ‘complete iknimaya’ and you are the youngest in a century to succeed on your first try.”

Lo’ak turns towards the sun, but the dying light serves to do nothing but highlight the tears running down his face. “Dad says, ‘protect Lo’ak’, and like the perfect son you are you die for me.”

Beneath him Neteyam’s ilu startles, Lo’ak’s keeping steady in the water. “Come back to the shore,” Neteyam says, batting the hitch from his throat. “I am not having this conversation with you here.”

“Neteyam, no—I’m sorry,” Lo’ak stutters. His ears lay flat against the side of his head. “I didn’t mean to say that—”

“Please, little brother.”

Lo’ak follows.

Neteyam pulls his kuru from his ilu, stumbling into waist-high water. Lo’ak jumps off smoothly, patting his ilu lightly on his neck before it dives back into the ocean. He doesn’t hover around Neteyam as he finds his balance, choosing instead to keep his face tilted into the sun as though it will dry his tears faster. Neteyam is thankful that even if Lo’ak has avoided him like his skin is hollowed with poxes, he has yet to treat Neteyam like he is glass waiting to shatter. It seems as though he will not start now.

“Come,” Neteyam says again when his brother stays in the ocean.

He leads them to the end of the village, to the studded collection of rocks edging around a quiet cove. Even here, far away from the rest of the clan, the ocean follows.

Neteyam sits on one of the larger rocks, his feet in the water. After a moment Lo’ak joins him, the space he keeps between their bodies palpable like a wound. 

Lo’ak keeps quiet beside him, his feet slowly parting the water. Neteyam would think it odd that his brother leaves the air around them empty, waiting for Neteyam to speak first, but that was before he woke in their marui without Lo’ak by his side. Before he died and walked out of the ocean like he had never been gone.

“I respect our father,” Neteyam says, watching the light dance across the waves Lo’ak makes. “I value his input and try to live up to what he expects of me. I do not always agree with him.”

Lo’ak snorts, the most sound Neteyam has heard from him since they sat down. Even his laughter, aimed at Neteyam, has been something he missed.

“But he does not have to tell me to protect the family. To protect you. Everything I did, I did of my own volition,” Neteyam says.

This little cove is not one Neteyam had been to with Lo’ak before. Aonung had brought him here once, and then a hundred times over when he found Neteyam submerged in the murky water near the ilu pen, the only part of the ocean tame enough where he could practice holding his breath and not be afraid he would drown beneath the waves. The cove is quiet, and it is private, and it is the only place in the village that reminds Neteyam of home. It is the only place Neteyam could think of that would put Lo’ak at ease, that might revive thoughts of the forest and the two of them in Eywa’s gentle cradle of life.  

“The memories of my death are still difficult to grasp.” Lo’ak sucks in a sharp breath. It sounds painful, like it caught in his throat and refused to be set free. “But I remember my gun locked up for a moment, my bullets spent. And I saw the solider line up. I saw him aim for my chest and I thought ‘I will not survive. Not from this.’ I was not scared, little brother. I was happy, because you were safe. You let me die knowing it was not in vain. It was not a hardship to trade my life for yours. I would do it again.”

Lo’ak stands, droplets of water chasing after him. “I didn’t want you to! I didn’t want you to die for me!”

“You do not get to decide that for me,” Neteyam says, standing to meet Lo’ak. His brother has grown taller than him in the years they’ve been apart, in the years Lo’ak felt but Neteyam did not. He is stronger, too. And should Neteyam crack open his ribs and count the marks on them, he would find him older. But he is still his younger brother.

“You do not get to decide what I live or die for. And when that something is you, you should not harbor guilt, either,” Neteyam says, not softly, because he will not let Lo’ak leave without him knowing this, but gently, because his brother has not been handled with the care he deserves.

“I never wanted your protection,” Lo’ak whispers. He steps closer, and Neteyam meets him with open arms. His head falls lightly on his chest, his forehead brushing the forever-healing wound, but it does not hurt. “I just wanted my big brother.”

Neteyam winds his hand into hair much longer than he remembers, tears like the ocean caught by his waiting fingers. “I am sorry, Lo’ak, but you cannot have one without the other.”

Chapter Text

The next moon cycle finds them still in the water, their large fishnets half submerged. Lo’ak does not line his nets with bait, and Neteyam follows his lead.

“Flat skate fish follow the warm water currents,” Lo’ak says. “They’re too fast to catch with a spear, and the skin around their mouths is too thin to not tear if we caught them on a hook. We’ve got to let them come into our nets on their own. The ends of their tails should catch on the netting.”

“Like this?” Neteyam asks, adjusting his net to lay between two short reefs.

Lo’ak’s laugh is not kind, but he tosses his net over his shoulder and wades closer to Neteyam. “Not at all, man. You couldn’t catch fish eggs like that.”

“Watch your mouth.”

Lo’ak ducks beneath the waist-high water, pinning the ends of Neteyam’s net to rest around the woody roots of a cluster of reeds. He shakes the water out of his braids as he breaks the surface.

“You need a stronger base. The fish are good swimmers. Try again,” Lo’ak says.

Lo’ak reminds him so much like their father like this Neteyam almost drops the net entirely. Their father was not an expert at trapping or bows or the sharp edge of a hunting knife, not compared to their mother, but he got down on his knees and fixed the placement of Neteyam’s fingers with five of his own all the same. Lo’ak doesn’t wear Neteyam ragged with practice, not like their mother would. He does not show him the best way to hold the net and then stand back for Neteyam to emulate him. He lets Neteyam struggle, lets him flounder in the water and miss tens of fish that swim by, waiting for Neteyam to change the angle of his net or the subtle movement of his feet. He is so much like their father Neteyam does not know how he doesn’t notice.

Neteyam holds the net taut, just barely out of the water. He keeps the rest of his body still. He faces the sun so his shadow lies on the ocean behind them as dark, quick shapes race below the surface.

In a swift twist of his wrists, he wraps the fish darting around his net under the weight of the anchored ends. He follows after it, scooping the net into his arms like he’s holding a swaddled baby. There is a single fish, twisting and struggling in his capture.

Neteyam peels the net from its scales. The fish’s larger fin is bitten off at the end. It is the runt of the school, and Neteyam is surprised it’s survived into the beginnings of adulthood.

“Well,” Lo’ak says as Neteyam dumps the fish back into the water, watching it dart further into the ocean, “at least you got one.”

“It was injured,” Neteyam says. “A child could have plucked it from the water.”

Lo’ak shrugs, his own net yielding more squirming fish than Neteyam can count. “You haven’t been here as long as the rest of us. Catching fish like a child when you’ve only lived here for a year isn’t too bad.”

“I suppose,” Neteyam says. His smile, when it breaks across his face, curls his lips uneven. “I guess I’m just surprised you’ve taken to the ocean so well. I still remember a young Na’vi who could hardly hold a bow properly.”

Lo’ak groans. “Neteyam—”

"But he still insisted on shooting it, embedding an arrow in our father’s leg.”

Lo’ak drops his fish back into the water. “Fuck, man, stop reminding me. Dad still looks freaked out whenever I hand mom her bow—”

Neteyam grabs Lo’ak by the back of his neck. He has to reach higher than he expects to wrap his fingers around. “I am kidding, little brother. It was not surprising at all. I have never seen someone as at home as you are here.”

Lo’ak takes Neteyam’s net, folding them both up neatly. They make their way back to the shore together. “You’re not mad?”

Neteyam tilts his head, the beads on his braids clacking gently. “Mad about what?”

Lo’ak does not look at him, not even when Neteyam moves in front of him, walking backwards to try to catch his gaze. Lo’ak’s pounding heart is audible in the silence. “Aren’t you mad that I’m—I’m olo’eytakan in your place?”

Ah. Neteyam cannot say he saw this coming, but he should have. Lo’ak has always walked with him like his shadow was a tether, something he both feared and found shelter in. How he did not see that Neteyam only ever wanted him by his side.

“There is no ‘place’ you are stealing, if that is what you are afraid of,” Neteyam says fiercely. “I was—not fit for olo’eytakan. Not the way you are.”

Lo’ak laughs again, and Neteyam almost thinks he can see it shake the surface of the ocean. “Bullshit,” he says. He does not sound angry or incensed or a thousand other things that belong solely to Lo’ak. He sounds resigned, as though he is voicing a thought that has festered inside him for years. “You were perfect. The perfect soldier. Perfect son. Perfect olo’eytakan.”

Neteyam shrugs. It would not do any good to refute his brother, not when they both know what he says is true. Neteyam was born for olo’eytakan, they both know this. To ignore it would be to ignore the canyon driven between them since they were children.

“Perhaps,” Neteyam says. “But it was not what I wanted. There is something about being olo’eytakan that cannot be taught, and so it cannot be learned.” He puts his fingers, four instead of five, over Lo’ak’s heart. “It is inside you, as instinctual as riding an ikran or running through the forest. Or diving beneath the ocean’s waves.”

Neteyam smiles. “And it is inside you, little brother. It always has been. I saw it inside you, and the only difference between then and now is that now everyone else can see it too.”

Lo’ak settles his hand over Neteyam’s, five against four. “You promise you’re not upset? I’ll step down if you want me to. I know Tonowari would have preferred you anyway. The entire clan would.”

“Lo’ak,” Neteyam says. “I am happy you’re olo’eytakan. I am happy here, truly.”

The deep pit that had settled in his stomach the moment Neteyam mounted his ikran and flew towards the twin moons with their home at his back, the pit that raged and grew and ate at him until it was all he could think of has not made itself known in weeks. It has calmed, along with his pounding heart and shaking hands, in the time since he woke from Eywa’s clinging death.

“Promise?” Lo’ak whispers.

“I promise, little brother.”

Lo’ak turns from him, wiping his tears with his back to him as though Neteyam has not been both the cause and closure of them a hundred times over. Neteyam lets him have his faux privacy, picking up the nets from the sandy floor and hanging them by the trees further on the shore to dry.

The sound of the sea splitting has both of them turning towards the ocean, Neteyam raising a hand to block out the sun’s harsh rays.

Half a dozen Na’vi ride towards the shore, their ilu barely skimming the water. Neteyam feels himself smile. It is tradition, Lo’ak has told him, that every five years the most promising warriors barring the ones that lead will ride out to the ends of the ocean for a moon’s rotation. It is twenty-eight days of hunting and scavenging and marking the ever-growing edges of the Metkayina village.

Neteyam watches the warriors block out the lowering sun. It is Aonung coming home.

The warriors jump from their ilu, swimming the short distance back to the shore. Aonung greets Lo’ak, his fingers barely touching his forehead before he is clapping Lo’ak on the shoulder. Neteyam is covered by the shadows of the thin forest, and he tells himself he is not hiding. Not from Aonung, but when he looks down at his feet he finds they refuse to move.

“Missed me?” Aonung asks as Lo’ak rolls his eyes. Aonung is not asking him, but Neteyam wants to call yes. He wants to scream and yell and fall to his knees and say yes. Yes, I have missed you. I have missed you like the moon misses its oceans. I have missed you the way I used to miss the forest; you have filled the hollow hole it left in me, but it does not hurt any less.

Aonung is smiling at Lo’ak beneath the thin façade of irritation, and Neteyam wonders after the friendship that bloomed while he was away. He wonders after so many things he did not have the chance to share with them. He wonders after new height and new scars. He wonders after the family that grew around the wound he left when he died, and he wonders after the place he still has with them. And with his Aonung, he wonders after all the almosts that plagued them.

“I speared four srakats at once. What was your record? Three?” Aonung laughs, and somehow that is just like Neteyam remembers. It is the sound of an arrow slicing through the air and raindrops falling on leaves, and it is the sound of ocean waves.

“Looks like you owe me—”

Aonung has grown so much in three years. He has grown and matured and inked new shadows into his skin while Neteyam was not around to watch.

Their eyes meet over the ocean and sand that separates them. His voice is like the ice that lays itself across a frozen lake. “Neteyam?”

Neteyam smiles, his cheeks pinched so tightly it is almost painful, but he can’t help himself. “Hi, Aonung,” he whispers, not nearly loud enough to be heard over the growing waves, but it must not matter to Aonung, because soon he is being swept into a hug, strong arms around his waist as his is lifted from the blanket of leaves at his feet. Neteyam has never been taller than Aonung, but he looks good like this, his head tilted back so he can grin up at him.

“You’re alive?” he asks, his eyes blown wide and happy. “How? When? Oh, Eywa, I don’t care.”

Aonung sets Neteyam back on his feet, his large hands tight on Neteyam’s waist. They had not touched like this, before. Again, it was an almost that separated them. Aonung would look at him when the moons began to set and glance at Neteyam like he wanted to reach for him, but then a fish would jump from the ocean or a bird would call or a thousand different things would keep them achingly apart. Aonung has not touched him like this before, and Neteyam cannot find a reason to pull away.  

“Careful,” Lo’ak hisses from the shore. “His chest is still bleeding.”

Aonung spreads his fingers lightly over the fabric hiding Neteyam’s wound. “Here?” he asks.

He must feel the wild pounding of Neteyam’s heart, his smile sinking into something less kind and more playful. Neteyam nods as Aonung drags his hand away, taking gentle heat with him.

“I’ll see you back at Mom and Dad’s for dinner,” Lo’ak mutters, picking up the bundle of freshly caught fish and dried meat Aonung had dropped. He slings the bundle over his shoulder and taps lightly against Neteyam’s chest as he passes. To Aonung, Lo’ak pounds his fist into his shoulder, hard enough that he stumbles back a step, but not once does he stop touching Neteyam. “Watch yourself.”

After Lo’ak has left, a conflicted look left behind as the rest of the hunting group leaves with him, Aonung leads Neteyam through the fledgling forest, their hands locked.

He doesn’t ask Neteyam to follow him, he just tilts his head, tucking a braid behind Neteyam’s ear, and he finds himself fitting his feet in the sandy footprints Aonung leaves behind.

Aonung takes him to a rock jutting out of gentle waves. He dives into the water first, his hand almost reluctantly leaving Neteyam’s, before he offers to help him in.

“You’re alright to swim, right?” he asks after Neteyam has been steadily bobbing towards the rock. Aonung is swimming slowing for his sake, his tail oscillating in steady movements to keep himself in place.

“I am fine, Aonung,” Neteyam says. Watching two ears lay flat against his head, Neteyam adds, “I appreciate your concern.”

Aonung helps him onto the rock, too, his hand extended towards him seemingly without notice. Neteyam takes it before it has the chance to curl away from him.

They sit close together, their shoulders brushing. Aonung is so much taller than he remembers. His new inkings extend over the majority of his chest and wrap towards the fragile expanse of his stomach. There is a spot higher up on his chest, almost a mirror of Neteyam’s wound, that is left empty. Aonung catches him looking, and he turns to let Neteyam get his fill.

“My parents tried to push me into courtship,” Aonung says when Neteyam’s eyes refuse to stray from the achingly empty skin. Lo’ak has a beautiful mark in the same spot, soft curls and sharp edges and the outline of water flowers; it matches Tsireya’s gentle spirit perfectly. “I think I’m the oldest unmated warrior in our clan.”

Neteyam brushes his fingers lightly over his chest, sees them shake and knows Aonung must, too. “I’m sure there are plenty of women who would be honored if you chose them.” Plenty of women that Neteyam will not be strong enough not to envy.

Aonung catches his hand, interlacing their fingers. Now both their hands shake. “There was no one I wanted.”

Neteyam feels his heart settle. He should not be happy, that Aonung has been alone all these years. He should not have felt a twinge of satisfaction upon seeing the empty space on his chest that speaks of a lack of mate, or the marui he must live in alone. Neteyam does not take pleasure in Aonung’s loneliness, but let him be selfish just this once, let him be glad that Aonung missed Neteyam as much as he missed him.

“And this?” Neteyam asks, his mouth dry as he nods to the thick band Aonung wears, additional threads of leather allowing it to fit all the way around Aonung’s wide upper arm. “Is this a sign of an unmated man, too?”

Aonung twists the armband, showing precise rows of red and forest blue. “It’s a sign of mourning. I guess I should take it off now.”

Neteyam touches the leather, kept smooth even after years under salt water. “No,” he says. “Keep it. It looks better on you.”

Aonung drags his foot through the water. “Neteyam,” he begins, his voice soft. “How did you come back? To us. To me. Eywa knows I did nothing to deserve it.”

Neteyam drops his head, letting it fall against a strong shoulder. “I don’t know,” he admits, his voice low to match Aonung’s. “I guess she was not yet done with me.”

They wait until the day of an eclipse to perform both ceremonies.

Neteyam has not seen his brother in feathers and ornate shells in years, not since his own iknimaya induction. The two village traditions fit well together, forest blues and ocean sand, the scales of an ikran studding Lo’ak’s chest plate lying next to the akula bones around his neck.

Tsireya is a lovely combination of strength and beauty, perfectly matching Lo’ak’s tense shoulders and the hands Neteyam knows are shaking even if he can’t see them below the feast table.

He was not nervous when Tonowari took the tip of his blade and dragged it over Lo’ak’s chest, the first spillage of his blood as olo’eyktan. And he was not nervous when he was announced to the waiting clan that he would now lead. But when Tsireya joined him at the helm, the beads that brushed the tops of her feet floating in the ankle-high water, Lo’ak’s mask began to quiver.

For anyone who does not know him as Neteyam does, it will not be noticeable. And so he lets his brother be, his newly recognized mate finally by his side, and pushes his plate of fire-roasted flat skate fish aside.

“Are you not hungry, my son?” His mother’s plate has been cleaned, her cheeks rosy with sweetened vine.

“I went hunting this morning,” he says. Then, because though his mother will take his lies and not ask for more, she has always deserved everything he has to give, he says, “I have not been hungry much. Not since I woke up.”

“Ah,” his mother says. From a pouch on her hip, she draws a bursting fruit. She begins to peel the thick rind. “Healing is a fickle thing. It is not always easy on the body. One day it may take your appetite and then your strength. And then the next it may have you swallowing down the entire ocean to quench your thirst.”

She offers him a bright red slice, smiling when Neteyam pushes it past his lips. Juice covers his tongue and chases away the lingering taste of fish.

“You are getting better every day.” His mother lays her hand over the muscles on his stomach. “Strong,” she says.

“It’s hard, Mom,” Neteyam says softly over the excited crowd around him. “I missed three years. I—I am not as strong as I once was. My body does not move the way I want it to. I feel like a child again, relying on everyone around me.”

His mother draws a careful hand through his hair. “It would not be fair of us to ask Eywa for more, not when she has already given you back to us.”

“But—”

“My sweet son,” she says. “Eywa has not abandoned you. Your body will heal, you will make memories with the family, and soon three years will feel like nothing. Please do not let your regret for the past prevent you from creating a future.”

His mother’s eyes slice into the crowd. They narrow slightly. “There is so much of your life left ahead of you,” she says.

“Your Aonung,” she begins, her eyes kept forward but her tail flicking playfully when Neteyam’s cheeks heat. “He has spoken to your father and I.”

Neteyam feels his heart speed. Aonung sits beside his mother and his father, his skin smooth like an ocean wave under the torchlight. He smiles when he catches Neteyam’s gaze, leaning closer to offer him a wink that does not go unnoticed by his mother.

“What does he have to speak to you about?” His voice stays valiantly even.

His mother lets silence grow between them. “About the hunt next moonrise,” she says. She continues to peel the fruit in her hand, setting a segment onto the discarded plate in front of Neteyam. For him to take, if he chooses.

“But I see the way he looks at you, like you are the water around his body,” his mother says. “And I have seen the way you look at him.”

“How?” Neteyam whispers, watching Aonung toss small pieces of dried meat into the air just to catch them between his sharp teeth. Aonung knows he is watching, and he throws them higher.

“How do I look at him?”

“You look at him the way I look at your father. Like you cannot bear to be parted,” his mother says.

“Neytiri,” his father says, appearing by his mother’s side as though he was called. Sometimes Neteyam thinks he is. Sometimes he thinks the bond between them goes further than mates, further than love or family or duty. Sometimes he thinks they were born each with half a soul, reunited after years and distance kept them apart.

His father sets a hand at the base of her neck. “Dance with me?”

“Of course, my love.” She drops a kiss to Neteyam’s forehead, and after a stuttered moment, his father does, too.

They dance under the flickering light from the torches, the moons doing little to illuminate the hollowed-out cave. His mother’s sanhì are much like his own, a softer blue compared to his father’s and Lo’ak’s. But hers are like the anthers of a blooming flower. Hers explode into light when his father dips her at her waist, laughter tumbling from her mouth like a waterfall.

Neteyam is not alone for long, a broad hand settling against his neck much like his father’s on his mother.

“Neteyam,” Aonung says. He looks down at Neteyam, the tips of his fingers stained red from sweet fruit. “Will you come with me?”

They do not go far. Aonung stops them a stone’s toss from the cave mouth, torchlight and music and laughter Neteyam thinks is his father’s or Lo’ak’s at their backs. Neteyam dips his feet into warm water, Aonung following after he has cleaned his hands.

Neteyam leans down to trace over a fin that breaks the water, hissing when the movement pulls at the wound on his chest.

“Does it still hurt?” Aonung asks.

“It doesn’t heal,” Neteyam says. “It has not gotten any better in four moon cycles. But it has not gotten worse, either. There is no need to worry.”

“But it hurts,” Aonung says. “That’s enough to make me worry.”

Neteyam shrugs. “There is nothing to do about it. It is payment for coming home.”

Aonung smiles back at their feet. “Home?” he asks. “Is this village home?”

“I—I think it will be. It feels like it can be,” Neteyam says. The ocean does not frighten him anymore. It is cold and it is dark and it is stronger than the roaring winds between the Thundering Rocks. But it also welcomed his family when they had nowhere else to go, when devils snapped at their heels. It is home to his parents and siblings and his Aonung who sits beside him and rests his hand gently over his chest.

“Wait here a moment.” And then Aonung is rushing back into the light of the cave, returning quickly with a lit torch in his hand.

“We can cauterize the wound. Burn the blood vessels until they close.” When Neteyam just looks at him, he adds, “your brother taught me this. I got injured really bad on a hunting trip. I probably would have bled out before the medics got to me if it weren’t for him.”

Neteyam drags his eyes over every exposed section of skin, searching for a wound that almost took Aonung’s life. “Are you alright?”

Aonung laughs, his head thrown back to highlight the long tendons in his neck, dark ink dragged over muscle. “I’m fine, Forest Boy. It was two years ago.” It was when Neteyam was still buried in the ocean.

Aonung shifts closer, their thighs touching. “It will hurt,” he whispers. “Just for a moment, but it’ll hurt like a bitch.”

Neteyam laughs. He peels the black fabric from his skin, the makeshift bandage sticking awkwardly to the wound. “It’s alright,” he says. “It’s alright if it’s you.”

Aonung keeps his gaze the entire time, setting fire against Neteyam’s skin and holding it there. He is right; it does hurt. It burns and festers and makes Neteyam want to howl with pain. Aonung keeps his other hand entwined with Neteyam’s, his thumb brushing over his beating pulse. And then he’s dipping the torch in the ocean at their feet, steam and smoked flesh rising.

“There,” he says softly, tearing a part of the fabric between his legs to wipe at the fizzled blood around the wound. Neteyam looks down as he drags the wetted fabric gently around it’s edges. It’s stopped bleeding, leaving behind only a starburst of a scar above his heart.

Neteyam rejoins the celebration before the moons are completely overhead, the scent of burning flesh lost to the wind. He rejoins after he has sat at Aonung’s side and stolen all the heat from his body.

His mother and Ronal stand before the mated pair. In all the time since Neteyam has returned, he has been unable to unearth the nature of their relationship. One day they will be snapping at each other’s throats, pulled apart by their husbands. The next they are riding their ilus out to the deepest parts of the ocean, more fish caught between them then the village will be able to eat before they spoil.

His father finds him like that, tucked away in the corner after he has waved Aonung off to congratulate his sister and new brother-in-law.

“I always thought you would get married before Lo’ak,” his father says. “Your brother has never been the best with women.”

“Aonung says Tsireya was dropped on her head as a child. It ruined her eyesight.”

His father frowns. “Poor girl.”

Neteyam smiles into his cup. “It was a joke, Dad.”

“Ah,” his father says. He shakes his head, laughing. “I forgot you joke like your mother. She had me convinced tspìng would fly away if you didn’t keep your back to them. She had me hunting them backwards like an idiot.”

“I suppose you didn’t have much luck even with her ‘hunting tips’?”

“Of course not,” his father says. “Your mother couldn’t stand me in the beginning. Really, I think she told me that just so Tsu’tey could laugh at me.”

“Tsu’tey?” Neteyam says. “Laughing? From your stories I would think he wouldn’t know how.”

“Ah, my stories could never do him justice,” his father says. He tilts his head, watching Neytiri bare her teeth in a smile at Ronal. “You’re so much like your mother. He would have loved you.”

“And if I were like you,” Neteyam asks, “would he set his ikran on me?”

His father laughs. “He would probably love you regardless—" His brow pinches, frowning as he brushes Neteyam’s braids over his shoulder.

“Shit, kid, what happened to your chest?” he asks. His hands hover over the cauterized wound.

Neteyam traces his fingers over his chest. “Nothing,” he says, smiling as he remembers the pain that quickly bled into warmth. “It’s healed now.”

Laughter trills against the cave walls, Tsireya’s and Lo’ak’s harmonizing like a child’s hymn.

Neteyam watches a small smile take over his father’s face as he looks at Lo’ak. “You should tell him,” Neteyam says.

“Tell him what?”

“That you are proud of him,” Neteyam says. “Proud of the man Lo’ak has become.”

“He knows,” his father says. His tail flicks behind him. “He has to.”

“There is a difference,” Neteyam says, “between knowing and believing. Lo’ak knows that you care for him. But he still believes you are upset with him, and that belief will color everything you say to him.”

His father frowns. Neteyam can hear it when he speaks. “What would I be upset with him about?”

“Me,” Neteyam says. “My death. He thinks you blame him.”

“It wasn’t his fault; he was a child—”

“I know that,” Neteyam says. “I made my own choices. I knew what running into a battle with three bullets in my gun would get me. It is not me you need to convince.”

“But you knew, right?” his father asks, his voice pitching high and then breaking. He will not meet Neteyam’s eyes. “You knew that I was proud of you before—before you died?”

Neteyam thinks of a loaming shadow behind him. He thinks of knives pushed into his small hands and fish speared by an arrow of his own and his father racing up the winding branches of the trees, the downward slope of his mouth saying higher, faster. Stronger. He thinks of his father, weeping over his body as it grew lax and quiet and empty.

“I—I had hoped,” Neteyam admits. “There were times, when I came back from a hunt with nothing to show for it and you looked at me as though you wished I had been better. As though you wished I were someone else—”

“Never, kid,” his father says. His hands moving frantically as though he cannot decide whether to pull Neteyam into a hug or fiddle with the trigger of a gun he does not carry. “Not—you were and have always been perfect.”

Neteyam laughs softly. “That is a lot of pressure, too, Dad.”

“I’m sorry,” his father says. “It wasn’t meant to be. I’m sorry if I ever made you feel like you weren’t enough.”

“I knew you loved me,” Neteyam says after a moment. “More than anything, before anything else, I knew that.”

“Good,” his father says. He clears his throat, setting his cup on the feasting table, and then he sinks into a chair. Finally his father tugs Neteyam down with him, his hand wrapped around Neteyam’s neck so he can rest his head against his chest.

Neteyam still is not strong enough to ride into the ocean on his own, but it is not difficult to convince Aonung to go with him. And once Aonung joins, Lo’ak and Tsireya are not far behind.

He shares the same ilu as Aonung, swinging his feet over the beast’s side when Aonung pulls her into a stop.

“I want to see those hands up high,” Lo’ak says, directing his ilu to pass them in a splash of water that falls mostly on Aonung. Olo’eyktan looks good on him. It widens his smile when he lets it loose and strengthens his voice when he speaks to a mass of hunters waiting on his every word. But it does nothing to warm the frosty air that rises whenever Aonung is next to Neteyam.

Aonung raises his hands in surrender. Then he settles his hand, high, on the meat of Neteyam’s thigh and squeezes hard enough to leave the imprint of his fingers.

“I’m going to kill you,” Lo’ak threatens, his spear lofted above his head.

Aonung coaxes his ilu into motion, jerking her behind a thick reef that sticks out of the water. If Lo’ak were to throw his spear, the spindly wall of a reef would not stop him. But it is hard for him to truly tumble into anger when Tsireya is beside him, smiling gently as Aonung laughs behind the reef.

“If you do anything with my brother before you’re bonded before Eywa,” Lo’ak calls, “so help me I will castrate you.”

“Your threats don’t work on me when I don’t know what they mean, Demon Blood!” Aonung shouts back. Their ire, this tension they bat between each other, does not have thick roots. Neteyam knows if he were to express true disapproval, they would be the quickest of friends. But this is also a friendship of its own.

Tsireya’s laughter peters off into the distance, and Neteyam waits a few more moments until he can be sure his brother will not round the reef.

“It’s nice,” Neteyam says. “Though I would have preferred something smaller, with less curls.”

Aonung traces a hand over the new ink on his chest. “Shit, really? I can have my dad try to—”

“I’m teasing you, Aonung,” Neteyam says. He drags a finger down the center, over the splatter of ink that resembles the sanhì across his own cheeks. “I wish I could have seen you get it.”

“It’s tradition,” Aonung says filling his lungs with air so his chest moves beneath Neteyam’s hands. “It’s supposed to be a surprise. Like a gift, representing all the things I—I love about you.”

Neteyam hums, pressing his thumb into the tender skin of his new tattoo. “And what,” he says, smiling when a blush spreads across Aonung’s face and down his chest, all the way to the ink Neteyam never wants to stop touching, because it was made for him, “is it that you love about me?”

Aonung takes Neteyam’s face in his hands, bringing their foreheads to rest together. Neteyam meets him in the middle, brushing his lips against his waiting ones so he can breathe in the gentle, “Everything,” Aonung gifts him.

His brother calls for them from the other side of the reef, a warning in the proximity of his voice, and Neteyam laughs into the kiss, smiling when the ocean laps at his feet.