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***
The first time Neytiri doesn’t join in the hunt, Jake finds her seated with a group of women, doing something that seems to involve peeling huge leaves apart into thin, fibrous strands.
“For weaving,” Neytiri explains when he asks, sitting down beside her. She keeps working, so intent on her task that she doesn’t even turn to meet his eyes. One of the others, an older woman, does look up at him, a look that seems to be trying to convey something.
“We will not be able to replace all that was lost in one season,” Neytiri goes on, fingers moving with manic grace, reducing the mammoth leaf in her hands into a pile of white filaments that bleed pale green sap onto her knees. “If we tried, we would take too much, the forest would be diminished. We do not take heedlessly, like the Sky People. But, because we are moving from place to place, searching for our new Kelutrel, we may take more than we could have if we kept to the same place always. This is how Eywa blesses us, that she gives us hardship so that we may endure.”
Her hands never stop, her eyes never leave some vague midpoint in front of her; Jake doesn’t really think she’s looking at the leaf. If he had to guess, he’d say she is working by touch. The sound of a loose circle of two dozen all doing the same at once turns the tearing noises into something almost fluid, like the rushing of a stream.
The old woman holds Jake’s gaze insistently; he wishes he knew what she was trying to tell him.
“These are no good for cloth,” Neytiri tells him, as if he’s asked, “I am not a weaver of cloth; that is an art which requires much study, like the making of beads, like becoming hunter. One who is of a peaceful nature, quick hands, much patience, such a woman would study from childhood - which plants make fine strands, where they grow, how to pluck, weave, dye. This is an honorable thing. Like being hunter.”
The old woman with her meaningful stares has apparently given up on Jake – she’s glaring down at her gnarled hands, which seem to be moving with a certain frustrated vehemence. She’s probably mentally calling him skxawng, but he still can’t figure what she was trying to communicate – or why Neytiri has suddenly decided she needs to explain the value of weaving.
Looking around the circle, though, Jake realizes that he’s staring at more pregnant women than he’s seen in one gathering since he joined the Omatikaya. The women who aren’t heavily with child are uniformly elderly, except for the teenaged girl with her arm in a sling, her hands intact but her shoulder a mass of mangled flesh and deep purple scabs.
And there is Neytiri – young, whole, and so far as she’s told Jake, not pregnant.
“These will make baskets, thick ropes, mats – to cover the ground in our new Kelutrel when the rainy season comes,” Neytiri tells that same undefined bit of space out in front of her unfocused eyes. “This is work for anyone; every child learns this.”
No one else in the circle is speaking; the young girl fidgets and hunches her shoulders when Jake’s eyes land on her. One of the oldest of the women is humming tunelessly. Several others look away.
“Okay,” says Jake, cautiously. “Well, then, give me a leaf – if every child learns this, so should I.”
“No,” Neytiri says flatly, tearing a filament of leaf free with a particularly vicious twist of her wrist. The ripping sound it makes is loud, discordant with the rest. “You would waste too much – you can learn later, when we are settled. Go hunt.”
***
A few days later, when meat is again growing scarce, he finds her with a baby on her hip and a gaggle of rugrats are her feet. She’s amusing the baby by twirling her fingers through the air in front of him, movements that mimick flight, accompanied by soft sounds that might be an extremely subdued irkan. The baby finds this fascinating; the other children seem absorbed in a game that involves a large number of pebbles.
“Hey,” says Jake, smiling at the baby, addressing Neytiri peripherally. “Who’s this?”
“This is Kel’tey,” Neytiri tells him, her face also turned toward the baby. “He belongs to Li’nat.”
“So where is Li’nat?” Jake asks carefully, vaguely annoyed to find his mate babysitting when he’d hoped they could hunt together, but at the same time hoping the answer isn’t dead.
“Gathering shells for beads,” Neytiri tells him, and Jakes exhales in relief.
Something exciting has apparently happened in the children’s game, because there is suddenly a rousing outcry, followed by laughter and a great deal of good-natured shoving of one particular little girl, who is gathering up most of the pebbles.
The pebbles, Jakes realizes on closer inspection, have a pewtery sheen to them, with flecks of something shinier mixed in. He can’t be positive, but he’d be willing to bet the kids are playing with unobtainium marbles.
It sort of makes him smile, and it sort of makes him nauseous at the same time.
“When’s she getting back?” Jake asks Neytiri.
“When she has gathered enough,” Neytiri replies unhelpfully, letting Kel’tey grab a fistful of her hair and stuff it into his mouth. She smiles softly.
“You’re, uh,” Jake ventures, stumbling over the words. “You’re not trying to tell me something here, are you?”
The look Neytiri gives him is both uncomprehending and a little perturbed. “I am trying to tell you that I do not know when Li’nat will return,” she says, in a tone that adds skxawng to the end of the sentence, even if she doesn’t say it aloud. “You should not wait for me.”
***
Later, as Jake climbs into the nest of leaves where Neytiri already waits, she announces, “I am not with child, Jake. Li’nat now has the care of two sisters’ children, all of them very young, and no mate. She needed time, quiet, not so many voices calling for her. I could give her that for a day.”
“Oh,” says Jake, because he’s at a loss as to what else to say – half the clan is widows and orphans now, but they’re good at taking care of each other, and why shouldn’t Neytiri be a part of that? He’s not sure exactly how many children Neytiri was watching earlier, but at last five or six aside from the baby, and if all those are Li’nat’s now – hell, letting her have a little peace is more important than Jake getting to hunt with his mate. They can hunt together another day.
“It is good that I am not with child,” Neytiri says, nestling back into Jake’s arms as he curls around her from behind. Her tone is firm, decisive. “Not yet. It will be as Eywa wills, but I pray that our child will be born in our new Kelutrel.”
Right – the one they haven’t found yet. Jake’s not part of the scouting parties assessing promising trees, being neither very familiar with the forest nor knowledgeable as to what makes for a structurally sound and spiritually appropriate Home Tree. When he’s not needed in a leadership capacity – and the Omatikaya are, to his great relief, really pretty good at doing what needs to be done without needing anyone to tell them to do it – Jake spends his time hunting. It’s what he knows, what he’s good at, the way he can be most useful to his people.
This makes it no less frustrating that it sometimes feels like their entire lives are hovering in an awkward holding pattern until a new Kelutrel is found, and he can’t personally do a damned thing to speed that along.
That, and Neytiri’s still staring off into the distance while she talks to him. She does that a lot lately, and Jake thinks that if he got out hunting with her, got her to let go a little, maybe afterwards she’d talk – actually talk, with him. Somehow that never seems to happen, though – the hunting or the talking.
And apparently she wants to hold off on making any babies, which Jake assumes means holding off on the activities that tend to result in babies. The Na’vi don’t practice birth control.
The day’s hunt was successful, his belly is full of fresh meat and he’s still riding a little high on the adrenaline, and this was really not the end of the day Jake had been hoping for.
Her shoulders are rigid where they’re pressed back against his chest, the curve of her spine is taut, but her feet have wrapped themselves around his, toes clinging in a way his residually-human feet can’t emulate. She smells different for having spent the day in the camp rather than out in the forest – like spices and dye and sweat, but under it she still smells like herself, still smells like his. The rainy season is creeping up on them, and it is apparently cooler than the months Jake has experienced thus far on Pandora – the nights have a distinct chill to them now.
In their new Kelutrel, Neytiri has told him, they will wrap themselves in brightly dyed blankets within their vine hammocks, then cover those over with thick, waxy leaves to repel the rain. The new blankets are not yet woven; for now all Jake has for warmth is the leaves, and Neytiri.
“Sounds good to me,” Jake agrees, dropping a chaste kiss onto the hollow where her neck meets her shoulder.
Neytiri makes a sound that is half eager and half mournful, and turns in his arms. Her limbs wind around him and her lips seeking his with a desperate urgency. Part of him is wondering what happened to all the sensible waiting they were going to do, but most of him really can’t care, most of him just wants her, will take her any way she comes to him.
Afterwards she pretends to sleep – it seems only polite to return the favor, so Jake just holds her and tries to breath evenly, until at some point in the night she gives up and finally looks at him. Her eyes are huge and fathomless in the dark, blinking up at him, and he blinks back down at her and doesn’t say anything. He feels almost afraid to say anything – whatever he said might be wrong, might scare her away again.
She drops her eyes and tucks her head back into his chest, but she holds him tighter, arms and legs curling around him vise-like and trembling. Jake just keeps holding her.
***
He doesn’t see her all the next day, until evening, when she comes back into camp with two bright yellow lizards half as long as her arm slung over her back. From the reaction this gets out of everyone else, they must be a delicacy – or maybe their hides are something special? Jake’s never seen them before, alive or dead. A handful of women a little older than Neytiri try very hard to act like they’re not all trying to get to her first and elbowing each other out of the way, but the two who end up with the carcasses look distinctly smug. One of them is Li’nat, attended by a small herd of little bobbing heads and tiny hands, all of them trying to reach out with one finger and touch the dead lizard’s tail.
Jake tries very hard not to be hung up on the fact that Neytiri went hunting without him, when he’s spent the better part of the past two weeks trying to get her to hunt with him with absolutely no luck.
It’s possible he’s not as good at keeping his expression neutral as he’d like to be, because she turns, catches his eye, gives him a brief nod of greeting, then follows Li’nat. Jake gets a passing glare from Mo’at.
Neytiri wasn’t the only successful hunter that day and there’s some kind of burgundy-colored fruit that’s come into season lately, meaning they have more than enough food and Jake has absolutely no good excuse to go shoot something. He decides he’s going to gather more firewood. It’s going to start raining non-stop in a couple weeks, right? They could use more dry wood.
Neytiri finds him despite the fact that he really doesn’t want to be found, which does not exactly improve Jake’s mood. The little bit of tangy, salty, absolutely unbelievably delicious lizard meat she feeds him helps. The fact that she feeds it to him with her hands, and it’s still hot and her fingers are a little greasy and she trails them over his lips and lets him suck the last bits of juice from them – that helps a bit more.
Then they’re not sensible or patient about doing things that could get her pregnant, again, right there on the forest floor, and that helps a lot.
They both sleep pretty well that night, Jake thinks, or at least he does – he’d ask her in the morning, but she’s already gone when he wakes up. He spends half the day tracking her down, and eventually finds her knee-deep in a nearby creek with Li’nat and company, and a handful of other women and children, collecting mollusks.
“These are good to eat,” Neytiri tells him, eyes on the creek bed, plucking shells out of the muck and dropping them into the basket over her arm. “And the shells are beautiful, many colors. They have a sting – here -” She pulls one from the mud that is half open, some vaguely obscene-looking extremity protruding. Neytiri catches the wiggling bit carefully between two fingertips, avoiding the pointed end. “The sting takes away all feeling where it touches. Put the venom of this on a wound, and there is no pain.”
“Cool,” Jake says, as the clam-thing sucks its stinger back into its shell. Neytiri tosses it into the basket. He looks down at his own feet, just at the edge of where water meets land. “How are you spotting them?” All he sees is mud – no, wait. “Is it the little holes in the mud? Are those how they get air?”
Neytiri smiles approvingly at him; it’s the warmest look he’s gotten from her in days – at least, the warmest he’s gotten when they weren’t actively forgetting about not getting her pregnant. Jake reaches down into the muck, quick like she’s been doing, and comes up with a large shell, stinger poking around frantically for half a second before it clamps itself shut. Jake grins, and Neytiri grins back, and for a second it’s all good, everything’s okay.
Then Jake dumps the mollusk into her basket, asks, “So how many of these things can we take?” and her smile fades.
“Many,” she says, but she no longer sounds welcoming. “But this is simple work – like a game, trying not to be stung. Children’s work.”
Then why are you doing it? Jake wants to demand, but someone is coming up behind him calling out, “Olo’eyktan!” at the same time that one of Li’nat’s little nieces slips, sits down hard in water suddenly up to her neck, and starts wailing.
“You do not have time for this,” Neytiri snaps at him, before she hurries over to the child.
Jake wants to tell her that he will damned well make time to figure out what’s wrong with her, but that’s pointless – he knows what’s wrong with her, what she’s lost. Hell, what hasn’t she lost? What he doesn’t know is how to fix it, or if it’s even really her that’s broken – she seems content to keep herself busy. Just not hunting. Not with him.
Jake turns towards the voice that’s calling out for him. He doesn’t remember the man’s name, but he recognizes his face and remembers, stomach lurching with dizzy hope, that this man is one of the scouts sent out to look for a suitable tree, for their new Kelutrel – and he looks excited.
***
Settling into a new Kelutrel, as it turns out, involves a crazy amount of ceremony, and most of that ceremony involves Jake, or Neytiri, or both. Mo’at is still Tsa’hik, but there are prayers and rituals that require the participation of a mated pair, and those fall to them. Jake does his best and tries not to think of how awful this must be for Mo’at – like she needed her nose rubbed in the fact of her new widowhood.
Either Jake’s Na’vi is getting better, or the clan decides en masse to be tolerant of him, because he gets through his parts without anyone having to translate or hiss corrections at him.
***
A week or so after all the excitement has started to die down and the practical concerns of stringing hammocks and carving out niches and steps has taken over, Jake finds Neytiri high up in the branches of their new home, sitting with her arms wrapped around her knees, staring up at the rustling leaves over her head. The hunters’ ikran are settling in too.
There are tears running unheeded down her face.
Jake suddenly gets it, and skxawng isn’t nearly a strong enough word for how he feels. His ikran is up there with the rest; he thinks in another couple decades it might forgive him for making it drop him onto the back of a toruk, but it will still come to his call. He still has that bond, can still fly.
He sits beside her and doesn’t speak. For a long time, neither one of them speaks.
“It is so stupid,” Neytiri blurts out, tucking her head down into her knees so she’s not looking at him, still not looking at him. “My father is dead – Tsu’tey is dead. So many are dead. The Kelutrel which was home to my people for generations is destroyed. Why this? Why is it this that I cannot face? Seze should not have – none of them should have died!” she hisses, raising her head to meet his gaze, furious. “None of them!”
Jake wants to say I know and that bastard paid for it, you got him, you made him pay and I am so much sorrier than I’m ever going to have words to tell you, but all of that is just so damned inadequate.
Neytiri sucks in a breath while Jake says a lot of loud, despairing nothing, steadying herself. “I cannot choose another,” she says. “I cannot do it.”
“Okay,” Jake says.
“Okay?” Neytiri repeats back angrily. “No, it is not okay! I must!”
“Then you will,” Jake says, “when you’re ready.”
She looks at him, blinks, scrubs at her eyes with the back of her hand. “I cry like a child,” she snaps, scowling at herself. “Weeping for things I cannot have.” She pauses, then admits in a shamed little mutter, “I want her back. I want it all back.”
To that, Jake feels like he can say, “I know.”
She nods, acknowledging that – it’d be nice if that made something better, but it doesn’t.
“They are with Eywa,” Neytiri says, in this horrible broken sort of voice that Jake does not ever want to hear out of her again. “I know this.”
“I – I had a brother,” Jake blurts out. He doesn’t decide to say it, doesn’t think about, and it doesn’t occur to him until the words have left his mouth that, holy crap, he’s actually never told her about Tom. How can he have never told her about Tom? This is Neytiri, his mate, the one who knows everything about him.
And the second he thinks it, he realizes how ridiculous that is – they’ve known each other what, five months? Fought beside one another, had some really amazing mind-linked sex. It's a good start, but that's about it.
But they can work on that, Jake thinks, as Neytiri tilts her head at him, curiosity sprouting up through her grief. They can work on that starting right now.
“A brother?” she asks.
“Yeah,” Jake says, suddenly self-conscious despite how much he wants her to know he gets it – not just the grief, but the shame. He needs her to know that she’s not alone here, and if she’s not alone . . if she’s not then he’s not either, and that’s sort of a little bit petrifying, but also a bit of a miracle.
She considers this silently a moment, then says, “You have not spoken of him before,” in a tone of careful calculation, watching him in a way that says yeah, she gets it, she sees why he’s telling her this right now. Hell, she gets it a lot quicker than he did, and he’s the one who brought it up.
“Well, I’m speaking of him now,” Jake offers. He reaches out to push her hair behind her ears, wanting a clear view of her face. She catches his hand and hangs on, and he talks.
***