Chapter Text
They hadn’t wanted Ghost.
They hadn’t even wanted Simon Riley.
They had wanted a scientist, not a discharged soldier.
“About your brother…”
Ghost had never thought that he’d reach for the stars. That had always been Tommy’s dream - his indomitable twin that dared to bury himself in a school that sold itself to the military with the vain hope that he’d be able to do something good with his time in the world. A dying world, Simon would so often tell him. Earth had become a gunmetal steel outline into the galaxy that turned the very oceans so toxic that no whale nor fish could live to see adulthood - if they were born at all. It felt that the only things being birthed on their shriveled husk of a world would be the staggering 20 billion people crawling across its surface - that didn’t even take into account the elitists that had flocked to Mars many years before Simon and Tommy had been born.
Simon had been content as a pawn, if nothing else. He enlisted a year too early, but no recruiter cared enough to double-check the records. They needed fodder, not skill, for a pointless war that left his hands with an irreparable tremor. It didn’t matter — couldn’t — matter. The money he made from the military was enough to secure his mother an apartment that she could stretch both arms across after disease took her husband and the house with it. He’d later learn that it was bulldozed for another spiraling apartment complex that stretched high enough up that oxygen became a costly utility.
Still, no matter the peppered Christmases they spent together or Tommy’s everlasting dreams of a sky full of sears, he’d bled the same red as all who came before him. His twin now sat in a cardboard box beside the rest of his family. While they hadn’t been allowed a burial, because there was no rich soil left to give love to the dead, they had been preserved before cremation just long enough for Ghost to be shipped back after Roba’s blood ran like rivers between his fingers.
He didn’t want to look.
“Your brother represented a significant investment…”
Of course, he had, Tommy was the dreamer. Where Ghost had stopped looking at the stars years before to fight wars no one could ever hope to win, Tommy kept his eyes to the heavens and demanded to be heard. He was the one who went to college, who stumbled and fell but got back up again. They had wanted him to go to Pandora…and now he was dead. All because of Ghost’s loose ends.
“We’d like to talk to you about taking over his contract.”
Contract. Not some greater cause for mankind or a holy exploration. No, a contract was something you could put monetary value to. They wanted Simon Riley to go to Pandora because they knew that he had nothing else to live for now. He’d been unceremoniously discharged from the military without a penny to his name, and this Christmas had felt colder than ice with the blood still drying beneath his nails.
A part of him had wanted to return to a dead CO and beg for company in his unmarked grave, the other part just wanted rest. He hadn’t slept for days now, and unconsciously began reaching for the next shot of stims that kept him going on the barest dregs of adrenaline alone. A hand stopped him, one unscarred and entirely devoid of the thick calluses and scars that left him shaking every second of the day.
Whereas Tommy saved lives with his work, Ghost ended just as many lives with a bullet, and took to reminding his twin of this each time he began to spout off statistics.
“And since your genome is identical to his…you could step into his shoes.”
Ghost couldn’t replace Tommy. He nearly denied them then and there through split knuckles and bared teeth, but he held himself together. Perhaps it was their lucky day that he’d been run ragged just hard enough so that the world felt too foggy to be of much conscious thought. Not anything substantial, at least.
He knew vaguely what Tommy’s work entailed. He wished that he’d spent more time with him just listening, but Ghost always just barely missed his twin between Tommy’s college and his deployment.
Tommy had wanted to go to Pandora. The exploration of the century, he’d called it. There would be no greater joy than piloting the artificially grown body of an alien species - to exist in their world - to see it through their eyes. The eyes of the Na’vi, native denizens of the extraterrestrial moon stood like titanic examples of raw power. When he and Tommy were still young enough to be awestruck by holopads distracting them from the dismal state of the world, they were infatuated with the Na’vi.Most people shared this sense of reverence, the only difference was that Simon grew up from such fantasies, and Tommy didn’t. Tommy had never given up on his goals. He worked tirelessly for them, and yet barely a week before deployment Ghost’s traitorous teammate put a bullet between his brother’s eyes without a second thought. In a millisecond, every dream that Tommy had would never come to be. The money that ought to have gone to get their mother a flat bigger than a downsized office space? Gone. She’d died too. Every one of them died like the collapsed cards of some flimsily built house.
Truly, what else did Ghost have to lose?
Ghost saw firsthand what this world did to people - what he did to people.He watched as the hope flickered from Tommy’s eyes toward the end of his unnaturally short life. It was as though he’d finally cracked whatever code got him through the night, and found the answer wanting as he turned his gaze from Earth. Tommy had always wanted to use Pandora to save Earth, but by the last few days of his life Ghost was certain that he just wanted to go to Pandora to escape. He’d finally realized what Ghost had been telling him all these years: all the work he did, the lives he saved, the people he helped? It didn’t matter. The world would die broken.
Ghost had given Tommy that reassurance all their life, and up until that last week, Tommy had stubbornly maintained hope in Earth. Hope in Humanity. Some part of his own subconscious whispered that it was his fault, on top of the wasted bullets, that Tommy lost his love for the world. He’d poisoned the well and everyone else would pay for it.
He had a cold heart - a dead one.
Truly, he was a dead man on Earth.
He’d be a dead man in space too…but at least he’d die amongst the stars.
He’d never even seen them without the help of dated pictures and blurred images from Mars. There was too much light pollution that even artificial constellations would not hold a candle to the blinding nature of humanity.
Once, Ghost had been told that they were all made of stardust. It connected people on an atomic level so that even when you felt at your most alone, your most unloved and ugly that you could find solace in the fact that you were brought together to at least someone on their pale blue dot. Stardust ran like iridescence through his bloodstream, and faintly, Ghost wondered if Pandora held the matching stardust that saw him through the day.
He signed his life away into his brother’s contract that day, and hoped that the coming years would be kinder.
They weren’t. At least, not at first.
At least he might live long enough to rest amongst new stars.
. . .
Nhìt'Syìp had watched the ship crash earlier in the day.
It was hard to have missed it. The whole forest had heard the explosion as one of its whirring engine’s caught fire mid-descent. Nhìt'Syìp, and many other young warriors of the People, had gone up to the highest branches of Hometree to watch the ship fall. All of them winced for the wounded earth that was sent flying when it finally did crash into the canopy. The trees that its spinning turbines caught against were far older than any of their metallic craftsmanship, and that alone had his ears pulled back into a fitful hiss.
They hadn’t waited very long before Nhìt'Syìp was summoned by the hunting party. They wanted to explore the ruins that lay behind the Sky People's onslaught of death. They had to work fast as an arrow as he dove through the underbrush and ducked beneath twisting roots in a mad race against his friends. His party wanted to reach the crash site before the Sky People could drag further wounds into the soil. Perhaps his peers had far nobler aspirations, but Nhìt'Syìp was curious before anything else as they all skidded to a stop right at the edge of the clearing that lead to their quarry.
The ship was split into two, with one half still hanging high in the tree and creaking precariously from the propeller still whirring faintly against the grass. The other was in pieces, all of which lay strewn across the ruined meadow in a mess of scattered baggage and blood. He nearly missed the blood when he first looked, but in hindsight, he wasn’t even sure how you could miss the sheer amount of it all.
He could feel the collective recoil from his party as he held a hand out to keep the youngest at bay.
“Stay,” he hissed to them as he drew a hesitant foot out into the moonlight. “I will call when it is safe.”
His four-toed foot brushed across unsoiled grass as he fully uncloaked himself from the underbrush with the grace of a prowling thanator. Something unseen to whatever might have survived the initial crash, though he doubted that anything - least of all the Sky People - could have survived such blazing fires. Some still remained as he flicked his tail across the grass to narrowly avoid the still-smoldering embers around him.
The once serene meadow had become catastrophic evidence of deathly destruction. He didn’t look too closely at the bodies, only enough to confirm that there were no survivors to be found. Nothing that could be used as a bargaining chip, and he didn’t dare pilfer through their goods for fear of giving them a reason. Any reason, however small, would be seen as an act of aggression in their temperamental eyes. He had felt firsthand the grazing of their bullets against bare skin. He’d buried family and friends with wounds that just didn’t get better. Nothing Eywa could do would grant them reprieve, and so he felt it most important to leave without a trace.
The Sky people had arrived thirty of their years before, though Nhìt'Syìp knew that the journey from their planet to Pandora often took much longer. They explained this to him on charts and in ‘books’ they offered to the Omaticaya as peace offerings, as though that would mend the bonds broken by how many of their sister clans had been slaughtered at the beginning of their ‘peace talks’. The phrase was translated much later, to which Nhìt'Syìp audibly scoffed at with a sneer.
Sky People were not built for peace. They came to Pandora for war, and the Na’vi would respond in turn.
They came for many things, but hospitality was a thought shared only by scientists who saw them as little more than animals to ogle at.
Still, some years before, the Sky People built a school. A small scientist called a ‘Price’ explained to them that they built schools to teach, but Nhìt'Syìp suggested that the Sky People ought to do much more learning about the world before they taught the Na’vi anything at all. While he had laughed at his barbed comment, the smile hadn’t reached his eyes. In this school, they taught the youngest and the eager - like Nhìt'Syìp - how to read, to speak, to live as one of them.
They were never able to fully grasp that the Na’vi way was done by choice. They were connected to Eywa, and her will in the world was almighty and unquestionable. She would not have them gut her lands for metal when she gave them all they could ever ask for. She was their deity - their breath of life - as Price wrote in his many books. It was one of the few times that he found himself agreeing with the bearded man.
Of course, the peace hadn’t lasted.
There was an accident just outside of the school grounds. A massacre would be a better word. The school was burnt to the ground, and Nhìt'Syìp had a bullet wound in the shoulder as proof of his involvement. He spat vitriol at Price’s feet for the perceived betrayal of the school, and levied him with the fact that every dead Na’vi child was an arrow he’d knock into the man’s chest.
Price, even as a Dreamwalking ‘Avatar’, steered clear of Nhìt'Syìp’s hunting grounds even years later. It was a promise between them that no matter the bastardized body he took, Nhìt'Syìp would have an arrow knocked just for him.
This? This was nothing short of an omen as Nhìt'Syìp twisted himself back into the present by hopping atop the least on-fire bit of debris.
Wherever these people went they brought death. They’d killed their world and now they wanted to set Pandora ablaze.
A shock of movement caught his eye as he drew his bow with a sharp whistle to catch everyone’s attention. His arrow was drawn back as the bowstring quivered between his four-fingered hold. He held fast till his attention landed on the spot that had him pausing.
Bloodstains on the greenery just across from him on the outermost ring of the clearing. They speckled the trampled ferns and with startling clarity, Nhìt'Syìp realized that it was a bloody trail leading away from the crash site. It looked like something big had trampled through, and dimly he beat himself at the thought of having missed something so unfathomably clumsy. That alone brought about a more icy question…
Had something survived?
Could something have survived?
Sky People were so very small compared to the Na’vi, compared to anything on this world at that. Eywa rarely took kindly to their transgressions, as though the Na’vi were the fiercest extension of her will. Their poison-tipped arrows dragged many creatures big and small into her embrace, and while no human would ever get to hold her, they died all the same. Regardless, the Na’vi were not her only protectors. If something had survived, then it would likely not last the night.
His eyes turned to an empty seat not yet bloodied by innards or a ragdoll body. The cogs of his mind were turning with haunting clarity, but he couldn’t think further about it. He didn’t have time to dwell as the panicked chirp of the youngest girl in his party, Kyuna, just barely on the cusp of her hunting rites, alerted him of danger.
“Sky People!”
Nhìt'Syìp couldn’t expand on this thought, though he suspected that anything that might have crawled from the wreckage would not last the coming night. The nantang would see to that if its own injuries did not do it in.
He clambered off the burning wreckage and strapped his feathered bow back across his chest as he hissed out a warning for the overachievers to stay the fuck back. The whirring of a chopper was fast approaching, and he knew that the Omaticaya would be blamed if they were seen.
“Stay together but move!” he shouted to them as he finally breached the cover of the jungle to urge them along. His tail whipped out to sweep across their feet in an effort to get the rest of them moving.
His party was young, and while Syuro usually accompanied him as a senior warrior for banter, he was up Ayram alusìng conducting Iknimaya, hunting rites to those who wanted to reach proper adulthood. He was proud of them, and Nhìt'Syìp was convinced that they’d all pass with excellence.
In turn, he looked forward to flying with them once they were finished.
But now was not the time for his mind to wander.
“Hurry back,” he called with a decisive chirp.
True, the ship might have had a survivor, but it would be long dead before Nhìt'Syìp’s curiosity could truly blossom, and if not? Then perhaps its own people would celebrate one less loss tonight.
He didn’t let himself care, nor did he allow himself the shameless curiosity that bubbled within his chest. Curiosity was a dangerous thing to feel, and he had been burnt before.
. . .
Ghost’s senses returned to him with the same suddenness as he’d entered the world with, violently.
He was choking. Sudden, short gasps did nothing but add to his panic as he scratched blindly at his scarred throat and was reminded so horribly of where such scars had come from. In his daze, he very nearly put himself back in the shoes he’d been in all those years ago.
A knife had torn through his throat. They’d wanted his tongue, but death was a permanence they couldn’t quite pass up when it came to the brief capture of someone like Ghost. He could recall to this day the horrific clarity he felt when the knife was dragged in and out of his throat in a slow line.
He thought that he was going to die. A part of him wanted to die.
Ghost knew that he was dying now. He couldn’t get a breath in without choking on acrid air that burnt the back of his throat with blistering boils for every fitful he unwillingly took in. When he finally managed to crack his eyes open, he felt a strangled sound of utter distress leave his throat. An unwilling display of weakness, but one he couldn’t have helped even if he’d tried.
The plane had crashed, and the blood of dozens of men now smeared itself across Ghost’s face from where a body hanging limp above him dripped a river of ichor down his cheeks. He wanted to scream. A part of him feared that he still might when a dead hand landed itself on his shoulder before slipping off and hitting the ground with a wet squelch.
Okay.
He could calm down.
He couldn’t breathe, but he could assess his surroundings, first and foremost: where was he?
Pandora.
He was on Pandora.
The air on Pandora was toxic to humans. He’d read that in a pamphlet hadn’t he? That’s why they provided masks for when they touched down - to keep the air breathable in a portable fashion.
With this in mind, Ghost resolved to hold his breath like his life depended on it, because it did. He’d suffered worse before, and he’d not let this planet be the death of him that quickly.
There was a piece of rebar that had broken the buckle against his chest so thoroughly that he couldn’t wiggle the lock loose - though he did try. The rebar itself had struck him through the side, but whatever connective tissue he had was torn just enough that when Ghost raised his knife against the belt across his chest, he fell without further resistance. Granted, there was nothing to break his fall as he landed with a sick crunch amongst a broken halo of shattered glass. He had to slap a hand across his mouth to keep from screaming.
Mask.
He needed a mask.
Pain could wait, but oxygen couldn’t.
Desperately, Ghost pried himself off of the floor. He had to pull his sleeves up and over the palms of his brutalized hands to reach through the minefield that the debris-ridden terrain had become. He was still in the remnants of half of the plane, and from the corner of his eye, he caught the back end still hanging halfway off the ground. He swore he heard a man choking inside, but he couldn’t do anything. Maybe they had been stuck in their seat as he’d been, but without a stolen knife to get themselves free, they’d just die. He couldn’t let himself dwell on the thought as Ghost finally managed to crawl his way toward the tangled mess of dangling rebreathers - the only damn thing that allowed Pandora to remain semi-hospitable to humans. The basic functionality of it had been explained to him briefly before they departed, though much to his frustration, several had been broken during the crash. When he finally managed to slot the damn thing across his face and suck in greedy lungfuls of air, he felt the very atmosphere shift into something downright grisly.
Ghost had dealt with many predators in his lifetime. Those with human hands and with sharp claws crept towards him in the dead of night, but he’d learned to listen well enough that he was able to catch them just before they leapt. He knew they were there because the world fell silent. Pandora was no different in its response to an apex predator creeping just overhead as Ghost felt the ruined plane shudder with the weight of something landing atop it.
His breath caught in his throat as he felt the metal above him groan beneath the strain. He hadn’t heard it approach over the whirring fans of the plane’s dying engine.
The entire forest was silent save for the beating of the plane's steadily slowing propeller even still. The beast above him didn’t even seem to breathe - at least not that Ghost could hear from how far above him it was.
He couldn’t stay here.
Ghost was a sitting duck for whatever scavengers would come at the beckon of fresh blood.
Closest to him would be a series of ferns with leaves the size of his whole chest. He knew that if he could just make it beyond the forest’s barrier, he’d likely find shelter within tree roots and foliage. Truth be told, Ghost had never seen so many trees in one place. It was a delayed sense of reverence that filled him at the thought of the sheer vastness of this world’s flora. There were no forests on earth - barely any plants left at that. But Pandora? Pandora was a never-ending expanse of sprawling greenery that exploded with colors more vibrant than any holopad could ever hope to replicate.
He feared suddenly that he’d be an open sore on the moon’s surface even if he did try to hide.
In the same line of thinking, Ghost realized that it wouldn’t be much different than on Earth. He had been a blight upon the world as a military dog, and no matter the way he turned the equation around in his hands, he’d die on Pandora a wayward mutt all the same. He might not die today, because stubbornness would be his antiseptic, but he charged through the world with spread wide to pepper death across the land with every molted feather that fell from his unholy visage.
He was unaccustomed to not being the scariest motherfucker on the planet, and he wholly planned to make this right if given the time.
Now was not that time.
Instead, Ghost forced himself onto both unsteady feet and bit down the insistent urge to weep against the pain. He knew that he was covered in blood, and most of it wasn't his, but that didn’t take away from the fact that he was brutalized through a meat grinder with the way his fingers struggled to keep hold of a knife. He was certain that he had a concussion at the rate the world was spinning, but that couldn’t matter. He awarded himself one small solace as he shakily bent down to grab all that he’d brought to Pandora, Tommy’s old backpack that had seen better days. Enough patches had been sewn across moth-bitten holes that the original rich leather was few and far between.
He timed his mad dash to the forest line with the slowing beats of the off-kilter propeller. The dying engine’s death rattle was his only cue to go as he bolted for the waiting ferns and prayed that he’d be welcomed with open arms. Whether or not those leaves were laced with poison, or if something lay just beyond his field of vision it didn’t matter. Anything was better than the beast atop the carnage that even the forest bent itself before.
Only when Ghost was blessedly shielded by shadows did he dare turn around, knife in hand, to greet the beast.
His breath caught unwillingly in his throat.
Large.
Ghost had always known that the Na’vi were big. It was perhaps the greatest point of intrigue for their species to those who knew little more than side-by-side comparisons. The Na’vi were massive in theory…but it was an entirely different topic to tackle when one was staring directly at where Ghost lay in hiding.
The Na’vi was adorned with vibrant feathers and colorful beads that caught against the sun like a wildfire. He had deep indigo skin with a dusting of purple to mimic where sunkissed skin would tan like a labor of love. While dim against the light, there lay a dense peppering of bright blue freckles all across his body that pulsed whenever he so much as flexed a muscle. It was unnerving just as much as it was a transfixion weaker men might get drunk off of. Darker stripes were imprinted across his face like waves lapping against the shoreline, and Ghost was reminded so suddenly of dated videos he’d seen of long-extinct tigers prowling through equally absent forests. His hair was braided into elaborate twists that had been entwined with dangling beads and animal bones that clicked like wind chimes when he swiveled his head towards Ghost. A long tail twisted behind him with the frighteningly curious inclination of a cat.
The Na’vi were lithe examples of corded muscles pulled taut across deep skin that never once knew the tainted touch of human greed.
Until recently.
Ghost had been briefed on the barest reality before he’d departed. The extent of human aggression, and the ferocity with which the Na’vi would defend Pandora. He was meant to receive an updated briefing when he reached the human settlement - Hells Gate - obviously, he supposed that he'd be missing that particular seminar with the way things were looking. No matter, Ghost was a fast learner.
He steadied his hand as he raised his knife.
He could make the shot. He might not kill him, but he had another knife in his boot that he’d finish the job with. There ought to be a soft spot just between his collarbone that Ghost could sink his knife into if he couldn’t drag his blade across the Na’vi’s throat in time. A dozen and one ways to butcher ran through his mind as he weighed his options carefully. He could take his bow and arrow when he was done and then he’d at least have an edge against the brutal nights of Pandora.
Just as he readied his blade, he caught sight of something else. A flash of turquoise and an even deeper shade of purple outlined against the dappled sunlight of the forest. They were smaller than the Na’vi standing atop the wreckage, but he counted at least five of them huddled together.
He couldn’t fight them all.
Ghost’s eyes narrowed with a puff of frustration as he began to carefully creep further back. If he could just disappear…
Snap!
A twig cracked beneath his boot as his breath stilled and his heart dropped. He was good at navigating through the rubble of ashen cities and scalding rebar, but Earth had no forests for him to maneuver through. He hadn’t expected the twig, nor the crunch of dead leaves as he took another step back and met the golden eyes of one of the young Na’vi from across the burning meadow.
She screamed and Ghost ran.
. . .
There!
Nhìt'Syìp’s ear flicked as his head snapped towards the rasping breath of a dying animal. His fingertips traced across the speckling of bright red blood that peppered the foliage all around the decimated clearing. It looked as though a stampede had run through here, but the dead nantang at his feet bore no evidence of a bludgeoned death — no — this was done by a sharp blade. Smaller than anything but a Na’vi child would carry, and no child that Nhìt'Syìp trained were ever this precise…or ruthless. They were clean kills, at least. Clean enough that they gave him pause as he picked through the bodies and curled his lip at the utter needlessness of it.
These creatures did not have to die.
A Palulukan would have not left such carnage, though the nantang would never have chased after such a beast in the waking hours of the day.
So what had both provoked them and been their end all in the same moment?
Nhìt'Syìp puzzled over this conundrum as his eyes caught sight of a bloodied smear painted upon a tree trunk. It nearly blended into the vibrant red ferns that stretched all the way up to his hip, but Nhìt'Syìp was a trained hunter. Few things escaped his sharp eye as he crept closer, and found more.
Blood on the ferns.
Blood on the roots.
Blood drying tackily against his fingertips as he dipped his hand just barely into a puddle.
It was thinner than Na’vi blood, and dried bright enough to be a beacon now that he knew what he was looking for.
He could call for his team. They were back at Hometree - he could be there faster than an Ikran at this rate - but curiosity was his enslaver as he toed the line of ‘too far’ and wondered when a bullet would catch his throat. The unceremonious finish line to his foolish fantasies as he jumped across the tree roots and rounded the next bend of bloodied footprints.
They were considerably smaller than his own, and with a haunting realization, Nhìt'Syìp was reminded of what he’d seen days ago at the crash site.
Bloodstains on the greenery just across from him on the outermost ring of the clearing. They speckled the trampled ferns and with startling clarity, Nhìt'Syìp realized that it was a bloody trail leading away from the crash site. It looked like something big had trampled through, and dimly he beat himself at the thought of having missed something so unfathomably clumsy. That alone brought about a more icy question…
Had something survived?
Could something have survived?
Sky People were so very small compared to the Na’vi, compared to anything on this world at that. Eywa rarely took kindly to their transgressions, as though the Na’vi were the fiercest extension of her will. Their poison-tipped arrows dragged many creatures big and small into her embrace, and while no human would ever get to hold her, they died all the same. Regardless, the Na’vi were not her only protectors. If something had survived, then it would likely not last the night.
His eyes turned to an empty seat not yet bloodied by innards or a ragdoll body. The cogs of his mind were turning with haunting clarity, but he couldn’t think further about it. He didn’t have time to dwell as the panicked chirp of the youngest girl in his party, Kyuna, just barely on the cusp of her hunting rites, alerted him of danger.
“Sky People!”
Nhìt'Syìp couldn’t expand on this thought, though he suspected that anything that might have crawled from the wreckage would not last the coming night. The nantang would see to that if its own injuries did not do it in.
So, Nhìt'Syìp had run.
He was not running now as he inquisitively felt a chirping call bubble in the back of his throat. The instinctual call to the likeness of the world, versus how utterly wrong he knew whatever lay deeper in the forest to be. He had his suspicions, but a part of him still desperately hoped that it would be a wounded nantang at the end of this trail. Some clever trick a pack pulled to get the jump on him. They were crafty, and for that, were worshiped by other clans.
A deeper part of him suspected the worst, and knew this to be the truest. The most detrimental of all as he drew his bow in preparation.
For his people, he told himself this with iron-will reassurance as he peered out into the next clearing.
More blood.
It ran like a halo all around him of trampled flowers and crushed succulents that left a thick green tar trailing after the unsteady, yet small footsteps all around him. Whatever this had been was frantic in its pacing. He couldn’t trace a direct timeline of its tracks even if he’d wanted to, but briefly, he tried as he spun on his heel to track the wayward lines etched into the upturned soil.
As he ventured closer, Nhìt'Syìp was reminded of many things with the growing sense of unease he felt. It was as though the forest fell silent.
There were few things short of a palulukan that had the forest cowering back into soundless submission….
“It wasn’t a ship that I saw,” Kyuna had whispered to Nhìt'Syìp after their hunting party safely returned to Hometreee. She spoke soft as a passing breeze, as though speaking any louder would bring panic back to the People.
“What?”
“I saw one!” her voice was sharp and pitched with fear as she gripped Nhìt'Syìp’s arm enough to draw out divots of dark blood. “In the forest. He came from the fire just beneath you. He — He saw me too, I think.”
“Alive?” Nhìt'Syìp asked breathlessly. He was kicking himself now for having dismissed his suspicions in the curled ferns that had shifted just in his peripherals.
“He looked…Karyu — teacher — he looked angry. I can’t imagine what fueled him so, but I saw his knife. I know what he wanted to do with it, I just know it!”
While Nhìt'Syìp had reassured his young huntress that while Eywa took no sides, the nights of Pandora were harshly unforgiving to the soft-skinned Sky People. It was all he could do to ease her worries as she finally unhooked her claws from his arm only after he promised Kyuna that the man would be dead come morning.
Nhìt'Syìp worried that he’d eat his words in a fit as he caught a faint glow just on the pathway ahead of him.
It was a soft light that he’d very nearly mistaken for the forest’s usual ethereal luminosity, except for the fact that while it was late in the day…it wasn’t quite night yet. The forest should not be aglow at this hour.
His feet were quick now as he raced towards the light, and skidded to a sharp stop when he neared its source. His eyes were wide as saucers as he stumbled back in shock. He couldn’t even get a breath in from the way he was paralyzed stock still before the near-overwhelming wall of reverent light before him.
The tree, while young respectively, was covered in atokirina - forest spirits - an auspicious sight on their own but rarely did they congregate to the extent that he saw them now. They looked nearly like wispy flowers with dangling willow leaves that carried them along a gentle breeze. They were the purest form of spirit to all Na’vi, and on reflex Nhìt'Syìp found himself uttering a prayer to Eywa for having blessed him with such a sight.
The spirits were gathered all across the trunk of the tree, its branches high above, and the roots where they congregated most heavily.
One landed upon his hand as though to beckon him forth, and as great or terrifying an omen as this might be, Nhìt'Syìp was helpless to listen. He heeded their beckon as he bent himself low to the ground. He ought to see the world from their perspective, to know what it was they blessed so heavily.
He drew his dagger.
Surely, the spirits made a mistake, because at his feet lay the exposed back of a man with skin the color of mixed clay before it was fired. A deep mottling of freckles was plastered across its skin like stars in the night sky, but they did not wax and wane with the changing emotions that ran with the temperament of tides. Instead, its body was stagnant and bore far more meat than he’d seen any Na’vi capable of. The folds of its clothes were filthy even from a distance, and his nose wrinkled at the overwhelming smell of metallic blood that reached his nose.
It had to be dead.
He thought this second as he dared to drew his dagger closer to his chest - if it wasn’t dead then he’d finish the job.
He wrapped his free hand loosely around its ankle and began dragging it from beneath its deathbed, both literally and figuratively as he found a puddle of blood had formed like a lake in the rocky dirt beneath it. When he finally rolled it over onto its back with a dagger raised above his head, he knew what he had to do. To protect the Omaticaya. To protect the People—
An atokirina landed upon his dagger.
It kept his hand as he released the breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding.
“Move,” he begged it, as though whatever spirit lay within the flowering extension of Eywa would hear him.
Another landed upon his hand.
He let his eyes wander back down to where a cluster of atokirina had risen from the tree and drifted down to land all across the stranger beneath him. Something small enough that they could cover the entirety of its small frame. They kissed its skin as though it were one of them in a sign only Nhìt'Syìp was allowed to see. He swore that no one would believe him as his shaking hand lowered itself in submission.
Eywa stayed his blade…
“You live today,” he whispered like a promise.
When he looked closer, through new eyes, Nhìt'Syìp began to find the identifying markers of a man, though he only truly had Price as a frame of reference. He had broad shoulders that shook weakly with tremors despite the moderate temperature they’d been blessed with. His hair was a sweat-streaked mess of filthy blond curls that spread itself around the man’s head like the outstretched wings of angels depicted in human picture books - bibles - Price had called them. When he leaned across him, Nhìt'Syìp used the tip of his blade to gently nudge the man’s masked face towards him, and promptly jerked back in surprise.
Blue eyes the color of shallow saltwater looked back up at him with the mistiness of a foggy day. They were unfocused, but still shook the Na’vi where he sat with the unbridled sense of fury they held. Though he was clearly struggling against the sluggish nature of sleep as he made a pitched sound of distress at the sight. It was a rattling whine that rang like an unnatural warning call between them. Something caught between distress and fury at having been put in such a situation, but he did not move other than that. When Nhìt'Syìp next reached out, just to readjust the seam of the man’s rebreather, he watched him flinch back violently enough to disturb the remaining sprites as they rose in a cloud around them. Blessedly, they didn’t disappear entirely as they circled around the two like fussing mothers.
The man’s eyes were closed now. He’d squeezed them shut with a wince, and that alone seemed to sap out what little strength he had left as his body sagged against the ground with newfound exhaustion.
“Shit,” he breathed out as he hovered across the strange man like a daunting shadow.
His fingers itched to feel for a barely there breath against his lips, but he knew that he’d only meet the rebreather’s clear plexiglass finish instead. All humans wore them when they weren’t Dreamwalking in their ‘Avatar’ bodies, and up until now, Nhìt'Syìp had sneered at this perceived failure for their species. Even the very air of Pandora was unwelcome to the Sky People, and yet they remained like a stubborn burr stuck to his side.
Still, there were other ways to gauge just how close to death they were. Price had taught him that after one of his teaching assistants, a young man named ‘Gaz’, had his rebreather cracked during a training exercise. Sometimes, the youngest in the Old School would forget their own strength. Humans, as Price explained, had fragile bones when compared to the People. They were soft in every place that Nhìt'Syìp was not, and cracked beneath the slightest amount of pressure without a gun to cut them down. They had to don metal exosuits just to even the playing field between them.
Gaz never wore such titanic suits, he just happened to get partnered with a young girl who got too excited for her own good. She’d apologized profusely as Gaz’s body convulsed against the toxic air of Pandora. He’d scratched at his throat up until Nhìt'Syìp seized his hands and did his best to comfort the man until Price could be found.
“You have to find a pulse,” Price had told him with a sense of desperation that seemed unbecoming of the usually indomitable man.
They’d managed to slot a new rebreather onto Gaz’s face, but by then he’d stopped moving. Nhìt'Syìp’s strangled chirps of concern did little to ease any of the Sky People’s fears like it did the shaking Na’vi children.
“Show me how,” he had begged Price as the man’s smaller, albeit calloused hands guided Nhìt'Syìp’s across the expanse of human anatomy with clinical precision.
Recreating the steps was a matter of muscle memory, though it had been years since he’d last seen Gaz, and this man was considerably bigger than Gaz’s wiry frame. He had to be large for his species when Nhìt'Syìp began to run comparisons between all the other Sky People he’d seen and the staggeringly small stature they walked with. This one would be tall to others, but compared to the Na’vi - specifically Nhìt'Syìp - he would just barely reach the sharp ‘V’ of his waist. He could encircle the man’s wrist twice over with room to spare, and so he had to be impossibly gentle when he handled him. Humans were breakable, and this one was already weakened from blood loss as it stood. He just…He had to be sure that he wasn’t gone entirely.
“Eywa do not give me a man just to take him,” he swore quietly as he worked to find a proper pulse.
When he pulled back the thick fabric of the stranger’s sleeve, he found patches of freckled skin to match the mottled array that danced across his face. He couldn’t yet stop to marvel at the strangeness of it all as he pressed two fingers to the most obvious vein and waited without so much as a breath to spare.
He nearly felt his heart plummet to the deepest recesses of his stomach before the faintest flutter of life beat against his fingertips with a stubbornness only possessed by humanity. The pulse was faint as a waning echo, but no less real as Nhìt'Syìp’s tipped ears flicked forward in elation. He felt his tail twisting across the trampled earth with the renewed sense of vigor that filled his chest. Eywa had given him a sign, and she had not stripped him of it so quickly as he sat back to consider his options carefully.
If he left the man out here then he would die. Whether from the feverish tint to his sweaty skin or the sizable amount of blood that the rest of the forest surely took notice of - he would die without intervention. The hellish human settlement was too far to walk to on his own, and even on his Ikran he knew he wouldn’t make it very far before they gunned him down. So, returning him was out of the question. At least for now. A selfish part of Nhìt'Syìp simply didn’t want to return the man to the rest of his tainted people - as though their very touch would spoil whatever was left of their home planet on this man. He had not yet partaken in the spoils of an unjust war, and that alone would give him Nhìt'Syìp’s mercy as he began studying the strange creature’s scarred face.
A snap in the treeline had his head jerking towards the sound with a crack. On instinct, his lips pulled back to reveal sharp canines, and his ears were pressed close to his head from how he hissed his warning into the underbrush.
He learned a valuable lesson at that moment as he caught movement from his peripherals, just beside where he’d finally released the man’s captured wrist.
Even weakened, this human was a force of nature.
Nhìt'Syìp had barely enough time to draw his arm up before the edge of a serrated blade was glancing off of his forearm. Blood splattered upon his cheek as he recoiled just as fiercely to grab the man by his hair and slammed him back to the ground with a frustrated snarl.
The man grunted in pain beneath him as Nhìt'Syìp wrestled the knife from the bone-white grip he had on it. Jagged nails bit into Nhìt'Syìp’s palms as he pried each finger off the blade’s handle with a sense of unyielding strength that offered no room for debate - even if the little thing beneath him bit back against inevitability like he alone could change the stars.
A boot to the face had Nhìt'Syìp audibly swearing loud enough to stir a flock of stingbats from their roost high above. A burst of blood ran freely down his face as he spat it free from his lips with a gag. Distantly, the sound of rustling leaves told him that the scarred man was trying to flee, and failing at that as Nhìt'Syìp looked up to find that he was still lying on his back weakly kicking out to get a leg beneath him.
“This is fucking ridiculous,” he swore to himself as he wiped his nose and bore his fangs right back at the spitting man with the same venom that had been laid at his feet.
Finally, Nhìt'Syìp managed to plant his knee against the man’s back - right in the space where his shoulder blades flexed beneath his shirt - and pressed down hard enough so that there was no further use in struggling. Throughout this all, bitten back nails dug bruising crescents into his arm from where the little one beneath him refused to let go. Whether or not he knew that he could was up in the air as every time Nhìt'Syìp so much as flexed, the man squeezed tighter. Nhìt'Syìp didn’t genuinely think that he’d be able to break skin, but the blatant effort was admirable if nothing else.
They sat together in a silent standoff, though the outcome was still an inevitability, the man fought in small ways. Tiny bouts of rebellion that had Nhìt'Syìp’s tail swishing behind him in equal turns frustration and admiration. Finally, after the human beneath him finally did manage to draw blood through sheer stubbornness, Nhìt'Syìp put more weight against him and bent himself low enough that his braided hair fell across the blond’s back.
“I’m not trying to hurt you, little thing. Be still!” he hissed. The barest brush of fangs could be felt on the hollow shell of the man’s exposed ear, and that alone sent a static shock through the human’s body.
Much to Nhìt'Syìp’s initial relief, there was no further fight left to be had as even the dagger-like nails drawing thin rivulets of blood down his arm receded. When Nhìt'Syìp carefully, and with great care watched where the man kept his wicked little claws, Nhìt'Syìp rolled him onto his back and stepped back just as quickly.
Oh.
His eyes were open again.
Most Na’vi had eyes like molten lava or cracked amber caught against dappled sunlight. Their irises were a spot of color against the otherwise mottled blue hue of their skin. The vibrancy of a wildfire would have sonnets written just so poets could capture the exact way a pupil dilated from love to hate in the span of seconds, for emotions flowed freely across all Na’vi. They felt the world with unbridled sincerity that few humans could ever hope to meet, but they were almost always this spot of gold against the forested landscape.
Humans had such variety in all that they were, from skin to hair, but most striking of all to Nhìt'Syìp specifically were their eyes.
And this one? His eyes were currently shot with the kind of fear that narrowed his pupils down to pinpricks amongst the glacial hues of his otherwise icy stare. He could taste it in the very air as he sucked a sharp breath in and registered the situation around him from the perspective of a Sky Person.
The Na’vi were so much bigger than humans, and this one hadn’t yet even been reunited with his kin. They had been cleaned up from the crash site, but Nhìt'Syìp knew for a fact that there had been no other survivors save for this stubborn tick of a man. He’d likely been out on his own this whole week, injured and alone.
Sky People…they were pack hunters. Price had said it in an offhand comment, equating his own people to the nantang, or as Price called them, viperwolves. Nhìt'Syìp didn’t know if it was meant genuinely, but he took it as such. That made it easier to comprehend what the man was going through as he began to catch onto every detail he’d initially mistaken as fury.
It was fear.
The man was fucking terrified of Nhìt'Syìp.
Almost immediately, Nhìt'Syìp shrank himself down to be as small as possible, but even then he still towered over any human with enough room to spare that he’d break bones if he weren’t excessively careful. His tail draped itself across his four-toed feet with the delicacy of something far gentler than Nhìt'Syìp could ever hope to emulate. He lifted both hands up and spread his fingers out to reveal the emptiness in his palms.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he began, even if the blond couldn’t understand him. He hoped that the cooing cadence of his voice carried enough weight to be a promise of peace.
Whether or not it worked, Nhìt'Syìp would never know because promptly after he watched the man’s eyes roll back as he sagged uselessly against the ground.
Fuck, that couldn’t be good.
