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Tuktirey’s biggest brother is dead. He got shot, and all of the blood in his body spilled out of him like a bag with a hole in it, and it turns out that when people lose all of their blood, they die.
Dying means that their soul goes to Eywa. Dying means that her brother will never wake up again, will never hoist her into his arms or play with her ever again. Dying means that the body that once cradled her, protected her, is nothing more than a shell, a discarded husk. His eyes were so empty, staring forth and at her without any love. That was how she knew that he was gone, and it disgusted her, but she couldn’t bring herself to move away from the thing that once housed her brother’s soul, terrified that if she moved a muscle, somebody else would drop dead next.
One day - nearly a year after Neteyam’s death, she thinks, but time has worked strangely ever since he died - Daddy is fiddling with his gun in the marui. She’s watched him do this a thousand times, just as she’s watched Mommy oil her bow, but this is the first time she’s seen him do it since her brother died.
A gun was what killed Neteyam. The contraption shot a bullet out and embedded it into her protector’s chest, ripping apart his skin and gushing blood all over the place until there was no more blood left to give, until her brother was a husk.
Daddy glances up as she approaches, offers her a small, fragile smile in greeting. A lifetime ago, before the body that held her close at night lay a hollow, bloodless shell on the ocean floor, she would’ve smiled back, but now the only action she can find in herself is to point at the weapon and say, matter-of-factly, “That killed Neteyam.”
Daddy’s breath catches, leaving his chest still, but his eyes are still looking at her with love, so he’s not dead. Not yet, anyways.
She tilts her head to the side, sizing up the gun with her arm still outstretched. It’s big, but the wound it gave her brother was tiny, because guns shoot bullets like bows shoot arrows - but she can’t see any bullets anywhere on it like she can see the arrows her mother notches on her bow, because they’re inside.
Arrows fire because a powerful archer pulls it back on the string and fires it at a target. Bullets fire…
She looks back up at her father, lowering her hand, “How?”
His throat bobs as he swallows, breaths trembling. “H-How?” He echoes hoarsely.
She nods. “How do you fire the bullets? Do you pull on a string like a bow?”
“Um” He blinks the tears from his eyes, forcing a deep inhale, and turns back to the gun, though his hands remain still around it, “We-I press the-the trigger, and the… the bullets fire out from the muzzle.”
“And then the bullets hit people and kill them?”
“… Yeah” He replies, voice cracking, staring pointedly away from her.
“But only RDA people?”
He nods.
She thinks of her brother bleeding out on the rock, and she thinks of the humans slumped over in their AMP suits.
She thinks of Lo’ak fidgeting with the arrow lodged in the skeleton of the human Quaritch. She thinks of Spider watching on, looking haunted. She thinks of her brother bleeding out onto the rock. She thinks of her mother’s arrows piercing the chests of her captors. She thinks of a sea full of bloodless corpses and crackling flame.
She thinks of her mother telling the tale of how she met Daddy, about how he was an RDA soldier and she saved him, taught him the ways of the People.
A dead person cannot change. A dead person is nothing but dead. How many fathers has her father killed, how many big brothers? And so far from home - do the humans too lay bleeding out on the rock punctured with arrows and bullets and think, I want to go home? Do they too cry out for their fathers? Are they too buried in alien soil?
Her father rises, hastily pulling away all of his equipment. “I’m going to go see if your mother needs any help with the hunt” He explains, voice tight, “How about you go play with the village kids, hm?”
She says nothing in reply, but he seems to take that as a yes, tucking his weaponry away where she cannot reach and all but running away. Tuk watches him go, still and silent, thinking of bloodshed.
He doesn’t know that she doesn’t like playing with the village kids. Not because she doesn’t like them as people, but because she has a preferred activity: Helping or watching Ronal as she fulfills her duties as tsahìk.
Ronal smiles at her as she enters the healing marui from where she’s hunched over herbs, “Ah, my little tsakarem, how are you today?”
She shrugs. “What’re you doing?”
“I’m preparing some salve for Say’na, a human shot in her the leg a bit ago and this will help keep away any infection.”
“Is she going to die?”
“No, no, not if I can help it.”
“How did she survive?”
“The leg is not a bad place to be shot.”
“Not like the chest?”
“No, not like the chest.”
“Why?”
“We store very important organs in the chest, like our heart, but our legs are just muscle and fat. It is rarely a deadly wound.”
“Why didn’t the human aim for the chest, then?”
“They probably did and missed” Ronal, satisfied with her salve, rises and walks out of the den. Tuk follows her in silence as they travel down the village’s woven roads, and watches without words as Ronal applies the salve to the wound in Say’na’s leg.
It’s a red hole, like Neteyam’s was, but hers isn’t bleeding at all, though she still hisses from the pain as the salve is applied. Ronal shushes her kindly in a way Tuk wouldn’t have thought her to be capable of before Neteyam’s death softened her sharp edges.
“Did you kill the human?” She asks Say’na suddenly.
“Yeah, I did.”
“Did it hurt?”
“No, my brother shot him cleanly afterwards. An arrow straight through the chest is a quick death.”
“A bullet straight through the chest isn’t, though.”
“No, it is not.”
“Why?”
Say’na shrugs, “Probably because it is a Sky People contraption. Everything they create is evil, lacking respect and mercy.”
“My brother was shot in the chest by a bullet. It was slow and painful.”
“I know. I am sorry, child. Your brother did not deserve to die.”
She nods, a simple acknowledgement of the truth. The sky is blue and the ocean is deep and her brother did not deserve to die, but he did.
Still, though, she doesn’t understand. How could her big brother be nothing? How could she be living in a world without him?
But she is. Somehow, she’s still eating and drinking and waking in a world that her brother isn’t in.
“Ronal” She calls quietly to her as they leave, because Ronal is safe to talk about Neteyam to, not breaking down like what remains of her family.
Ronal’s ear flicks in her direction, a silent invitation.
“I don’t feel like Neteyam’s dead.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know, I just… Death means that he can only be found in the Well of the Ancestors, but I always feel like he’s nearby. I don’t feel like he’s dead, I just feel like he’s… I feel like he’s at my marui, and then when I go there and he’s not there, I’ll feel like he’s at the beach. I don’t feel like he’s gone. I just feel like I can’t see him.”
Ronal hums, nodding, before replying in a whisper, as though telling Tuk a secret, “I’m still waiting for the tulkun to return again so that I may see my spirit sister. I know that she will never return again, but still, I find myself waiting, and I can’t make myself stop.”
“Will we ever be able to stop?”
“I don’t know, child. I don’t know.”