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Her children, at least in this particular forest, like to exchange flowers as courting gifts. She's felt them skipping through her branches many times, giggling and flushing over colorful little treasures. They can tuck the petals into each other's clothes and braid them through each other's hair, sweetness drifting from their mingled bodies.
Eywa has no hands with which to pluck flowers, or at least no hands that do not already belong to another, no hands to take shape in this world. How, she finds herself wondering more than once, does a moon court a woman?
She realizes the answer as she watches Grace pick her way through the undergrowth, bathing every plant she can see in little waves of flashing light. Her curiosity curls off of her tall body, singing through the air. Grace has no fears of Eywa's mysteries, and that makes her intoxicating.
When the first flower sprouts between Grace's toes, she staggers backward with a yelped curse. Then she drops to one knee, a bit calmer while she carefully examines her find. Her hands gently caress the petals and Eywa shivers at the touch, the motion unfurling through the surrounding trees.
Grace doesn't notice, so focused on the small she doesn't see the whole. But she wants to learn, to see, no matter how many walls her Earth education has put up on her arm. There is a light in her that none of her fellow humans have, and Eywa wants to badly to nurture it, to be nurtured by it.
She grows more flowers, more offerings, tugs her oldest and strangest roots up from the deep. Grace mutters to herself, waving her devices around and tapping out notes on a crystal square. Sometimes she pokes or prod, but the soft scrape of her needles only makes Ewya's sap flow faster.
The Omatikaya teach Grace how to harvest with care, and she walks triumphantly out of the forest with a loose gathering of flowers held safely between her palms. Eywa cannot feel the disconnected flowers, but she can feel the one that Grace teaches to grow in her greenhouse, coiling tenderly out of the dirt.
"Amazing," Grace mutters to herself, again and again, red hair or black braids bobbing. It does not matter what body she wears, any more than it matters what body Eywa wears; their shared awe and curiosity is always the same.
The one flaw in her plan is Grace does not know these flowers are gifts. She thinks herself lucky; she nods and smiles at the Omatikaya’s stories of Eywa. It is a little frustrating, but also a challenge--how many petals can she tap slyly across Grace's back when there is no wind, how much stalks can coil around her ankles. How far can such disbelief be pushed?
As time passes, her offerings get bigger, more daring. She lets Grace into fragile root systems, lets her track the pulse of electricity from tree to free, forest to forest. A whole world's worth of flowers given on electric stems, if only Grace can learn to See it.
She does, in the end, she Sees so much. She Sees Ewya not because she is born to do so, but because she chooses to do so, and that makes her miraculous. It also makes her a target, makes her bleed red across the ground.
After Grace slips into the world beyond, Eywa comes looking for her. Grace is wearing her blue Na'vi body, and looks surprised at the sight of Eywa approaching her in a pale, red-haired human one. She looks even more surprised at the flowers in Eywa's hands, shimmering in the forever twilight.
"Are those..." she drops to one knee to get a better look, frowning. Then her eyes flick to Eywa's bright with sudden recognition. "From you?"
"All of them," Eywa whispers. "Do you like them?" It feels like an obvious answer, but she suddenly has to be sure. They have only just connected for the first time, Grace's mind is so beautifully strange to her, perhaps it always will be.
"Yes." Grace takes the flowers slowly, holds them to her nose. She breathes deep enough that they flicker out her existence, shifting under her skin to swirl and dance like stars. "They're beautiful," she breathes, and Eywa smiles.
Five years from now, their daughter plucks flowers from the earth and weaves herself messy crowns. Fifteen years from now, she raises her hands and the whole forest blossoms, baring colorful teeth in welcome.