Rie @crownmoon77 - Tumblr Blog

"Why would this character be jealous of their friend's romantic relationships? Clearly they're in love with them" I don't know if you guys have ever Had Friends but it's actually pretty common for people to feel jealous if their best friend suddenly has less time for them and is prioritising someone they just met over them. That's not inherently romantic, that's the general human desire to be valued by the people you value.

immortalbeingz

fatfemmefreaquency

aransmind

some toji art

readwritealldayallnight

Simon Riley with his weird ass acts of love and bizarre concept of boundaries

You’ll be waking up confused in the middle of the night, feeling a strange pulling at your feet, only to glance down and see your boyfriend has thrown the covers off and is attempting to clip your toenails for you

“What in the actual f-”

“I’m tired o’ your talons diggin’ into my legs every nigh’. This is for both o’ us, love.” He’ll grumble in that tone of his that leaves no room for argument, only the sound of nail clippers echoing in the room as your roll your eyes before shutting them again

Every so often when you’re on your period, you’ll be stepping out of the shower, bewildered to find that the night time pad and underwear you’d set aside with your pyjamas on the bathroom counter top, have been put together for you?

“Simon- you saved me all of two steps at most? Opening the wrapper and sticking it on?”

“And you’re welcome.” He’ll mutter casually with a quick kiss to your forehead before he’s off to brush his teeth

“I’m so confused. I might be losing it, Si.” You’ll mention one time, coming home after work with bags of greasy takeout food in hand, his brow only raising in question. “This is maybe the third time now I’ve noticed that the petrol was nearing a quarter tank, so I’d plan to fill up the next day. But next time I get in the car- the tank is fucking full! The first time I thought I had dreamt it, second time I thought I was hallucinating a little bit, but now-”

“Love, I’ve been filling up your car.”

“…what?”

“That’s me. Every time I’ve heard you say you need petrol- I’ve filled up the car.” Simon shrugs as though he’s simply telling you what the weather is for today, not that he’s been sneaking out in the middle of the night with your car keys to run a quick errand for you as you sleep

“I don’t know if I want to ask how or why first.”

“Well petrol’s fuckin’ expensive now, that’s why. You don’t need to be payin’ tha’.”

“You could have just … asked me?”

“… righ’. Noted.” He’ll nod in quick agreement before moving on to take the bags from you, no intention whatsoever of changing his habits

nginnk12

champzapp

Team guy dynamic, Guy doesn't interfere in their inevitable quarrels he just lets it happen.

omegaworld

Twin - [Neteyam Sully x Omatikaya! reader] - Chapter 4

Masterlist

Series Masterlist/Summary

Word Count: 1k

almostholyfest

The Winner Takes It All

—and the loser has to fall

Context: Arranged to be married since a young age, the reader tries to be perfect in order to fit the status of "The Golden Boy's Wife." She changes her whole personality and does everything for Neteyam, yet she still cannot win his heart. Will their love bloom, or will Neteyam give his heart to another?

Author's Note: Have you ever watched Mamma Mia? There is a moment when— Meryl Streep sings: "The winner takes it all, the loser has to fall." That very verse made me think. About what it means to be groomed for perfection before you even understand what perfection costs. What happens when you pour your entire childhood — every lesson, every sacrifice, every quiet tear under Eywa's canopy — into becoming worthy of someone who never asked you to? Will a love like that ever bloom? Or will it simply... wither in the dark, bioluminescent and unseen?

Warning: emotional pain, heartbreak, rejection, harsh words, arranged marriage, and childhood sacrifices.

Life would always play the silliest, most vicious little tricks on you. Even the ones you never deserved. Even the ones that dressed themselves up in fate and called it Eywa's will. Mine arrived the moment I was born — wrapped in the scent of night-blooming flowers and the glow of a Kelutral branch that had not lit up like that in living memory.

His name was Neteyam. Son of Toruk Makto. Son of the Olo'eyktan. First-born of the clan's most sacred lineage. And, according to two mothers standing beneath the Tree of Voices while the whole of Pandora seemed to hold its breath — my intended.

Our mothers had spoken of it long before either of us could walk. When we were both newborns, it is said that the Hometree's luminescent roots flared gold and teal in a pattern that no elder could explain. Mo'at herself had pressed a wrinkled hand to the bark and whispered something none of them were permitted to repeat. My mother took it as a sign. His mother — the fierce, war-painted Neytiri — had tilted her head, studied my sleeping face in the woven cradle, and said nothing. Which, my mother always insisted, was its own kind of agreement.

Neteyam, when he was old enough to understand, apparently did not share his mother's silence. He listened — because he was disciplined and the clan's golden son obeyed — but he listened the way rain listens to a drought. Politely. Without wanting to.

I did not know any of this the first time I truly met him, face to face, when we were both seven years old and the forest around the Omaticaya village smelled like rain and warm earth. I only knew that he was tall for his age. That his queue was already neatly braided the way older warriors wore theirs. That he frowned — not cruelly, but with the furrowed brow of someone deeply inconvenienced by the universe — and that his eyes, when they finally landed on me, were enormous and amber-gold and entirely unimpressed. My face went the color of a Pandoran sunrise. Warm and uncontrolled.

I know what you are thinking. How could you fall for a boy who did not do a single remarkable thing? Who stood there frowning at the dirt like it had personally offended him? Well. I have always had a soft heart for beautiful, unattainable things, and ofc my heart is extra weak when your that cute. My mother says I inherited it directly from her. She married my father because he looked unbearably handsome standing at the edge of a thanator hunt and did not flinch. It seems, i fell for a boy because he frowned and the world still bent around him like he was the center of gravity. Eywa forgive me. I have my work cut out for me.

Years passed the way years do when you are trying to become something you were not entirely born as. I trained. God, did I train.

While other Na'vi children were still learning to braid their queues and chase each other through the bioluminescent undergrowth at dusk — still falling out of trees and laughing about it, still pressing their small palms to the Tree of Voices just to feel the warmth without needing to understand it — I was already seated, spine straight, in a circle of the clan's eldest women before the morning mist had finished lifting from the forest floor.

I was eight years old the first time I was corrected for sitting incorrectly. Eight. I had crossed my legs in the way that felt natural, that every child sits when they are tired and the ground is soft and there is no particular reason to perform. Elder Ralu had looked at me without breaking her own posture and said, quietly and without cruelty, that the intended of the first son does not sit like she is waiting for nothing. She does not slouch. She does not fidget. She does not exist casually. I spent the next three hours learning how to fold my legs in a way that communicated presence, not comfort. By the time I was allowed to stand, both of my feet had gone numb and I had not yet said a single word.

That was the first lesson. There were hundreds more. I learned to weave ceremonial garlands — not quickly, but correctly, which meant a single crooked petal could undo a morning's work and earn nothing more than a calm instruction to begin again. I learned to walk with a clay vessel of water balanced on my head, first on flat ground, then on the uneven roots that snaked across the village paths, then on the narrow walkways that connected the Hometree's higher platforms, where the drop below was not something you wanted to think about. I spilled. I spilled many times. I was told to fill the vessel again and try once more, and I did, because I had no other choice available to me.

I learned the herbs. Which roots reduced fever. Which leaves, when pressed into a paste, drew infection from a wound. Which seeds should never be combined. Which bark the Tsahik preferred for the morning rituals and which was reserved for ceremony only, and the difference between those two things was not written anywhere — it was simply known, and therefore I had to know it too. I memorized it all. I recited it in my sleep. There were nights my mother would find me murmuring plant names into my pillow and she would smooth my hair back and say nothing, which was the kindest and saddest thing she ever did for me.

I learned how to speak in the presence of elders — not too softly, which reads as hiding, and not too clearly, which reads as performing. The correct pitch was somewhere between the two, as though you had an opinion you were confident in but were gracious enough not to impose. It took months before I found that register naturally. Before that, I practiced in front of still water, watching my own reflection make adjustments that I could not feel from the inside.

I learned the songs. All of them. The harvest songs that require four-part harmony and a specific tonal drop on the third verse that has no written notation — it must be felt. The mourning songs that the women carry when a warrior does not return from the hunt, low and circular, designed to pull grief out of the chest before it calcifies. The songs for iknimaya, for first bonds, for the naming of newborns, for the planting of the season's first seeds. I learned every one. My voice was not exceptional — it was adequate — and adequate, I was told, is its own kind of acceptable as long as everything else compensates.

I learned to embroider. The patterns that encode a Na'vi woman's lineage in thread — her grandmother's clan, her mother's role, the sacred name given to her at birth and the one she will carry after her bonding. I learned to do it without pricking my fingers, which is far harder than it sounds, and then I learned to do it in low light, and then I learned to do it while holding a conversation, which is the real skill, the one that no one names out loud but everyone expects.

I gave up the Tree of Voices. Not all at once — that would have been a grief I could have named and mourned properly. It happened gradually, in the way that important things are often lost: an afternoon replaced by a fitting, a morning stolen by a ceremony rehearsal, a whole season gone before I noticed that I could no longer remember the last time I had pressed my queue to the roots and simply listened. The other children went. I heard them talking about what they heard there — ancestor voices, old songs, something that felt like being held by the whole history of the clan. I smiled when they described it. I did not tell them that I had stopped going. It seemed like something worth being ashamed of, though I was not entirely sure why.

I gave up the floating rocks. The reckless, breathless joy of climbing them on a dare, of hanging off a ledge while the valley spooled green and impossible below you, of screaming just because the sky was that enormous and you were alive inside it. I was told once, gently but clearly, that the intended of the first son does not take unnecessary risks with her body. Her body belongs, in a sense, to the lineage she will carry. I understood this. I did not argue. I watched the other children from the platform's edge instead and practiced keeping my expression pleasant and still.

I gave up being seven in the way that seven is supposed to feel. I gave up ten, and twelve, and fourteen. Each age arrived and passed over me like a season that I had not quite been present for — I was always one step inside the next lesson, one correction behind the current expectation, one performance away from being ready.

There was one afternoon — I was twelve, I think, perhaps thirteen — that I keep returning to when I am trying to remember the exact moment I understood what this life was costing me.

I had been asked to serve at a small gathering in the Sully family's living space within the Hometree. Nothing ceremonial — simply a meal, a meeting of the clan mothers, the kind of quiet domestic occasion where an intended learns to move invisibly and usefully through a room. I had prepared for it. I had worn the right beadwork. I had practiced the correct way to present a vessel of food — two hands, a small inclination of the head, eye contact held for exactly the right duration before a modest glance downward.

And then I dropped it. Not dramatically. Not with a crash that shattered the gathering and drew every eye at once. It simply — slipped. The clay bowl turned in my fingers and hit the woven mat with a dull, definitive sound, and the contents scattered, and the smell of the food was suddenly too present in the quiet of the room, and every woman looked up.

I froze. I recovered quickly — bent, gathered, apologized in the right register, kept my voice level. But the heat in my face was uncontrollable, and the silence in the room had a particular texture, the kind that has an opinion in it.

It was Neytiri who spoke first.

Leave it. Stand up.

I stood. The bowl was still on the mat. My hands felt enormous.

You have been training for how long now? Four years?

Six, Ma Neytiri.

Six years. And you cannot carry a bowl across a room without losing it.

I — yes. I apologize. It will not—

Do not apologize to me. An apology is not a correction. Look at me.

I looked at her. Neytiri, who had ridden a Toruk. Who had fought the sky people in the dark of a burning Hometree. Who looked at me now with the flat, measuring gaze of someone who had very little patience for the performance of effort when effort itself was missing.

You are pretty. Everyone says so. The elders talk about your face, your posture, the way you hold yourself in ceremony. Very lovely. Very composed.

She paused. The other mothers had gone very still around us.

What is the point of being pretty when you fail your role?

The room did not react. The clan mothers looked at their hands, at the walls, at the space above my left shoulder. Nobody disagreed with her. Nobody said anything at all. I do not remember what I said in response. I think I said something measured and appropriate, because I had been trained to say measured and appropriate things, and by that point the training had gone deep enough that it activated even when the rest of me had gone completely blank. I cleaned the mat. I refilled the bowl from the cooking pot. I finished serving the meal without another mistake.

I did not cry until I was outside, around the curve of the Hometree's roots where the dark was thick enough to be private, and I pressed my back to the bark and breathed through it the way you breathe through something you cannot fix, long and deliberate, until it was small enough to carry again. I was twelve years old. And I understood, for the first time with my whole body rather than just my mind, that beauty was not the goal. Beauty was only the entrance fee. The goal was perfection, and perfection had no ceiling, and every time you believed you had reached it, the floor simply rose to meet you and the distance above remained exactly the same.

"What is the point of being pretty when you fail your role?"

I trained harder after that. I trained the way you train when fear has replaced ambition — not because you want to reach something, but because you cannot afford to fall short again. I trained until the bowl never slipped. Until my hands knew the weight of every vessel in the Sully household by memory. Until I could cross a room in any light, on any surface, carrying anything, and arrive at the other side looking as though nothing about it had cost me effort.

Eventually, I became precise. I became poised. I became — and the clan said this openly, as though it were a gift rather than a verdict — "The flower that attracts all." Every elder approved of me. Every ceremony I attended, eyes would follow. The mothers of unmated warriors would watch me pass and lean together to murmur. I had become, by every measurable standard of Omaticayan womanhood, the ideal.

What they did not say — what none of them ever said — was what it had taken. The twelve-year-old girl with her back against the bark. The years of sitting in classrooms of patience and refinement while her feet went numb. The mornings she had woken up already exhausted from the weight of the person she was required to be before she had fully finished becoming a person at all. They saw the flower. They did not ask about the roots.

Then the rumors started. They moved through the village the way whispers always do in a close clan — in glances, in pauses, in the sudden hush that falls when you walk into a gathering that was loud the moment before. I caught fragments. A name I did not recognize. A girl. A girl that Neteyam had been seen with at the edge of the forest canopy, away from the village paths, away from where the elders walked. Her name was Mhari.

The worst part was not the hearing of it. The worst part was the two seconds before I understood what I was hearing — when it was still just sounds, still just a name, still just a sentence without a shape — and how quickly that blankness curdpled into something I did not have a graceful word for. Not quite pain. Not quite rage. Something older and quieter than both. The feeling of having spent years building a house in someone else's name and arriving one morning to find the door already locked from the inside.

I had given up afternoons. I had given up the Tree of Voices. I had stood in a clan mother's gathering at twelve years old and swallowed Neytiri's words whole and trained harder because of them, because I believed that the harder I trained the more real this would become, the more he would see it — see me — and understand that I had chosen him, not just obeyed the arrangement, chosen him, over and over, every single day in every small sacrifice he never witnessed.

And he had been in the forest. With her. Laughing, presumably, the way people laugh when nothing is at stake. I had been so careful. I had been so unbearably careful. And it had not mattered at all.

I did not want to believe it. I am not, I told myself, a jealous creature. I had been raised to be gracious, to be composed. The perfect intended of the clan's first son does not run after rumors like a child chasing an ikran shadow.

But I was also, underneath every careful layer of training, still the seven-year-old girl who had gone red in the face over a frowning boy. And that girl — the one who had never been permitted to be unfinished, or useless, or simply young — she could not sit quietly and breathe. She was already on her feet. So I went to find him.

I found them at the edge of a mossy overlook not far from the village — a place where the bioluminescent fungi lit the ground in soft turquoise rings, the kind of spot that lovers chose precisely because it was beautiful and secluded and nobody who mattered would think to look there. Neteyam was there, leaning against a root as though the world owed him its ease. And beside him, laughing softly at something he had said — something small and private, the kind of thing you only say when you are completely comfortable — was a girl I did not know. Mhari.

She was lovely in the uncalculated way that things which have never been trained are lovely. Easy. Natural. Unaware of being watched in the way that I had not been unaware of anything since I was eight years old.

The sight hit me somewhere behind my sternum, in a place I had not known could hurt that particular way. Not a sharp pain. Something worse — a slow, spreading recognition, the way cold water rises. I had spent six years learning to be perfect for him, and he was here in the dark with a girl who had not tried at all.

I stepped forward. My voice came out far steadier than I deserved.

Neteyam. What is this?

He turned slowly. No startled guilt. No shame. Only that familiar, exhausted look — a boy braced for exactly this moment and deeply resentful of its arrival.

We are engaged. You understand that, yes? The whole village understands that. The elders understand that. What in Eywa's name are you doing out here with her — alone — where anyone could see you? Do you know the whispers already running through the clan? Do you have any idea what this looks like to the Tsahik, to your father—

Neteyam: Let go of my arm.

I'm not — I don't even have your arm, I'm just — Neteyam, talk to me. Please. Tell me this is nothing. Tell me I misunderstood. I will believe you. I want to believe you. Just say something that makes this make sense—

Neteyam: I am so tired.

...What?

Neteyam: I said I am tired. Of this. Of the engagement. Of watching you walk into every room like it's an audition. Of the way you speak to my mother's circle with that perfect, measured voice. Of the way you exist around me like you are always one step away from being graded. It is exhausting to be near you.

That one landed differently. Not like a blade — like something dropped from a great height, flattening everything underneath it on impact.

I am — I do that because — Neteyam, I was taught to—

Neteyam: I know you were taught to. That is the problem. Everything about you is taught. Every smile, every gesture, every word you choose. I look at you and I cannot find a single thing that is actually you. Do you even know who you are underneath all of it? Or did they train that out of you too?

That is not fair—

Neteyam: It is not about fair. It is about what is real. You are not real to me. You are a role. A very well-executed role. But I cannot — I will not spend my life standing next to a performance.

You think I don't feel things? You think I have stood beside you at every ceremony, learned everything I was asked to learn, become everything I was told to become — and felt nothing? I have felt everything. I have felt it for years and I had nowhere to put it because you never once—

Neteyam: Stop. I did not ask you to do any of that.

I did it for you—

Neteyam: You did it for an idea of me. There is a difference. You decided what I needed from a wife before you ever asked me a single question about what I actually wanted. You built your whole life around a version of me that I never agreed to be.

He said it so simply. Like it was obvious. Like it had always been obvious. Like I was the last one in the clan to understand something everyone else had long since stopped discussing.

Then tell me what you want. Tell me who Neteyam is and I will — I will learn that too, I will—

Neteyam: That is exactly what I mean. You will learn it. Like another lesson. Another thing to practice in front of still water until it looks convincing enough. Do you hear yourself?

What else am I supposed to say?! I don't know any other way — they didn't teach me any other way—

Neteyam: I know. And I am sorry for that. I genuinely am. But that is not a reason for me to pretend that what is between us is something it has never been.

There could be something. If you gave it time — if you just — Neteyam, we have barely spoken, how can you know that there is nothing when we have never—

Neteyam: Because every time I have looked at you, I have felt nothing. I have tried. I want you to know that — I have tried to feel what I was supposed to feel. I waited for it. And there was nothing. There was just a girl performing being my future and a weight in my chest that got heavier every season.

The bioluminescent fungi pulsed around us in their soft, indifferent turquoise. Mhari had not moved. She stood against the mossy rock with her eyes down, as though she understood that this moment was not hers and was trying very hard to take up less space in it.

And her? You feel something for her?

A pause. The kind that answers before the words do.

Neteyam: That is not what this conversation is about.

It is exactly what this conversation is about. Answer me. Look me in the face and answer me.

Neteyam: ...Yes.

One word. One syllable. And somehow it undid more than everything else combined — because everything else had been about the engagement, about the performance, about what I was or was not. But that yes was about something I could never have trained my way into. Something that simply existed between two people who had not been assigned to each other by a glowing tree and two mothers with opinions.

I gave up my childhood. Do you know that? I gave up climbing the floating rocks. I gave up the Tree of Voices. I gave up afternoons and laughter and being useless and young because someone told me that was how I would be worthy of you. I have bruises on my knees from kneeling on training mats for hours. I have memorized every herb in your mother's household. I have perfected a smile that doesn't reach my eyes because the reaching kind was called too eager. I did all of that. For you. And you stood in this forest and felt nothing.

Neteyam: I know. And I am—

Do not say you are sorry again. Do not say it.

He closed his mouth. The forest breathed around us — warm and bioluminescent and completely unconcerned. Somewhere above the canopy the floating mountains drifted, green and impossible and indifferent to every small human grief happening beneath them.

Neteyam: Do you even love me?

I—

Neteyam: Do not. Do not say it. That word, coming from you — it doesn't sound like love. It sounds like something you decided before you were old enough to decide anything. You do not love me. You love the version of me that would complete the story you were handed as a child. The golden boy. The first son. The ending your mothers planned. That is what you love. Not Neteyam. You have never even met Neteyam.

Then let me meet him. Let me — please, just—

Neteyam: It is too late for that.

How can it be too late? We haven't even—

Neteyam: Kehe. I am done. I am ending this engagement. I am sorry — truly, I am — but I will not say it again, since you have asked me not to. Do not follow me.

He walked away. Past the turquoise rings of glowing fungi. Past the moss, past the overlook, past the place where the floating mountains were just barely visible through the canopy — green and vast and silent. Mhari lifted her eyes to mine for exactly one second. Not unkind. Just honest. Then she followed him. And I stood there.

Alone under Pandora's sky. The bioluminescence pulsed around me, gentle and entirely uncaring, the way it always did. The way it would tomorrow, and the next day, and every day after that — because the forest does not register the specific weight of a girl standing in the dark realizing that the life she built has just been handed back to her, quietly and without ceremony, like something nobody wanted to keep.

I did not move for a long time. Not because I was dignified. Not because I was composed. But because every graceful thing I had ever learned — every step, every word, every carefully managed expression — had been arranged around the axis of him, and without that axis, I genuinely did not know which direction to face. The fungi pulsed. Pandora breathed. And somewhere in the warm dark of the forest, Eywa's network carried the weight of my grief into the roots, the way it had carried every grief before mine, without judgment and without answer.

My childhood was gone. I had handed it over willingly, in small pieces, every single day, like offerings pressed into soil — and the soil had taken everything and grown nothing in return.

I had not learned to play with the other young Na'vi the way they played — reckless and loud and beautifully present — because I had been too busy being prepared. I had not climbed the floating rocks for joy because I was told it was unbecoming of the first son's intended. I had not sat with my queue unbraided and my feet in the river, listening to nothing in particular, simply existing in the uncomplicated way that children are supposed to exist before someone assigns them a purpose. There was always another lesson. Another refinement. Another layer of polish to apply to a surface that nobody was ever going to look at the way I needed them to.

I had sat at the roots of the Tree of Voices not to listen to my ancestors — not to feel that warm, enormous hum of belonging that the other children described — but to rehearse. To practice what a perfect daughter-in-law would say in every imaginable social situation. I had approached Eywa not as a child running home, but as a student in a lesson she could never afford to fail. I had turned even the sacred into curriculum.

And now he stood in a bioluminescent clearing with a girl who laughed without measuring the sound, and he looked at her with something open and unguarded in his face — something I had spent years trying to earn and had never once been given — and I understood with the kind of clarity that only arrives when it is already too late that no amount of training, no degree of perfection, no sacrifice made quietly in the dark had ever been going to change what he did not feel.

You cannot train someone into loving you. I wish someone had told me that when I was eight years old, sitting with numb feet, learning how to fold my legs correctly. I wish someone had told me that at all.

The crying, when it came, was not elegant. There was nothing practiced about it, nothing composed, nothing that resembled the measured, appropriate display of emotion I had been taught to produce when grief was socially expected. It was the other kind. The kind that bends you. That starts somewhere deep in the chest and moves upward without asking permission, that takes your breath and your posture and every careful thing you have constructed and dismantles them simultaneously. I knelt on the moss and I pressed both palms flat against the forest floor — against the soft glow of Pandora pulsing beneath my skin — and I cried so hard my shoulders shook.

I cried for the afternoons. For the floating rocks. For the Tree of Voices and every ancestor I had never properly listened to because I was too busy rehearsing how to speak to the living. I cried for the twelve-year-old girl who had stood in a clan mother's gathering with a dropped bowl and absorbed Neytiri's words and turned them into fuel, who had believed — genuinely, completely, with her whole small heart believed — that if she tried hard enough, the trying itself would become a language he could hear.

I cried for the seven-year-old who had gone red in the face over a frowning boy and decided, in that ridiculous, tender, irreversible moment, that he was worth becoming someone new for.

He was not worth it. Or — no. That is not right either, and I have never been able to lie convincingly, not even to myself. He was worth it. He was. That was the cruelest part. He was worth every bit of it. He simply did not want it.

Was all of it not proof? Were years of silent devotion not love made visible? Or was I simply a shadow — not even a shadow of him,

but a shadow of someone who had never existed at all?

Somewhere far above me, through the canopy, the stars of a sky that was not Earth's burned in colors that had no names in any human language. I thought about what Mo'at had always said — that Eywa does not give signs without reason. That the bond of tsaheylu cannot be faked. That what is real will endure.

I had built something real. I had built it for years, brick by brick, lesson by lesson, sacrifice by sacrifice. I had believed in it with the whole weight of my childhood, with the entirety of everything I had been willing to give, and I had given so much. I had given until there was very little of me left that had not been shaped by the giving.

And it had endured for no one. It had stood perfect and untouched and entirely unwanted, like an altar built in a temple that nobody visited. The Eywa network hummed through the roots under my palms — ancient and enormous and full of every grief any Na'vi heart had ever pressed into the soil. I wondered if it felt mine. I wondered if it carried the weight of it the way it was supposed to. I wondered if, somewhere in the vast living archive of the forest, there was a record of a girl who tried too hard for too long and was not thanked for it.

And then something shifted, quietly, in the deepest part of my chest. Not healing — nothing so clean as that. Something more like a door closing. A decision made in the marrow before the mind has finished catching up.

What is the point of loving someone who does not even see your worth?

The trees bioluminesced above me. The fungi pulsed below. And for the first time in my life — the very first time, without an audience, without a lesson, without a purpose — I stopped performing. I simply cried, screamed wondering why such love even exist? why i can't have that one thing that i wanted, why loving someone must hurt so much. Until there was nothing left to cry with. Until I was emptied out completely, light and hollow and strangely, terribly clear. And then, when the crying was done, I made the only decision that had ever been entirely my own.

I went back to the village. I walked the path I had walked a thousand times, the one I knew so well I could have navigated it in darkness — and I did, because by then the forest's glow was the only light there was. I walked it perfectly, out of habit, because even now my body defaulted to what it had been taught.

I went to my sleeping space. I did not take much. The beadwork my mother had made for me when I was small — not the ceremonial pieces, not the ones they had given me for the engagement, just the childhood ones, the ones threaded before anyone had decided what I was going to be. A small carving. A length of woven cloth. Things that belonged to me, not to the role. I did not leave a note. There was nothing I knew how to say that was not going to sound like an accusation or an apology, and I was done performing both.

I walked out of the village before the first light touched the canopy. I did not look back. I had been told, once, that looking back is the body's way of asking permission to return, and I could not afford to ask that. Not now. Not when the asking would undo everything.

Pandora received me the way it always had — without opinion, without ceremony, bioluminescent and enormous and entirely indifferent to the smallness of one girl walking away from the life she had been assigned. The roots glowed beneath my feet. The canopy whispered above. Somewhere behind me, the Hometree stood as it always had, vast and ancient and unchanged. I did not say goodbye to it. I had given it enough.

He found out the way bad news always arrives — sideways, from someone who assumed he already knew. One of the younger clan women mentioned it in passing, the way you mention weather, the way you mention something unremarkable — a pity about the girl, leaving so suddenly, do you know where she has gone? — and Neteyam had stopped walking in the middle of the village path and said, very carefully, what.

She was gone. Her sleeping space was cleared. Her ceremonial beadwork was still there — all of the engagement pieces, every careful, beautiful thing she had been given to mark her as his — but the small childhood ones were missing. Whoever she had been before the training had taken what it could carry and walked out before dawn.

He stood in the empty space for longer than he intended to. It smelled faintly of the herbs she had always kept nearby — the ones from his mother's household that she had memorized so completely she had begun keeping her own supply. He had not known that. He had not known a great many things, he was beginning to understand, because he had not looked.

He found his mother in the place she went when she was thinking — high in the Hometree, on the platform where you could see the floating mountains through a gap in the canopy. Neytiri was sitting with her back to him when he arrived, and she did not turn around.

Neteyam; She is gone.

A long silence. The floating mountains drifted in the middle distance, unhurried.

Yes.

Neteyam: Did you know she was going to—

No. But I am not surprised.

Neteyam: — I told her the truth. I told her what was real. I cannot be blamed for—

Turn around and go back to your sleeping space, Neteyam. I do not want to say something I will regret.

Neteyam: Then don't. Just — talk to me. Tell me where she might have gone. I only want to make sure she is—

Safe?

She turned around then. And Neteyam, who had faced his father's disappointment and his teachers' corrections and the judgment of a hundred elders without flinching — Neteyam took a half step back from the look on his mother's face.

You are concerned about her safety now. Now that she is gone. Now that she made a decision you did not anticipate and it has unsettled you. Now you are thinking about her.

Neteyam: That is not fair—

Do not talk to me about fair. Do you know what that girl did? Do you have any idea?

Neteyam: She trained. I know. She trained and she prepared and she—

She was eight years old when she sat before the elder women for the first time. Eight. I was there. I watched her sit with her legs folded wrong and get corrected and fold them again without complaint. I watched her carry water vessels on those floating platforms for three seasons before she stopped spilling. I watched her come to my household and learn every herb, every root, every preparation — not because she was required to, not because anyone was standing over her with a consequence, but because she wanted to know the things that mattered to the people around you.

Neteyam said nothing. His mother's voice had dropped — not softer, but lower. The kind of low that means a fire burning at its base rather than its tips.

She asked me once — she was perhaps ten, eleven — she asked me what your favorite meal was. Not what was appropriate to serve at a ceremony. Not what the household required. What you liked. What made you happy when you ate it. I told her. She learned to prepare it. She never once served it to you because she was afraid it would seem like she was trying too hard. So she just — knew how. In case you ever needed it. In case it ever mattered.

The words settled over him like weight. Quiet, and accumulating.

Every single thing she did — every lesson, every sacrifice, every morning she woke up and chose to keep becoming something difficult — she did it with you in her mind. Not your title. Not your lineage. You. She used to watch you train from the upper platform when she thought no one was looking. She was not watching the golden boy. She was watching my son. She learned the difference between those two things long before you did.

Neteyam: sa'nok, I didn't — I didn't know—

No. You did not know because you did not look. Because it was easier to see the performance than to ask what was underneath it. You told her she was fake. You told her she was a role. You told her you felt nothing when you looked at her — and she stood there and listened and then she went home and she left. Because what else was she supposed to do? You took everything she had built and told her it was worthless, and then you walked away. You fool.

Neteyam: I—

Don't you know? Don't you understand what that kind of love costs? I do. I know exactly what it costs. Your father and I did not have an easy beginning either — but I saw him. I looked. I asked. You never once asked her a single question, Neteyam. Not one. In years. You decided what she was and you stopped looking. And she kept trying anyway. That is not performance. That is devotion. And you called it fake to her face.

He sat down. Slowly, without intention, the way a person sits when their legs have simply made the decision for them. The platform's edge, the gap in the canopy, the floating mountains hanging green and impossible in the air beyond. Something was moving in his chest that he did not have a clean name for. A recognition arriving in the wrong order — the understanding coming long after the moment it would have been useful.

Neteyam: She watched me train.

Every morning she could manage it.

Neteyam: She learned what I liked to eat?

Years ago. And never used it because she didn't want to seem like she was trying too hard. Does that sound like someone who loved a title?

He pressed his hands flat against the platform and stared at them. The bioluminescence of the Hometree moved faintly beneath the bark. Slow and steady, the way a heartbeat is steady. The way hers must have been, he thought, when she stood in that clearing and tried to say something and he had told her not to finish the sentence.

Neteyam: ...I told her the word made me feel ill.

A silence. His mother did not fill it.

Neteyam: When she tried to say she loved me. I told her it made me feel sick.

Yes. You did.

Neteyam: — where is she? Which direction did she go, someone must have seen—

No one knows. She left before the light. She did not tell anyone because there was no one to tell — she had given every hour of her friendship and companionship to becoming your wife and had very little of either left for herself. She walked into Pandora alone. That is what you gave her.

Neteyam: Then I will find her. I will go now, I will follow the path toward the eastern forest and—

Neteyam.

Just his name. The way she said it when he was a child and had made a mistake that could not simply be corrected. He stopped.

Pandora is vast. She has a full night's head start and she knows how to move quietly — you made sure she never had reason to learn otherwise. You do not know which direction she went. You do not know which clan she might seek shelter with, or whether she intends to seek any shelter at all. You do not know, because she made herself invisible to you so carefully and for so long that you have no map of her. You never built one.

Neteyam: Then tell me where to start. Please. mother, please—

I cannot tell you what I don't know. And even if I knew — I am not certain I would tell you tonight, while you are still thinking about what you feel rather than what she needs. Go and think. Go and sit with what you have done. And tomorrow, if you still want to find her, you will have to earn that. The way she earned everything. Slowly. With nothing guaranteed at the end.

She turned back to the mountains. The conversation was over. He remained on the platform for a long time after that, not moving, with the Hometree's pulse beneath him and the wide dark of Pandora spread out in every direction below — vast and bioluminescent and full of a girl he had never properly looked at.

He thought about what she had said in the clearing. I gave up my childhood. Said it not as a weapon — said it as a fact, the way you name something that has already happened. No plea in it. No bid for sympathy. Just the accounting of a person who had kept meticulous records of every cost and was finally, briefly, permitted to read them aloud before the file closed.

He thought about the dropped bowl. He had heard about it, years ago, from one of the younger warriors who had a sister in the clan mothers' circle. He had filed it away as a story about her training and not thought about it again. He had not thought about what it cost a twelve-year-old girl to stand in front of his mother and receive those words and then go back and try harder. He had not thought about her at all, not really, not as a person with an interior life that continued when he was not present to observe it. He thought about her watching him train from the upper platform.

He had never noticed. He had never looked up. And somewhere in the vast living dark of Pandora, under a sky full of stars with no names,

she was walking away from everything she had ever built

toward something she had not yet decided to be

and he did not know which direction she had gone.

He had spent years certain he felt nothing. Standing at arm's length from her certainty, her devotion, her relentless, quiet, costly love — and feeling nothing, he had told himself, nothing, it is simply nothing.

But sitting on this platform with her gone and the empty space of her absence already reshaping the air around the village like a removed stone reshapes the current of a river — sitting here now, he was no longer certain that what he had felt was nothing. He thought it might have been something he did not recognize because no one had taught him what it looked like from the inside. He thought it might have been the beginning of something he had ended before it could finish becoming. He thought: I did not know. I genuinely did not know.

And then, with the particular cruelty of realizations that arrive precisely one moment too late: that does not change anything. She is still gone. And I do not know where she is.

"The winner takes it all. The loser has to fall. It's simple, and it's plain. Why should I complain?" — ABBA, Mamma Mia

ilynaaa

Need help! Lost a Neteyam fic in this app and I really want to read it again!! The fic goes reader is a really good hunter and stood by Neteyam for long, Mo'at misreads the sign from Eywa and arranges Neteyam with someone else but that 'someone' has a foul mouth and keeps provoking reader with her dead mother, in the end, Neteyam & Mo'at chose reader to be Tsahik. It's like a slowburn story with lots of misunderstanding!! Plsss help me find it!!

neteyamthinker

hopelessly devoted

pairings neteyam x omatikaya!female reader

notes friends to lovers, slow burn, heavy pining, down horrendous neteyam, inexperienced neteyam and reader, smut (p in v), oral (f&m receiving), dry humping

synopsis for twenty-two generations, your father’s family has guarded a sacred legacy: one woman will choose a life of solitude and remain unmated for life for the service of the great mother and the people. you decided it will be you now... except for one problem. neteyam. the boy who has looked at you with quiet and unwavering devotion since you were children.

word count 19.2k

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You sat perfectly upright in the healing pavilion, your fingers meticulously sorting herbs as Kiri hummed softly beside you, a little unfocused as she sorted her own set of herbs. She has always been a little too connected to the forest and all its creatures. Once, when you were children, she’s told you about how she can feel Eywa in every plant, and every animal that crawls and walks.

You believed her without thinking twice. You wished you could connect to Eywa the same way she does, because it is your greatest dream to follow the path of your great aunt, Äye. You could see her now in your mind’s eye, her skin mapped with the lines of nearly eighty years of wisdom. She has been serving Eywa and the people since the Tsahik that Mo’at succeeded, so her counsel is sought on all matters of faith and ritual, even by Mo’at.

For the past twenty-two generations, a woman in your father’s family chooses the same path. They are women who belonged to no man, but to the Great Mother and the people. You aspire to be just like all of them. Your great aunt is the blueprint of your soul, so at twelve years old, you had already decided to tuck away your heart, to pay attention to no boy in the clan, preparing your life for one of worship.

“He didn't even look back once,” Yaremu’s voice pulled you away from your thoughts, her chin now rested in her hands as she neglected the poultice she was supposed to be thickening. “Neteyam, I mean. He’s so focused... Remember what the elder hunters said about the sturmbeest hunt? My uncle said it was the cleanest kill he’s seen from a boy of thirteen years. Not a single wasted movement.”

“And those eyes...” Another girl, Tasi, gushed, her tail twitching with excitement. “He’s going to be such a strong Olo’eyktan one day. Imagine being the one who gets to stand beside him.”

You kept your head down, making their chatter a background sound to your more interesting work of grinding your herbs on a mortar.

vaniellea

Neteyam accidentally gets too rough with you

maybe being mated to the perfect son, the perfect husband was starting to kill you.

it sounds dramatic, sure, but you didn’t want to dwell on it or you’d just get snappy with the kids and then he’d give you that look, that disappointed “you’re supposed to be the leader” look, and then you’d have to spend the whole night apologizing while he just stares at the wall.

and you can’t stand it when he’s quiet.

so you just keep your mouth shut. you play the part.

but honestly, sometimes you feel like a guest in your own home, like you’re just there to fix the nets and bring in the meat and make sure lo’ak doesn’t kill himself, and you’re starting to get tired of it.

you don’t hate him, obviously. you love he more than anything. you remember how he looked when you first met him or when you were pregnant with your first daughter, how he held your hand when the sky people came back, how he’s the only person who actually makes you feel safe.

but god, Neteyam is exhausting to live with.

you’re always the one who has to remember the small stuff, the specific way the bows need to be strung, the exact time to start the fire so the kids don’t get cranky, and if you miss one thing, just one tiny thing, it’s like the world is ending. and you’re the one who has to fix it.

“i’ll sharpen the spears after i eat, i promise.” is what you said, just trying to sit down for five minutes after a twelve hour patrol of trying to get your two daughters to sit down and he just looks at the pile of wood you haven’t chopped yet and makes that clicking sound with his tongue. “the hunt is at dawn, yawne. ‘after’ doesn’t help us then.”

you just feel this hot spike of annoyance in your gut and you want to tell he to do it himself if it’s so urgent, but you see spider and kiri watching from the mats and you just deflate. “you’re right. i’m sorry. i’ll do it now.”

and you do. you always do.

you’re the one who stays up late working while your hands ache. you’re the one who says sorry when he’s being unreasonable. you’re the one who carries all the weight because you’re the “strong one” and you’re not allowed to be frustrated.

until that night.

The fire’s burned down to embers, the kids are finally asleep, and he’s been pressed against your back, deep In your pussy for a while now , his arm draped over your waist as he slowly glides your hips back onto his hard cock.

You should be asleep too, but your mind won’t quiet, won’t stop picking at the seams of the day.

His cock is hard against your hole, and before you can even protest, he’s sliding inside you again from behind, slow and thick, filling you up until you’re gasping into the furs. He’s been grinding into you for what feels like forever, his hips rolling in lazy, deep circles, his breath hot against the back of your neck.

You can feel his last release dripping out of you every time he pulls back, only to push in again, his cock dragging through the mess he’s already made.

His hand slips under your arm, fingers finding your nipple, pinching just hard enough to make you whimper. “Fuck, yawne,” he growls, his voice rough, his hips stuttering as he bottoms out inside you.

The sound of your pussy is obscene in the quiet room, wet and sloppy, and you can’t help the way your body clenches around him, greedy for more.

His lips brush your shoulder, his voice a low, desperate whisper. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m—” His words dissolve into a groan as your toes curl against his leg, your body shuddering through an orgasm that leaves you trembling. He doesn’t stop, though. He just keeps fucking you, desperately, whispering apologies about his words from earlier.

And then, because you’re a glutton for punishment, because you can’t let it go, you ask, breathless: “Did you put the food up?”

His cock twitches inside you. His body tenses. And then he sighs, his hips stuttering for a second before he pulls back just enough to slam into you harder. “Why is it always something with you?”

You should’ve kept your mouth shut because now that you look back, it wasn’t the best time to mention it. You know you should’ve. But the words are out now, and his thrusting turns much more harder than before, his thrusts getting hard and deepening, his fingers digging into your hip hard enough to leave marks. “Because if I don’t ask, it’ll rot, and this isn’t the first time you’ve forgot. ” you bite out, even as your body betrays you, arching back into him.

He sighs, and suddenly he’s fucking you even harder hard, relentless, his cock pistoning in and out of you with a wet, sloppy sound that fills the room.

His other hand tangles in your hair, yanking your head back just enough to press his mouth to your throat, his teeth grazing your skin. “You think I don’t know that?” His voice is a snarl, but his hips never stop, his cock hitting that spot inside you that makes your vision blur. “You think I’m a kid that needs to be micromanaged???”

His grip on your hair tightens, fingers twisting in the dark strands as he yanks your head back harder, forcing your back to arch sharply against his chest. “My cock is this deep,” , he pushes his cock as deep as it can go letting his balls squish again your ass. “ and you still think I don’t know what I’m doing.” he snarls, voice low and dangerous, each word punctuated by a brutal snap of his hips.

The wet, filthy sound of his thick cock slamming into your soaked cunt echoes through the quiet marui. Your pussy is a sloppy, creamy mess—his previous loads and your own slick dripping down your thighs, coating his heavy balls as they slap against your clit with every punishing thrust.

He’s so deep it hurts in the best way, the fat head of his cock battering against your cervix like he’s trying to bruise it.

You can’t stop the broken moan that rips from your throat. “N-Neteyam—ahh—fuck!”

He doesn’t slow down. If anything, he fucks you harder, hips snapping forward with savage force, stretching your tight walls around his throbbing length.

His hand leaves your hip only to slap your ass hard enough to sting, the sharp crack cutting through the obscene squelching of your cunt.

“You just can’t let it go, can you?” he growls against your ear, teeth sinking into the sensitive skin of your neck hard enough to leave a mark. “Even with my cock buried–mhh fuck, –this deep”

He pulls almost all the way out, leaving just the swollen tip inside your fluttering hole, before slamming back in with a brutal thrust that makes your whole body jolt.

Your tits bounce heavily with every thrust, nipples tight and aching. His free hand reaches around to pinch and twist one, rolling the sensitive bud between his fingers until you’re crying out, tears of overwhelming pleasure pricking at your eyes.

Your pussy clenches violently around him, gushing more slick as another orgasm crashes through you. Your walls flutter and milk his cock, but he just keeps pounding you through it, using your spasming cunt like a toy.

“look at you,” he hisses, voice dark with anger and lust. “Cumming so hard on my cock while you scold me. You like scolding me, huh? Is that why you’re always so angry?”

He releases your hair only to grab both your hips with bruising strength, yanking you back onto his cock as he rails you from behind.

The wet slaps of skin on skin are loud and relentless. His balls are soaked, slapping messily against your swollen clit with every thrust. You’re drooling into the furs, eyes rolled back, body shaking as he uses you.

It’s too much. Too rough. Too deep. And you fucking love it.

But then Neteyam seems to realize something.

Neteyam’s rhythm falters. His harsh breathing catches. He stills deep inside you, cock twitching against your abused walls as the anger suddenly drains from his body. A quiet curse leaves his lips.

“Shit… yawne.”

He pulls out of you slowly, his thick cock glistening with your combined mess. Before you can protest the sudden emptiness, he gently flips you onto your back. The furs are soft beneath you as he settles between your spread thighs, his large frame hovering over yours.

His golden eyes are softer now, filled with regret as he looks down at you—your flushed face, your heaving breasts, the way your pussy is still clenching and leaking his cum.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, voice rough but tender. One large hand cups your cheek, thumb brushing over your bottom lip. “I was too harsh. I didn’t mean to be so rough with you, I just—”

You cut him off by reaching up, grabbing the back of his neck and pulling him down into a deep kiss. Your legs wrap around his waist instantly, heels digging into his lower back as you whisper against his mouth, “I liked it.”

Neteyam groans, forehead resting against yours. “You’re going to ruin me.”

You don’t let him pull away. Your hands slide down his broad back, fingers digging into the firm muscle of his ass as you pull his hips forward. His cock, still rock hard and slick, nudges against your dripping entrance.

“Inside,” you breathe. “Please.”

He sinks into you in one smooth thrust, filling you to the hilt in missionary. This time it’s slower at first… deeper, more intimate. His hips roll against yours in long, sensual strokes, grinding his pubic bone against your swollen clit with every thrust. You can feel every thick inch of him dragging along your sensitive walls, the messy mix of cum and slick squelching lewdly between your bodies.

Neteyam kisses you like he’s trying to apologize with his mouth, slow, deep, filthy kisses where his tongue slides against yours, tasting every moan you give him.

His hand cradles the back of your head while the other grips your thigh, holding you open for him.

But you want more.

Your hands squeeze his firm ass harder, nails digging into the muscle as you pull him deeper. Your lips brush his ear, voice a desperate, broken whisper:

“Faster… please, Neteyam—harder. Fuck me harder.”

He shudders above you, a low growl vibrating in his chest.

You beg again, lips against his jaw, voice trembling with need. “I can take it. Please—give it to me. Harder.”

That’s all it takes.

Neteyam’s control snaps. He braces his hands on either side of your head and starts fucking you with deep, punishing strokes, fast and brutal, just like you wanted.

The wet slap of his hips against yours fills the marui again as he rails you into the furs.

“Yes—fuck—yes!” you whimper, legs locked tight around him, hands desperately gripping his ass as you urge him deeper, faster. “Don’t stop—harder, please—!”

He gives you exactly what you beg for, pounding into you relentlessly. His balls slap wetly against your ass, your pussy creaming around his thick length as another orgasm builds fast and violent inside you.

Neteyam buries his face in your neck, kissing and biting as he fucks you senseless, the perfect son and husband completely lost in the filthy need between you.

First time doing something so dominate, how did u feel about it?

Based off this request!

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glimmerfics

Your home is gone in this NSFW Choose Your Own Adventure -- and as you navigate this strange, foreign place, Neteyam is there by your side to help you make sense of it... somehow.

Neteyam x Fem!Reader NSFW Choose Your Own Adventure CW: All characters have been aged up by 6 years

🔗 READ/PLAY HERE 🎮interactive fanfic "Past Susurrations" by Renegade 📖 Episode 1 of ?

khiarsa

MUSCLES

Neteyam x Omatikaya Reader

Idea/Summary: You were walking around the campus until you spotted Neteyam working out with his friends near the training ground. Women were drooling over him, and you got jealous since he was yours.

Warnings: jealous reader, a bit of sexual tension, best friends to lovers, saliva sharing, & girls drooling over neteyam.

Theme: fluff w sum good make out session w nete <3

Note: Neteyam is aged up! (23) Reader is (22)

Translations: Sevin - Pretty, Yawne - Beloved, Syulang - Flower

Word Count: 1,380 :3

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Neteyam Sully, the honorable eldest son of Toruk Makto. The future olo'eyktan who is called the mighty warrior. His clan whispers about him being bright amongst his peers, and when he was young, he had always been praised as the youngest warrior that defeated a palulukan at the age of 13. Some might say he's more intelligent than some elders. He is now 23 years old and mighty, courting Y/N, one of the best female warriors.

Years before Neteyam and Y/N were courting each other, they were always together, whether it be tending the ikrans, training, hunting, joining on patrols, cooking, weaving, etc.; they were always together. Even if one were busy, they would always make time for one another. Ever since they were young, the clan saw their relationship more than just friends. They kept on saying it is Eywa's will. Everyone knew they were destined to be together.

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You were walking towards the tsahik's tent since you are the tsakarem. You assist Mo'at alongside Kiri with the herbs. You arrived at the tent as you greeted the Tsahik and Kiri. Then you sat beside Kiri as she was arranging some herbs. Mo'at spoke, "Y/N, we are running out of Dapophet plants. Could you quickly grab some?" You replied, "Yes, Tsahik. I will go now." You then stood up, and of course, you couldn't resist teasing Kiri, so before you left the tent, you tickled her sensitive spot on her neck, making Kiri yelp in surprise, and then she playfully hissed at you. "Y/N!" Before she could grab your hand, you immediately left the tent giggling.

You grabbed an empty basket as you hummed a lullaby, going to the forest to get some dapophet plants. It is usually used to treat burns and injuries. After 20 minutes of gathering the plants, your basket was filled to the brim. You grinned to yourself because you knew Mo'at would be delighted to have a basket full of herbs. You then held the basket happily. While walking back, you immediately thought of Neteyam. You guys haven't been spending that much time anymore due to your duties. But once a day you would only interact for 30 minutes max, and then you'd part your own ways due to the busy schedules. It wasn't enough for you, and, you know, Neteyam felt the same way about it too. You then decided to go visit him at the training ground.

As you were walking towards the training ground with the basket full of herbs, you heard girls gossiping and looking at the warriors who were working out. They were ogling at their sweaty, muscular bodies. You huffed and rolled your eyes until one comment you heard from a Na'vi woman said, specifically, "Le'ra." Le'ra is a quite well-known weaver in the Omatikaya clan. There are quite a few times you'd request her to make you a top, and sometimes you'd ask her to fix a headpiece, loincloth, or anything with fabric. Not that you don't know how to weave. You simply don't have the time to, so you spend your time giving your stuff to Le'ra to fix it for you while you run some errands. Le'ra spoke about a specific warrior, YOUR warrior exactly, Neteyam. She said, "Look at Neteyam's arms. So big and strong." She blushed at his sweaty body while he was doing push-ups with the other warriors. The women giggled alongside her.

You were furious yet amused by her comment. You decided to be petty and show her that you can be the only one who can touch him. So you immediately put the basket on the side as you fixed yourself a bit, and then you walked towards the warriors, specifically your warrior, Neteyam. You yelled, "Ma'Teyam!" You smiled at him the pretty smile that always gets Neteyam on his knees. He looks up at you, and then he stands up immediately. "Yawne," he says, and he immediately engulfs you into a tight hug. His sweaty yet muscular body pressed against yours as his huge arms wrapped around your waist, pulling you even closer to him. You giggled at his clingyness.

You whispered in his ear softly, "I missed you so much, Teyam." You nuzzled your face on his neck, inhaling his scent. Sweaty or not, he still smells amazing. He chuckled and pressed a soft kiss on your forehead. "I missed you more, Sevin." He then cupped your cheeks with his calloused hands, yet he was being gentle with you. His tail wrapped around your thigh as he pressed a soft kiss on your lips, which took you by surprise. You then kissed him back. Then a few seconds passed, and you broke the kiss off. You giggled as he looked into your eyes with so much love, and then he asked, "What's my baby doing here, hm?" He buried his face in your neck as he planted soft kisses on your neck.

You felt shivers down your spine when you felt his soft lips pressed against yours. You left out a breathy moan only for him to hear. He immediately smirked as he looked at you, waiting for a response. You immediately huffed and said, "Teyam, not here... I can't answer your question when you're kissing my neck as if we're the only ones here." He just chuckled as he then stopped and looked at you. "Fine, my love, I'll stop." He then gently held your hand and guided you to a nearby hut that provides shade. It isn't far from the training grounds. Most warriors go to the hut to take a rest. You sat down on the floor with Neteyam sitting down next to you.

You then laid your head on his shoulder. "Teyam, last time you did push-ups, you could do 50 with no breaks. How many now?" you curiously asked your suitor. He chuckled and said, "Only 100, Sevin." You were shocked. "What do you mean ONLY?? That's insane! Teyam! You're really strong! Ugh, I want to see you do push-ups!" You whined to him as you held his arm. Suddenly one of his friends, Ru'ka, came in and chimed in on the conversation. "Well… you can watch him do push-ups. There's a competition going on with the warriors who can carry the heaviest weight while doing push-ups." Ru'ka glances at Neteyam then looks at you. "You want to see Neteyam doing some heavy lifting?" Ru'ka smirked.

You nodded immediately, then you looked at Neteyam. "Nete! You should definitely join," you said excitedly as you immediately told Ru'ka to lead the way, and then you grabbed Neteyam. He groaned in response, but then he laughed at your antics as he then intertwined your hands together. He noticed the sun was hitting your face, so he switched sides and covered the hot sun for you. You noticed his action and smiled at him. He gripped your hand tightly as he led you the way to the training grounds. There he saw some warriors with baskets on their backs while doing push-ups. Grunts were released as women were watching the warriors do the push-ups. They were all over the warriors. These women were imagining touching the warriors' muscles and possibly doing more than just touching them.

Then Ru'ka announced that Neteyam would be joining, so you immediately giggled and pushed Neteyam to the warriors who were already competing. Neteyam got into position as they placed two heavy baskets that were hung on a stick and placed it on Neteyam's back as he did his push-ups with ease. His biceps flexed as he went down, the veins on his hands becoming more visible. Then he pushed up, showing his abs that were sweating and his mouth panting. His face concentrated, making him look extra hot. Then they eventually kept on adding weight until they ran out of weight to put on. Soon Neteyam was panting, and you immediately grabbed a bowl of water and gave it to him. You said, "You did good, Teyam. You looked absolutely ravishing when you were sweating and panting." You teased him. He looked at you and then pressed a deep, passionate kiss on your soft lips. One hand is on your head and the other on your hip. He pressed your head deeper, wanting his tongue to enter your mouth. You gave him access to your mouth as your tongue and his are fighting for dominance; eventually he won. He is more familiar with your mouth than he knows his own freckles. Soon you broke the kiss with a wet pop and a saliva string connecting you both. You were panting; the same goes for Neteyam.

After catching your breath, you saw Neteyam looking at you, and he spoke. "You want to know how strong I am, Syulang?" you asked. You looked at him and said, "Obviously, I do." You huffed as he stood up, then held out a hand to you, helping you stand up. Then he guided you back to the center of the training ground. You then looked at him. "Why here?" he said. "So everyone can see us." He smirked, and then he eventually did the push-up position and said, "Sit on my back, Yawne." It took you by surprise. "Your back? Are you sure?" You hesitated at first, then sat on his back. He then went down and then went up. Doing push-ups with you on his back. The warriors stopped doing their job and watched their future olo'eyktan doing push-ups with his future mate on his back. You blushed at how strong Neteyam is as you then gently laid your hands on his back muscles, fingers tracing each muscle and absorbing every grunt Neteyam makes. Gosh, his scent and his sweat mixed almost made you cum on the spot.

He truly is a mighty warrior; he did 50 push-ups while you were sitting on his back. Then gently he spoke, "Yawne, I'm finished now." He waited for you to leave his back as he gently stood up and pressed a soft kiss on your lips. You kissed him back softly and then gently pulled away, making a wet pop sound and leaving a saliva string. You chuckled then looked at him. "You're strong, very strong, my yawne." You pressed your forehead on his forehead, and your noses are touching, doing an Eskimo kiss. He smiled at you, showing his cute bunny smile. "I'm always strong for you, baby." He then buried his face in your neck, arms wrapping around your waist, pulling you close to him.

₊˚ ✧ ━━━━⊱⋆⊰━━━━ ✧ ₊˚

Note: This is my first-ever one-shot! Please don't be shy to reach out and give me tips to improve my writing! I hope you enjoy reading it. <3 (P.S : Y/N completely forgot to deliver Mo’ats herbs…)

Special tag: @laineypooh

jinxyswritting

Hey queen, I have a requestttt (kinda angsty and lots of fluff)

It can either be loak x reader or neteyam x reader and it’s a misunderstanding trope where reader has had a crush on neteyam for years now but never said anything, rumour goes aroynd that neteyam has found his mate and she gets so depressed and it’s kinda angsty. Then she finally confesses her feelings to tsireya or kiri and neteyam overhears EVERYTHING and he has a crush on reader too. However reader avoids him a lot cuz she thinks he’s already mated while neteyam keeps trying to talk to her like multiple attempts, then finally someone forces her to talk to him and he confesses

(Sorry it took this long, but Uni has been killin my ass lately. Hope you like it. )

Like a tidal...

༉‧₊˚✧Pairing : Neteyam x Fem!Reader

༉‧₊˚✧ WC :

Love. To love, to be loved, and to be in love.

Among your people, it was more than a feeling - it was a bond whispered and carried by the tides, and blessed by Eywa herself. Like a tidal. You had always held it close, fragile and sacred, like a glowing seed cupped carefully in your palms. Never spoken too loudly, never shared too freely - as if naming it might break it.

That was simply who you were. A heart worn openly, like the shimmer of the sea carried by the sun. Your emotions were not something you hid, they flowed through you, visible in every glance, every breath, every soft tremor in your voice. A spirit as fierce as yours demanded a heart just as powerful—and yours… was hopelessly drawn to love.

And yet, beneath that warmth, there was fear.

Because love, you knew, was not always returned. And to love alone, to give everything and feel nothing echo back, was a kind of drowning no ocean could rival. A silent, suffocating ache. One that could hollow you out until nothing remained but the memory of what once was.

So you were careful. Careful with your smiles, with your lingering glances, with the way your heart reached without permission. You told yourself that you only had one heart to give, and it belonged to someone who had not yet found you. Someone chosen - not by chance, but by something deeper. Something sacred.

But no amount of care could prepare you for what was to come. For the quiet unraveling of something once so pure.

You still remember the first time the Sullys arrived. The sky had darkened under the shadows of their ikrans, their wings slicing through the golden light as they descended upon the shores of Awa’atlu. The villagers watched in silence, tension coiling through the air like an unseen current. They were outsiders, carrying stories, scars, and a past that clung to them like salt on skin. Some called them cursed. Others simply kept their distance.

But you… you couldn’t.

Something about them pulled at you, deep and insistent. Like the tide answering the breeze. Maybe it was curiosity, or perhaps admiration, but they were unlike anything you had ever known. Different, yet undeniably powerful. Like a storm that had learned how to walk on land.

Everyone knew their story. Jake Sully - the Toruk Makto, the one who had once led a revolution, the one born of sky-people blood who chose to become something more. And Neytiri - the fierce daughter of the forest who gave up everything to stand beside him.

They had lost their home. Their roots. Their world.

And yet… they endured. Because they had each other. “Sullys stick together.” It wasn’t just something they said, it was something they were. You could see it in the way they moved, in the way their eyes always searched for one another, in the silent understanding that passed between them without words.

But it wasn’t the legend that caught your attention. It was him, the one carrying himself like the Sun.

Neteyam.

From the very beginning, your gaze found him as if it had always known where to look. The eldest son. The firstborn. The weight of expectation resting heavily across his shoulders, yet he carried it with a quiet grace that made it seem effortless.

He stood tall, like his father. Moved with purpose, like his mother.

And yet, there was something softer beneath it all. Something… gentler. Neteyam was a warrior, yes, but not just in the way others were. His strength wasn’t only in his skill or his bravery, but in the kindness he carried so naturally. It was rare. Almost startling. Like finding still water in the middle of a raging sea.

When he spoke, his voice held warmth. When he smiled, it reached his eyes. And when he stood beside you… the world felt quieter.

Lighter.

As if all the sharp, jagged pieces inside you slowly began to smooth themselves out, reshaping under the quiet influence of his presence. You found yourself softening without meaning to, mirroring him, drawn into that calm like something instinctive, something inevitable.

At first, you didn’t even notice it happening.

The way your heart lingered a little longer when he was near. The way your thoughts drifted back to him when he was gone.The way your chest tightened, not painfully, but achingly, when he smiled at someone else. It grew slowly. Quietly.

A glance here. A shared moment there. A laugh that lasted just a second too long.

And you kept it to yourself. Guarded it like a secret only Eywa could hear, waiting for the right moment - the perfect moment - to let it bloom into something real. Something spoken. Something returned.

But time has a way of slipping through your fingers when you’re not looking.

Days became weeks. Weeks softened into months. And before you could truly understand what your heart had become…

Years had passed.

Growing up beside Neteyam had never felt like something that needed effort. It simply… was. Like the tide meeting the shore, like breath filling your lungs without thought.

You learned each other in quiet, instinctive ways - matching steps without realizing it, finishing each other’s thoughts with nothing more than a glance. Wherever you were, he followed, or maybe you followed him. At some point, the line blurred so completely that it no longer mattered. When you sat with the other girls, polishing shells and threading them into delicate patterns, he would always find his way beside you, clumsy fingers fumbling through the process just to hand you the prettiest shell he could find, a shy, crooked smile tugging at his lips. And when you braided someone’s hair, your touch careful and practiced, there he was again - lingering close, asking Kiri just loud enough for you to hear to braid his hair the way you always did. Always there. Always close.

Those small things, those tiny, almost meaningless gestures, became everything. They fed the quiet flame inside you until it burned brighter than you could control, until loving him stopped feeling like a choice and started feeling like something carved into your very being.

You didn’t just fall for him, you became entangled with him. It reached a point where everything that belonged to Neteyam - his voice, his scent, the sound of his laughter carried by the wind - felt like something you needed, like air, like water. You dreamed of him with your eyes open, imagined him beside you not just as he was, but as something more - your mate, your other half, the one Eywa had shaped you for.

And the more he grew, the more he seemed to become exactly what your heart had always been searching for… or maybe your heart had shaped itself around him all along.

In your eyes, he was perfect - not flawless, but yours.

The way he made you feel had no name, too vast and consuming to be contained in words. You couldn’t get enough of him - always finding reasons to be near, to touch him in passing, to laugh a little too loudly at his jokes. You circled him like a restless songbird, bright and devoted, without ever realizing you had made him your center. He was your happiness, and he didn’t even know it. He didn’t need to - because for a long time, it felt like he was yours anyway.

But happiness like that is fragile, and fragile things break the loudest.

It didn’t happen all at once - just a crack, then another, until the glass world you had built around the two of you shattered before you could understand what was happening.

Rumors had always existed, clinging to the Sullys like shadows. Some admired them, praised their strength and the way they proved themselves again and again. Others whispered, their jealousy sharp and quiet.

You had learned to ignore it, to let it pass like wind through leaves, but then the whispers began to change, to shift, to circle closer and closer until they wrapped around him. “Of course he doesn’t want a mate yet… why would he settle for one when he can have many?” “Seyra followed him into the forest… she came back hours later like she had seen the stars themselves.”

Each word struck like something cursed. At first, you refused to believe it, you couldn’t. Not him. Not Neteyam. He wasn’t like that. He couldn’t be. He was… yours. Wasn’t he?

But doubt is cruel - once it slips in, it spreads quietly, patiently. And your heart began to ache long before the truth ever reached you. You could have asked him, you should have, but the fear of hearing it from his own voice was unbearable. So you waited, clinging to a fragile thread of hope even as it unraveled in your hands.

Until one day, you saw them. Neteyam walking in perfect sync with Seyra - close, comfortable, certain.

And just like that, everything ended.

The boy you had loved so quietly, so completely, had found someone to stand beside him, and it wasn’t you. Not after all those years, not after everything you had been to each other.

The bitterness of it settled deep, because Seyra was everything you were not - taller, stronger, shaped like a true warrior of the reef, her name spoken with admiration among your people. She fit beside him in a way that made sense to everyone, and of course they celebrated it, of course they were happy for them.

And you… you were left behind in the quiet, slowly poisoned by something you couldn’t fight.

You mourned a love that had never even been given the chance to exist, like a widow grieving a life that had never been lived. It hollowed you out, drained you until even breathing felt heavy. Knowing he was near, just a few steps away from your marui, was enough to twist something deep inside you, sharp and unbearable, so you hid.

Curled into yourself, rooted to the same place for hours, replaying everything over and over again, searching for the moment it slipped away. When did it change? When did he turn away from you… or had you imagined it all?

Eventually, you had to step out of your home, if only to keep up appearances. Too many people had started to worry, their glances lingering a second too long, their voices soft with concern whenever they spoke your name. You couldn’t hide forever, no matter how much you wanted to.

Still, the moment your feet touched the warm sand again, something felt… wrong. The sun no longer kissed your skin the way it used to, its warmth dull and distant, like it belonged to someone else. The grains beneath your feet didn’t tickle or soothe you, they were just there. Everything was. And you… you weren’t. It was as if something inside you had gone quiet, leaving behind a hollow, echoing cold that spread from your chest to the very tips of your fingers.

People noticed. Of course they did. How could they not? The girl who once moved like living light - always laughing, always reaching, always there - had faded into something unrecognizable. Your presence no longer filled a space, it barely occupied it.

It showed in your eyes most of all - those deep blue hues that once shimmered with turquoise brightness, now dulled, dimmed like a sky before a storm that never breaks. Your arms stayed wrapped around yourself as if you were trying to hold something in place, something fragile that threatened to fall apart at any moment. Your lips, once so quick to smile, now pressed into a thin, tired line.

And somewhere beyond your awareness… Neteyam noticed it first.

Your absence unsettled him in a way he couldn’t quite explain.

At first, it was just a thought - she hasn’t been around much. Then it became something sharper, something that tugged at him with quiet insistence. He knew you too well to dismiss it as nothing.

You weren’t the type to disappear, not without reason. And when reason didn’t present itself, concern took its place. He asked about you - casually at first, then more often, his voice tightening ever so slightly each time your name came up without a clear answer. But the worst came when you began to avoid him entirely.

Every time he tried to catch you alone, something stood in the way. You were sleeping. You had somewhere else to be. You slipped away before he could even reach you, turning your back the moment his presence brushed against yours. It wasn’t subtle, it couldn’t be, and it left him with a quiet, gnawing ache he didn’t know how to name. He had thought your bond was something shared, something mutual. Not something that could simply vanish overnight. Were you hurt? Were you sick? Had someone done something to you?

He didn’t know. And not knowing ate at him.

“Come, come…”

Tsireya’s voice broke through the haze, light and insistent, as she patted the sand beside her. Before you could even think of an excuse, Kiri’s hand had already wrapped around your wrist, pulling you along with a familiarity you didn’t have the strength to resist.

The two of them sat as they often did, small baskets of beads scattered between them, threads catching the sunlight in soft glimmers. It was such a normal scene, so painfully normal, that it irritated you in a way that felt foreign, almost wrong. All you wanted was to go back, to curl into yourself and disappear into sleep, to escape the exhaustion that clung to you like a second skin.

But Kiri never took no for an answer, and Tsireya’s smile was already too warm, too expectant. So there you were, back in your old place, like nothing had changed.

Your lips parted, a complaint ready to slip out, heavy and sharp, but Tsireya cut you off before you could speak.

“We missed this,” she said softly, her voice carrying a quiet joy as her fingers continued their work. “So yes… you’re staying.”

And just like that, guilt settled over you, thick and suffocating. It pressed against your chest, making it harder to breathe, harder to think.

It wasn’t fair. Not now. Not when you could barely hold yourself together. You had the right to be selfish just this once… didn’t you? Then why did it feel like you were the one doing something wrong?

Being around them only made it worse.

Their laughter, their ease, the soft rhythm of their movements, it all felt like a mirror reflecting everything you had lost. Everything you no longer were. Their happiness twisted something deep inside your stomach, a quiet reminder of how out of place you had become ever since… him.

And Kiri, Eywa, Kiri was the worst of it. Not because of anything she did, but because of what she was. There was something about her - her softness, the way she carried herself, the quiet strength beneath it all - that echoed him in ways you couldn’t ignore. She felt like a reflection, like a fragment of him standing right in front of you, and it made your chest ache in ways you couldn’t put into words.

“I don’t know what to say about this…” you finally murmured, your voice distant, fingers dragging absent patterns into the sand just to avoid looking at them.

Both girls stilled, their attention shifting to you immediately. It wasn’t like you, not at all. You loved these moments, cherished them.

So where had that version of you gone?

“Y/N…” Kiri’s voice softened, her hands leaving her work as she turned fully toward you, concern written clearly across her features. “You’re like our sister. Seeing you like this, it’s worrying us. Please… talk to us.” Her hand came to your shoulder, rubbing gently, grounding, comforting.

And just like that, it hit you.

That unbearable, suffocating need to cry. To let it all spill out, raw and ugly and real. It clawed at your throat, burned behind your eyes, but fear held it back. Fear of saying it out loud. Fear of hearing it. Fear of making it real in a way you couldn’t undo.

“I… I’m just tired.”

The words came out wrong - tight, strained, barely holding together as the knot inside you twisted painfully. Even you didn’t believe them.

Tsireya moved without hesitation, closing the distance between you in a single motion. Her arms wrapped around you, pulling you firmly against her chest, warm and unyielding, like something meant to protect rather than comfort. There was no escaping it - not that you truly tried.

“I can feel your spirit,” she murmured gently, her voice low and certain. “Something is hurting you. You were fine… not long ago. What changed?”

You did.

That’s what you wanted to scream.

Your heart did. Your feelings. Your foolish, fragile hope that had grown into something too big, too consuming to survive.

You fell in love.

And it destroyed you.

“Nothing, really. I’m just going through a rough phase, I believe. Just… give me some time to figure myself out.”

Your voice came out softer than you intended, fragile at the edges, as if it might crack apart if pushed even a little further. Tears burned behind your eyes, already threatening to spill, but you forced yourself to look away, far beyond them, far beyond everything, fixing your gaze on the endless stretch of sea. The waves rolled in and out, steady and indifferent, as if nothing in the world had changed.

Just a little longer. If you could just hold it in a little longer… you could break later, when no one was there to see.

The silence that followed was heavy.

You didn’t need to look at them to know they didn’t believe you. How could they? You had grown up together, shared too many moments, too many pieces of yourselves. They knew you like the lines of their own hands. To them, you were as easy to read as clear water over white sand.

“If you don’t want to speak to us…” Tsireya began carefully, her voice gentle but firm, “you could speak to someone else. Lo’ak, maybe… or my brother. Neteyam is worried too. He’s been trying to talk to you for so long…”

And just like that, everything shattered.

His name struck something deep inside you, something raw and unhealed, and before you could stop it, the tears spilled over. Your chest convulsed violently as sobs tore their way out, sharp and uncontrollable, each breath catching painfully in your throat. It hurt, just as much as it had every other day, tight and suffocating, like your lungs refused to work properly under the weight of it.

“Great Mother, help us, Y/N, what’s happening to you?!” Kiri’s voice broke, panic slipping through as her hands came up to cup your face, turning you toward her as if searching for an answer hidden somewhere in your expression.

But there was nothing there to find.

Just broken breaths. Shaking shoulders. Tears that wouldn’t stop.

“I’m sick of it… I’m sick!” The words ripped out of you, jagged and desperate, as you pushed yourself away from them, your body trembling as your hands pressed into the sand, grounding yourself against the sudden surge of emotion. “Both mentally and physically-...it’s like a parasite, eating me from the inside out!”

Your voice rose, strained and unstable, your fingers clawing instinctively at your neck before dragging down to your chest, pressing hard against the place where your heart throbbed erratically beneath your ribs.

“This heart is messing with me- I… I want it out!”

The words came out almost hysterical, laced with something raw and dangerous, your eyes flashing with a kind of anger that didn’t belong to you, not really. “It sickens me, do you get it?!”

The two of them froze.

Neither of them knew how to respond, your words hanging in the air like something forbidden, something wrong. It was as if they were looking at a stranger, someone twisted by pain into something unrecognizable.

“We can talk about it, okay? It will be fine—...” Kiri tried, her voice soft, careful, reaching for you like she always did.

But this time, you recoiled. A sharp, almost feral hiss slipped through your teeth, your body tensing as if her touch burned.

“Stop this crap!” you snapped, your voice breaking under the weight of everything you had been holding in. “You don’t know anything! It’s not like I could help myself either - do you think I like the way I am now? Hell no!”

Each word came out heavier than the last, soaked in bitterness, in frustration, in something dangerously close to self-loathing as your hand pressed harder against your chest.

“And for what? Because of this stupid heart I have?”

Your breath hitched, voice dropping into something quieter, more broken, yet somehow more painful.

“I got cursed…”

The words trembled as they left you, barely above a whisper now.

“Cursed by loving someone who was never meant to be mine.”

Your lips quivered, your vision blurring again as fresh tears slipped down your cheeks, unstoppable.

“I wasted the one thing I treasured… for what?” your voice cracked, hollow and defeated. “For nothing.”

Silence fell again, but this time, it was heavier.

Different.

“…But you never looked at anyone,” Tsireya murmured slowly, confusion threading through her voice as she tried to piece everything together. “You never told us you were interested in someone…”

A laugh escaped you - low, hollow, and completely lifeless. It didn’t sound like you at all.

“I didn’t want to,” you admitted, your voice trembling as your gaze dropped back to the sand, unfocused. “Not until I felt him… falling for me the same way I was falling for him.”

The words felt bitter on your tongue.

“Can you imagine?” you let out another weak, broken breath, shaking your head slightly. “All those years… trying to matter to him. Trying to be seen.”

Your lips trembled again, your chest tightening painfully.

“And another woman got him… in just a few weeks.”

The shame hit harder when you said it out loud. It burned through you, hot and suffocating, making your face flush as if the truth itself was something humiliating. Something you should have hidden better.

“Are you speaking about—...” Kiri started carefully, her voice barely above a whisper.

But you cut her off immediately. A weak, trembling motion of your hand, as if even the sound of his name would break you further.

“Don’t,” you breathed, your voice fragile now, almost pleading. “Don’t even say his name… I beg you.”

Your throat tightened again, your stomach twisting violently at the mere thought of him being close, existing somewhere within reach.

“Just thinking about him being near me…” you swallowed hard, your voice dropping into something quiet and raw, “makes me sick.”

You drew in a shaky breath, your body still trembling, your heart still aching...

“…the worst part is that I still love him.”

From afar, Aonung jabbed Neteyam sharply between the shoulder blades, the sudden impact snapping the forest Na’vi out of whatever thoughts had taken hold of him. His body tensed instinctively, head turning with a quiet, irritated breath, only to be met with Aonung’s knowing look, brows slightly raised, lips curled in something halfway between amusement and concern.

“Pay attention,” Aonung muttered under his breath, though his gaze flickered past Neteyam almost immediately, toward the scene unfolding not too far from them.

Both Lo’ak and Aonung had noticed it - the shift in the air, the way your voice had risen just enough to carry, strained and breaking in a way that didn’t belong to you. It wasn’t hard to connect the pieces. Not when Neteyam had been restless for days, distracted in a way that was unlike him, his attention always drifting, always searching.

And now… this.

Neteyam frowned, confusion knitting his brows as his gaze followed theirs, landing on you. At first, he didn’t fully understand what he was seeing - your trembling frame, Kiri and Tsireya gathered close, the tension thick around you like a storm about to break. But then your voice carried again, raw and uneven, and something inside his chest tightened sharply.

“…Don’t even say his name… I beg you…”

He froze.

It wasn’t just what you said, it was the way you said it. Like it hurt. Like it destroyed you just to speak.

A strange, uneasy feeling crept up his spine, something cold and unfamiliar. His jaw tightened slightly as his eyes stayed fixed on you, trying to understand, to make sense of something that refused to fall into place.

“What’s wrong with her?” Lo’ak murmured, his voice lower now, stripped of its usual edge as concern settled in. His brother couldn't really figure out if he was worried because of you or for his mate, who was desperately trying to help you cope with your emotions.

Neteyam didn’t answer right away.

He couldn’t.

Because something about this felt… wrong.

You had been avoiding him, he knew that much. Felt it every time you turned away, every time you slipped through his reach like something he wasn’t allowed to hold onto anymore.

And now, seeing you like this - broken, shaking, unraveling right in front of him - it didn’t sit right with anything he thought he knew.

“…I don’t know,” he finally admitted, his voice quieter than usual, rough around the edges.

Both Aonung and Lo’ak shared the same look - one that sat uncomfortably between irritation and something almost pitying, their expressions tightening as they watched the scene unfold.

“Man, I told you to stop getting involved with that woman,” Lo’ak muttered under his breath, though there was nothing light about it this time. His hand lifted, gesturing sharply toward where you sat, barely held together between Kiri and Tsireya. “Look what you did… to the one who actually loves you.”

The words hit harder than any blow.

Neteyam’s jaw clenched, a quiet, frustrated sound leaving him as he dragged a hand down his face, but he didn’t argue. He didn’t deny it. Because deep down, far deeper than he ever allowed himself to admit, he knew they were right.

They had always been right.

From the very beginning. And still… he chose not to see it. Or maybe it was easier that way. Easier to pretend, easier to push it aside, easier than facing something he didn’t know how to handle.

Because the truth was simple, and yet painfully complicated.

Neteyam didn’t understand feelings.

Not the way others did.

He had grown up learning that emotions could be dangerous, that they could cloud judgment, weaken resolve, put not only him but the people he cared about at risk.

He had seen it happen, seen how deeply things could spiral when feelings took control. He had watched it through Lo’ak, through every reckless decision driven by impulse and heart rather than reason. And so, Neteyam learned the opposite.

He learned control. Distance. Neutrality.

Or at least… he thought he did. Because none of that prepared him for you.

At first, it had been easy to explain. You were always there, always just behind him, beside him, laughing too loud, pushing too hard, never afraid to challenge him in ways no one else dared. You were part of his life in the most natural way possible, woven into it so tightly that he never thought to question it.

You were… his responsibility.

Something like a younger sister - someone he had to look after, to guide, to protect. That’s what he told himself, over and over again, whenever his chest tightened a little too much when you smiled at him. Whenever his gaze lingered a second too long. Whenever your absence felt… wrong.

He ignored it.Buried it. Because it didn’t make sense. Not when you had always been you. But time had a way of shifting things, whether he wanted it to or not.

You grew. Changed. And somewhere along the way, without him realizing it, without him allowing himself to realize it, something inside him changed too.

It wasn’t sudden. It was quiet. Subtle. Dangerous in the way it crept up on him slowly, until it was already there, already rooted too deep to be ignored.

The way his heartbeat picked up when you were near. The way your voice lingered in his mind long after you were gone. The way no one else - no one - ever seemed to hold his attention the same way you did.

And when it finally clicked… It unsettled him. Because it wasn’t supposed to be like that.You weren’t supposed to be the one. And yet… you were. You - with that taunting smile that always managed to get under his skin. You - the only one bold enough to push him, to challenge him, to make him feel something other than control. You - with your rough edges and ocean-deep eyes, impossible to ignore, impossible to forget.

It had always been you.

And seeing you like that - drained, hollow, nothing like the girl he had known his entire life - forced something into place inside him with a sharp, almost painful clarity. It hit him all at once, heavy and undeniable. Every broken word that left your lips, every tear that carved its way down your pale cheeks, twisted something deep in his chest until it hurt to even breathe.

He had done this.

Not intentionally, not cruelly, but that didn’t matter. The result was the same.

He had stood there, silent, uncertain, letting others speak for him, letting assumptions grow into something ugly and untrue. He had let the wrong story be written… and you had paid the price for it.

“I… just—shut it, guys. I’ll fix it.” His voice came out low, strained, his jaw clenched so tightly it ached. “I’m the one responsible for this.”

There was no hesitation left in him now. No doubt.

Only urgency.

His steps moved almost on their own, faster with each second, cutting through the distance that suddenly felt unbearable. The closer he got, the heavier it all felt - the tension, the pain, the weight of everything he should have said long ago.

He expected resistance.

Expected you to push him away, to look at him with anger, with hurt—with anything that matched what he had done.

And you did.

But not in the way he had prepared for.

The moment his presence reached you, it was as if something inside you snapped. Your entire body reacted before your mind could catch up, tensing, recoiling, your head turning sharply toward him as if he were something to be feared rather than known.

Something feral flickered behind your eyes.

Something broken.

“Y/N…”

His voice softened instinctively, cautious, careful, as if approaching something wounded - because that’s what you looked like. His ears pressed back against his head, his posture lowering just slightly, the way it always did when he felt… wrong. When he didn’t know how to fix what stood in front of him.

But this time, it wasn’t enough.

Just when you thought the fire inside your chest had reached its limit, when you were certain nothing could burn worse than this, it did.

Because there he was - close, too close. Reaching for you with the same arms that had always meant safety, warmth, something dangerously close to home… and yet now they felt unbearable, heavy in a way that made your skin crawl, like something sacred that had turned into a burden you could no longer carry.

“Get away!” The hiss tore out of you before you could stop it, raw and primal, sharp enough to freeze the air around you. It wasn’t just anger - it was something feral, something wounded, something that had been locked away for far too long. No one dared to interfere. Not Kiri, not Tsireya. They saw it clearly, this was the breaking point, and it belonged to you.

Neteyam didn’t step back.

Of course he didn’t. His ears flattened instinctively, that familiar crease forming between his brows as his tail lashed once behind him, restrained but tense, like he was holding himself together by force.

“Y/N… we have to sort this out, okay?” His voice was steady, but there was something underneath it now - something strained, something almost desperate.

One sharp glance toward the others was enough to send them away, reluctant but understanding, leaving the space between you exposed, raw, suffocating. Just the two of you, standing in the wreckage of something that once felt unbreakable.

“What is there left to talk about, huh?” The words spilled out harshly, your throat burning with the effort of holding everything else back.

Tears threatened again, blurring your vision, but this time you refused them, you would not let him see you break again, not like before. Not when he was the reason.

He frowned, confusion flashing across his face, real and unfiltered, and somehow that made it worse. “What happened to you, Y/N? To us? Why didn’t you come to me? Why couldn’t you tell me what was bothering you?”

There was no blame in his voice, no anger - just sincerity, just that same quiet care he had always carried for you. And for a second - a single, dangerous second - it made your chest twist with something that almost felt like regret.

Almost.

A hollow laugh slipped from your lips, bitter and lifeless, nothing like the sound he remembered. “Eywa must hate me,” you murmured, your voice trembling despite everything you did to steady it.

Every nerve in your body felt like it was burning, small tremors running through you, making it harder to even stand still.

“I’m so sick of pretending… pretending about what I feel, pretending this - this friendship is enough, pretending I’m okay watching everyone circle around you like it doesn’t tear me apart from the inside out.” Your breath hitched, uneven, your hands curling into themselves as if you could somehow hold everything in. “It’s the worst curse someone could have.”

Confusion shifted across his features again, but this time it wasn’t empty - it was searching, desperate, like he was finally starting to see the shape of something he had missed for far too long.

But you didn’t give him time to speak, because if you stopped now, you would fall apart completely.

“I can’t be your friend anymore.” The words landed heavy, final, cutting through the space between you like something irreversible.

“Not because I don’t want to…” your voice cracked despite your efforts, betraying the truth you were trying so hard to control, “but because it hurts. It hurts to have the one thing my heart wants so close to me and still not be able to reach for it.”

Your hand pressed weakly against your chest, fingers trembling over your racing heart. “Because it doesn’t belong to me.”

You laughed again, quieter this time, broken, painfully aware of how it sounded even as you said it.

“I know… I know how stupid it sounds. After all these years…” Your gaze dropped for a moment, your body swaying slightly under the weight of it all. “And Eywa knows I tried - I tried so hard to stop it, to ignore it, to kill it before it could turn into something like this.”

Your voice faltered, breath catching as everything you had buried clawed its way out. “But it was too late.” Slowly, you looked back at him, no anger left now, no sharpness - just something raw, something completely exposed, something that had nowhere left to hide. “Because this stupid heart of mine…” your voice broke, barely holding together, “chose you. From the very beginning.”

He followed every word like it was something sacred, something fragile that could slip through his fingers if he didn’t hold onto it tightly enough. His ears twitched with each sound, catching not just what you said—but what you meant, what trembled beneath your voice, what broke between your breaths. He had never listened like this before. Never needed to. And now… now it felt like if he missed even a single piece of you, he would lose you entirely.

Because that’s what this was.

A breaking point.

You stood there, both of you, on the edge of something neither of you fully understood - he didn’t know if he was about to lose you, and you didn’t know if you were about to lose him too.

And for the first time in his life, Neteyam felt something dangerously close to fear wrap around his chest, tightening with every second you looked at him like he was already gone.

“I see you…”

His voice came quieter than before, stripped of control, stripped of that practiced calm he had always hidden behind. It wasn’t the voice of a warrior now. It was just… him. Raw. Unguarded.

“Body and soul. More than you think… more than I ever allowed myself to admit.”

He took a step closer—not enough to crowd you, not enough to push you—but enough to close the distance that suddenly felt unbearable. His movements were careful, like he was approaching something sacred… or something that could shatter at the slightest touch.

“You think I didn’t notice?” he continued, his voice low, almost breathless now, like the words had been waiting for too long and didn’t know how to come out properly. “The way you look at me… the way you’re always there, always reaching, always giving more than anyone ever asked of you?”

His gaze softened, something aching settling deep within it.

“I noticed everything.”

A pause. A breath.

“I just didn’t understand it… not at first.”

His hand lifted slightly, hesitating mid-air before falling back to his side, like even now he wasn’t sure if he was allowed to touch you anymore.

“You were always there,” he murmured, quieter now, almost like he was speaking more to himself than to you. “Always beside me. I thought… that was all it was. That you were just…” he exhaled shakily, searching for the right words, “…mine in a way that didn’t need questioning.”

His jaw tightened slightly, regret flickering across his features.

“But then it changed.”

His eyes met yours again, steady this time, even if everything else about him wasn’t.

“And I didn’t know what to do with it.”

There was no pride in his voice now. No certainty. Just honesty—painfully clear, painfully real.

“My heart started to… react to you,” he admitted, the words slower now, like each one mattered too much to rush. “The way you smiled, the way you fought me, the way you challenged me like no one else ever could…” A faint, almost broken hint of a smile touched his lips. “You made me feel things I wasn’t taught how to handle.”

He swallowed hard, his voice dipping lower.

“And that scared me.”

The confession lingered between you, heavy and unpolished.

“So I did what I thought was right,” he continued, quieter still. “I ignored it. I buried it. I told myself it wasn’t real… because I didn’t know how to face something that could take control away from me.”

Another step closer. This time, slower. More certain.

“But it was real.”

His voice steadied, not because the emotion was gone, but because he had finally stopped running from it.

“It’s always been real.”

Now, when his hand lifted again, it didn’t hesitate as much—fingers reaching carefully, slowly, until they hovered just inches away from yours. Close enough to feel the warmth, but not yet touching. Waiting.

“You think you’re the only one who suffered?” he asked softly, not accusing, just… asking. “You think it didn’t hurt, watching you pull away from me? Feeling you disappear without knowing why?”

His brows drew together, pain flickering across his face.

“I thought I was losing you… and I didn’t even understand what I had done wrong.”

A breath. A pause.

“And now I do.”

His voice dropped into something deeper, something steadier—something that carried weight.

“I was too late.”

The words hurt to say. It showed.

“I let fear make choices for me… and it pushed you away.”

Finally, his fingers brushed against yours, barely there, hesitant, like he was asking without words if he was still allowed.

“But listen to me…”

His gaze locked onto yours, unwavering now, filled with something that could no longer be mistaken.

“You didn’t love alone.”

The words settled softly, but they carried more truth than anything else he had said.

“I loved you too.”

A breath caught in his chest, like even now, saying it out loud felt unreal.

“I just didn’t know how to say it… until it was almost too late.”

His hand finally closed around yours, gently but firmly, grounding himself as much as he was grounding you.

“You were never a mistake,” he whispered, his voice rough now, emotion breaking through despite everything. “Never something I overlooked. You were the only one who ever reached that far into me… the only one who made me feel like I wasn’t just what I was meant to be.”

His thumb brushed lightly against your skin, a small, trembling gesture that said more than his words ever could.

“And if you think I’m letting you walk away now…”

A faint, fragile smile broke through the tension, soft and aching. “…then you really don’t see me as well as you think you do.”

“But what about the woman you were spending all that time with, huh?” The words came out uneven, fragile despite the sharp edge you tried to give them.

Your eyes, glassy with unshed tears, searched his face like you were trying to carve the truth out of him, piece by piece. “All those days… just the two of you, running through the forest, so close…” Your voice faltered at the end, quieter now, almost breaking under its own weight, as if even saying it out loud hurt more than you had prepared for.

For a split second, Neteyam just looked at you - really looked at you -and something softened so deeply in his expression it almost undid you. Then, to your surprise, a quiet laugh slipped from his lips. Not mocking. Not cruel. Just… relieved, almost disbelieving, like he couldn’t quite grasp how something so simple had twisted into something that hurt you this much.

Before you could react, he closed the distance completely, his forehead pressing gently against yours, warm and grounding. He rubbed it lightly against you, a familiar, affectionate gesture that felt so him it made your chest tighten all over again - but differently this time. Softer.

“She’s building a place for her mate,” he murmured, his voice low, calm now, like he was smoothing over every sharp edge inside you with each word. “Somewhere hidden. Somewhere safe… in case they ever need it.”

His breath brushed against your lips as he spoke, close enough that you could feel every small shift in him.

“She loves her woman,” he added, a faint smile tugging at his mouth, something almost amused flickering in his tone. “Deeply. Enough that if I had even thought about making a move…” he huffed softly, shaking his head just a little against yours, “…I would’ve been torn apart by both of them before I could even explain myself.”

One of his hands came up slowly, carefully, like he was still afraid you might pull away, his fingers brushing along your arm before settling there, steady, warm.

“I was helping her,” he continued more quietly. “Keeping it quiet so no one would question where she was going, what she was doing. That’s all it ever was.”

There was a pause then, a breath shared between you, the tension shifting, unraveling, piece by fragile piece.

“And all that time…” his voice softened further, almost a whisper now, something heavy with meaning settling into it, “…you thought I was choosing someone else.”

His forehead stayed pressed to yours, unmoving now, like he didn’t want to risk losing this closeness again.

“I was never looking at anyone else.”

You felt the heat rise instantly, spreading across your cheeks until it burned, impossible to hide.

There was no denying it - you were ashamed. All those days spent crying, breaking, convincing yourself of something that had never even been real.

All that pain, all that misery… because you had been too afraid to ask, too afraid to face him. In that moment, you felt painfully, embarrassingly small.

“Her… woman?” you echoed weakly, lips pulling into a crooked, uncertain line as you glanced up at him, still trying to process it. “Eywa… this is just—...”

You didn’t even get to finish.

Neteyam laughed, soft at first, then fuller, warmer, like something had finally lifted from his chest.

His hands came up to cup your face, fingers spreading gently over your flushed cheeks, thumbs brushing lightly beneath your eyes where tears had once fallen. There was no mockery in it, no cruelty, just relief, affection, and something deeply fond.

“Uh-huh,” he murmured, still smiling as he leaned closer, his voice dropping into something softer, more intimate. “You fooled yourself… all because you were too scared to come to me.” His thumbs traced slow, absent circles against your skin, grounding, steady. “Little skxawng…” he added under his breath, the word lacking any real bite, softened completely by the warmth in his tone. “Making me wait for you like a mad, driven man…”

Your breath caught somewhere between your lungs and your throat as he leaned in closer, his nose brushing yours. Everything slowed, the sound of the waves, the distant voices, the world around you fading into something quiet and distant.

“And now…” he whispered, his voice barely there, lips just a breath away from yours, “let’s stop wasting time.”

There was no rush in the way he moved. No hesitation either.

Just certainty.

His hand shifted slightly, one thumb tilting your chin up just enough to close the last inch of distance between you, and when his lips finally met yours, it was softer than you had ever imagined. Gentle, careful, as if he was afraid you might still disappear if he pressed too hard.

It wasn’t overwhelming.

It wasn’t rushed.

It was… right.

A quiet kind of right that settled deep in your chest, unraveling every knot that had been tied there for so long. His lips lingered against yours, warm and steady, like he was memorizing the feeling, like he had been waiting for this moment just as long as you had - only neither of you had known it.

And when he pulled back, it wasn’t far.

His forehead rested against yours once more, breath still mingling with yours, his hands never leaving your face.

“There,” he murmured softly, a faint smile in his voice. “Was that so hard?” -----------------------------------------------------

larajeansongcoveyenthusiast

lyle from avatar deserves NO fans he is disgusting and killed neteyam

neteyamthinker

he got everything from you

content dad!Neteyam x mom!Omatikaya reader

note i’m just obsessed with a parallel universe where neteyam reached adulthood and had a family of his own :')

warnings: the cutest toddler on pandora, lil smut in the end (p in v)

wc: 2.4k-ish

Sunlight filters through the thick canopy of the Hometree, dappling the woven fibers as your fingers, nimble and accustomed, guided the threads, creating a vibrant pattern that would soon become a new sleeping mat. A soft gurgle, followed by a delighted squeal, pulled your gaze from your work.

Your son, a miniature Neteyam in every conceivable way, sat cross-legged on a soft hide beside you. His tail, a thick, plush extension of his small frame, twitched with an independent life of its own. He clutched a crudely carved ikran, its wooden wings spread as if in flight.

“Fly, fly, little ikran!” you watched him whisper, his voice a sweet, high-pitched melody. He bounced the carving gently on the hide, a soft thud accompanying each landing. “Go to the big tree! Find the yummy fruit!”

You smiled, a warmth blossoming in your chest. His imagination, even at such a tender age, was boundless.

“Is your ikran on an adventure, little warrior?”

He looked up, his bright, golden eyes, so like his father’s, sparkling with mischief. He pointed a chubby finger at the carved creature.

“He is brave, Mama! He fights the big, big skunk-worm!”

neteyamthinker

where the act ends

content aged-up!neteyam x omatikaya female!reader

notes fake dating (this trope was requested <33), he falls first AND harder, yearning neteyam, reader is the sweetest girl in the world, smut (p in v), oral (f&m receiving)

synopsis neteyam offered a proposition to the most quiet girl in the clan: pretend to be his intended to make another girl jealous... but a short time into it and the lines had blurred for him. not for you, though! you’re serious about the mission, much to his frustration.

word count 14.4k

₊˚ ✧ ━━━━⊱⋆⊰━━━━ ✧ ₊˚

“The moons are ripening,” Elder Peyka remarked. “The courting season will be upon us before the next great hunt. The young warriors are already preening like forest ikrans... Oh, how nice to see.”

“And the girls are no better,” another elder chuckled, tightening a string of seed beads. She turned her clouded but sharp eyes toward you. You were sitting a few paces away, your fingers flying across a loom. “Child. Look at me.”

You paused, your heart giving a small, nervous flutter as you looked up. “Yes, elder?”

“You are of age now, are you not?”

“I am,” you replied softly, your voice barely rising above the rustle of the loom.

Peyka sighed, shaking her head. “If only you would go out there and be seen, child! You have the grace of the willow, but you hide like a yerik. You are too shy for your own good. If you do not lift your head, the season will pass you by and you might actually become a spinster, weaving alone while the rest of the clan sings of mates!”

A chorus of gentle, teasing laughter erupted from the circle. You felt the heat rise in your cheeks, and you quickly ducked your head back down, focusing intensely on a loose thread. You let out a small, embarrassed chuckle of your own, a soft sound that barely escaped your lips.

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