She's got you mesmerized while I die
Pairings neteyam x omatikaya!female reader
Context: Reader returns back in time before Neteyam hurt her to the point of oblivion. In the past, the reader pines over Neteyam and does everything for him, only to find out he likes someone else and gets hurt. Now, knowing what will happen, she tries to move away from Neteyam — but fate is cruel and keeps pairing them together. Will this love hit or will it be another miss?
Author: I've been thinking of creating this type of story but forgot at someone point. So basically here neteyam hurts reader so much, reader dies while fighting because in their perspective fate is cruel. And then when they opened their eyes, the turned back in time, back before she liked him. So around age 12.
PART 2!!
Twelve. I was twelve years old again and the Kelutral smelled like morning and wet bark and the particular sweetness of atokirina' after rain, and my hands — my small, unscarred, twelve-year-old hands — were pressed flat against the living wood of the Home Tree wall, and I was standing very still, taking inventory of my own life the way you count arrows before a hunt.
Not fourteen. Twelve. Two years earlier than I had expected. Two additional years of this. Eywa, you absolute, magnificent, terrible mother.
But the first thing I noticed — the very first — was the silence where the grief used to be. That particular ache I had carried for years, that low constant wrongness of caring too much about someone who cared too little back. It was not there yet. Of course it was not there. Nothing had happened yet. I was twelve, and Neteyam was twelve, and the whole catastrophe was still an unwritten thing, and I was the only person in the entire living universe who knew how it ended.
The second thing I noticed was him.
Neteyam at twelve moved differently than the Neteyam I remembered. Easier in his own skin somehow, less aware of being watched, less polished. He was laughing with his younger siblings near the base of the great roots, and there was something so unbearably ordinary about it — the laugh, the way he shoved Lo'ak's shoulder, the way he tilted his head back — that I felt the old recognition move through me like a current. I turned away. Fast. No. Absolutely not. We are not doing this. Not again, i thought to myself.
The third thing I noticed: the day that was supposed to change everything — the river, the current, the reckless rescue that had tangled our names together and started the whole foolish story — had not happened. I had been careful. In the first weeks, when I felt the pull of familiarity, when my feet wanted to walk the old paths toward the places where our histories were supposed to intersect, I had chosen differently. Taken other routes. Spoken to other people. Kept my hands to myself and my heart behind glass.
I had outmaneuvered fate. I had been so proud of myself.
Like an idiot who thought they could have candy at the end of every supper.
Iknimaya. The first attempt. The test that every young Omatikaya both dreads and dreams about, the moment when you climb to where the ikran nest and you make your choice and the sky either accepts you or it doesn't.
I had not considered this. That we were the same age. That we would be in the same training batch. That Toruk Makto himself would be the one standing on the cliff face watching his eldest son learn to fly, and that I would be standing six bodies to the left, trying my absolute best to look anywhere except at the boy who was — in this life, in this timeline — still just a face I knew by sight and nothing else.
I had bonded with my ikran first. She was grey-green and furious and we had understood each other immediately, the way certain things simply click into place without ceremony. I had named her Txewì — little shadow — and she had bitten my wrist on the way down and I had loved her for it. I was watching Txewì settle when I heard the sound.
It is not a sound you forget. The specific pitched shriek of an ikran that has not accepted its rider, the burst of wings against wind, the crack of the connection failing. I had heard it before in training stories, had never seen it happen — in my past life Neteyam had made it look almost easy, that first bond, that first flight. Clean and perfect, the way everything Neteyam did was clean and perfect in the story I had told myself about him.
But this was not that story. This was the ikran rearing. This was Neteyam — twelve-year-old Neteyam who had done nothing to me, who was nothing to me, who was going to grow into someone who would look me in the face and say I would never like you that way — this was him losing his grip at sixty feet above the cliff base, his body arcing outward into open air, and the collective sharp intake of breath from every trainee watching, and Jake Sully's voice somewhere behind me barking his son's name —
And I was already moving. I don't know how to explain instinct to someone who has never had it override their entire rational mind in under a second. I had told myself, with great conviction and careful cruelty, that I was done. I was done saving Neteyam. I was done being the one who threw herself between him and the world. The whole problem, the root and the ruin of it, was that I had spent years being the person who caught him, and he had spent years simply expecting to be caught.
None of that mattered when his body left the saddle. Txewì responded before I had finished the thought — that is the beauty of the tsaheylu, the bond, the neural thread between rider and ikran: she felt it in me before my body had fully committed, and she banked hard, and we were dropping, and the wind was a wall and the cliff face was a blur and I was completely, catastrophically, irrevocably doing this again —
I caught him by the arm. His weight nearly took us both sideways. Txewì screamed her displeasure but held — she was stronger than she looked, my furious little shadow — and I had Neteyam's wrist in both hands, my grip bone-white, his face tilted up toward mine from below, expression cycling through terror and shock and then something softer and more dangerous that I did not want to look at directly.
We landed hard on a lower outcropping. Tumbling, both of us, a graceless sprawl of limbs and bruises, and then stillness, and then Pandora's wind cutting across the cliff face and the distant sound of the training group above us erupting into noise. I sat up first. My hands were shaking. I pressed them against my thighs so he would not see.
Neteyam pushed himself upright slowly, one hand against the rock, and turned to look at me. He was breathing hard. There was a scrape across his cheekbone that would bruise beautifully by morning, and his eyes — those impossible amber eyes that I had spent years carefully not memorizing — were fixed on me with an expression I could not read and did not try to. I stood. I brushed the dust from my knees. I called Txewì down with a small sound from the back of my throat.
Don't thank me.
He blinked.
Just — don't. I wasn't thinking. It was a reflex. It doesn't mean anything.
And I climbed back onto Txewì before he could find his words, and I flew back up to the cliff, and I did not look back, and that was my first mistake. Because the second time you save someone, they stop being a stranger. And the moment they stop being a stranger, everything else becomes possible.
He started following me three days later.
Not literally, or not at first — he was too proud for that, too aware of his own dignity, too much his father's son. But in the way that mattered: the way the world suddenly rearranged itself so that Neteyam was always near the water source when I went to fill my vessel in the morning. Always at the communal fire when I passed it at dusk. Always somehow in the sightline, always angled toward me, always with that particular look on his face of someone who has decided something and is waiting for the right moment to say it.
I refused to give him the moment. I became very interested in the other side of any room he was in. I developed an elaborate system of alternate routes through the village. I was polite — I was always polite, I had manners, my mother had raised me properly — but I was polite the way a closed door is polite: present, visible, absolutely not opening.
I knew what I was doing. I knew it was unkind. I also knew what happened if I let him in, and that knowledge sat in my chest like stone, and it was heavier than any guilt. I'd rather be cold than get hurt once again.
The first time he actually managed to speak to me was at the morning weapons training. We were paired by the instructor — not fate, not Eywa, just alphabetical assignment, I told myself very firmly — and Neteyam held out a practice staff to me with both hands and said:
I've been trying to find a way to thank you properly. For the cliff.
You don't need to.
I want to.
Then consider it done, i who you owe your life, releases you, now are we sparring or not?
He stared at me for a beat too long. Then he raised his staff. I beat him in four moves — not because I was better, though I was faster — but because he was distracted, and I was not going to be the one who was distracted, not in this lifetime, not ever again. He came back to training the next day looking determined. I pretended not to notice.
The second time: two weeks later, at the weavers' gathering near the eastern roots. I was helping my aunt with the pxorna' leaf work when he appeared beside me, crouching down in the way that tall people do when they want to seem less imposing, and he set a small bundle on the ground between us.
I looked at it. Then at him. Then back at it. It was smoked meat — wrapped in the good leaves, tied with the blue-striped reed that people use for gifts.
My mother showed me how to smoke it the right way. I asked her three times until I got it. She said if I was going to do it, I should do it properly.
He said this with the careful casualness of someone who has rehearsed the casual. Something in my chest moved, the tiniest fraction, like a root shifting in soil. I pressed it back down. Stop it me, remember how
You didn't have to.
I wanted to. You keep saying I don't have to do things. I want to. There's a difference.
Irayo.
I took the bundle. I did not smile. He watched me not smile for a moment, and something shifted in his expression — not hurt exactly, more like puzzlement, the puzzlement of a person who is used to being smiled at and has suddenly discovered that not everyone will do it just because he exists. Good, I thought. Learn that lesson now. It'll save us both. But that night I ate the smoked meat alone by the roots and it was, despite everything, the best thing I had eaten in weeks, and I hated him a little for that too.
The third time: he found me during the night-bloom watching — that hour just after second dark when the floor plants open their light and the whole forest breathes in color, violet and gold and the deep soft green of Eywa's memory. I had come alone deliberately, because alone was safe, because alone meant no one could get close enough to matter. He sat down next to me without being invited.
We sat in silence for a long time. The light moved around us, slow and indifferent, beautiful the way only things that do not know they are beautiful can be.
You don't talk much.
I talk plenty.
Not to me.
I'm talking to you now.
Barely.
Another silence. The forest breathed. A small luminescent creature moved through the roots nearby, leaving a trail of gold.
Why don't you like me?
I turned to look at him then. Twelve-year-old Neteyam, asking me with perfect earnest directness why I didn't like him, in the same tone someone might ask why the sky is a certain color — curious, a little wounded, entirely genuine. And the answer, the real answer, the one I was carrying in my chest like a second skeleton, was: because I know exactly how much I will like you and I cannot survive it again, is because i know how much you'll hurt me in the future
Instead I said:
I don't dislike you.
That's not the same thing.
No. It isn't.
He looked at me for a long moment, and I kept my face very still, very neutral, the way I had learned to keep it when everything underneath was anything but. Then he looked back at the night-bloom, and after a while he said, quietly, almost to himself:
"I'll figure it out."
Please don't, I thought. Please, please don't.
Two years.
I need you to understand what two years feels like when you are fighting yourself. When the enemy is not outside but somewhere between your ribs, that treacherous, warm, inexhaustible thing that keeps reaching toward someone despite every instruction you give it. I had the advantage of memory — I knew the ending, I had lived it, I had died in it — and still. Still.
He grew. We both did. The clan's children became the clan's young warriors, and time moved the way time moves on Pandora: by seasons and ceremonies and the slow patient turning of Eywa's light. I grew taller and quieter and more careful. Neteyam grew into something I could not afford to look at directly, the way you cannot look directly at certain things without being changed by them.
He never stopped. That was the part I had not prepared for. In my previous life — in the life I had lived and lost — I had always been the pursuer. I had been the one who orbited, who reached, who kept showing up. I had never considered what it would feel like to be the one pursued. I had never considered that it would feel like this: simultaneously the most fortifying and most devastating thing I had ever experienced.
"Every time Neteyam chose me deliberately — not out of habit, not out of history, just because he had decided to — a small piece of my carefully constructed wall turned to sand."
He brought me things he had learned. A new way to read wind direction before a hunt. A herb the elders used for headaches that grew near the second waterfall. He shared food without ceremony, without making it a moment, with the easy naturalness of someone who simply did not think twice about offering what he had. He argued with me — genuinely argued, the way you argue with someone whose opinion you respect, not to dismiss but to engage — and when I was right, he said so, and when he was right, he did not gloat. He was becoming, in the way water becomes ice, in the way the green thing becomes the ancient tree, the person I had always somehow believed he was underneath all the damage he would do to me.
Stop it, I told myself, daily, sometimes hourly. You know how this ends. You were there. You felt it. You died with it in your chest. Stop. But my hands had stopped shaking around him. And I had stopped choosing the alternate routes. And sometimes — not always, but sometimes — when he said something that cut straight through to the honest, funny, unexpectedly tender part of him, I forgot for whole seconds at a time to be afraid.
I was melting.
I hated it. I was melting and I hated it and I was still, stubbornly, catastrophically, melting.
He found me near the eastern path at midday — the lazy, gold-heavy hour when most of the clan was resting through the heat — and he fell into step beside me the way he had learned to do, easy, unannounced, as if proximity to me was simply where he was supposed to be.
I was fourteen. He was fourteen. We had been doing this complicated, unspoken, exhausting dance for two years and I was tired in a way that had nothing to do with sleep.
Come to the falls with me.
Not a question. He had learned that questions gave me space to construct refusals.
No.
Why not?
I have things to do.
You don't. I've been watching you the whole afternoon. You have nothing to do.
You've been watching my afternoon?
That's not the point —
That is absolutely the point, that's slightly alarming —
_____. Come to the falls. It's hot. The water is cold. We can swim and not talk about anything important and it will be a good afternoon. That is all I am offering.
He said it with such straightforward, uncomplicated sincerity that the refusal I had ready just — sat there in my throat, useless. This was the problem. This was always the problem. He never asked for too much. He never reached for the dramatic gesture or the loud declaration. He just kept asking for small things, ordinary things, afternoons and conversations and the occasional shared meal, and those small things were so much more dangerous than anything grand would have been, because I could have rejected grand, I had armor for grand — but ordinary kindness, ordinary presence, ordinary him —
I said no, Neteyam.
He went still. Something shifted in his face — the particular expression of a person who has reached the very end of their patience and discovered, to their own surprise, that there is nothing left on the other side of it. Two years, I realized distantly. Two years of this, and the easy, warm, endlessly patient Neteyam had apparently found his limit.
Kehe. No. We're not doing this again.
Doing what again —
This. This exact thing. Where I try, and you find a reason, and I accept the reason because I don't want to push you, and then tomorrow we start over like nothing happened. I've been doing this for two years, _____. Two years.
Nobody asked you to.
I know! I know nobody asked me to, I chose to, because I wanted — because I —
He stopped. Pressed his mouth shut. His jaw was tight. I watched him gather himself the way I had watched him gather himself a hundred times at weapons training, that same controlled breath, that same deliberate stillness before the strike.
What did I do?
Nothing. You didn't do anything.
Then why? Why do you look at me sometimes like I've already hurt you? I have never done anything to you. I saved your name in the training rankings when the instructor miscounted. I went out of my way — deliberately, multiple times — to be someone worth knowing. And you look at me like I'm something you're bracing against. Like I'm a coming storm.
The accuracy of it hit me somewhere in the solar plexus, that specific truth that lands not because it's cruel but because it's exact.
You're not. I don't — I don't see you that way.
Then tell me what I'm missing. Because from where I stand I am doing everything right and you are treating me like I've already done something unforgivable, and I don't know what it is, and not knowing is starting to make me —
It's nothing. Drop it.
It is not nothing —
Drop it, Neteyam!
I won't! For once in two years I am not going to let you shut this down with a look and a wall and whatever armor you put on in the morning before anyone can see you properly! I am fourteen, I am not stupid, and I know — I know — that something is happening here that you are refusing to name, and I am so —
He dragged a hand over his face. His voice, when it came back, was quieter. Rougher.
I'm so tired of guessing, _____. I'm tired of trying to earn something from you that you've already decided I'm not allowed to have. It's not fair. I haven't done anything wrong.
The words landed and stayed. I felt them settle against my ribs like stones. He hasn't done anything wrong. Not yet. Not in this life. But he will.
He will look at me one day with that same open, earnest face and he will say: I would never like you that way, and you will feel every single one of these moments turn to ash in your hands, every smoked-meat gift and night-bloom silence and warm afternoon he tried to offer me, all of it ash, and then i will die with it.
And if i let him in now, when it happens — and it will happen, because Eywa is not merciful and fate does not change because i beg it to — it will be so much worse. Because now i will have had two years of mornings and conversations and him being exactly this, and then it will be taken, and you will not survive it a second time.
I looked at him. At the boy who had not yet become the thing I needed protection from. At the face I was trying — still trying, desperately, with everything I had — not to love.
You're right.
He blinked, surprised by the agreement.
You haven't done anything wrong. And I'm — I'm sorry. For making you feel like you had. That wasn't fair.
Then tell me what's actually happening. I can handle it. Whatever it is.
I looked at him for a moment longer. At the genuine, infuriating certainty in his face that he could handle it, whatever it was, the absolute confidence of someone who had never been handed something they couldn't carry. You can't, I thought. Not this. Nobody could carry this.
I have to go.
_____ —
I was already walking. I could hear him behind me — not following, just there, the way he was always just there, the particular frustrated quality of his stillness pressing against the back of my neck.
Running away is not the same as being strong, you know. You can call it whatever you want. It's still running.
I kept walking. My eyes were burning. I pressed the heels of my palms against them, hard, the way you press against something to stop the bleeding, and I walked faster, and the forest swallowed me the way it always does — without judgment, without hesitation, completely — and the sound of him fell away behind me.
He was right. I was running. But the thing he didn't understand — the thing no one living in the present can ever understand about someone who has already seen the future — is that sometimes running is the only honest thing left. Sometimes the bravest act is knowing exactly where the cliff ends and refusing to walk toward it anyway.
Sometimes the battle isn't with the person in front of you. Sometimes it's with the part of yourself that, despite everything, despite the memory of the fall, despite the hydraulic gun and the white-dark and the dying — that part of you that is watching your own feet slow down in the forest, and wondering, just for a second, what would happen if you turned around. I didn't turn around. I kept walking.
But my feet slowed. Just slightly. Just enough to feel the warmth of the path behind me, the shape of everything I was choosing to leave, the particular quality of the air near someone you have spent two years pretending not to know by heart.
And Eywa — quiet, watching, absolutely unmoved by my preferences — said nothing at all.
Part 2 is done part 3 will end it hopefully, i don't know if this can be counted as a taglist but, thanks @lulu-mlk, @cookieartz1, @crucificu. How do you want this to end?