Who did this to you
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Jake Sully x Omatikaya!reader
Another one for @junebugonjupiter 's jealousy in june event!
Prompt 26. Who did this?
A man seeking uturu turns violent when you reject him. Jake finds him afterward and makes sure he answers for it.
TW: physical violence, injury, hiding trauma - read at your own discretion
who doesn't love jake when he's angry for his woman
words: 4,516 - proofread
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You had seen him watching you for three days before it became a problem.
He had come to the Omatikaya seeking uturu two weeks ago, one of four from a lowland clan whose home the RDA had taken. Toruk Makto had granted it, as he granted all genuine requests, and the four of them had been folded into the edges of clan life with the careful welcome the People extended to those who had lost everything.
Three of them had been grateful. Quiet. Learning the rhythms of a new home with their heads down and their hands open. You liked them. Had brought them food during the first difficult days when everything was still strange, had answered their questions about the forest without impatience, had done what your clan did for those who arrived with nothing.
The fourth one watched you.
You did not say anything. It was not proof of anything, a man looking. You were born to this forest, and you knew its people. You understood that grief did strange things, made people reach for things that felt solid. You had been patient. You had been kind in the way you were kind to all newcomers, no more and no less, and you hoped he would understand the shape of it.
He had not understood the shape of it.
-
It happened at the edge of the eastern grove, late in the afternoon when the light came through the canopy in long golden columns and the rest of the clan was occupied with evening preparations. You had gone alone to collect certain roots that only grew there, particular things Mo'at used in the healing rites. You had been focused on your work and not expecting company.
He appeared between the trees like he had been waiting.
You straightened slowly. Kept your face even.
"I have been trying to speak with you," he said.
"I know," you said. You kept your hands busy, crouching back to your work. "I have been busy."
"You have been avoiding me."
"I have been busy," you said again, and kept your voice even, and did not look up, and hoped he would take the shape of that and go.
He stepped closer. The undergrowth shifted under his feet. "You are courting the Olo'eyktan."
It was not a question. Something in the way he said it carried an edge beneath it that made the back of your neck go tight.
"Yes," you said.
"He is not Na'vi." Another step. "Not truly. He came from the sky people. He wears a body that is not his own. You are Omatikaya born and raised, you have roots in this forest that go deeper than his ever will, and you are wasting—"
"I would ask you to stop there." You stood, and turned, and met his eyes, because you had learned from watching Jake that some conversations required you to take up your full space.
"What I choose is not something I need counsel on. I am spoken for. I am not interested. I say this without cruelty and with respect for what you have lost, but I will not say it again. Go back to the village."
Something shifted in his face. Something that had been beneath the surface the whole time, waiting.
"You do not dismiss me," he said, low.
"I am not dismissing you. I am asking—"
His hand closed around your wrist.
Not gently. A hard grip, the kind that said he did not intend to let you finish the sentence or move away from him, and something cold moved through your chest that you recognized as fear. You did not feel fear often. You were Omatikaya. You had grown up in this forest and learned its dangers and faced them without flinching, and the fact that fear was what moved through you now, here, among your own trees, made something underneath the cold go very, very still.
"Let go of me," you said, quietly.
He did not let go.
You did not think after that. Your free hand came up and struck across his face, open-palmed, the heel of your hand connecting hard enough to snap his head to the side, because you had been trained since childhood and you were not without your own strength and you were not going to stand in your own forest and be held against your will.
He turned back to you slowly.
His expression was the last thing you saw clearly before everything moved very fast.
-
You walked back to the village with your arms wrapped around yourself, your eyes fixed on the path, and your jaw set in the way your mother had always said meant you were trying not to feel something.
Your lip had split. You could taste it, copper and salt. The left side of your face held a heat that pulsed with your heartbeat and would be something worse by morning. Your wrist, where he had grabbed you first, ached in the low, steady way that meant bruising was already happening beneath the skin. When you looked at your wrist, the marks of his fingers were already visible, dark against the blue of your skin.
You stopped walking and looked at it for a long moment.
Then you looked up and kept going.
You did not go to the healers. Ralu would ask questions and her voice would carry and by nightfall the whole clan would know and it would become large and loud when all you wanted was for it to be small and contained and manageable.
You did not go to Neytiri, who would read it in your face before you said a word and whose reaction would be immediate and thorough and would involve her mother and her bow.
You did not go to Jake.
You went to your own kelku and sat down against the far wall in the dark and wrapped your arms around yourself and breathed steadily. The way your mother had taught you when you were small, and the world felt too large. You were fine. You were home. You were safe in your own walls.
You told yourself this and waited for it to become true.
-
Jake found you the way he always found you, without particular effort, like something in him simply oriented toward you without being asked.
You heard his footsteps on the path and knew them immediately, two years of listening, and you turned your face toward the wall before he came through the entrance. You arranged yourself into something that looked like tiredness and kept your voice ready and told yourself the kelku was dim enough.
"Hey, baby." His voice was easy, the low comfortable register he used when the day was done and nothing was required of him. The voice that meant he had come just to find you, no reason, just because you were where he wanted to be. "Didn't see you at the fire. Neytiri said you came back early."
You kept your face toward the wall. "I was tired. It's been a long day."
A pause. Shorter than you wanted it to be.
"Yeah?" He came further into the kelku. His footsteps slowed. "You eat anything?"
"I'll eat in the morning."
Another pause. Longer.
Then, quietly: "Hey. Look at me."
"I'm fine, Jake. I just need to—"
"Look at me."
Not loud. Not sharp. Just steady and immovable in the way Jake was immovable when he had decided something, and you knew that voice, had heard it across battlefields and council fires and every kind of hard moment, and you knew it would not move.
You didn't move either. You kept your eyes on the woven wall and your breathing even and hoped.
Then he crossed the kelku and crouched down in front of you, bringing himself to your level, and you could feel him looking at the side of your face even with your eyes turned away. He didn't reach for you. He just waited, down there on your level, patient and present and not going anywhere.
"There it is," he said, very quietly. Not to you. To himself. Like he had already seen enough from the angle he had.
"Jake—"
"Look at me." Said so gently this time that it undid something in you completely.
Your eyes filled before you turned your head. You hated that. You turned anyway, slowly, and he was right there, close, his expression doing the thing it did when he was holding something very tightly inside himself so that you wouldn't have to see it yet.
His hand came up slowly, giving you every chance to pull away, and his fingers curled beneath your chin, and he turned your face toward the faint light from the entrance with a care so deliberate it made your throat ache.
He looked at your lip. Your cheek. He reached out and, with the back of one finger, moved your hair away from the bruising along your jaw.
The silence was the worst part. Jake loud was manageable. Jake quiet like this was something else entirely.
"Who did this to you," he said.
"I didn't want you to see it like this, I was going to—"
"Who did this to you."
Low. Flat. Patient in a way that had nothing to do with calm.
Your eyes spilled over before you could stop them, which you resented deeply, and the whole thing you had been holding in the walk back from the eastern grove came loose at once.
"Kertan," you said. "The lowlander. He followed me to the eastern grove and I told him to go back and he grabbed my wrist and I hit him and then he—" your voice held steady through sheer discipline, "—he did not take that well."
Jake's jaw shifted. A small movement. Controlled.
"Your wrist," he said.
You held it out. He took it in both hands and turned it over in the dim light and the bruising that had darkened there, the clear distinct marks of fingers, made his hands go very still around yours for one long moment.
"Anywhere else," he said.
"My arms. My face. Jake, I'm alright, I handled myself, he just—"
"You're sitting alone in the dark with your face turned to the wall." Said without judgment. Just plainly, the way he stated things that were simply true.
You had nothing to say to that.
He was quiet for a long moment. You watched him breathe, in and out, steady and measured, the kind of breathing that meant he was deciding something very carefully.
"I'm going to go to Mo'at," he said, still crouched in front of you. "Get what she has for the bruising. I'll be back."
"You don't have to—"
"I'll be back." Quieter. He reached out and took your bruised wrist in both hands, carefully, and turned it over. Then he lowered his head and pressed his lips to the inside of it, so gently you felt it everywhere. He held it there for a moment before he let go.
Then he leaned in and pressed his lips to your forehead. Stayed there. His eyes were closed.
He pulled back and looked at you.
"Stay here," he said. "I mean it."
You nodded.
He left.
He did not go directly to Mo'at.
He told himself he would. He walked the path toward the healer's dwelling with every intention of doing exactly what he had said, and then his feet took him past it, toward the outer edge of the village where the newcomers had been given shelter, and he did not correct them.
Tsu'tey was coming the other way on the path.
He stopped when he saw Jake. His eyes moved over his face, took in the set of his jaw and the direction he was walking, and that was all he needed. He didn't ask. He turned and fell into step beside him without a word, and Jake didn't look at him, and neither of them spoke, because nothing needed to be said. They had come out the other side of enough together that this was simply what it was.
Kertan was awake when they came through the entrance.
Jake looked at him for a moment. Kertan looked back, and started to speak, and Jake crossed the space and hit him before he finished the sentence. He went down hard and Jake stood over him and waited until his eyes focused again.
"You put your hands on her," Jake said. Low. Quiet. The voice that had nothing left in it but the thing itself. "In her own forest. You grabbed her wrist and when she defended herself you made her bleed." He crouched down, bringing himself level, and his voice dropped further. "She walked home alone and sat in the dark. That is what you did to her."
He let that sit for a moment.
"She is mine," Jake said. "I am hers. That is not a small thing and it is not something you were ever going to change." He stood, slowly. "I am Olo'eyktan of this clan. Every woman, every hunter, every child in it is under my protection. That does not stop at the edge of the village and it does not have exceptions." His voice stayed level and it was worse for it. "You will stand before this clan at dawn and answer for what you did. And then you will be gone."
He held Kertan's gaze for a moment longer. Then he stepped back.
Tsu'tey had not moved from the entrance the entire time. He looked at Kertan once, a single sweep that conveyed everything Jake had said and several things he hadn't, and turned and walked out.
When they left, Kertan was awake but had decided lying very still was his best option.
Jake went to Mo'at.
She was awake, as Mo'at always seemed to be when something had happened, and she looked at the state of his hands without expression and waited.
"One of the lowlanders," Jake said. "He followed Y/N to the eastern grove. Grabbed her wrist, wouldn't let her go. She hit him and he—" he stopped for a moment. "Her face. Her arms. She came home alone and sat in the dark."
Mo'at was quiet.
Mo'at looked at him for a long moment. "She has always carried things quietly," she said. "It is her way. It does not mean she should carry them alone." She turned to her stores and began gathering what was needed, her hands moving with unhurried efficiency. "You found her."
"Yeah."
"Then she did not carry it alone." She pressed the salve and the cloth into his hands and met his eyes. "She is well?"
"She will be."
Mo'at held his gaze, reading whatever was in it with those pale eyes that never seemed to miss anything. Then she glanced at his split knuckles, and back up at his face, and the look she gave him was not quite approval and not quite reprimand and contained both entirely.
"Good," she said, and went back to what she had been doing.
-
You were where he had left you when he came back, which meant you had actually listened to him, which meant you were more shaken than you had let on and you both knew it.
He sat down beside you without ceremony, close, his shoulder against yours, and opened the small pot Mo'at had given him. The salve inside was dark green and smelled of things that grew deep in the forest, cool and sharp and familiar.
"Give me your wrist," he said.
You did.
He applied the salve with the same deliberate care he'd used when he'd turned your face to the light, working it gently into the bruised skin, and you watched his hands and tried not to think about how much of yourself you had handed over simply by letting him in tonight.
He moved to your cheek next. Your jaw. The split of your lip, barely a touch, careful as anything.
When he was done you looked at his hands properly for the first time and saw the split knuckles. Two of them, on his right hand, the skin broken in a way that had not been there when he left.
You reached out and took his hand before he could put the salve away.
He let you.
You worked the salve into his knuckles in silence, and he sat still and let you do it, and neither of you said anything for a while. The forest moved outside, soft and dark and alive.
"He's still breathing," Jake said, eventually.
"I know," you said. "Or you wouldn't be here. You'd be in front of my father explaining yourself."
Something shifted in his face that was almost a smile and didn't quite make it. "Tsu'tey helped."
"Of course he did."
"He was already waiting."
"Of course he was."
Jake exhaled. You finished with his knuckles and held his hand a moment longer than necessary and then let go. He looked at you, and then without a word he shifted, lying down on your sleeping mat and opening his arm in the way that asked without demanding. You settled against him, your head on his chest, and his arm came around you and held on.
You leaned into the warmth of him and felt the tension still in his body, contained, managed, Jake carrying what remained of the night so you didn't have to.
"I didn't want you to see it," you said, quietly. "I didn't want it to become this."
"I know," he said. "I'm glad I saw it."
You were quiet for a moment. "What are you going to do. Tomorrow."
"What needs to be done," he said.
You thought about that. Felt something loosen in your chest that you hadn't fully realized was still wound tight.
"Good," you said.
He pressed his lips to the top of your head and held them there. "Sleep," he said. "I've got you."
You closed your eyes and listened to his heartbeat and let the warmth of him and the smell of the salve and the familiar sounds of the forest do what they did best, and sleep came faster than you expected.
-
Jake did not sleep for a long time after.
He lay still with your head on his chest and listened to your breathing slow and even out against his collarbone and stared at the ceiling of the kelku and tried to let the night settle into something he could hold.
He watched your chest rise and fall. The slow, steady rhythm of it. Up and down. Up and down.
He looked at the bruising along your jaw in the dark, the faint shadow of it visible even now, and he made himself look at it, made himself sit with it instead of looking away, because looking away didn't help anybody and he had learned that a long time ago.
You were here. You were breathing. You were warm against his side and your face was relaxed in sleep and you were safe in your own walls.
He told himself this several times. Let it work on him the way the salve had worked on your skin, slow and quiet, doing its job in the dark.
He thought about two years. About every morning you had found each other. About the way you looked when you were about to say something you found funny, about how you had never once made him feel like less for being in a body that wasn't born here the way yours was. About how you were the first thing he wanted to find at the beginning and end of any given day.
He looked at your face in the dark and felt something so large move through him that it was almost hard to hold.
He was still awake when the forest shifted from night to the earliest grey suggestion of morning. Only then did he finally let himself close his eyes.
-
He was up before you woke.
When you opened your eyes the kelku was full of pale early light and Jake was sitting beside you freshly returned from the river, and on the ground next to you was your water vessel, filled, a portion of food from the morning preparations, and the salve pot left open in case you needed it.
You looked at all of this for a moment. Then at him.
"Morning," he said.
"Morning." You sat up slowly, and before you could say anything else he was already reaching for you, his fingers gentle at your jaw, tilting your face toward the morning light the same way he had the night before. He looked at your cheek. Your lip. Your wrist where the bruising had deepened overnight into something dark and visible.
"How are you feeling," he said.
"Sore," you admitted. "Better than last night."
He looked at you for a moment longer, reading something in your face that satisfied him enough. He reached for the salve pot and worked a little more into your wrist without being asked, careful and unhurried, and then he handed you the food he had brought and stood.
"Come on," he said, holding out his hand. "You should be there."
The clan gathered the way it gathered for all things that required witness, drawn by the quiet word that had moved through the village since first light. You stood beside Neytiri, who had taken one look at your face that morning and gone very still in a way that meant she was only keeping herself together for your sake, and her hand found yours and held on.
Jake stood at the center of the gathering space. Tsu'tey stood slightly behind and to his right with his arms crossed and an expression that could have curdled water.
Kertan was brought forward.
He looked at Jake and then at the assembled clan and at the faces around him, and whatever he had thought the morning might hold for him, you could see it revising itself in real time.
Jake waited until it was fully quiet.
"You came to this clan with nothing," he said. His voice was not even now, it had an edge to it, controlled but present, the kind that made people go still. "You were given shelter. Food. Safety. The welcome of the People, which is not a small thing and is not given without thought."
He paused, and when he continued, his voice had dropped into something quieter and more dangerous. "You repaid that welcome by following a woman of this clan into the forest. By putting your hands on her. By leaving marks on her."
A sharp intake of breath moved through the gathering. Then murmurs, low and angry. Someone hissed, and it was not alone.
Jake let it settle.
"She came home alone and sat in the dark." The pause that followed was short and sharp. "She should never have had to do that."
The murmuring deepened. Around you people shifted, drew closer together, and Neytiri's hand in yours tightened.
"You are no longer welcome here," Jake said. "You will leave today. You will not come back." His eyes held Kertan's and did not move. "If I ever see your face at the edge of this forest again, you will regret it. That is not a threat. It is the only warning you will get."
The silence that followed had weight to it.
Kertan looked at Jake with something that had nowhere left to go and nothing left to stand on.
Then the eldest of the three remaining lowlanders stepped forward from the edge of the gathering. She held herself straight, her hands open at her sides, and when she spoke her voice was clear enough for the whole clan to hear.
"We ask to speak," she said.
Jake looked at her. Nodded once.
"What he did does not represent us," she said. "It does not represent our clan, or the people we were taught to be, or the gratitude we carry for the welcome we were given here." She looked briefly toward you where you stood beside Neytiri, and her expression was pained and genuine. "We are sorry. We are deeply sorry that this happened in a place that was made safe for us. It should never have happened."
The other two echoed it, quiet and sincere, heads lowered.
Jake looked at them for a moment. When he spoke again the edge was gone, replaced by something steadier.
"What happened here is not on you," he said. "You have conducted yourselves with nothing but respect since the day you arrived. The choices he made are his alone, and they will follow him alone." He held the eldest woman's gaze. "Your uturu stands. You are welcome here for as long as you choose to stay. The People do not punish the honorable for the failures of those beside them."
Another murmur from the clan. This one warmer.
Tsu'tey smiled. It was not a warm smile. It was the smile of someone who had been waiting for exactly this and found it satisfying in every particular.
Kertan left before midday.
Tsu'tey was the one who watched him go.
You found Jake at the edge of the village afterward, looking out at the forest with his arms loose at his sides and his shoulders finally down from where they had been all morning.
You came up beside him and he turned his head and looked at you, really looked, the way he had in the kelku last night with your face tipped toward the light, like he was checking that you were still whole.
"Hey," he said, quietly.
"Hey," you said.
He opened his arm and you stepped into his side without needing to be asked, and his arm came around you and held on, and for a while neither of you said anything. The forest moved around you, green and endless and breathing, entirely yours.
"You didn't have to do it publicly," you said.
"Yeah," he said. "I did."
You looked up at him.
"You tried to make it small," he said. "So it wouldn't cost anyone anything. So nobody would have to make a fuss." His arm tightened around you. "It needed to cost him something. In front of people. So everyone in this clan knows what it means to be one of them."
You held his gaze for a moment, and something in your chest that had been carefully wound since yesterday afternoon finally, fully let go.
"Thank you," you said.
He pressed his lips to the top of your head and left them there for a long moment.
"Always, baby," he said, soft and easy, the human words slipping out the way they did sometimes when it was just the two of you and he forgot to translate himself. "Always."
You leaned into him and let the forest hold you both.
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Taglist: @theendlessvoidofdarkest
