Of course, I’m going to take any opportunity to ramble about my time!verse AU
despite the fact that I have one fic with only two chapters posted… I have far too many ideas for prequel fics set in the same verse living inside of my brain, wanting to be written while I beat them back with a stick and tell them I need to work on the actual fic 😭
A lot of the extra ideas I have were inspired while I was listening to a song, but in this case, it was a random phrase. ‘One if by land, two if by sea,’ that phrase referring to long ago american revolution stuff that I tried several times to explain but couldn’t find a way to do succinctly because I’m like that so… look it up if you don’t know but do care?
Anyway, for whatever reason, my brain adapted that phrase into ‘One is by Land, Two are by Sea,’ and built a fic around it. It would be from Neteyam’s perspective, about being the only living Sully child still with the Omaticaya after Tuktirey and Lo’ak join the Metkayina. Very melancholy, introspective stuff. So… now I have an excuse to write a snippet for that :)
Once, Neteyam’s father had told them about ghosts.
Growing up, Jake was always full of stories, fact or fiction or a mix of the two, all from the far away, foreign planet where he’d been born. Many times, when he’d tried to explain something from Earth, whether myth or custom or tradition, they’d end up confused. Sometimes, they would pretend confusion just to watch Jake desperately trying to come up with an explanation, but just as often the bafflement would be genuine.
Ghosts had been one of those things that, the harder Jake tried to explain, the less anyone understood.
Now, standing alone in the middle of a marui that had once been filled with movement and laughter, Neteyam recalled that long ago attempt at a lesson and thought that he understood what Dad meant when he’d talked about ghosts.
They echoed here, his siblings, in the height-marks carved on support poles (a borrowed practice from Earth, he distantly recalled) the scuffs and scrapes on the floor. But the loudest echoes came from the emptiness. In a home that had felt too small for six, yet so massive for three.
What was it that Dad had called it, Neteyam asked himself, wracking his memories for that long ago, sunlit afternoon when ghosts seemed so impossible to comprehend. Haunting, he thought. That was it. When people were driven away from a place because ghosts lived there, they called it haunting. Or was it haunted?
Nobody had explained that the more people who fled, the more ghosts were left behind.
