Reason to Refuse

The clearing was quiet. Quiet in a way his body did not believe.

Jake set the blade in under the yerik's hide and drew it down along the ribs, and his hands did all of it without asking him — the angle, the pressure, the small turn at the shoulder where the skin tore if you hurried it — because they had done this a few hundred times by now and had stopped needing him for the easy parts.

That was the trouble with easy parts. They left the rest of him free.

So the rest of him counted. Two ways out of the clearing: the low one under the roots, and the one his children used, which was not a way out so much as a habit with a drop at the end of it. Four bodies in the home behind him, one of them awake and pretending otherwise. The fire sitting between himself and the treeline, which was wrong, which he had known was wrong for years, and which he had left exactly where it stood because his mate had built it there and there is no version of I need to move your fire for tactical reasons that a man says out loud and survives.

He did not count the weapons. He always knew where the weapons were.

The animal came up warm and close under his hands, faintly sour where the gut wall had opened, and over that the woodsmoke, and under both of them the wet green rot of the forest at night — which he had stopped smelling sometime around the year he stopped keeping a bag packed.

His ears turned back towards the fire without being asked to do that either.

They were all out past dark. Neteyam sat closest, cross-legged over a set of arrows, running a thumb up each shaft to feel for the warp his eyes would not catch. Lo'ak lay flat on his back with his hands behind his head in the specific arrangement of a boy who had made an art of lying down. Kiri had a lapful of green cuttings and was sorting them into piles with the seriousness of a woman four times her age. And Mo'at sat above all of them with her back against the root and a length of beading cord moving through her fingers, her hands working it without needing to watch them.

Tuk had folded herself against her grandmother's knee and was turning the beadwork at Mo'at's hip over and over, and she asked her question into the quiet the way children ask things — not as an opening, but as a thing that had simply arrived and needed somewhere to go.

"Grandmother — why did you let sa'nok choose sempul?"

Jake's hands stopped.

The clearing went on being quiet. Nobody laughed. And for one entire second his body, which had spent fourteen years learning this place and four before that learning to leave places, offered him the low root-path under the home, the count of steps to reach it, and the reasonable observation that he was holding a knife and could be elsewhere before anyone answered.

He caught it halfway. He was not going anywhere. There was a half-skinned animal open in front of him and a daughter waiting on the other side of the fire and no possible way to stand up now that would not become a story his sons told for the rest of his life.

He put the knife back to work.

Across the fire Mo'at's eyes came up and found him — once, briefly, dark with the particular darkness she kept for him alone. Not cold. It had not been cold in a long time. She looked at him for as long as it took her hands to finish a bead, and then she looked down at Tuk, and Jake had just been informed of something.

"I allowed nothing," Mo'at said.

Her hands kept moving.

"Your mother did not come to me and ask. She chose. I was told afterward." A pause, unhurried, entirely for effect. "Not that I lacked reasons to refuse."

Tuk's ears came up. She turned to look at her father across the fire with her eyes gone bright and her mouth already open, thrilled to her bones to learn there had been reasons, and Jake — who had led fifteen clans into open war, who had been shot out of the sky twice and lived — held very still and wished with his whole heart to be anywhere with a wall.

"He was loud," Mo'at said. "He came through the forest like a wounded palulukan. Every living thing knew where he was. So did everything that hunts."

Lo'ak made a sound into his own hands.

"…I was still pretty new," Jake said, to the yerik.

"…I was learning," he huffed.

"Nobody handed me a manual, Mo'at."

The human words meant nothing to Tuk. They meant enough to the older three that Lo'ak's shoulders shook against the ground and Kiri's quiet smile turned entirely merciless.

"Tuk." Jake levelled the blade at his youngest, gentle as a man calling in a debt. "Hey. Kid. Ask her something else, huh?"

"He also interrupts," Mo'at said, without pausing at all.

And his own daughter — his own daughter, who had ridden here on his shoulders — turned her back on him and settled deeper against her grandmother's leg to hear the rest.

"He followed my daughter through the forest like a lost yerik," Mo'at said. "Wherever she went, the dreamwalker went also."

Jake kept his head down over the knife and said nothing at all.

Neteyam glanced up. Not at Mo'at — at his father, one quick check of his face, and then back down to the arrow in his hands.

"…Right."

The laughter thinned out of the clearing.

"…That one I couldn't help," Jake said.

Mo'at's hands went on with the cord.

Jake's mouth opened on the reflex — the debrief, the correction, the small joke that would put a floor back under the moment — and his mouth found nothing to say, because it was true, and because he could still see it.

He had been three months in the body then and still getting the feet wrong. They had let him sit at the low fire that night, at the outside edge of it, the way you let a dog in out of the rain without deciding anything permanent. The smoke had gone straight up. Somebody was singing four platforms above him and stopping to laugh in the middle of it. And Neytiri had come around the far side of the flames to sit where the light could reach her, close enough that he could smell her over the smoke, and she had turned her face towards the noise of that singing with her mouth doing something small and private that had nothing to do with him. She had not been performing anything. She had not known he was watching. He remembered thinking — clear as a report, in words, because the human in him still narrated everything back then — I am going to be in trouble about this. And then she had looked over and caught him at it, and raised one eyebrow, and gone back to the singing, and let him stay.

The hide came loose under his thumb with a small wet sound and he was kneeling in the dark again with a knife in his hand and his mother-in-law taking him apart in front of his children.

He looked at the fire. He looked back at his hands.

"And he was Sky Person," Mo'at said. "Everything he was never meant to be, he was."

It went down through him and kept going. His shoulders followed it. His ears followed his shoulders. Heat crawled up his neck into his cheek, and there was nothing he could do about where the spots showed.

Nobody said anything. Even Lo'ak had stopped moving.

Then Lo'ak sat up.

"But he was Toruk Makto!" he said, with the wounded certainty of a boy who has watched his father's ears sink for ten straight minutes and cannot stand it a second longer. "Why would she not choose him?"

Mo'at did not even look up from the cord.

"There was no Toruk Makto," she said. "There was a dreamwalker who could not cross a stream without falling into it. That is who she chose. Before he was anything."

Jake worked the blade in beneath another stubborn strip of hide.

"And yet," Mo'at said.

His hands slowed.

"He questioned everything. Even me. Even what should not be questioned." The cord turned over in her fingers. "And he was — sometimes — right."

Kiri's ears lifted.

"He did not know the clean kill," Mo'at said. "So my daughter taught him. He has not forgotten any of it since."

And Jake knelt over the yerik, his hands moving through work that Neytiri had put into them one winter with her palm flat on the back of his and her voice low and impatient in his ear. Something came up under his ribs and settled there and refused to be looked at directly.

His ears came up a fraction.

Mo'at's hands went still in her lap.

"And he looked at my daughter as though he had never before seen fire," she said. "He looks at her that way still."

Jake turned.

Neytiri had come up out of the dark at the edge of the firelight without any of them hearing her, which was normal, and which he had long ago stopped taking personally. She stood with one hand on the root and looked at the four children who should have been asleep, and then at her mother, and then at her mate on his knees in the middle of a half-butchered animal with his ears down and his face doing something complicated.

Her eyes came back to Mo'at.

A groan went up from all four of them at once, which was a thing they had learned to do in unison somewhere around the time Tuk learned to talk.

They went. Lo'ak went slowest and loudest, and Jake flicked a strip of hide at his head as he passed and got it back in the ribs, and Kiri stopped by her father on the way and said, low, so only he would hear it:

Then the clearing emptied out, and their voices went with them into the home, and Neytiri's followed after — the flat unarguable one she used at this hour — and then there were two people left at the fire and the sound of the fire itself.

Jake let his shoulders down. He picked up the blade.

He had got about four inches along the flank when Mo'at spoke again, and her voice had changed, and the change was that she was no longer talking about him.

Jake stopped.

"Foolishness passes," Mo'at said. "I have buried no child of mine for foolishness."

The fire cracked and settled.

She did not name her. She did not have to, and she would not have, and Jake — who had learned this family's silences the hard way, one at a time — did not so much as move his head.

"Then another fell out of that same sky," Mo'at said, "with foolish words and a foolish heart, and he pulled her off the path I had set for her. A path where she would be accepted. A path where she would be safe." Her hands lay open and still on the cord. "A path I could keep inside my sight."

And Jake's mouth opened, because it always did, because fourteen years in this body had not got the Marine out of it and the Marine's first move under fire had always been to give the report — the context, the reasons, the mitigating circumstances, the sir-if-I-may.

He caught it. Shut it. Nothing to defend here. Not from her, and not tonight.

He looked at the blade in his hand, firelight caught along the edge of it. He looked at his other hand, stained to the wrist with the work. He looked at the blade again.

Then he set it down across the hide — the last thing he had that he could have defended himself with — and sat back off his heels with his palms open on his knees.

"You're not wrong," he said.

Mo'at said nothing.

"I've asked myself the same thing. Every day." His voice came out level, and he was distantly grateful for that. "Whether I took her from a good life and gave her… this one."

It was not new. It had gone into him at Hometree with everything else and had never come out, and he had learned to carry it as a man carries a joint that does not sit right — you stop noticing, mostly, and then some particular morning you go to stand up.

Because the thing was, he could still hear it. Not the fire and not the falling. The sound she had made afterward, in the dark, with her face against his chest and her hands closed in the fabric he was still wearing then — a sound with no words anywhere near it, torn up out of somewhere under the ribs, and he had held her and said nothing because there was nothing, there had never been anything, and every single thing that made that sound possible had come down out of the sky in the same ship he did.

He had never once been able to unhear it.

The fire put out its heat against the left side of his face.

"You did," Mo'at said.

Jake shut his eyes.

He lifted his head.

Mo'at had gone very still against the root, and her eyes were on him, and she had put the cord down — which she did not do, which she had not done all evening, not once through the whole long catalogue of his failures.

"It was a small thing, in the end," she said.

And Jake braced.

He had stood inside this shape a hundred times — the ceremonies, the songs, the young ones who came up to him at gatherings with their eyes too wide — and he had practice at being humble about it, he had a face for it. She was going to say Toruk Makto. She was going to say the clans, or the war, or the man who had turned on his own people and flown the great one down out of the cloud. Something with weight on it. Something he would have to be gracious about.

The fire cracked.

A sound got out of his throat before he had any say in it — small, wrecked, nothing like language.

He shut his mouth on it.

Jake did not move. His ears, which had betrayed him all evening, went still.

And his body sent up the report as it always had, clean and factual and without any mercy in it at all: arrival logged. Fourteen years. No exit rehearsed. Nothing packed. No route out of this clearing that he had not built for someone else to run down.

He had never counted staying as a virtue. It had never once occurred to him that it was a thing a person could be given credit for. He had counted the fights and the crossings and the years and the dead, he had counted them obsessively, in the dark, the way you count what you owe — and the one thing he had done every single day without ever entering it in the ledger was not leave.

The forest was making its noise around the clearing — the insects up in the canopy, the water somewhere off to the north, a pa'li shifting its weight in the dark, one of his sons muttering and getting shushed for it. All of it perfectly ordinary. All of it there every night of his life.

He had stopped hearing it years ago.

There was nothing he could say that would not be smaller than what she had just handed him.

So he turned towards the fire and said nothing at all.

He was sitting like that when Neytiri came back.

She came out of the home with her braid half undone and her shoulders finally down, moving with what she had given him, silent across the ground without trying to be. She did not ask what they had been talking about. She did not appear to wonder.

She sat down beside him, put her nose against his cheek, and held it there.

A greeting.

Then she settled in under his arm with her cheek on his shoulder and her hand landing flat on his chest, and she said something about Lo'ak that Jake did not entirely catch, and somewhere in the middle of the next breath she stopped talking.

Jake stayed exactly where he was.

☾─────•──•°•𖥸•°•──•─────☽

Mo'at watched them from the root.

Her daughter had gone under in less time than it took a fire to shift, asleep in the open, in the dark, with her weight given over to a man who had killed people in front of her, her hand slack on his chest and her mouth open and her breath gone long and slow. Bodies do not lie about who they are safe with, and Neytiri's had stopped asking permission years ago.

The man was not looking at her. He was looking into the fire, with his hands open and forgotten on his knees, and the yerik lying half-finished beside him, and his ears loose — for the first time that evening, and, she thought, for far longer than that.

He was not listening for anything.

Once, Mo'at had counted every reason this man would leave. She had counted carefully, in the manner of her office, and she had been right about the danger and right about the sky and right about the cost of it, and she had been wrong about the one thing she had actually been asked to judge.

So she picked up her cord.

And where he could not see it, with her daughter asleep under his arm and the fire going down between them, Mo'at smiled.