Archive of Our Own

"All I want is you - Show me everything you're hiding " - SLOWBURN — All I Want Is You 

Ever since she had been a child, she had been taught the importance of silence and the place it kept among her people.

The quiet of the hunt — breath held behind the teeth, the bow lifted in the moment before a step. The quiet of evening, when the smallest of the children slept in their woven nests and the elders smoked at the great fire and did not need to fill the air with anything more than the soft pop of resin. The quiet of a room where prayer was being spoken, where a Tsahìk bent her head and named Eywa under her breath, because Eywa did not need to be shouted at and would not have been more present if she were.

Quiet was not absence. Quiet was the shape the Omatikaya had carved themselves into so that they might all fit inside one great living tree without their edges cutting one another. Her mother had taught her this without ever saying it. Her father had taught her this without ever saying it. Her cousins, swinging in the tiers of hammocks above and below her own through all the years of her girlhood, had taught her this without ever saying it.

She had been born into quiet the way a fish was born into water.

When she had grown older — old enough to know what the older girls whispered of, old enough to be folded into the long instruction the Tsahìk gave only to her daughters — she had learned that the small space between a mated pair was also a place where quiet was cherished, where quiet was held the way one held something fragile and burning. The clan slept close. There was no wall in Kelutral that one could place between oneself and the world. The mated pairs of her childhood had loved each other through tail and queue and breath, through palms and the slow lean of one shoulder into another, through sounds so small one could almost have blamed them on the woven branches.

She remembered, with a child's accidental knowing, the soft sounds from the next hammock over on certain nights — quiet things, breath-shaped, the sigh of a name half-spoken into a shoulder. Never a cry. Never a word loud enough to wake a sleeping cousin. This was love. This was how love sounded.

She had imagined, as young girls did, what her own mating would sound like. She had imagined it would sound like her mother's hammock. Of course it would. What else could it sound like? She would lie in her sleeping place under the great curved branches of Kelutral and she would think about the man — the unnamed, faceless man, the one whose features she had not yet been given — and the way his breath would come quietly into the hollow of her throat, and the way her own breath would answer him, and the way no one in the tiers above or below would ever have to know.

And then there had been Jake.

Jake, who had come into her forest the way a stone came into a still pool — crashing, scattering, sending every quiet thing fleeing for the canopy. Loud in his footfalls, in the absurd brightness of his voice, in the questions he asked at the wrong volume and the wrong hour. Loud in his laughter, which was not the small held thing Omatikaya laughter was but a great open-mouthed sound that went up into the leaves and did not bother to come back down. Loud, even, in the way he smiled — teeth bared without thought, joy worn on the front of his face.

She had been certain, in those first weeks, that he would never learn quiet. She had told him so. Skxawng, she had hissed at him through the long cycles of his training — be still, be small in the world — and he had only blinked at her with that wide, clueless expression of his and gone on being loud.

Weeks had passed and he had not, in the ways that mattered, stopped. He had learned to set his foot on a wet leaf without speaking to it. He had learned to draw a breath without announcing the drawing. But his laugh stayed loud. His smile stayed loud. His joy at every clumsy thing he managed correctly stayed loud, and his despair at every clumsy thing he did not stayed louder still.

She had braced herself to keep finding it intolerable.

She had not. She had, instead — slowly, against her own will and then in time without it — come to love the loudness. The way his laugh broke a council fire open. The way his grin found her across a clearing and refused, with no shame at all, to be small about itself. The way he said her name as though her name had been built to be said at full volume.

It had become, by the time she lifted her queue to his, one of the things she loved best of him.

So when at last he had come to her in the dark and the loudness had, for once, not come with him, she had taken the silence as a gift. Something he had set down at the edge of the hammock the way a hunter set down a bow — because she was in the quiet, and he had wished, she thought, to meet her in it.

And the first time, it had sounded just like that.

Or so she had thought. A willow-light. A quiet she had not questioned. A body learning hers in a silence that had felt, at the time, like the deepest devotion she had ever been shown. She had been certain — certain in the way only the young and the loved were certain — that they had made the same kind of love. That he had been listening to her mother's hammock too. That this was the shape of the thing that had been missing, that she now shared with him.

Three days after Jake had returned as Toruk Makto, with the last of the outer clans behind him, she found him at the Tree of Souls.

He had not come to her. He had not, in fact, come anywhere near her in those three days. She had felt him turn his head when she entered a council space. She had watched his hand find a task at the edge of every room she walked into — the strap of a quiver, the fletching of an arrow, the harness of an ikran — anything for his fingers to do that was not lifting toward her. He spoke to her now only in the language of plans. The western flank. The moss-arrows. The riders from the eastern sea. He spoke to her the way a man spoke to a stranger who happened, by some accident, to know everything about him.

She had let him have it. She had her own grief to walk through; she had not, in the first days, had room for his. Her father's face was still very near to her. The smoke of Kelutral was still in her hair. She had let him build his careful wall and she had built her own beside it, and the two walls had stood between them like the staves of a fence neither of them was quite ready to step over.

But tonight the camp had grown larger than her grief.

The clans were gathered — Omatikaya, Tipani, the Ikran People of the Eastern Sea, all the slow streams of warriors that Toruk Makto had bent toward this one place. The Tree of Souls was full of light and full of murmuring and full of the quiet clatter of arrows being fletched along the rim of the basin. The world was preparing to end. The world was holding its breath. And she had been watching her mate, three days running, lower his eyes from her face as though looking at her any longer might cost him the steadiness he needed for what was coming, and she had decided — without quite deciding it, the way she decided most things — that she was done allowing it.

She had gone looking for him.

He was alone — or as alone as one could be in that place, where the pale tendrils of light moved among the white roots like slow breath and Eywa was always, by definition, in the room. He was on his knees. His head was bowed. The braid she had plaited for him as Toruk Makto fell heavy along his shoulder; the beaded cuff at his wrist caught the soft blue light when his hand opened and closed at his side. He had been there a long time. She could see the weight of it in the line of his back.

He was praying.

She stopped just inside the shadow of a fern and listened.

His Na'vi was rough. It had always been rough. She had taught him most of what he had, and he had taught the rest of himself in the long hours after she had gone to her sleeping place. But tonight it was rougher than usual, full of the halting fumbles of a man too tired to find his footing in a language that was not his own. He stumbled on a word. He stopped. He took a breath that she could hear across the distance between them. And then he switched, almost without seeming to notice that he was doing it, into English.

She did not know all of his English. She knew enough.

He was asking for help.

Stand with us, he was saying. Or something close to that — the cadence of standing, the cadence of with. The skypeople will come and they will burn what is left of us, and I cannot — I cannot — And then he was back in Na'vi for one fierce attempt, a sentence she did not quite catch the shape of but which had her people's word for fire in it twice. Then back into English. Please. Please. I know I have no right to ask. I know.

She stepped out of the shadow of the fern.

He had not heard her. He could not have heard her; the Omatikaya did not let themselves be heard unless they wished to be. But the quiet awareness mated pairs had of each other lifted his head. His prayer died on his tongue. For one long beat he did not move. Then he rose, slowly, like a man pulling himself up out of deep water, and he turned.

The bright light of the tree was behind him, silhouetting him.

He looked hollow.

His amber eyes were wide and tired, the lower lids smudged with the long days of no sleep that no avatar body should have been able to hold. His jaw was set against something his face was trying very hard not to do. The clan's adornments sat on him like a costume someone else had chosen — the heavy beaded cuff, the coral and bone at his ears, the long clean braid. He had been dressed as their savior. He did not, in this light, look like one.

He looked like a man who had rehearsed his apology in three languages and no longer trusted any of them.

"Neytiri," he said.

Just that. Her name.

It was the first time in three days he had said it.

He took a step toward her. He stopped.

He opened his mouth.

"I'm sorry," he said. In English, the way the most important things kept coming out of him in English now. Then, finding the Na'vi a beat too late: "Ngaytxoa. Neytiri — ngaytxoa. I should have — I should have told you. I should have told you a long time before — "

The words were the wrong shape. She knew it before he did. They came out of his mouth in fragments and the fragments did not fit one another and he watched her face the whole time, watching for some sign that the words were doing the work he needed them to do.

"I know what it looked like," he said. "I know what it — I had a — there was a deal, before. Before you. Before any of this. And I didn't — by the time I — Neytiri, I didn't know how to tell you, I didn't know how to — "

His hands opened and closed at his sides.

She let him talk.

She did not interrupt. She did not move. She let him spend the whole of it — every English fragment, every stumbled Na'vi attempt, every place his voice caught on something he could not quite say and had to try again. She had been listening to him fail at apology for three days. She did him the small mercy of not stopping him now.

When at last he ran out — not because he had said everything but because his mouth had simply run out of shapes to make — she stepped closer.

The distance closed in two breaths.

She did not strike him. She did not embrace him. She lifted her hand to his face.

Her palm cupped his jaw. Her fingers settled along his cheek. Her thumb came to rest near the corner of his mouth — not to silence him, not quite; to redirect him. And she felt, before she had time to brace for it, the small unguarded press of his face into her hand. He had not given her that in three days. He could not have given her that in words. His eyes closed for one full beat. Something in his throat moved.

The gesture already telling her more than his words had told her.

"Kehe," she said. Quietly. The kind of sentence that did not need to be loud.

No.

"Ke aylì'u." Not words.

He opened his eyes.

"Aylì'u tsun fkew si." Words can lie.

She did not look away from him as she said it. She let him have the full weight of it. Your words. The words of your people. They can be true and they can be untrue, and I cannot tell which. I have heard you speak in your language for three days about flanks and arrows and tribes, and I have not been able to tell, once, whether the man speaking was the man I bonded to or the man who carried the recording in his head. Words can lie. I will not take this from you in words.

She did not say all of it aloud. She did not need to. He understood.

His mouth moved. Nothing came out.

She lifted her queue.

She did not say will you. She did not ask if he wanted to. She offered, and let the offering be the whole of the question.

He looked at her queue.

He looked at her face.

He looked at her queue again.

And for the first time since he had turned toward her in the light of the Tree of Souls, she watched him hesitate.

It was not the hesitation of a man who did not want it. It was the hesitation of a man who did. He knew — she could see him knowing it, in the way his throat moved and his eyes did not — exactly what the bond was going to let her see. The recording. The corridor where the deal had been made. The faces of the men who had sent him. The things he had wanted from her before he had earned the right to want any of them. The wanting that had been braided through all of it from the very first day, in the same rope.

He had never, she understood, bonded with anyone since knowing what it would let her feel of him.

His head bowed.

He offered it back.

The bond opened.

She had been ready for many things. She had been ready, perhaps, for a lie. She had been ready, perhaps, for a wall. She had been ready, on the worst of the three days, for the small dull horror of finding the bond empty — of touching her queue to his and learning that there had never, really, been anyone there.

She found, instead, a man split open like a fruit.

There were no words in the bond, only shapes. The shape of his shame, dense and dark as a stone at the bottom of a river. The shape of his fear — for her, for the clans, for the small ridiculous accident of his own life. The shape of how badly he had wanted her under the Tree of Voices, and the shape of how that wanting had not stopped through any of the rest of it. Not through the lie. Not through the burning. Not through the long days of standing six paces away from her and turning his head.

His desire and his guilt wove together like a twisted braid, running alongside each other like a rope that was impossible to separate. If she pulled on one, she pulled on the other.

She had thought, perhaps, she would find a lie there.

Instead, she found a man who could not have lied to her now, even if he had wanted to.

For a long moment she only stood inside it. She let him feel that she was looking. She let him feel that she was not turning away. And then, after sitting inside it for long enough that she could feel him splintering apart, she let him feel that she wanted him too.

Still.

The sound that came out of him was small. An indistinct, wordless thing, surprised and broken, the shape of a man who had been bracing himself for rejection. The bracing in him went out all at once. She felt it leave him like water leaving a cupped hand.

She took his hand.

"Za'u," she said.

Come.

The hollow she brought him to was one she had known since girlhood — a place where the great roots of one of Kelutral's sister-trees lifted off the ground to form a small soft chamber, walled in moss, roofed in the slow pale tendrils that ran from the Tree of Souls in every direction like the veins of a sleeping body. The light was low, but alive, pulsing in steady heartbeats along the walls and ground.

She brought him through the curtain of pale strands and let it fall closed behind them.

He stopped just inside, breathing slow. The blue light caught along the line of his jaw, the long clean braid she had plaited for him, the heavy beaded cuff at his wrist. She watched the small tilt of his disbelief move across his face like a leaf on slow water.

She turned.

She did not speak. She lifted her hands to his shoulder.

She untied the cord at his shoulder. Then the long strap that held the loincloth at his hip — the worked one, the Toruk Makto one that the clans had given him. She untied it slowly. There was no need for hurry. She let her fingers take their time at each knot. She wanted him to feel her undoing it.

Then the cuff at his wrist. She lifted his hand and turned it palm-up between hers and worked the lacing loose. The beads clicked once, softly, as the cuff fell away into her palm. She set it aside on the moss.

The coral at his ear. The bone at his throat. The braid she left — she had plaited that herself; that one was hers.

Each piece she laid down. The mantle of Toruk Makto came off him in pieces in her hands and the man underneath stood very still for it, and she could feel — clearly enough that her own breath caught on it — the unspeakable relief in him at being undressed of all of it. He was shaking faintly. He did not try to hide it.

He looked back.

Just him now. The body she had chosen under the Tree of Voices. No savior, no rallying speech, no plan of attack. Just him.

She lifted her hand to his face again.

She played along the line of his jaw, up until her fingers brushed along his ears, sliding across the skin behind them.

His eyes closed. She felt, like the heat of a fire from across a room, the way his whole body wanted to lean into her hand. She drew his face down to hers.

His lips found hers — careful, slow, as if he had forgotten in the days of avoidance how to do this and was learning it again under her hands. His breath caught against her lower lip and stayed broken.

A sound moved at the back of his throat. Small.

She felt it on her mouth as much as she heard it, the slow release of his breath against her tongue.

She broke the kiss only enough to look at him. His eyes opened, wide, pupils blown large enough that the yellow of his eyes was almost swallowed into the black. His mouth was open, short breaths pressing out of him like her kiss had stolen whatever he had in his lungs.

She liked doing that to him.

"Ma Jake," she said quietly.

His throat moved. He did not speak, but a low hum moved through his throat. She set her hand flat over his heart where she could feel his heartbeat, beating fast and loud against her palm.

Then she moved her hand down.

Her palm slid down — slow, deliberate, over the long flat plane of his stomach, the small striped catch of the muscle there, the faint shiver that ran under her hand from where her fingers brushed his hipbone where they reached the soft warm length of him, already half-hard against his thigh. He dragged a breath through his teeth, eyes widening slightly, her name falling out of his mouth like a plea.

She wrapped her hand around him, her eyes hooded and fixed on his face.

The sound that came out of him was sharp. A choked moan that caught on the way out, as if she had reached into his chest and grabbed it.

It landed in her abdomen, low and immediate — a tight bright pull, a small involuntary clench of the muscle there. Her own breath caught against his mouth. Her hand on him went still for one heartbeat, only to calm her breathing.

He shuddered hard. His hand came up to her shoulder and gripped, fingers digging into the skin and holding. His forehead lowered to hers, his eyes still pressed closed, and a long unsteady breath dragged out of him against her mouth, shaking at the edges.

"Neytiri," he said. Quietly. Roughly. She had not heard her name said in that cadence from his mouth before.

“I don’t think I can hold.”

She smiled up at him and did it again.

Her hand moved on him slow — once down, once up, the soft drag of her fist along the length of him, feeling him harden beneath her touch, and a low broken groan pressed out of his chest. His breath broke open against her mouth.

"Fuck,"

It came out of him quiet, catching on his teeth. The sound of it shivered down the inside of her, settling in her stomach; her thighs pressed together and she could feel the warmth moving between her legs.

She had never heard anyone talk like this, not these words, not between mates, never from her mother’s hammock. It sat in her mind and instead of concerning her, it fluttered down to her chest.

This was hers, her sound, her hammock.

He moved in closer, one hand now moving to press against her back as he buried his face into her neck, breathing into the space below her ear. Hot moist breaths brushed against her skin and traveled down her neck.

She pulled him down with her to the floor of the hollow, one hand still wrapped around him, the other pressed to the back of his neck. He kept his face pressed to her neck, and she gasped when she felt his tongue move against her skin, dragging up and under her ear.

The moss was cool against her back. The pale tendrils of the great tree moved slowly above them. He settled over her with the full weight of him this time, heavier than the weight she remembered from the night under Utraya Mokri. Her legs fell open around him, a soft nest for his hips to press into, pressing against the wet heat between her legs.

Her own breath caught as she felt him slide against her. She hadn’t realised how wet she was until the press of him glided over her without resistance, her eyes pressing closed for a small second as pleasure shot up her spine and made her head fuzzy.

Her skin felt sensitive against him, sweat gathered in the places where their skin touched, and the point between her legs throbbed, anticipation gathering in her like a storm.

His breath went out in a long shuddering sound against her throat, she felt it climb her skin, the hairs raising and a shiver moved through her.

“God, I missed you.”

The words pressed into her throat, but she felt them on her heart, and her hands moved up to wrap around his neck. She didn’t say anything back, there was too much, too many words that would spill out of her onto him, and now wasn’t the time for it. She didn’t want words right now; she wanted him.

He did not move yet. He held himself up, propped on his forearms, the long braid falling forward over his shoulder and lying pressed against her chest where it stayed connected to hers.

For a moment he stayed there with her, his forehead pressed against her throat, and his breaths moving over her in short, warm pulses. Her hands stayed wrapped around him, and for a moment she stayed cocooned in his warmth and the small echo of his words against her heart.

Then he shifted and began moving lower.

He kissed her throat first. Then the hollow at the base of it where the bead of bone had hung an hour ago and did not now. Then the soft place at the underside of her breast, where his mouth on her, slow and reverent, learned the shape of her again. He spent a long moment at her nipple — drawing it between his teeth, his canines careful with the sensitive skin, his tongue working it slow until the skin was wet and over-sensitive. She arched up into the feeling, her hands still pressed to his shoulders, feeling the muscles work beneath her palm.

He paused for a moment, looking up at her. His eyes in the blue light were dark, endless, deep enough that she could get lost trying to look for the ends of them.

He did not say anything. He went lower.

He drew a path down her body with his mouth, pressing his teeth lightly into her ribs until her breath stuttered out and her back pressed up into his mouth. He soothed the bite with his tongue. He laid small kisses down her stomach, following the line of bright dots to her hips, then to the inside of her thigh. She felt his breath warm the inside of her knee, the skin tingling, and then his cheek, working back up, brushed the soft skin high on the inside of her thigh. She pressed her teeth into her cheek as his hand slid under her leg, drawing it up and over his shoulder, the fabric of her loincloth falling away onto her stomach.

It left her exposed, the warm air of the alcove brushing against her wet skin, her cheeks flushing in embarrassment at being so laid open for him.

“You okay?” He breathed, his voice moving over her. She took a second to process his words, then nodded, her throat too full for words.

And then his mouth was on her.

A startled sound fell from between her lips, one hand coming up to smother it, while the other moved to grab at the moss at her side.

She did not mean to. It slipped out of her and his low groan answered against her. His mouth pressed deeper, tongue dragging hungrily into her until she couldn’t tell where he was or where he had been. Her thigh shook slightly against his hand as pleasure spiked sharp from where his mouth pressed against her, all the way up her spine and into the spot behind her eyes.

"God," He groaned, low and rough against the inside of her thigh, and then a small wrecked whimper into her skin that climbed up the inside of her like a hand drawn slow along the muscle.

“You taste so good baby, so good.”

She was trying hard to focus, but the split between what his tongue was doing to her, and the words he kept speaking were tearing her carefully structured attention apart. She didn’t know whether to tell him to stop talking so she could calm down, or tell him to keep talking so she could fall apart.

He licked into her, slow and unhurried, until she felt sensitive and swollen, pressing kisses down against her entrance before dragging his tongue back up to the place that undid her. Every time his tongue circled or dragged over that spot, she felt heat shoot through her body, and her thighs would clench against his shoulders and head, one of her heels coming down against the gap between his shoulder blades and digging down, pressing him closer.

He moaned again, broken, into her, fingers digging into her thigh where he held it up and out.

"you let me, you actually — baby, you actually let me —”

She shifted under him, her hips rising up against him. Every sound moved through her where his mouth pressed against her. Every groan landed inside her; every small breathy whimper dragged under her skin, and her body answered each sound with a clenching of her muscles down against his tongue.

His hand on her hip steadied her, fingers pressed into the soft skin where her thigh met her hip, holding her up and against his face. His tongue moved careful and unhurried — pressing into the wet seam of her, then dragging up the full length of her to her clit, circling it once, twice, with the kind of focused patience a man had when he didn’t intend on moving any time soon.

She moved her hand from the moss at her side and dragged her fingers into his hair. Several strands had pulled loose from his braid.

She did not pull. She grabbed on like he was the only thing stopping her from falling.

His other hand left her hip. She felt the careful drag of his knuckles along the inside of her thigh, and then two of his fingers pressed slow into her — the stretch was enough to startle an open sound out of her chest, her back arching up and her hips pressing back against his hands and mouth.

“Slow baby, don’t want to hurt you.” She whimpered, her head falling back.

He groaned against her at the sound. His fingers moved up, dragging against something inside her body that she had not known was there — pleasure broke open inside her, sharp enough to set her teeth — and her thighs shook hard against his shoulders.

He found that place again. And again. And again. His tongue worked above, slow and reverent and hungry, in time with the steady press of his fingers below, and her body, between them, did not know which way to lift toward.

"That's it," he said. Roughly. Into the inside of her thigh. His voice deepened on the words, she felt it move under her skin like the deep growl of a Palulukan.

"That's it, baby — let me have it — Neytiri, let me have it — please —"

In that moment, she didn’t understand a single thing he was saying, her mind was being pulled between his tongue and his fingers and his words, but she knew enough.

Her body trembled, inching closer and closer to her peak with each slow, careful shift of his tongue and every press of his fingers drawing her higher. It was almost too much, too fast; her body fought the pleasure for a few seconds and she felt his quiet single-minded focus on pushing her forward regardless.

He was not in a hurry. He was listening to her. He was, she understood with a sudden bloom of something almost like laughter, hunting.

"Come on," he said. Lower, his voice growling into her. “Come on, Neytiri — baby— come for me — please —"

She broke apart under him, under his fingers and his tongue, messy and nothing like she had expected. Nothing like she had broken before.

She broke open all at once — a long shocked wave of pleasure that started where his fingers were and climbed her spine and broke her teeth open where they were clenched shut, and the sound that came out of her was a sound she did not know she was capable of making. A dragged out, broken moan that started in her chest and landed in the air between them. It was too much, her body sensitive from days without this, now jerking violently up into him. Her head twisted to the side, trying to bury the sounds into the moss, but he kept his hands on her hips, holding her open and against him where he could keep drinking from her. He did not stop, did not slow, did not let her come down too quickly. He worked her through it. He groaned against her the whole way, broken and reverent.

When she finally went soft against the moss, her thighs still trembling and open around him, her chest rising and falling in fast breaths, she lay there.

Against the cool moss that was a relief to her heated body, and her hair falling loose from her braid, around her head. Her skin was flushed warm, and her heartbeat was loud in her ears.

She pulled at his hair gently.

He came up with a reluctant moan. His mouth and chin were wet. His eyes were wide and dark, pupils blown wide with bright unmistakable need.

She dragged in a breath and shifted her hips under him, her eyes were lazy and warm and watching him.

He pushed himself up, pressing one final kiss against her thigh before he placed it back on the moss and shifted his body back up.

He braced his forearm beside her head and she lifted her hands to his neck, pressing him down against her, her nose finding the warm, soft spot under his chin, her knees now spread around his hips. His other hand reached between them and she felt him take himself in his hand — the slight warm tremor of his fingers, the careful shift of his hips. He held himself pressed against her entrance for a heartbeat without moving, watching her face. She looked back at him open, withholding nothing, her thighs opening a little further.

He held for a second, just pressing into her, the waiting was its own torture and she eventually pressed her heels into his back to draw him in.

He sank down.

So achingly slow. He held her open with his hand on her thigh for the first inch, and then let go and let his weight do the rest.

A low broken groan dragged out of his chest.

"Neytiri."

It came out of him like a rapture, like he had been holding it in for days and her body had finally released it, and the release was painful.

She had not been ready for it, had not been ready for any of what he had given her since they entered the alcove.

No one had ever said her name like that to her — open-mouthed, unguarded.

The sound landed deep behind her ribs. It travelled. It moved down through her body like a heated stone through snow, and where it reached the soft pulsing place where his body met hers her muscles contracted around him — a slow tight clenching, an open-breath whimper caught against his shoulder, her hand at the back of his neck tightening into the soft strands of his hair.

She lifted her hand and cupped the back of his neck.

He pushed deeper.

"Fuck —" he choked. "God, Neytiri —" And then, smaller, helpless at the edge of it, a whimper she felt against her skin more than she heard, the warm tremor of it dragging along her collarbone.

She had not known a single small sound from him could pull at her like this — like a thread drawn tight through her chest, like her body had been built, in some private way, only to answer his.

It undid her. Her fingers twining into the loose strands and holding on.

His head lifted to press against her hair, leaving his throat open. She took advantage of that and pressed her face into gap where his shoulder met his neck, breathing in the scent of him.

It was painful at first, it had been days since they had done this, and her body took its time adjusting. He kept still over her and slowly the pain faded and all she could feel was the stretch of her body adjusting around him — the fullness of it, the slow careful give of her around the shape of him, the small involuntary flutter at her entrance, where her body kept testing the fact of his presence — and the warmth of his body surrounding her. She felt like a small creature in a cocoon, aware of every movement he made on top of her — the fine tremor in his arms where they braced beside her head, the heat of his belly low against hers, the way his breath was breaking over her. She moved her hips up against his, drawing him deeper and a fluttering arrived in her stomach when he groaned against her.

He had been managing himself.

She felt the moment he stopped trying. He shifted his arms around her and his hips began moving properly this time.

The first stroke dragged slow and slick out of her and pushed back in, and her body, on its own, clenched once, trying to keep him in.

"Fuck, baby—”

Her hips lifted up off the moss. A sound caught at the back of her throat, a quick whimper that surprised her, and she pressed it into his throat.

He groaned again, low and undone, at the lift of her hips — the sound dragging out of him into her hair.

She kept her face pressed into his neck and breathed deep, once.

She did not say anything. She lifted her hips up into his and she let her body tell him everything — Yes. Like that. All of it.

His next thrust was deeper. His hips pressed down against hers and her thighs widened to accommodate his shape. The pale tendrils above them moved in the slow steady heartbeat, and her body opened under his by inches. The careful steady building of it gathered in her body like a fire, stroke by stroke, the heat returning to the place his mouth had left swollen.

He groaned again — long and low, the sound buried in her hair. He found the spot inside her with the angle of his hips, she felt it like a sharp spear of pleasure that shot through her abdomen and made her muscles clench tight around him. Her body grew wetter, making each thrust smoother and deeper than the last. Every time he rotated his hips back against her, his pubic bone pressed into the spot above her entrance and her breath caught in her throat.

“Fuck, wait, wait—” He choked, lifting himself slightly, cold air rushing between them as he looked down at where they were joined. “Fuck, don’t move baby, I can’t—”

He stopped breathing. His hips slowed. She could feel him twitch inside her, hard and hot and ready, and she stilled, her own breath heavy, and her body trying hard not to twitch up into him.

A breath came out of him that was almost a laugh — wrecked, helpless, but a laugh. "Christ, baby," he said. The first sentence he had finished cleanly since he had pushed into her. "You'll kill me."

It pulled at her in a way she had no defence against — the steady fight in his hips, the way his forearm trembled where it braced beside her head, the way his eyes screwed shut for one beat and opened again wide and dark. Her chest ached with it. Her hips ached with it. She wanted, with a sharpness she had not been prepared for, to be the thing he stopped trying to manage himself against.

She lifted her hands up to his face and dragged him back down against her. She pressed a kiss to his jaw, then shifted her hips, pressing against him.

”Please move, Ma Jake.” The words landed soft between them.

His next thrust was not careful. His mouth moved down against her shoulder and she could feel the sharp bite of his teeth into her skin. The sound that came out of him was loud, open.

She felt the whole of him, inside her, around her, in her ear and her mouth. The great open-mouthed unguarded loudness of him, the thing she had been listening for her whole life without knowing she was listening.

She felt it in her teeth. She felt it in the sockets of her hips. She felt it in the small wet place between her thighs where his body was still working her to a new height, the muscle there clenching helplessly around him in time with each syllable — yes, yes, yes.

A long open cry broke out of her against his hair, helpless and unbidden, and her thighs tightened, feet lifting to wrap around his waist and pull him down against her.

Cupping his face in her hands, she drew him up so that her forehead pressed against his.

Her lips found the corner of his mouth — she smiled against his skin before drawing his mouth fully against her own.

Every sound he made, she swallowed; she felt it travel onto her tongue and down into her chest.

This, she thought, distantly. This is the sound of him.

Her hips lifted and rolled up into his, her own breath heavy and coming out every time they parted to breathe.

He went with her without protest and together they rolled until she was sat straddling his hips, her braid falling forward across her shoulder. He looked up at her with the blue light moving across his face and his mouth open and his eyes wet at the corners, and his face carried the quiet ridiculous awe that he carried every time she showed him something new.

She set her hands flat on his chest and moved.

Her hips rocked up and back in slow, small circles, feeling him stir inside her, her own body twitching and gripping tighter in response.

She had not expected to find that her own body knew this. The slow rocking. The small backward shift that drew him deeper. The rhythm her hips wanted without asking her. She had not expected the sounds that came out of her in response.

His hands settled on her hips. His thumbs pressed against the small striped hollows at her hipbones. He held without control, palm settling down and moving with her. He was holding on. His eyes did not leave her face. A wrecked sound was breaking out of him on every other breath now — half-groan, half-whimper, the kind of noise a man made when he was being undone slowly and could not get out from under it — and each one broke her, the ripple of it moving down the inside of her thighs.

"Say it again," he said. In English. Roughly. His voice broke in the middle of the please. "Please — say it again —"

She dragged in a breath, her hips stuttering down against him before resuming their movements. The word, his name, came up her throat and out her mouth with difficulty, fighting the scattered breath and the sounds that wanted to come out with it.

“Ma Jake.” It came out high-pitched and breathless.

The sound it pulled out of him was almost a sob — a broken open curse that fell from his lips, his head falling back into the moss and the long line of his throat exposed. She leaned forward, dragging her tongue over the dip in his collarbone, up along the line of his neck, before pressing her teeth into the soft skin at the side of his neck. She held her grip there as she dragged her hips forward before pushing them back, a bright burst of pleasure moving through her as his pubic bone ground into the place he had found before and she felt him drag across the sensitive roof inside her.

His hand moved from her hip to her back, then down her spine until his fingers brushed the base of her tail. She whimpered, her hips jerking as his fingers played with the sensitive skin there, her fingers digging into his chest as she pressed her head deeper into the crook of his neck.

”Ma Jake—” The word choked out of her, “please.”

He came apart under her — his hips bucked once under her hands and he said her name the way a man said something before he was dragged beneath water.

He pressed his hands on her backside and rolled his hips up into her, and she gasped when she felt one hand reach back between them and press against her clit. He held her hips tight against him, grinding up into her as he circled it with his fingers.

“Come on baby, one more time, give me one more.”

She whimpered, her forehead pressed to his collarbone as she felt her release approach like a tide drawing in. It was almost painful, her body sensitive, and his voice driving into her like a blade, stripping her apart.

She bucked against him as it drew closer, a small gasp falling from her lips as he groaned under her, the sound moving through the both of them, and her walls fluttering around him in response.

”That's it, come on, come for me, I want to feel you.”

The words mixed with the soft press of his fingers and the pulsing fullness inside her pushed her over and the sound that came out of her was loud, broken and nothing like she had ever made before. She felt him still beneath her, then a deep groan moved through him and she felt him pulse inside her, a small, rhythmic beat that felt like a second heartbeat, and she pressed her face into his chest, breathing him in, her own body still shaking slightly from her own breaking, still twitching around him.

The spot he had touched that broke her apart was pulsing with each aftershock, and she found her hips still kept moving slightly.

The shape of it inside her was warm and uncareful, and the broken open sound he made for her — yours, yours, all of it, yours in the rhythm of his hips — caught her on the edge she had been balanced on and pulled her over with him.

His hands came around her, holding her against him, his breaths heavy and loud against her ear.

It did not belong to her mother’s hammock.

It belonged to him.

It belonged to her.

For a long while afterward, there was no language.

There was only the slow careful work of their breath finding itself again. He had drawn her down onto his chest, his hands wrapped around her. Her cheek lay over his heart, the steady rhythm of it beating against her ear. His hand pressed against her back, running small ticklish lines up and down her spine.

She listened to him breathe.

His breath was loud, even after enough time passed for it to settle, it was loud.

She smiled into his chest where he could not see it. Loud. Of course it was loud. It had always been going to be loud, every breath he had ever taken in his life.

He shifted under her.

He drew her up his chest so that her face was level with his and he could look at her. The blue light caught at the wet at his eyelashes. He had been crying, she realised, somewhere in the middle of it — quietly. She had not realised. The tears tracked down into his hair, and she followed the dark paths down his temple with her eyes. She didn’t say anything. She only put her thumb to the wet at the corner of his eye and held it there.

He closed his eyes.

He drew her hand against his mouth and pressed a light kiss against her fingers.

"The first time," she said. In Na'vi. Quietly. "You were quiet."

His eyes opened.

He looked at her for a long beat. She watched the small careful gathering in his face as he understood that she had finally said the thing — that she had been carrying it the whole time, and had only now, in the after, set it down between them.

"I know," he said. In Na'vi. Very softly. "Ngaytxoa."

She shook her head once.

She did not need that word from him here. She put her hand flat over his mouth — gently, only for a heartbeat — No more apologies tonight. I have you. I have heard you. We will not speak of it again.

He closed his eyes.

Three days of bracing went out of him in one long slow ebb and this time she did not have to watch for it. She lay along the length of him and felt it move through them both.

Outside the curtain of pale tendrils, somewhere in the wider basin, the clans were sharpening arrows for the burning of the world.

Inside the hollow, a man she loved was breathing loud against her hair and for a moment the sound of him blocked out the rest.

She closed her eyes.

She listened.