Na'vi...A Tsu'tey FF

Log Entry: 12

After a week, Jake was finally ready. Nyami was happy for him, but also worried. The practice of Iknimaya, to ride a banshee, or die trying, was a dangerous act. She got through it fine, but Jake wasn't as tough as her. He never had been. It was always her defending him as a child. It was her beating up his bullies when he was a teenager. It was her ordering him around in the marines. Now, it would be her, a hunter, protecting him from the dangers of Pandora. Jake was neglecting his health again. Nyami could never prevent this. She knew how he felt. Like being with Tsu'tey was reality and this world was fiction.

Lying in the link, Jake looked exhausted, pale, and thin. Norm helped Nyami get him to his chair. "You're still losing weight. Here." She hands him a microwaved burrito. He looks at the now alien food. Bites into it without enthusiasm.
"I made a kill today. We ate it. I know where that meal came from." Jake said.
"That was your avatar. You need to take care of this body too." Grace lectured.
"Yeah yeah."
"Jake, she's serious, you look like crap. You're burning too hard." Grace warned. Jake takes the cigarette out of her mouth and stubs it out.
"Get rid of this shit, then you can lecture me." Nyami stepped up.
"I'm asking you, as your best friend and sister, to take some down time." Nyami persuaded. Jake sighed. "Not now. Tomorrow we leave for Iknimaya."
Grace walks past Jake, starts making herself coffee. "Yeah, you're gonna go ride a banshee. Or die trying."
"That's right, Grace. This is what I've been working for."
"And this is your check up from the neck up, Marine. You're getting in way too deep." She turned away from them. "Trust me, I learned the hard way." Jake scans the pictures tacked up around Grace's workstation.
"What happened at the school?" Grace looks up from making coffee. Her eyes track across the pictures of the laughing children.
"Neytiri's sister, Sylwanin, stopped coming to school. She was angry about the clear-cutting." Grace sips her coffee, grimaces at the taste. "One day, she and a couple of other young hunters came running in, all painted up. They'd set a bulldozer on fire. I guess they thought I could protect them." Grace's voice stays oddly calm as she tells the terrible story, while getting milk out of the refrigerator. "The troopers pursued them to the schoolhouse." As she poured the milk, her hand started shaking. "They killed Sylwanin in the doorway. Right in front of Neytiri. Then shot the others.I got most of the kids out, before they shot me."
"Jesus." Jake gasped.
Nyami stood, looking down. Will Jake and her bring that kind of destruction and devastation to the Omaticaya Clan?
"Yeah." Grace whispered. Nyami realizes that Grace is on the verge of tears and desperately trying to hide it. "A scientist stays objective, we can not be ruled by emotion. But I poured ten years of my life into that school. They called me sa'atenuk. Mother. That kind of pain reaches back through the link." Grace sits down at the table, looks intently at Jake. "It's a job. Learn what you can, but don't get attached." Grace looks at him with real pain in her eyes. "It's not our world, Jake. And we can't stop what's coming."

Nyami understood why Grace was directing her lecture toward Jake. He was allegedly working for the Colonel. Nyami didn't believe that. Nearly everyone at that base hated the Na'vi. Jake didn't. So why would he work with the Colonel? Nyami took what Grace said and really thought about it. She loved being part of the Omaticaya Clan, but was her loving it enough to save them? Or was it enough for her to draw away from them? Nyami couldn't be sure of what the future held. She was sure of her feelings though. Her feelings for the children who ran to her for attention. For Tsyal, who accepted her for who and what she was. Her feelings for Tsu'tey. She wasn't sure how long she had, but she knew she had to plan and train harder.