Thanks to everyone who read and reviewed. Apparently this is going to end up being a little longer than I planned…not sure quite how long since I didn't do an outline before I started it (since this was supposed to be short), but I figure there are at least a couple conversations Jake and Tsu'tey should probably have before they can actually be friends, and I had a couple activities to throw in as well.
There is a little bad language in this chapter; Jake isn't the most polite person in the world when he's hurt.
/speech/ = Na'vi
Tsu'tey hissed. Sky People had no sense. First this one tells him that the tolerable one, who was also Tsu'tey's most reliable link to his clan, at the moment, had been injured by a Titanothere, and then, rather than giving details, he asks if Tsu'tey wants food?
/Explain,/ he ordered sharply. A Titanothere could easily kill an adult Na'vi—if he was stupidly unobservant, anyway—and the Sky People were barely bigger than half-grown children. And it wasn't as though Jakesully could get out of its way…what in Eywa's name would a man who couldn't even use his legs be doing anywhere near a Titanothere anyway?
/It's…don't worry, he'll be fine. He went out scouting and ran into a young male split off from its herd. Fortunately, it just sent him flying rather than stomping him, but Jake was still knocked around some, and then he got another dose of hydrogen sulfide poisoning on top of that. Between the two, he was kind of loopy when he finally made it back to base—loopy enough to need help, and Jake does not like asking for help—so the healers are saying that he's not supposed to leave his room until tomorrow at the earliest./ He shrugged slightly. /I think they'd rather have kept him in medical, but he was being really uncooperative./
/Scouting for what? He's useless in that body./ It would make more sense for him to stay indoors and out of trouble.
/Jake's not useless,/ the man responded instantly, looking surprisingly offended.
Tsu'tey stared. Had this idiot not noticed that Jakesully's legs were nonfunctional? So far the only redeeming quality he seemed to possess was that he spoke acceptable Na'vi.
/Maybe he's not running any footraces,/ the man continued, /but he does just fine. And it's not like any of the rest of us have any experience with mines./
Tsu'tey saw no reason why it would take any experience whatsoever to deal with a giant hole, but he had no wish to prolong this conversation any further so he settled for a sneer. /I wish to see him./
/I don't think he's in the mood for company./
/I wish to see him./ Tsu'tey repeated, putting the snap of command into his voice. It wasn't as though he had particularly wanted company the majority of the times that Jakesully had come to visit him, after all.
The man stared for a minute and then shrugged. /Well, I guess we can ask. Just drop that 'useless' crap; I think he already got enough of that today./ He started to turn back towards the door and then paused. /Um, do you want…?/ He held up the tray again.
Tsu'tey took it and set it behind him on the cot. He could eat later.
The Sky People's building was…awkward…at best, for a Na'vi to travel through, which was why Tsu'tey hadn't spent more than a few minutes exploring on his own after the healers had given him the crutch. If he'd been uninjured, it would have been easier; he could have moved about in a full crouch as though he were scouting. That was probably what the healers were doing when they visited. Unfortunately, with the need to keep his injured leg as straight as possible, he ended up having to walk with his back and shoulders severely hunched just to keep from hitting his head on the ceiling. It was an awkward and somewhat painful posture to hold for any length of time. He could see rooms off to the sides where, like the room he was currently staying in, the ceilings were considerably higher, but in the corridors it was not so. /This is ridiculous./
He'd meant the comment to be private, but the Sky Person walking—easily—beside him answered anyway. /It's because of the air…./ He paused, and then switched languages. "Because of the air reclamation systems. Sorry, I don't know 'reclamation' in Na'vi." A shrug. /The filters and stuff that let us breathe here are built between levels, mostly over the corridors./
How they breathed wasn't of any particular interest to Tsu'tey—he might be able to tolerate the air in here, but that didn't mean that he liked it—but he grunted in acknowledgment.
They turned down yet another corridor with an absurdly low ceiling, this one lined with gray doors, and the man paused in front of the second one and then knocked his hand against it lightly. "Jake? It's Norm. You awake?"
"No. Go away."
"Well, at least he didn't throw anything," the man—Norm, not Norn, apparently—muttered before raising his voice again. "Tsu'tey's up and around. He wanted to see you."
There was a pause, and then, still less than happily, "Fine."
Norm pushed the door open and stepped inside, followed by Tsu'tey. "Hey," Norm greeted. "You feeling any better?"
Jakesully gave him a dark look. "I feel like I bashed my head against a couple metal posts and then had the docs bitching at me about it for two hours straight. Oh, wait, that's right. That pretty much describes my afternoon." He grimaced and then pushed himself into a sitting position on the cot that he'd been lying on.
"Uh, are you supposed to be moving around?"
Another glare was directed at Norm, and then with a wince Jakesully pulled himself around until his back rested against the wall. "What the docs don't know won't hurt them." He glanced over Norm's shoulder at Tsu'tey and then a flicker of something that might have been amusement crossed his face. "Not that I really wouldn't prefer that the two of you went somewhere else, seeing as how you're disturbing the marching band in my skull, but if you're planning to stick around, you better have a seat before you hurt yourself."
Tsu'tey wasn't entirely sure what a marching band was supposed to be, but the room was ridiculously small—small enough that the discomfort that he felt wasn't just from having to keep his upper body hunched—and after a minute he folded himself down into a sitting position onto the unoccupied cot, keeping his injured leg outstretched.
"I actually can't stay," Norm said. "I'm supposed to take over radio watch from Max in about ten minutes." He turned to Tsu'tey. /Will you be able to find your way back on your own?/
/I will be fine./ Probably. The Sky People hadn't been particularly creative about decorating the endlessly-similar walls of their building, which might make navigation somewhat difficult, but they hadn't taken that many turns to get here.
/Goodnight, then./ Norm grinned as he turned back to Jakesully. "Night, Jake. Don't fall out of bed and break an arm on top of everything else, all right? The docs would just love that."
"You're hilarious. Really. Just remember that I know where you sleep."
Norm rolled his eyes and left the room.
Jakesully rubbed his forehead as he returned his attention to Tsu'tey. "Well, at least one of us is getting better, I guess. How's your leg?"
"Fine. What happened? Why would you bother a Titanothere? Especially in that body." There were oddly colored marks on his face and arms, and a pack was once again strapped to his upper arm, but there were no other obvious injuries. Or, at least, no new obvious injuries. Which was better than Tsu'tey had expected, really.
"Well, for one this is the body I've got right now, and for another he started it, but it was mostly stupidity on my part." The disgust in his voice was obvious. "Well, stupidity all around, I guess, but on my part especially." He sighed and rubbed his forehead again before dropping his hand back into his lap. "You know that the colonel set up a kill zone on the approach to the base, right?"
'Kill zone' was an appropriate name for what the man had done—Tsu'tey had seen the carcasses of the animals killed when they crossed that invisible threshold lying in the sun rotting without even an attempt made to gather their meat—and he grimaced.
"We've got the weapon controls here, so at least they aren't going to start blasting anything without someone's okay, but it turns out that at some point he went and mined the whole area too. Couple hundred of the damn things, minimum. Maybe more, it's hard to say." He shook his head and then winced, leaning it back against the wall again. "Personally, if I was going to mine that big an area, I'd go for discouragement rather than destruction, but then again, I'm sane."
Tsu'tey shook his head. "There are not hundreds of mines." As much as he hated seeing the deep holes in the land, even he would not claim that the Sky People had made that many of them.
Jakesully frowned. "Yes, there are."
"There are not. Mines are large, and my eyes are good." Just because he didn't like the Sky People didn't mean that he and his warriors hadn't kept a careful eye on them.
"Mines are…?" He frowned slightly. "Wait, you're talking about the Unobtainium-gathering mines, aren't you?"
"The holes, yes. That is a mine." He was quite certain of that fact.
"That's one kind of mine," Jakesully agreed. "And knowing Grace, it's probably the only kind that ever came up in English class. Hell, it's probably the only kind she ever thought of. Unfortunately, the kind of mine I'm talking about is a weapon. They're…oh, say about this big around, on average," he held up his hands, sketching out a roughly circular shape in the air, "although the kind the colonel used are a little larger than the most of the ones I saw back on Earth. They go down in the dirt, hidden, and when someone or something steps on one and triggers it, it explodes. The kill zone varies depending on type, but it's usually safe to assume that whoever stepped on it is toast—dead—and there's going to be some collateral damage to anyone close." He frowned again. "Well, actually I doubt even the most souped-up mines out there could kill a Titanothere or a Thantor, but anything, say, direhorse size or smaller, probably wouldn't survive."
Which included any Na'vi. Tsu'tey felt his jaw clench. "Hundreds of these?"
"Two or three hundred, at least. I figure he set them up in case there was a counterattack here while they were going after Hometree. But the damn things are corroding—either because of the atmosphere or because they're just cheap, I don't know—and that is not a good thing. It means you don't even have to step on one to set it off, just shaking the ground around it will do it. Maybe a dozen of the ones down by the river went off early yesterday morning, which is how we found out they were there in the first place." He shrugged slightly. "Talia, an animal behavior specialist, thinks it was a viperwolf pack local to the area that started them off, and then they were daisy-chained upstream from there, but considering that there's nothing left to examine, it's hard to say."
"Day-see-chain?" His understanding of the Sky People language was good, but he was beginning to think that he should have put some focus on their military terms.
"Daisy-chain…it means several mines on the same trigger. Or possibly one just caused enough of a disturbance to trigger another which triggered a third and so on. That kind of thing is easy to do when the triggers get corroded." He looked away. "If even half of the rest are in the same shape, we're going to have to torch that whole area just to get rid of them."
"No." Bad enough that there had been destruction of most of the trees and much of the other plant life on the approach to the base; he would not see it burned clear.
"Yeah, well, I don't like it either, but we might not have a choice. You can lay mines relatively quickly with the right kind of machine, but picking them back up once they're armed is a pain in the ass. And if they're corroded enough to go off at proximity, it'll be too damned dangerous to even try."
Tsu'tey hissed. Hadn't the Sky People done enough damage to the planet?
"I went out today to try and sort out if we could at least get some of them up or if it was a total lost cause," Jakesully continued. "Was on the opposite side of the field from the river—I figured that's where the most stable mines were likely to be—doing some scans on the first mine I found, and the next thing I know I'm airborne. Titanothere came out of nowhere and sent me flying."
/Blind moron./ Titanotheres were easy to see if one was paying attention.
However poor his spoken Na'vi was, Tsu'tey knew that both of those words were in Jakesully's vocabulary, but he just rolled his eyes. "Yeah, thanks. I sort of didn't figure there'd be anything in the area since the colonel had been keeping the kill zone clear, but obviously I was wrong."
/Moron,/ he repeated. Never assume.
"You said that already."
"Why not send one of the others? One who's not broken." One who might have been able to get out of the way once the Titanothere appeared.
Jakesully's expression went hard. "Drop the 'broken' shit, I manage just fine. Someone needed to check the mines, and since I'm the only one here who's ever dealt with them before—or at least the only one on our side who has—I was the best candidate."
"But your legs don't work." Did no one here recognize that? It seemed obvious enough to him.
"Congratulations, you really do have good eyes." There was definite anger in his tone. "Like I said, I manage. AMPs can be set to run entirely from the hand controls, and there's not a damn thing wrong with my arms or my brain."
Tsu'tey privately doubted that, given that he'd missed a Titanothere approaching, but Jakesully continued speaking before he could say anything.
"Anyway, I'm pretty sure after the Titanothere sent me flying it kicked the mine—at least I'm hoping it wasn't just the stomping around that set the damn thing off—and the explosion scared it away. Unfortunately, when the AMP hit the ground I bounced around in the harness some." He indicated the marks on his face and arms. "And the shield got cracked too, although I'm not sure if that was the Titanothere's fault or if it was shrapnel from the mine. I got my emergency mask on as soon as I realized containment had been breached, but not before I got a whiff of the air." He shrugged. "Multiple episodes of hydrogen sulfide poisoning in a short period of time is the kind of thing that upsets docs even without a rattled skull, so they're fussing at me to stay inside for awhile."
"You don't plan to?"
"I've had enough doctors dictating to me what I can't do for one lifetime." The anger hadn't faded from his voice, and he gave Tsu'tey a disgusted look. "One of them kept pointing out that I'm 'broken' too…if I listened to that kind of crap, I'd probably spend the rest of my life sitting in a corner knitting or something." He shook his head and then winced, raising a hand to his forehead again. "I'll give myself a couple days to heal up—I'm not stupid—but I'm not going sit around waiting for that whole field to go up on fire on its own, either. Not without at least trying to do something about it. I'll be more careful next time."
Tsu'tey snorted. "You'll still be blind." And broken. He stared for a minute, considering. "How did you get…damaged?"
That got another glare, although this time there seemed to be some amusement as well as anger behind it. "You know, 'damaged' isn't really a whole hell of a lot better than 'broken.' The word is 'paralyzed.' Which, for the record, isn't all that great either, but at least it's better than the other two."
"That, then." Although 'broken' seemed accurate enough to him.
Jakesully stared at him for a long minute and then shrugged. "I got shot. I'd say it's not a lot of fun, but you've probably figured that out for yourself."
Tsu'tey snorted in acknowledgment. There was still some slight pain in his abdomen when he moved too quickly. "It happened here?" It seemed unlikely that he would willingly join the Na'vi if one of them had done that to him, but….
"What? No. It happened in a place called Venezuela, back on Earth." He went silent for a minute, and then, "My squad was assigned to take out a munitions depot in hostile territory. The area was pretty hot, we knew that going in, but it wasn't the worst situation we'd ever been sent into. Drop went fine, but then we couldn't have gone more than a hundred yards from the LZ before everything went to hell. I don't know if anyone ever decided whether someone tipped them off about us going in, or if they managed to track the energy signature of the bird—the stealth systems are good, but nothing's perfect—but we ended up walking right into an ambush. One second I'm on point and we're advancing, and then the next thing I know bullets are going everywhere, I'm on the ground, and no matter what I do I can't get back up. One of the guys told me afterward that a sniper on the ridge got me, but I don't even remember being hit."
"You got out," Tsu'tey pointed out. He hadn't understood all the terminology, but he understood the gist of the situation well enough, and it was not one in which he would expect many survivors.
"Yeah, well, fortunately it wasn't a very good ambush. Which, considering that the guys we were up against weren't exactly amateurs probably does mean it was something they threw together quickly rather than an operation planned in advance. They set it up too close to the LZ—uh, that's landing zone, by the way—and launched it too soon after we dropped, especially since they didn't seem to have any anti-air capability with them…once we knew that they knew we were there, the choppers dropped stealth and started shooting. Bought us enough time to fall back for evac. Or be dragged back in my case." He looked away. "Those of us that were still alive, anyway. It might not have been a good ambush, but in terms of body count it didn't go so badly for them either. Anyway, when I woke up in the hospital I found out that the shot that took me down blasted a hole right through my spinal cord—which I kind of need to use my lower body—so…well, here I sit."
Tsu'tey cocked his head slightly. "You had been in many battles, then. Before here." He'd rather suspected something of the sort when they had been talking about battle strategies to the other clans, but this was the first time that he had a chance to confirm it.
That got a half-grin, dispersing the dark look that had crossed his face when he'd mentioned the dead. "Quite a few, yeah. I joined the marines right out of school. Although the battle here definitely takes points for being the oddest."
"What do you mean?"
"If you'd told me a couple years ago that anyone could take out mecha and shuttles with bows and arrows and help from the local wildlife, I'd have called you crazy. Ten feet tall or not, that's pretty damn impressive."
Tsu'tey smirked. "Sky people are rather small and poorly built."
"I'd just like to point out that I have plenty of things to throw and excellent aim."
He considered for a moment. "I believe the other Dreamwalker, Norm, expected you to throw something when we were at your door. Do you do that often?"
Jakesully rolled his eyes. "I might have pitched a glass at that idiot doc when he tried to force me to stay in medical earlier. But I missed—intentionally—and anyway I'd already told him twice that I knew damn well what limits my 'condition' placed on me, so he pretty much had it coming when he brought it up yet again."
Tsu'tey had to admit that he'd had similar temptations when the Na'vi healers refused to let a subject drop, although it did remind him of his first thought when he'd realized that Jakesully's legs didn't work. "Why did you choose to live like that?"
"Well, I'd prefer not to be paralyzed, but getting my spine fixed wasn't an option, so…." He trailed off with a frown. "Wait, you're asking why I didn't off—kill—myself, aren't you? Is that normal around here?"
"I would not say 'normal,' but then that is not a normal injury."
"Jeez, I'm glad I didn't get paralyzed here, then." He shrugged slightly. "I guess I can't say the idea never crossed my mind, especially during those first couple weeks. I mean, this isn't exactly how I planned to live my life. But if the bad guys didn't manage to get rid of me, I'm sure as hell not going to just give up and do the job for them. Sure, there are things I'd like to be able to do that I can't, but..."
"Is that why you decided to come here, then? To have a body that fully works again?" He supposed that that made some sort of sense.
Jakesully gave a slight shake of his head, going silent for a minute, but he then answered in the affirmative. "Yeah, sure. Something like that, anyway. Look, it really does feel like there's a drummer settling in in my skull, so I'd probably better get some rest. I can call Norm and get him to send someone to show you where the radio is, if you want."
Tsu'tey frowned. Jakesully had seemed fine a moment before, speaking about how he'd been injured, but now his face was blank and he clearly didn't want to continue the conversation. It seemed rather odd. But then again, it wasn't as though Tsu'tey knew anything about Sky Person head injuries, and he did wish to speak to someone at Hometree, so he nodded. "Yes."
Tsu'tey checked the corridor carefully. He was fairly certain that this was the correct location, but the Sky People were absurdly uncreative when it came to decoration, and during the multiple trips he'd made last night—his room to Jakesully's, Jakesully's to the radio, and the radio back to his own room—he'd become somewhat disoriented with regards to what was where.
But there was a line of gray doors in front of him, and…. He stepped to the second and raised his hand to knock lightly, only to pause as he heard Neytiri's voice. Which confirmed that he was in the right place; she came to visit on occasion when the healers did, and it made sense that she would speak to Jakesully while she was here. He was not certain that he wished to deal with the two of them together just yet, though. It had been one thing when he'd had battle plans to occupy his thoughts, but now…now was a different time.
The door flew open abruptly, before he could make a decision, and his option of turning and leaving without making his presence known was suddenly gone.