Hey guys! Sorry this chapter uploaded weird! Hopefully it's fixed now!
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Leaving Trudy, Grace, and Norm on the cliff of the Hallelujah Mountains felt wrong, just like splitting from Tsu'tey, Neytiri, and Eytukan had felt wrong.
It was human—to want to keep everything within reach, within eyesight—the desire to protect them sitting like a twisting weight in his chest.
But Trudy was having none of it, when he hesitated, the Toruk's talons gripping against the rocky soil.
"Go," she'd said, shooing him away like he was being bothersome—her dark, braided hair shining with the light just starting to crest over the horizon. "We'll be fine. I'll let you know if we run into trouble."
She tapped at the radio in her ear, and Jake nodded—words sticking against his throat.
His friends waved as he finally dropped away from the edge, like it was just another day, like they didn't know he might not ever see them again.
"This is Juliet," Jake said into his mic, "Charlie, Alpha, and Sierra have been dropped off at location, moving into position now."
The call signs had been Norms idea, not much use in Jake's opinion, as Na'vi alone should have been enough of an obstacle should anyone from the RDA tap onto their frequency. But better safe than sorry.
"This is Romeo," Tsu'tey's voice crackled in Jake's ear, soothing his nerves, "my team is at location."
"This is November," Neytiri voice sounded, coming out tinny and sharp through the earpiece, "enforcements have arrived, my team is moving to location—just waiting for your signal, Juliet."
Jake nodded, even though none of them could see it, as he looked out across the canopy stretched out before him. The sky was stained gold, clear and peaceful and quiet. If he let himself, Jake might've thought it they'd gotten it wrong, that the sun would rise, the day would start, and nothing would happen at all.
It was a nice thought, if only for a moment, until the edges of the sky—gold and peaceful—darkened with distant shadows.
"This is Juliet," Jake said, forcing words through his throat as it tried to close around itself. He looked down, past the broad shoulders of the Toruk, and felt some relief to see the Tree of Souls just ahead—its branches peppered with the cool, earth tones of ikran wings. "I've reached the target. Looks like it's just in time, too."
"This is Charlie, I see 'em too," Trudy added, the sound of her Samson drowning out the edges of her voice, "got eyes on at least five. All transport, no gunners. I'll have the tin can out of sight before they start closing in."
Jake managed to touch down, the Toruk's large claws balancing them across the canopy, just as the distant shadows began to take shape in the horizon.
"As far as we can tell, their plan is to drop off the 'dozers, suits, and troops about a mile off, where the canopy cover is thinner," Grace's voice sounded in his ear, the radio static making it more gravely than normal.
After that, the line went quiet, and there was nothing more they could do but sit and wait for the right moment.
It seemed to take hours, each second dragging on into days, as Jake watched the transport ships grow closer.
Watching that crawling approach, though, was nothing compared to the time Jake then spent watching each tiny black dot fall from the belly of those great metal beasts.
The bulldozers had dropped first, their breech through the canopy cover announced by the plumb of creatures taking flight—fleeing from the crash that vibrated the air seconds later.
He wanted to give the word then, had wanted to give it since he could first make out the sharp edges of the ships.
No matter how much he wanted to, though, no matter how much it made his skin itch—he had to wait.
So he waited, watching as the mech suits dropped next, each one filing out of their transport like heavy, clumsy baby birds leaping from their nest.
He wondered, as he watched them disappear beneath the trees, which ones were on their side. He didn't have long to think on it—however long it may have felt to him—before there were no more suits left to fall, and there were only ground troops left to rappel down into the depths of the forest.
He waited, sweat beading at his temples, pooling in his palms, until the last trooper—little more than a dark pin point in the middle distance—had leapt from the ship.
"This is Juliet," Jake said, his mouth dry, lips bitten bloody, "the enemy has been deployed."
For all his waiting, Jake didn't give himself another moment to think as the Toruk spread its great wings and launched itself from the treetops.
That was all the signal the warriors sat atop their ikrans needed—rising from the limbs of the Tree of Spirits in a swirling mass of color—to follow just inside the shadow of the Toruk.
It wasn't hard to locate the convoy with the bulldozers leveling any trees in their path—like an open, gapping wound.
If the world had slowed to a crawl before, it was making up for the lost time now.
Seconds slipped through Jake's hands like water, each moment passing him in a blur of green and gold. He was moving fast, so fast, he must have left his body behind—trailing him like a shadow. He wondered if his lungs kept on drawing in air, if his heart kept beating, without him there to tell them to do so.
He thought he would feel panic, fear, something, but there wasn't time.
His body was far behind him, trailing in the wind, in the treetops blown asunder, in the sunlight. He didn't know sweat beaded at his temples, didn't know his heartbeat echoed in the hollows of his throat. No, the Jake that sat atop the Toruk—the great hungry beast that was diving, diving, diving, away from the sunlight, towards the treetops falling like blades of grass beneath careless feet—the Jake who braced himself against skin pulled against the ridges of a spine, who dug his heels against a shoulder blade and threw himself willingly into open, unforgiving air, was a man stripped bare.
The man that dragged numb finger tips against the neck of the beast who was him and he it—in thanks, in apology, in perhaps-goodbye—was not the same as the one whose eyes had opened to the grey morning light. No heart beat against his ribs, no lungs dragged in air, no panic closed like a noose around his throat, no fear lapped at his bones like ocean waves.
He couldn't, couldn't be something heavy, something real. Not if he wanted to touch the ground and run without stumbling.
The pads of his feet hit the hard, cool metal of the bulldozer—though they were thick with callouses, he still felt the sting of the impact, somewhere in the back of his mind.
The hammer, tucked beneath the ties of his loincloth, was in his hand—the weight of it pulling against the muscles of his forearm—already swinging through the air before he realized he was moving.
When the blunt stone tip cracked against the glass lens of the bulldozer's camera, he didn't hear it, so much as he felt it in his bones.
Jake was blind to the world around him, deaf to the screams and crunch of glass and metal beneath his feet.
He didn't feel the grass when he leapt down from the machine he'd just left as blind as him, didn't feel the bite of the edge against his palms as he clawed his way up the side of the next one.
He didn't hear the bullets that rushed past his ears, the ones that pinged against metal.
There was nothing but the weight in his hand and the cracks against his bones, again and again and again, as he leapt and clawed his way across the battlefield.
When the last bulldozer slowed to a stop, blind and useless, Jake fell back into himself in pieces.
He blinked, like he was waking up from a dream, and looked down.
He'd left a trail of blood, splatters and footprints and smudges across panels. It dripped from his fingers, ran from his knees, pooled at his feet, but it didn't feel like his.
The world around him was vibrating, blurring, blooming with smoke and sound, too big, too loud, too much.
Jake was falling back into himself in pieces—metal and glass hung, suspended in the air—the world was still and unimaginably quiet, waiting for him to catch up.
Forever can be held in the palm of your hand, if you let it, you know.
Time had stopped, moments ago, when air rushed past Jake's ears, when he fell and fell and fell, when calloused feet met metal.
It started again when a sound, like thunder, like the crust of the earth cracking, burst against his ear.
For a moment, that's all the world was—one singular, enormous, impossible sound.
Then Jake stumbled.
His hand rose, to where the sound had lit his skin aflame with the enormity of it, the sound that sharpened, crescendoed to one last drawn out, forever note, then it was gone, and Jake wasn't to know—not then, not just yet—that it would be the last thing that half of his world would ever hear again.
Jake's hand rose, and came back glistening a crimson so dark it was nearly black.
Jake had fallen back into himself in pieces, and the price of that borrowed time was not coming back whole.
This time, when Jake's feet hit grass, he felt it. When he reached down and wrapped his fingers in the ballistics vest of the ground trooper whose wild, scattered aim had sent him stumbling back into the world all at once, he felt every fiber of Kevlar catch against the torn, broken, bleeding pads of his fingers.
Jake felt the weight pull against his forearm as he lifted the man up high, high, high into the air, so much heavier than the hammer, but his body sang against the sky just as much, before Jake felt the crack of his body against metal vibrate through his bones.
The ground didn't tremble when the man slid, broken, torn, bloody, down the side of the last bulldozer to crumple in the dirt. But Jake felt it all the same, like he'd felt each echo of hollow metal against skin and blood and bone.
"This is November."
Jake startled at the sound, at Neytiri's voice crackling against his other ear—like he'd already forgotten that noise could be anything other than pain.
"All allies have been identified, only hostiles remain."
For the first time, Jake lifted his eyes and blinked away the narrowness of his vision.
He might've been surprised, if he'd felt more like himself, rather than pieces fashioned back into some approximate shape of him, at the number of mech-suits and troopers running past him, away from them, back the way their slow, crashing advance had started. He managed to focus just enough to look into their faces as they passed in a blur, just enough to see the whites of their eyes—wide, wild, afraid.
The ones that remained, stupid, stubborn, cowards who thought themselves brave, were few—fewer once the warriors Jake had led there started picking up troops like rabbits caught in the talons of hawks.
Those paltry few were handled quickly, easily, with arrow tips, with blunt, stone tips of heavy hammers, with torn, broken, bloody hands.
When the battle was finished—minutes, hours later, it didn't matter—marked by the sound of the last mech-suit teetering, crashing into the dirt, it's visor smashed—the world fell into silence once more and Jake had nothing to ground him but the mask he'd ripped off the drivers face, held delicately in his hands, stained and dripping with blood that had once belonged to him, but did not feel like his.