Author's Note: This is the World's Most Overdue Help_Haiti fic, but now it's finished. Many, many thanks to Websandwhiskers, a patroness as generous as she is patient. Thanks also to my fabulous beta-readers, Rexluscus, Stasia and IshyMaria, who saw me through this drawn-out process.

"SHIT SHIT SHIT!" snarled Trudy Chacon as her Samson took the first shot. She wasn't afraid: she knew she didn't have time to be, not now. Her wounded mount shuddered as it took more fire. "SHIT SHIT SHIT FUCK!" She was going down. There was no hope for it. "At least it's a pretty place to die…"

Without thinking, she flicked on the mic. "Norm, I love you."

Christ, had she really just said that on an open channel? She better really be dead, for the amount of ragging she was going to take. She slapped her mask on, slammed the emergency eject and prayed.

The gunship exploded in a ball of fire underneath her.

They say that, in the few seconds before you die, your entire life flashes before your eyes. There were large chunks that she could've done without seeing again. Dad and Lisbet dying of their burns when she pulled them out onto the roof, out of the storm surge. That awful patch in the Badlands where Gropo had bought it. Mom's face when she got her diagnosis.

But then, neither was it all bad. There was that moment, on the trip to Luna, when they broke above the smogline for the first time and she saw all that pure, pure blue. There was that thing that Gropo used to do with her tongue.

And there was Norm.

The exact moment she fell in love with him came into sharp focus. He'd gotten a bottle of wine from God-knows-where - real wine, not alcosynth, not that marginally sublethal hooch that the miners distilled - and while Jake and Grace were out in the field, he'd set up a vidscreen under one of the windows at the shack, with cushions around it. He'd put on some old 2-D movie, and they drank the wine and watched it while lying in each other's arms.

She looked up at one point and saw that he was staring out the window. He noticed her glance, and explained. "I had to take this lit class - all this poetry about wine and women in the moonlight. I've never actually experienced it before…"

Something in his eyes took her breath away. "That's not a moon, it's a planet."

"Close enough," he said, and kissed her.

Dammit, she was going to die without knowing how that movie ended.

This struck her as extraordinarily funny. She was still laughing when the world went black.

—

Waking up, now, that was a surprise.

She blinked at the white light, and tried to look around.

It hurt.

She was in… sickbay?

She looked over at the bed next to hers. A familiar figure lay awkwardly on it.

"Norm…?" she asked. Her tongue felt like sandpaper.

Her voice shocked Norm out of a sound sleep. He jumped up, tangled in his sheets, and fell off the bed. He scrambled up and kissed her hard. "Oh my God, my God. You're alive… I love you. God, Trudy, I love you."

As gratifying as this was, she was confused and feeling like she'd been run over by a bulldozer. What was going on?

"All right - yeah, I'm alive... What the hell happened?" She started to push herself up on the bed.

"No, wait! Not until you get checked out… Max! Max! She's awake!" He ran off.

Exhausted by this minor effort, she slumped back down. She was left alone for a few minutes; this was more than unusual. There should've been a bunch of duty nurses and (at least on Pandora, anyway) an entire ward of recovering patients. Dr. Patel hurried in, yawning and rubbing his eyes. "Wow, Trudy, it's good to have you back." He began to examine her, waving a light in her eyes. "How do you feel? Are you in any pain?"

"What happened?" asked Trudy.

"What's the last thing you remember?"

The last thing she remembered was… was talking to Max on the comm. Right. "Quaritch was rigging a bomb to destroy the Well of Souls. We were going to war."

Norm shot Max a panicked look. Max held up his hands reassuringly. "Memory loss is completely normal after a major trauma. It may or may not be temporary. Trudy, you were pretty beat up when they brought you in. We got you started on nanos right away, but it took them nearly two months to repair all the damage."

Two months! And since when did a mere pilot rate nanotech treatments? "Nanos? I hope to hell we won, or I'm going to be in debt forever. What happened to me?"

Norm grabbed her hand. "We won, baby."

"What?"

Norm recounted the tale as Max continued her physical exam. He told her of the battle, about Eywa entering the fight. He told of her heroism, about how she hit the Dragon. She tried to concentrate, but his words were making her head spin. They'd actually won? Jake was Na'vi? Selfridge and everyone else were on their way back to Earth? And God in Heaven, she really wasn't dead. A stabbing throb started up behind her eyes; it was getting to be too much.

Max caught on right away; the stress began to show on the monitors. "Norm, back off. An information dump isn't going to help."

"Right… sorry." Norm settled down, but kept the death grip on her hand.

Max ran her through the standard battery of tests - remember three objects, count backwards from ten, name the CEO of RDA and so forth. She answered mechanically; she was so tired. Why was she tired? She'd just been out for ages! It wasn't fair, but the exhaustion engulfed her, as inexorable as the tide.

"It's okay, Trudy, nanos take a lot out of you. Fatigue is an extremely common aftereffect. It's going to take you some time to recover. If you need to sleep, sleep some more."

"We'll be right here, I promise," said Norm.

She rallied a little. "You go running off with some blue girl and I'm gonna fucking kill you…"

Max and Norm grinned widely: it was the most Trudy thing she'd said up until now. Norm, however, sobered up quickly. "I can't. My avatar got killed."

Her fading consciousness flagged this as something very bad, very bad indeed, but her body overruled her mind. She crashed hard.

—

She slept for another two days.

This awakening was much better than the last. She was able to sit up completely and look around. Max sat alone at the console, going over some data. "So it wasn't just a bad dream, then?" she asked.

Max laughed, and got up to check her over. "Sorry, no. How are you feeling? You should be able to get up today."

"Better. Still trashed, though. Where's Norm?" She submitted wearily to the poking and prodding.

"I convinced him to go get a change of clothes. He's barely left the med center since you were brought in."

"How is he doing?"

Max stopped. "Physically, he's fine."

"Oh no…. What happened? It's the avatar, right?"

"He'd be pissed enough about the avatar dying, but it's not just that. Trudy, he died in it… or rather, it died with him in it. He felt it die. Four avatars got hit. Anderson's had a leg wound – he and it have both healed fine – but Lauren's and Javier's avatars got hit in the head and spine, and Lauren and Javier died of neurogenic shock. Out of the three fatal avatar injuries, Norm is the only one who survived."

Shit. She'd liked Lauren and Javier. "You said that physically, he's fine," she said. "Are you sure?"

"I checked him out as soon as I could. How he didn't fry synapses I'll never know, but he rejoined the fight anyway in a breath mask. It's the psychological damage I'm worried about."

Which, as she well knew, could be worse than a physical wound, and so much harder to heal. She digested this for a second. "What are you doing for him?"

"Nothing. He won't talk about it. Not to anyone. I only know about the nightmares from the nights he spent sleeping here."

Trudy put her head in her hands. "Can you fix the avatar?"

Max shook his head. "No. By the time we found it, it had been partially eaten by viperwolves. I've got the amnio tanks from the ISV, and all the supplies to grow a new one." He nodded over at the large placenta chamber.

"Will that work?"

"We'll find out in six years…"

Anyone who'd spent more than five minutes in Norm's company knew he'd devoted his life to earning a place on the avatar program; losing that on top of additional psychic trauma? She'd have to find out for herself once she got him alone. Not that it sounded like he was willing to talk…. But then, while she was at it, they were marooned light-years from home on a lethal planet, and she was recovering from massive trauma and a two-month medically-induced coma. If she wanted things to worry about, there wasn't a shortage.

Trudy rubbed her temples.

"You okay?" Max asked, watching her carefully.

"Yeah. Just tired." Her stomach rumbled. "And hungry. Got anything to eat?"

Max smiled and flipped the comm switch. "Hey Norm, Sleeping Beauty is up. And wanting some breakfast."

The comm squawked in reply: "I'll be right there!"

Trudy smiled.

They started the tests again, checking her neurological and physiological responses. She got out of bed and took a few steps, with Max as a careful spotter; her limbs felt as heavy as lead, like she was wearing an amp-suit with a nearly-dead generator. She loathed the feeling of weakness, but let Max help her back into bed when she started to falter.

"Well, you're in phenomenal shape, all things considered. We'll have to keep checking, and of course you're going to have to be careful, but you should make a full recovery." He smiled. "Good to have one more human around."

"How many of us stayed?"

"Out of the survivors? Thirty-six."

The base had had a full complement of several thousand. Amazing.

Norm entered with a tray. The smell made her mouth water; it wasn't rations, but actual food. Bacon and eggs and toast and…

"Strawberries? Are those strawberries?" She had only ever seen them in pictures.

"We raided Selfridge's private freezer," Norm explained.

Max grinned. "Norm had to guard those for you with his life."

"I could get used this." She dug in.

"Everyone's been waiting to see you, Trudy. Are you up for visitors?" asked Max.

She grinned ruefully. "I guess I gotta get it over with."

Max smiled, and tapped her chart on the table. "I'll go give them the good news."

As soon as he was gone, Norm spoke. "We really didn't think you'd make it, but we thought you had a better chance with us than on the ship home. We weren't sure what to do, if you'd rather take your chances back on Earth…"

"It's all good." And suddenly, she realized, it really was. "This has got to beat standing trial for treason, right?"

Norm exuded relief. "That's what I figured."

Cheated of the adrenaline of victory, she felt oddly empty. It was taking a while for her mind to wrap around such a momentous event. "How badly are they taking this back home?"

Norm gave a gallows chuckle. "It's a good thing the superluminal can't overheat. We actually got the jump on RDA with the news. I think they were hoping to keep it quiet. Speaking of standing trial for treason - we've all been officially designated as terrorists by the NAFTA countries. We were tried in absentia and publicly sentenced to death, though there's a pretty good chance that will be overturned."

She was expecting that. "Least it'll take the hangman a while to get here." She'd felt a frisson of distress at hearing this, but, as was her wont, she mentally slotted it into the category of "Problems That Need To Be Solved."

"What are we going to do about that?"

"Therein hangs the problem. Or, I should say, problems. We've been doing everything we can to get the news back to everyone at home. If we can get videos of what Quaritch was planning for the Well of Souls, we can have RDA's monopoly broken, and have Pandora declared a sovereign entity by the Interplanetary Commerce Administration. Ameera's talking to everyone she can get ahold of, all the newscorps, all the movers and shakers. She's even managed to make contact with 'The Movement,' which has been useful, but…" He shuddered.

"They're ineffective?"

"No. Just annoying. Ever sat down to dinner with someone from the Fighting Keyboard Militia?"

She groaned. "That bad?"

"They've decided Jake's download is a sign that he's the Second Coming. Literally, no exaggeration."

"Get the fuck out."

"Sad but true. Jake Sully Died for Our Sins and was reborn as a Na'vi to Save Us All."

Trudy snorted.

"They're trying to get together funding for their own avatar program, so that they can fly out here and 'Become One With The People.' We haven't actually told the Na'vi about that part yet, so I'd appreciate it if you didn't mention it to them."

"Oh man… but even if the legal bullshit gets straightened out, that's not going to be enough. They'll send raiders and claim they can't be responsible for piracy."

Norm nodded. "That's the next part. If we can talk to, say, XeWalCo or the Esbux Conglom, we can get a top-of-the-line planetary defense system, teach the Na'vi how to run it – but for that, we need cash."

"Cash? When we're on the biggest -hell, the only- chunk of unobtanium anywhere?"

"Well, let's just say that the Na'vi were… unreceptive to the idea of resuming the mining."

"But it's for their defense!"

"That's the other half of the problem. There's a huge meeting going on just outside the base… they're trying to figure out what to do about us. They're furious at the idea of us mining for more ore, and accusing us of throwing off RDA just to keep the profits for ourselves."

"That's bullshit!"

"Well, yeah, but we've got a really bad track record when it comes to the phrase 'trust us.' The majority of the tribes who actually fought in the battle are on our side… it's mostly the ones who didn't get here in time."

And who were being especially reactionary in response to missing that opportunity. Trudy rolled her eyes. "RDA'll come in with guns blazing. The big guns this time, and to hell with the treaty. Have you told them how out-of-date the equipment we have here is?"

"We've tried. But the prevailing feeling is that the Na'vi beat them once, with Eywa's help, and they can do it again, if necessary. We're doing what we can to build up defenses, and teaching at least the Omaticaya to use the equipment… incidentally, we need a flight instructor, if you're up for it."

"I guess I could manage." She smiled. Any concrete action, however quixotic, was better than nothing.

"For the time being, we're okay. Jake has gotten the Omaticaya to at least recognize us as honorary tribe members - the Omaticaya have taken over the area around the base, by the way, until they find a new Hometree. He's their new Olo'eyktan."

"So wait - he's really Na'vi? Permanently?"

Norm nodded. "We buried his human body."

She stopped chewing. "How is that even possible? He literally switched bodies?"

"Mo'at performed a ceremony at the Well of Souls - basically she proved all of Grace's theories about it being a neural net. She was able to permanently transfer his brainwave energy from his human body to his avatar. We've got only the faintest idea how, and Mo'at wouldn't let us take readings while it was happening, but it worked."

"Unbelievable. Are the rest of them going to try this transfer thing?"

She regretted the question instantly as Norm's face closed off. "Max told me he told you about Lauren and Javier. But yeah, everyone else is. They've just got to get accepted into a tribe first before they'll be allowed."

She absolutely burned to ask him whether he'd do it, if he still had the avatar, but she didn't dare - it was way, way too fraught. For her as well, much to her surprise: would he abandon her to run off into the forest, if given the chance? And when did she start caring that much? Dammit, she'd just been looking for a bit of fun… time to change the subject. "So let's get this straight: we can't go home, the Na'vi don't want us here, we're under sentence of death and there's probably a bigass army headed our way?"

Norm nodded. "That's about the size of it."

"I'm going back to sleep." She laughed, but he didn't, and the expression on his face gave her pause. "Norm, it's all right. We knew what we were getting into." She took his hand and looked up at him, really looked at him for the first time since she'd woken up. He was thinner, if that was possible, and the lines around his face cut deeper. He had great big circles under his eyes.

Norm swallowed hard. "Try the strawberries. They're really good."

She did. They were the best thing she'd ever eaten.

The door burst open, letting in a crowd of humans and one Na'vi in a rebreather. A cheer went up at the sight of Trudy awake and alert. Max led this motley parade - as Trudy would soon discover, the humans had taken to celebrating every event or milestone that came along for the sake of morale, and this was a better reason than most. They clustered around Trudy's bed, everyone speaking at once.

Jake reached his hand over the crowd. "Chacon, damn, it's good to see you up and around."

Seeing a Na'vi in a breath mask caused a brief second of cognitive dissonance. Jake held out a fist.

She bumped it. "Yeah, well, only the good die young. Norm says you've gone native for keeps?"

He grinned. "I'm thinking of it as an upgrade."

"Jesus, girl, you look like shit!" shouted a petite woman of indeterminate Asian descent, as her turn came in the scrum around the bed.

"Hey, Jiang-Mei! You stayed?" Trudy exclaimed, laughing. Jiang-mei McSweeney, also known as the only mechanic Trudy would trust with her gunship. That was good news.

Jake smiled. "It's amazing, the number of gunships and AMPsuits that developed mechanical problems on the day of the attack…"

McSweeney grinned slyly. "I told them, I kept saying, 'You got to get me more maintenance downtime, or these things just aren't going to work right.' Not my fault they picked a bad day to start malfunctioning."

"Never piss off a mechanic," said Trudy, in the tones of one quoting the Gospel truth.

The party continued. Trudy tried to stay alert as long as she could, but this was too overwhelming. Max and Norm chased everybody out when she started to nod off.

When she woke again an hour later (and she was getting very, very sick of this acquired narcolepsy, for all that Max said that it was temporary), she insisted on getting out of bed and walking a little. How she despised this feeling of weakness!

"When do I get out of here?" she grumbled.

"Well, I need to keep an eye on your recovery, but as long as you're willing to wear the monitor and have someone stay with you, you should be okay," said Max.

"Any volunteers?" She arched her eyebrow at Norm. He agreed, blushing, but Trudy could have sworn she saw a flash of fear in his eyes.

"I didn't think there'd be a problem with that," snickered Max.

"Let's go, then. I hate sick bay."

Norm insisted on bringing her in a wheelchair; she argued, but in the end she was glad when she saw where they were going. Since they were now unoccupied, the humans had taken over the high-rise apartments usually reserved for senior RDA staff. She whistled as they brought her in; she'd known the executive apartments were pretty sweet, but she'd never been in one before. There were four rooms. Four rooms! A bedroom, an office, a bathroom and a living space with vidscreen. The last apartment she'd lived in with four rooms had also housed eleven other people.

"Where are your things?" She still couldn't believe this was all hers.

"Next door." Norm blushed again. "I didn't want to presume."

She smiled.

She was tearingly hungry - nano side-effects again - so Norm fixed her some dinner, and afterwards, they rested on the couch.

"What was that flick you showed me that night at the Shack? Can you put it on? I want to see the ending this time," she said.

"'Casablanca'? I'm glad you liked it… so many people complain that 2-D gives them a headache." He complied.

—

"Whoa whoa whoa wait… are you sure you're in good enough condition? Maybe we should ask Max before…."

"No, we are definitely not going ask Max before. Shut up and kiss me."

—

Trudy ended up in bed, still not having seen the end of the movie, with an exhausted Norm lying prone beside her. It had been a bit too much for her, but she didn't care. She was alive, damn it, and she was going to grow stronger.

She slept like the dead; she didn't even stir when Norm slipped away into the other room.

He got her breakfast in bed the next day, and sat with her as she ate, before he went to the lab. As it turned out, he and Max spent most of their time monitoring the avatars embedded with the Omaticaya, a tedious but necessary task. Norm briefly put forth the idea that she should come with him and rest in sickbay, but she shot that down pretty quickly. She was done with the hospital for a while.

"I'll be right on the other end of the monitor, okay? You need anything, you call."

Once alone, she settled on the couch, and made yet another attempt to watch "Casablanca," but she hardly had time before Ameera stopped by to chat and bring her up to speed on how things were going (not well; they were at a standstill until the situation with the Na'vi was resolved). Then Jiang-Mei, to give her a progress update on her Samson. And so on and so forth, until practically the entire human population of the base had dropped by. Norm hadn't even orchestrated this - she was just the closest thing anyone had to a new person to talk to.

It was really nice, but exhausting.

Norm came back to make her dinner, and they settled in for the night. The next day, when Norm came for lunch, incipient cabin fever demanded that she get, if not exactly fresh air, at least a change of scenery. He agreed to escort her out for a walk. She leaned heavily on her lover, and the progress was slow, but she simply rejoiced at being outside.

They'd shut down most of the base to conserve power; already the margins were being eaten by the jungle, but far from being desolate, the Base was bustling. Jake and several of the other avatars were gathered on the flightline with a large group of Na'vi, clearly running a class on Earth weaponry and tactics. They'd set up a Na'vi-height table; the parts of an assault rifle had been laid out neatly and labeled, and a large area had been roped off as a shooting range.

The Na'vi were catching on quickly, if the targets at the end of the runway were any indication.

She wandered up to listen in. When Jake saw her, he interrupted the class. "This is Trudy Chacon," he said. "We would have gotten nowhere without her. She is also of the Jarhead Clan."

A ripple went through the crowd, and the assembled Na'vi looked at her with increased respect.

She asked Norm about the reaction as they were walking away. "You're from the same 'tribe' that produced Toruk Makto. They'll be expecting you to do something equally impressive."

"Great."

The hangar was another hive of activity. Na'vi and AMP-suited humans were working on several gunships and a Valkyrie. Jiang-Mei waved and ran over.

"Wow… didn't expect to see you so busy," said Trudy.

"Hell yeah. We're rebuilding and modding out the aircraft that survived to work in Na'vi hands. Thank God for redundancy, that's all I have to say. We've got duplicates and triplicates of everything - damn near enough to assemble a new ISV from scratch, and tools that'll work on Na'vi scale."

"Nice. How's it going?"

"Oh my God, these guys are great. Get me an avionics textbook translated into Na'vi, and we can take over the Universe."

Norm nodded. "The Diamond theory."

"The what?"

"The Diamond theory. Named after a 21st-century polymath, Dr. Jared Diamond. His theory was that the populations in hunter-gatherer societies skewed towards higher intelligence, the reason being that Nature tends not to forgive the stupid and the reckless."

Jiang-Mei grinned. "Makes sense. Anyway, chica, we'll have a new bird up and running for you to test out in a few days. Try not to be so hard on this one, okay?"

"It's not my fault it got shot out from under me…" Trudy laughed.

"Yeah yeah yeah… excuses excuses…" Jiang-Mei shot over her shoulder as she ran out to work.

They walked a bit further, to the outer wall, and saw the Omaticaya encampment on the other side.

"They're prepping to leave for the Gathering of the Clans," Norm explained. "In a few weeks, they'll have a enough representatives at the Tree of Souls for a planet-wide Olo'uxulta, and we'll get a chance to plead our case."

She nodded, and looked back out at the encroaching jungle. When she turned back to Norm, she stopped short. His face had gone sheet-white, and he stared out at the forest as if at any moment something would spring out to attack him.

"What is it?" she asked.

He jumped. "Nothing. Nothing."

Her brow furrowed; she couldn't have asked for a better lead-in. "Are you doing all right? I'm sorry you lost your avatar."

"What? Yeah, I'm fine. Max is working on growing me a new one."

"You were in it when it got hit, he said."

Norm shrugged. "It hurt, but it was the avatar, not me. I'm fine."

"Max says you've been having nightmares…"

"Yeah, well, Max should mind his own goddamn business. He won't leave me alone, and now he's got you nagging me," snapped Norm.

Trudy's eyebrows shot up, and her voice honed to a sharp edge. "Was that supposed to convince me of your sanity? Because I gotta tell you, that's not the way to do it."

Norm, instantly contrite, took her hand. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, that wasn't fair. Look, the past few months haven't been easy. Yeah, I'm stressed and tired, but come on, it's not like we haven't had a lot to deal with."

She couldn't argue with that. "He's just worried, is all."

Norm nodded. "I'm fine. Let's go back."

Trudy was not reassured, but didn't know how to proceed. She turned with him to go back to the base.

As they walked, she saw the sign at the checkpoint - Hell's Gate had been crossed out, but nothing had gone up to replace it. Norm followed her gaze. "There's a raging debate as to what to call ourselves. We're voting on it as soon as the Na'vi say we can stay permanently."

She started laughing, so hard that the laugh turned into a racking cough. Norm hovered over her like a broody hen. "Pitcairn," she said. "And we all know who Fletcher Christian is."

"That's awful," said Norm, an answer belied by his own laughter. "No one'll vote for that…."

Still, the cough pushed Norm's fears over the edge, and he escorted her back to the apartment.

For two weeks, they kept to this basic pattern, as Trudy grew stronger and she needed less sleep. She added more PT as fast as Max would let her, and within days she was able to walk to the hangar and back without getting out of breath. She threw herself into the exercise, determined to get back to fighting form as soon as she could. She kept watching Norm for signs of PTSD, but couldn't be sure of anything. It didn't help that the man had a point. He was tired, but sure, they were all tired. He was stressed, but how could he not be? If he seemed a bit down, well, wasn't depression occasionally a reasonable reaction to an extraordinary situation? At what point did it become a pathology?

She'd woken up once, in the middle of the night and found him working in front of a console. He'd passed it off as temporary insomnia. She tried to stay up later to watch him but she was hardly well herself. She overdid it, and bought herself a few more days of non-stop involuntary napping.

And so, when she recovered from her setback and McSweeney told her that her Samson was ready, it was all she could do not to sprint out to the tarmac.

They ran through the pre-flight checks, and she hopped in. Technically, she hadn't been given the medical all-clear and ought to have a spotter, but there was no one else who could fly these things anyway. She placed her talisman on the dash: a vidframe of her family, in that last happy summer before the storm came, downloaded from her personal storage drives.

This gunship was a bit different: in addition to the main pilot's seat (rebuilt to fit a Na'vi pilot), it had a secondary set of controls behind, slightly elevated. The configuration took some getting used to, but it handled mostly the same. She took off with a roar and slipped the surly bonds of Pandora.

For the first time since she'd woken up, she felt whole.

Most of the other pilots had bitched incessantly about flying the science sorties, but Trudy had volunteered, and volunteered gladly.

It was just that damned beautiful.

From her very first day, she couldn't believe it. She flew over green mountains and blue waters, rushing over heartstopping cliffs and sailing over open plains. It was what she'd always imagined flying to be; the simulators back home ran with images of Earth as it had been (unless you were training for a specific mission) but here it was all in front of her, all real. She could race for the horizon, sure that a vista just as astonishing waited on the other side.

Would she have wanted to go home again, to fly combat runs through smoke and ruin and smog?

Not a chance in hell.

She landed, ready to begin her first lesson. Neytiri was the first volunteer, as it happened. Trudy ran her through the pre-flight checks - all the things that a pilot should look for to make sure the flight wouldn't end up on the ground sooner than intended. Neytiri was a quick study, and missed very little.

Including the vidframe on Trudy's dashboard. Fascinated, she asked Trudy about it.

"It's nothing. Just a vid. My family."

"They must miss you terribly."

"They died. Years ago."

"They are dead?" said Neytiri, replaying the recording.

"Yeah. Let's get going."

Neytiri put it down reluctantly, and climbed into her seat. She lifted the end of her queue, and looked at Trudy questioningly.

It took Trudy a second to figure out what she meant. "Oh! No… we don't have any interfaces like that in the aircraft."

"Truly? But you have the technology… the dreamwalkers can communicate in that manner…"

"Nah, it might be nice, but you saw all the equipment in the lab that makes the avatars run. It's not practical in an aircraft. Out here, it's just our hands and eyes."

"How interesting."

They took off, and once they were airborne, Trudy allowed Neytiri to get the feeling for the controls. The years Neytiri had spent on the back of a banshee both helped and hindered. She had no fear, none at all. She had a good instinct for how the air would behave, if not necessarily how to translate that to the Samson's movement. She had a tendency to both under- and overreact in the air, but that would be corrected with practice. In the teacher's seat, where Neytiri couldn't see, Trudy grinned. This would be easier than she thought.

They finished the lesson, but Neytiri's eyes kept going back to the vidframe on the dash.

After the lesson, they both helped with the post-flight maintenance. Trudy missed having a full ground crew to do this scut work for her: the ratio of maintenance work to actual flight time was something appalling, but the Omaticayan volunteers were catching on fast. As they were wrapping up, she got a signal on the airship's comm. "Trudy, this is Max. Can you come see me when you're done?"

That was odd. "Sure. See you in fifteen."

Max stood by the amnio tank, checking the nutrient and hormone levels of the fetal avatar within. He looked up when Trudy entered, and greeted her. "How'd the flight go?"

"Fine. Neytiri's a natural. What's up?"

Max gave her a level look. "Over there."

She looked over to the console and spotted Norm. She hadn't seen him there before - he was slumped over, partially hidden by the monitor, and he was snoring gently.

"Does he do this every day?" she asked.

Max nodded. "He pretends he doesn't. Honestly, I'm not sure if I'm more worried that he's sleeping here all the time, or that he actually thinks I haven't noticed. Doesn't he sleep at all at night?"

Trudy thought back to the lame insomnia excuse, and looked at the dark circles under Norm's eyes. "Until I came in here, I would have sworn he did."

"He blew up at me last time I tried to broach the subject of the nightmares. Made me swear I wouldn't tell you. Trudy, he can't keep on like this... We're going to have to do something."

"Son of a bitch," she whispered. He wasn't just avoiding dealing with this, he was trying to hide it from her. Which meant that 1) he knew there was a problem, 2) he knew it was severe enough that people would try to intervene, and 3) if he was specifically hiding it from her, he was afraid of how the situation would be perceived.

Well, that answered some of her questions, anyway, even if it brought up dozens more.

"Let me see what I can do, first."

—-

She went back to the apartment. She'd get him to sleep in her bed that night if she had to pull out every wile she'd ever heard of.

—-

Her wiles did work, though they exhausted her as much as they did him. In fact, if Norm's screams had been any quieter, she might not have woken at all.

She sat bolt upright. "What! What!"

Norm flopped like a beached fish in the bed, screaming and scrabbling at a spot on his chest. He sucked in air like he couldn't breathe.

She grabbed his hands. "Norm, you're fine. It's just a dream. I'm right here." She tried to pull him to her, but his convulsions made it impossible.

He calmed a little, but still shuddered uncontrollably. He locked his eyes to hers, but all she saw in them was abject, primal terror. "Oh God, Oh God, Trudy, are you dead too?"

"No… look, we're both fine. We're here."

"Because you got hit! You got hit! I saw you go down, oh God Trudy I'm sorry…"

"Norm! It's okay! We're in bed. It's okay. It was your avatar that got hit, not you. Etorya saved me." She pulled him close to her and tried to hang on.

Eventually, he stilled. As came to his senses, a horrified look crept over his face. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm fine. I... I just need to use the bathroom…" He scrambled out of bed and vanished into the restroom.

With every ounce of willpower, she stayed up until he came back out again. "How long are you going to keep doing this?" she demanded.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

"Christ, Norm, you're not taking care of yourself! Do you honestly think you can survive without sleep?"

"I gotta go."

"No you don't!" She caught his wrist. "You've been doing this for weeks!"

"It's not that big of a deal!"

"If it's not that big of a deal, then what's with the nightmares? Why are you avoiding sleeping here? Tell me what's going on, Norm!"

"What do you mean, what's going on!" He started to strike back. "Is your amnesia flaring up again?"

"This isn't about me. Don't change the subject! You need to deal with this shit!" She tried to rein in her reaction. "Look, I know you've had a hell of a time. I don't remember nearly dying and you do… I can't imagine…"

"That's got nothing to do with it. The avatar got hit! Not me! It isn't real!"

"Oh, bull! You think it's not real! They've been working on how to treat shit like this for centuries, and you're acting like it's a phantom! It's a wound as real as any other. Get help, goddammit."

"I'm not crazy!"

"I'm not calling you crazy!"

"It's not that big of a deal! I'll get over it by myself!"

"IT WILL ONLY GET WORSE WITHOUT TREATMENT. Look, Sergeant Bakersen. Best soldier I ever met. We would've followed him through hell. Every hellhole, every wretched nasty little battle, we saw it together and he saved our asses more times than I can count. One fight, he ended up holding off an entire platoon of insurgents for six hours with nothing more than a sniper rifle and five grenades and came out without a scratch on him. He got the Medal of Honor for that one, and do you know how many people actually get the Medal of Honor and live? He ground through it all, but ate the barrel of his gun six months after getting discharged. You know why? Because, in the end, nothing could beat him but the trauma running around inside his own head! So talk to somebody. It doesn't have to be me; talk to Max, hell, talk to Sully. If he was in Venezuela I can damn well guarantee that he's seen some shit he wishes he hadn't."

"He was a real soldier after a real war. I was barely in one battle. There's no logical reason for me to be like this." Norm was turning sullen.

"There isn't any reason to this at all, of any kind! But this is how it goes: your head's three inches to the right, you're having a beer that night with your squad. Three inches to the left, and your CO is writing home to your family about how you died a hero. That's just how it is. And if you're fortunate enough to be three inches to the right, you go on with your life and you get the help you need. Anything else is an insult to the people who weren't so lucky, and who'd give anything to be in your shoes."

After all that, they sat in silence. Norm couldn't bring himself to look at her, and when she reached out to touch his arm, he flinched away. "It's late. I need to go to bed." He stormed out and went into his own barely-used apartment, slamming the door behind him.

She tried to follow him, but the door was locked.

Exhausted, she returned to her room and flopped back on the bed. "That could've gone better."

Jared Diamond is a real person, who put forth that idea in his excellent book Guns, Germs and Steel.