[fic] five reasons
Title: Five reasons Jake Sully regrets giving up his human body (and one reason he doesn't)
Pairing: Some Jake/Neytiri.
Rating: PG
A/N: Unbeta'd, etc. First Avatar fic, and I'm not too familiar with the 'verse.
1.
Three months of a rush-job of learning a whole new culture didn’t give Jake a whole lot of time to learn anything else; he tells himself this when, one month into his Na’vi - into his own body, he realizes:
They are savages.
Well, okay, that’s kinda rude. But he’s sitting on the outskirts of the tribe, quiet so as not to attract too much attention, and they’re all listening to a story, a tale-of-old historical thing and the teller says -
She says, “This was told to me by my mother, and she from hers.”
And he thinks: Well, damn.
Jake isn’t much of an Earth-history buff, not at all. He jumped straight from high school to military school, from there to war zones and trying to keep an unattainable peace. But language is such an inevitable part of being human, language and oh, god symbols and words and books and he’s not sure how to deal in a world where the natives haven’t even gotten to writing things down.
He takes a breath and stares at his hands and reminds himself that he’s one of them. No turning back, now.
2.
There’s something about technology that he misses. Not the later stuff, the fancy holos and brain-scans and robotics, but the simple things; plates and water-jugs, plumbing and textured fabric. Everyone eats with their hands and walks around mostly-naked and he gets it, he does, but it’s so different he still gets culture-shock every once in a while.
(Sometimes, he heads back to the base. The low buzz of machinery, of electricity, reminds him of home.)
Pandora’s temperate enough that he never needs a shirt or a blanket or anything else, but one day he realizes that if he ever has a kid, he won’t be able to tuck them into bed - it hurts more than anything else.
3.
Apparently humans were as stubbornly patriarchal as the Na’vi still are, once. Jake remembers learning about it, a lifetime ago, but he’s never really thought about it - it’s past history, and he’s grown up in an age where gender’s barely worth noticing.
He still has trouble believing woman can’t be warriors, women can’t choose who they want to mate with other than a demure yes-or-no, and he sometimes thinks that Grace - that any human females he knew would protest.
But it works for them, somehow. He isn’t here to uproot their culture and make them follow his rules, but occasionally it’s hard to reconcile.
4.
It’s the little things that matter: he gets a craving, real bad, for some buttered popcorn; he sets aside a jar of that white stuff and swirls lines on the grass, huge and reaching until it almost looks like a football oval; he wrings his hands and wishes he had a stress ball or something to dig his fingers into other than his own skin.
He grabs a length of rope from the base and ties it around the tail of his ikran, who watches him bemusedly but doesn’t protest; it’s Neytiri who looks at him strangely and says, “What are you doing?”
His braid isn’t long enough for his ikran to take him water-skiing, at least not without grievous bodily harm to either of them. He shrugs instead, a half-motion of his shoulders that doesn’t have any sort of equivalent with the Na’vi, and says, “Ah, nothing.”
5.
They have fights against other clans, small things like skirmishes that get larger and he’s expected to be present at every single one.
He thought he was done with that shit.
and 1.
It was never the legs. It was the way everyone looked at him after, how they saw him as a liability or a cripple or something to be pitied.
But sometimes, he wakes up in the middle of the night. He had phantom-limb syndrome for a while after Venezuela, and this is the opposite: he has these strange, long feet and toes and legs and no idea how to move them, not entirely sure what nerves connect his muscles to his brain and it seems important, suddenly, to know.
Neytiri shifts beside him, probably sensing his distress - and isn’t that strange? - and it’s automatic instinct, the way his body curls around hers, the way their legs tangle together and the cool press of her toes against his ankle.
Movement's not so important anymore, and it’s the incurable romantic in him that thinks: this isn’t so different; it’s still our happy ending.
Pairing: Some Jake/Neytiri.
Rating: PG
A/N: Unbeta'd, etc. First Avatar fic, and I'm not too familiar with the 'verse.
1.
Three months of a rush-job of learning a whole new culture didn’t give Jake a whole lot of time to learn anything else; he tells himself this when, one month into his Na’vi - into his own body, he realizes:
They are savages.
Well, okay, that’s kinda rude. But he’s sitting on the outskirts of the tribe, quiet so as not to attract too much attention, and they’re all listening to a story, a tale-of-old historical thing and the teller says -
She says, “This was told to me by my mother, and she from hers.”
And he thinks: Well, damn.
Jake isn’t much of an Earth-history buff, not at all. He jumped straight from high school to military school, from there to war zones and trying to keep an unattainable peace. But language is such an inevitable part of being human, language and oh, god symbols and words and books and he’s not sure how to deal in a world where the natives haven’t even gotten to writing things down.
He takes a breath and stares at his hands and reminds himself that he’s one of them. No turning back, now.
2.
There’s something about technology that he misses. Not the later stuff, the fancy holos and brain-scans and robotics, but the simple things; plates and water-jugs, plumbing and textured fabric. Everyone eats with their hands and walks around mostly-naked and he gets it, he does, but it’s so different he still gets culture-shock every once in a while.
(Sometimes, he heads back to the base. The low buzz of machinery, of electricity, reminds him of home.)
Pandora’s temperate enough that he never needs a shirt or a blanket or anything else, but one day he realizes that if he ever has a kid, he won’t be able to tuck them into bed - it hurts more than anything else.
3.
Apparently humans were as stubbornly patriarchal as the Na’vi still are, once. Jake remembers learning about it, a lifetime ago, but he’s never really thought about it - it’s past history, and he’s grown up in an age where gender’s barely worth noticing.
He still has trouble believing woman can’t be warriors, women can’t choose who they want to mate with other than a demure yes-or-no, and he sometimes thinks that Grace - that any human females he knew would protest.
But it works for them, somehow. He isn’t here to uproot their culture and make them follow his rules, but occasionally it’s hard to reconcile.
4.
It’s the little things that matter: he gets a craving, real bad, for some buttered popcorn; he sets aside a jar of that white stuff and swirls lines on the grass, huge and reaching until it almost looks like a football oval; he wrings his hands and wishes he had a stress ball or something to dig his fingers into other than his own skin.
He grabs a length of rope from the base and ties it around the tail of his ikran, who watches him bemusedly but doesn’t protest; it’s Neytiri who looks at him strangely and says, “What are you doing?”
His braid isn’t long enough for his ikran to take him water-skiing, at least not without grievous bodily harm to either of them. He shrugs instead, a half-motion of his shoulders that doesn’t have any sort of equivalent with the Na’vi, and says, “Ah, nothing.”
5.
They have fights against other clans, small things like skirmishes that get larger and he’s expected to be present at every single one.
He thought he was done with that shit.
and 1.
It was never the legs. It was the way everyone looked at him after, how they saw him as a liability or a cripple or something to be pitied.
But sometimes, he wakes up in the middle of the night. He had phantom-limb syndrome for a while after Venezuela, and this is the opposite: he has these strange, long feet and toes and legs and no idea how to move them, not entirely sure what nerves connect his muscles to his brain and it seems important, suddenly, to know.
Neytiri shifts beside him, probably sensing his distress - and isn’t that strange? - and it’s automatic instinct, the way his body curls around hers, the way their legs tangle together and the cool press of her toes against his ankle.
Movement's not so important anymore, and it’s the incurable romantic in him that thinks: this isn’t so different; it’s still our happy ending.