Chapter Text
You were never supposed to be on Pandora – a child, barely seven years old when Jake Sully was lost on the alien planet. You’d been carted off to Pandora along with a mother so sick she was on her deathbed, but was needed for successfully extracting Unobtanium. There was no one else to take care of you, your mother had argued with Parker and Grace and anyone who dared to suggest that you should be left on Earth.
So, in last minute haste, you’d been put in a CryoPod and were possibly the first child (belonging to the middle-class) to ever experience outer space. Your eyes had been so full of wonder as shrill screams escaped you at the sight of all the enchanting scenes you got to witness. But at the age of five, just a year after arriving, your mother had passed away.
There was no way Parker was going to spend money just to send a stupid kid back to Earth, so you had to stay.
And it wasn’t a bad thing, no. You grew up surrounded by people of science – people with knowledge so vast they could transform into blue aliens when they wanted to, it was almost like sorcery. You grew up with Grace, and her lectures about the relationship between science and spirituality, and Max, and his stories about his grandma and his cousins and his eight dogs. You grew up in a place of care, even when there was war raging outside of your little storage closet-turned-bedroom. You grew up surrounded by marines and scientists and soldiers, but despite the presence of all of these people, you could never really have a mother. Grace was more like an aunt than anything else. Max was the funny cousin. Parker was the distant relative who hated kids. Miles Quaritch was the conservative grandfather who could neither accept your nor reject you, who just observed you from a distance. Tom Sully was a warm visitor who did not quite understand you.
And then there was Jake Sully. Jake Sully was… well, something. You haven’t been able to put a name on it even after all these years. He was in your life for barely a year – a disappointment of a replacement to his dead brother. An ex-marine, paralysed from the waist-down, who did not want to be there. Who wasn’t supposed to be there, just like you. He didn’t seem emotional, because he didn’t really feel genuine emotions most of the time, his life a passive buzz. But when he did feel, he felt so much it overwhelmed all of his senses and clouded his thoughts and hindered his ability to function.
Maybe that’s why, when Jake Sully saw you, he felt a tug at the pit of his chest, and to twenty-two-year-old Jake, you became the closest thing to a daughter he ever had.
“Jake?” you asked, trotting over to his single-bed, and making space for yourself.
“Yes, baby girl?” He remained as he was, didn’t move. If it were someone else, he wouldn’t have let them be in the same room as him while he was on the verge of falling asleep. Vulnerability didn’t come easy to him.
“What’s Pandora like?”
Jake looked up a little then, shifting himself to rest on his elbows as he gazed at your big eyes curiously. “…Why do you ask?”
“Grace said that when I grow up, she’ll make me an avatar too, and then I can live with you and the Na’vi.”
The man blinked, then smiled. He would have to tell Grace to limit her fake promises.
“It’s a great place. I’m sure you’ll have a lot of fun with us, when you go there,” he said, laying back down. Then, glancing at the clock, he asked you to go to bed. “It’s past your bedtime, Parker’ll be mad if he sees you.”
“Parker’s always mad,” you whined with an adorable pout and a crease between your brows. “And anyways, I can’t sleep. I want to sleep beside you. Please?”
“Baby, you need to go to your room. There’s barely any space for me, how will you sleep here?”
He doesn’t question why you can’t sleep. Nightmares are another common problem you both share.
“Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Now move over, pleaseeee!”
But then Jake stopped coming to meet you. He just slept and slept and slept and when he woke up, he recorded a video diary and went back to sleeping.
He enjoyed being in Pandora, it seemed.
That wasn’t an issue. You still had Grace, until you didn’t. She and Norm and Max and everyone else began being busy and suddenly it was no longer about Pandora, it was Jake Jake Jake. You didn’t understand; you just wanted to see Jake once.
But you couldn’t. He came back and then he left with Grace and Norm and you were left with scary marines and unknown scientists and grumpy old Parker. Quaritch scared you more than anyone, so you just stayed in your room. You ate and slept and repeated until one day, everyone was going back to Earth and so were you.
You wanted to see Jake just once. Just one last time, you wanted to see the closest thing little-you had to a Dad, but you couldn’t. He didn’t want to meet you.
He cared about Pandora more than he cared about you.