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Twenty-three years after the transfer, Jake woke to find a blue hand resting on his chest and flinched before catching himself. For a split second, he'd thought it belonged to someone else.
The wrongness had crept in so gradually he couldn't pinpoint when it began. Maybe year fifteen, when he'd caught himself mid-laugh at a clan gathering and realized the sound coming from his throat felt strange. Or year eighteen, when he'd tried to recall his mother's face and found only a flat, colorless impression, like a photograph of a photograph. The Na'vi brain stored memories differently. Encoded them in alien architecture. His human past was becoming a story he'd heard rather than a life he'd lived.
He was good at being Na'vi, too good. He'd spent over two decades perfecting the imitation, and somewhere along the way he'd realized that's all it was. Imitation. The clan saw Jake Sully, warrior, father, Toruk Makto. He saw a human mind performing pantomime.
The dreams started around year twenty. Not the gentle, symbolic visions Eywa granted her children, Jake had those too, though they always felt like watching through glass, but fever-twisted fragments of his marine days. The weight of human clothes. The particular echo of boots on concrete. The smallness of human hands, perfectly calibrated for holding coffee cups and door handles and all the thousand forgotten textures of Earth. He'd wake gasping, and it would crash over him like cold water. This wasn't his body. It had never been his body. He was wearing it.
Neytiri noticed, of course. She'd catch him staring at his reflection in still water, or standing too long at the edge of human ruins, hands clenched. "You are far away," she'd say, and he'd lie and say he was only tired. How could he explain? That some essential frequency in his mind had never quite synced with the Na'vi around him? That their spiritual certainties felt like peer pressure, their connection to Eywa like a song he could hear but never truly feel? He loved her. He loved their children. But love couldn't bridge the gap between what he was and what housed him.
The resentment grew like rot. Small things at first, irritation at communal rituals that felt hollow, at the way everything came naturally to them, grace that wasn’t learned. He'd watch them connect their braids to the Tree of Souls with expressions of rapture and feel nothing but alienation. These weren't his people. They'd never been his people. Every day he woke up blue was another day of wrongness so fundamental it had no language.
The scientists who'd stayed, Max and Norm and a handful of others, had gathered around the communications array the day the message arrived, the last transmission Earth would ever send. A singularity, they'd explained in hushed, disbelieving tones. Artificial superintelligence had bootstrapped itself into godhood. Earth was healing. Oceans cleaning themselves. Problems solved by technology that made the RDA's mining operation look like children playing with sticks. They'd seeded worlds with life, built habitats in the void, transcended the desperate resource hunger that had once driven them. They didn't need unobtanium anymore. Humanity was not coming back to Pandora.
The Na'vi had celebrated their victory. Sang songs of how they'd driven out the sky people, how Eywa had protected them. Jake had said nothing. He'd understood what they didn't: Pandora had become irrelevant. A footnote in humanity's explosive expansion across the stars. And those last few humans, their bodies breaking down on Pandora's lighter gravity, they'd been gone now for years. Jake would live for decades more, having watched the last human faces disappear, long enough to be the only one left who remembered Earth as anything but a myth. He felt only the weight of forever settling over him like a grave.
The door hadn't slammed shut. It had simply, quietly, permanently closed.
On good days, he could almost forget, lose himself in the hunt, in his children's laughter, in the vast green forever of Pandora. On bad days, he'd find himself drawn to the old Hell's Gate compound, to the skeletal remains of link units and dust-choked medical bays. He'd catch himself reaching for the pods sometimes, fingers stopping just short of the cracked lids, as if muscle memory still believed in a way back.
He'd stand there, braid hanging limp, tail still, trying to remember what it felt like to taste food with a human tongue, to exist in a body that matched the map in his head. To see human faces, hear human voices, the particular cadence of English spoken by people who'd grown up under Earth's sun. But the humans were gone. And Jake, the real Jake, whoever that had been, was gone too, had been gone since the moment his consciousness jumped the gap and found itself imprisoned in this beautiful, perfect, utterly wrong skin.
He would turn away from the ruins and walk back to his family, back to the life he'd chosen and could never, ever leave. Forever was a long time to be homesick for a body you'd never inhabit again.