Hiraeth ||Tsu'tey||

When Jake met It

AN: Look at me exploring Avatar from yet another perspective. This one is a bit more difficult for me to write but it'll be fine. Hope you enjoy it!

"Wake up, monkey"

"She's not waking up"

"You bet it is"

"She's really not"

"Hey blue brains, wake the fuck up"

"Calling her names won't help "

"It, Santiago, it's an it"

"She, birdbrain, she"

"That thing is an it, an animal even. No, scratch that, less than an animal. It's a beast"

It started to hear the voices spitting words at her, hurtful ones that made its head spin and its eyes water. It had no idea why such words would bring such a weird reaction in its eyes but it knew it didn't like it. No matter, it had gotten used to it over the years and the tears were quickly pushed back in their place and its breathing went back to normal.

One of the voices was soft but had a bite to it, like a stray cat that will purr sweetly to you but once it knows you have no food it will bite and scratch you. The other voice was deep, gravelly and hateful. It had nothing to compare the other voice to, it had only had so much time exploring its surroundings.

"Her eyelids are twitching, look!"

"I told you it was waking up. Go tell Quaritch, I'll watch the mutt"

"She's not-. You know what? Never mind"

It felt a twinge of hurt in its chest at that. Why would the first voice defend it one second and then agree with the bad voice. It had heard them before, once, they were similar to the two first voices it heard when it was 'born', as a different voice called it. It had never seen these two voices, but it had seen others. They didn't look like it; they came in all sorts of colors and shapes, but none tall. They were all short, less than half of its length, and they didn't have a tail like it did, nor the cyan skin, darker cyan stripes, white spots that glow in the dark or any of its other features. It looked nothing like them, its eyes didn't look like theirs, its ears were different, body shape like none of their and nose far different. They had a finger more than it, it was stronger than them, faster than them and smarter than them, but not worth anything.

It could think, though they said it could not. They said it was a beast, a monster, a mindless less-than-a-monkey, a wild space savage. It had at first struggled at the concept of being born less but after their convincing arguments it had realised that it was less than them and was lucky to be in their presence.

They had been kind enough to try and educate it, they said its brain was slow and it would never be smart but it tried anyways. It liked learning. They trained it, they taught it combat in their metal suits. It won only once, they beat it bloody and bruised for it, and after that it never won again. It learnt the language of them, the humans, but it felt wrong on its tongue. They told it that it should be glad it was allowed to learn. It had thanked them for it.

Quaritch was a familiar man to it. He was small, had three, red, angry scars that stretched from his forehead to the back of his head. He told it that it came from a thanator, another beast. He informed it that they had saved it from the monsters and beasts of its homeplanet. It had thanked him for that, gone down on its knees and touched his boots with its forehead. He had kicked it for that, saying it was akin to a custom of the beasts they saved it from. He had not been there when it was born, none of the humans that protected her now had been there.

It was 18 in human years, they didn't want to tell it how many that was in beast years. They had told it the less it had learnt and thought about its beastly heritage the better it would be. It believed them and never asked again. It had never seen another like it.