Chapter Text
For as long as Jake could remember mirrors had been his biggest enemy.
He could never exactly pinpoint why, but it was true. He wasn’t trans, he tried. He kind of liked the they/them bit but the general transphobia in the Marines and the world at large made expressing that unwise or even down right dangerous depending on the person. Their gender aside, it was just something about his body. It just didn’t feel right.
He didn’t know how to explain it to anyone except his trans friends. They at least understood what it was like to feel like ripping your skin off because it was fundamentally wrong.
Those feelings had only been exacerbated by losing their fucking legs.
They were still there; he just
couldn’t fucking feel them.
It was distressing at first, seeing them and trying to move them and them just
not work
, but over time they had become desensitized to it. Life moved on and he tried to raise money to have the surgery to get
his legs back but then Tommy got accepted into the Avatar program and suddenly all their money went towards that.
Tommy protested of course, saying that he should keep raising money for his surgery.
Jake didn’t care. The Avatar Program meant that Tommy could get off this shit-hole of a planet and do what he loved so very much.
He also knew Tommy planned to use his wages to pay for their surgery but they didn’t care. It was a win/win for both of them. Tommy got to live off this shit-hole planet , and he could fully focus on raising money, no longer having to give up their income to pay for Tommy’s college’s expensive tuition.
He never minded of course, he thought he was going to have a long, successful career ahead of them. That wasn't happening anymore.
He didn’t entertain any delusions that he would be having anything even close to resembling a career. Society would care he could walk and that that alone disqualified from most jobs because all the other jobs they could have done were taken by A.I.
In his hospital bed after the accident Tommy began to teach him Na’vi. He found he rather liked the language, with it not being needlessly gendered the way so fucking many Earth languages he spent countless hours learning, hoping to find a word to make it all make sense, were. He now knew 14 languages which was nice, but that was beside the point. More importantly it gave him something to do besides lay in bed
staring at the ceiling for hours, bored out of their mind. He used a similar tactic as a child to escape the hell he was trapped in thanks to his mother and father.
Tommy brought books to help him learn and he soon devoured them, his passion for language reborn like a phoenix, and soon he was able to hold whole conversations.
Not very good ones, but the more he learned the more could relate Na’vi to the other languages the more he learned, accelerating his learning.
It also helped Tommy, constantly talking to someone in Na’vi, it helped his fluency, boosting his test scores, furthering his cementation into the program.
And as his shipment day grew closer the more panicked he was.
“What if Tomas shows up?” was a frequent worry. Tommy had the misfortune of being named for their sperm donor and Tomas had hated him from the start. It was kind of funny in a way, Tommy was named for Tomas and Tomas hated him the most and Jake was named for their mother, Jessica, and she hated him the most.
Jake did their best to reassure his frantic brother that if Tomas hadn’t shown his ugly face for this long, the chances of it happening decreased and the chances of him being dead in a ditch increased. If he didn’t show up to literally any milestone they had achieved after being taken by CPS, he wasn’t going to show up to this one. Even still, Tommy had Tomas and Jessica blacklisted from the event.
Jake themself had mixed feelings about Tommy leaving. On one hand, Tommy would be making a shit ton of money and be far away from their sperm and egg donor. On the other hand, Tommy would be far away from him.
He had gotten used to being Tommy’s protector and didn’t really know how to cope with not being that.
Being in the military and Tommy going off to college had been hard but at least they could talk almost whenever thanks to modern technology.
But Pandora…
That was six years away and communication wasn’t as fast. They could send messages but it was just text or pre recorded videos. Not the video chats they were incredibly used to. Text messaging was borderline obsolete, with only a few hold out still using it as their primary means of communication, with the masses favoring video chats via datapads.
Why, he could never say but maybe people favored knowing that they were speaking to an actual person rather than some AI chat bot, which he completely understood.
Whatever.
He focused on spending time with his brother. They wouldn’t be near each other for at least 18 years. More if Tommy decided to stay for another tour, which was likely. They may genuinely never see each other again.
The two brothers spent the following weeks crossing as many things off the bucket list as possible.
They went skydiving(that was only Tommy, Jake had not been allowed to jump thanks to his legs), went to one of those fancy restaurants, spent the day at the zoo to see and newly cloned tigers that Tommy had worked on a bit, nothing huge of course, just some second opinions and rubber ducking, fishing, and just going out and seeing some of Earth’s last green spaces even though Tommy would be spending the next(for him) six years surrounded by nature, he wanted Jake to experience it as well.
That night they had decided to go drinking. It was some of the most fun he had had in awhile.
They played pool, chatted to random strangers, got drinks paid for once it came out why they were celebrating, and just generally let their hair down.
It all ended with a bang and the thump of a body hitting the cold, wet ground.