1,604A half-sized chapter today, but I think it's more important to build a weekly or bi-weekly posting habit than to hit an arbitrary file size, so… here you go.
Pandora
"Hello."
Harry stares up, and up, at the wrinkled blue alien woman. He's used to craning his neck for Hagrid, but this is something else. She must be more than half a meter taller again than the half-giant.
"It's nice to meet you." He continues automatically. "How can I help?"
His veins are itching inside of him. He needs to get back to work. He doesn't want to, but he needs to.
He's so close.
"Walk with me." The woman commands him and instantly there's a clamour from the gathered – armed – humans.
"Not gonna happen." Baker has come up to one side of him, mouth tight. Michael is at his other shoulder, hovering ready to yank him back. He's paranoid about the enemy's neuro-toxin dipped arrows – he's seen too many men die twisted and screaming-
Harry pulls back from his mind with a wince. It feels a bit like sucking in his breath and holding it.
The alien woman ignores the base commander though her guard definitely don't. Her eyes stay fixed on Harry's, yellow and gold with deep flecks of brown like a reversed tiger's eye stone.
"I don't mind." He says as mildly as he can. Baker doesn't look at him.
"I do." The commander says curtly. "I am responsible for the safety of this camp and all its inhabitants. I'm not about to let a bunch of locals walk off with a minor. Especially not the same bunch that have attacked our operations before."
That's not all it is. It's not even most of it.
Most of it is that he-
Has his orders. Harry Potter is a key strategic asset
and-
He's not even shaving and-
Too many, out in front of bullets and-
He's a weapon, their best weapon, and you don't give the enemy your weapon-
That last one is faint, but deep. Headache building, Harry can sort of feel the shape of it in every mind around him.
He's not just the kid who can levitate modules and turn one thing into another. There's something else. Something new. Something connected to how he can feel them, and – without consciously realising it, he thinks - they can feel him.
There's a dark little urge scuttling around the edges of his mind. A combination of his own buzzing, constricting impatience and their fear/hostility/other.
He thinks, for a moment, about how stupid and pointless this all is. About how easy it would be to just… get rid of the blue people. These things that stop existing once he stops seeing them. He doesn't think they could stop him. They didn't-evolve the way humans did. To take and shape and command.
Pandora might be more peaceful, and healthy, and less likely to destroy itself and everything on it - but Earth was more powerful by far. Earth cultivated ruthlessness.
Pandora maintained its ecological balance through interconnectivity of almost every living thing. Gaia maintained the balance through eruption and flood and drought.
No matter how insane she was now, on the edge of death at the hands of her own creations… Harry sometimes liked to think that part of her would still be proud. Because here her children were, on another world, the fox in the henhouse, ready to feast.
Gaia built her children to win.
But.
He doesn't… doesn't need to.
So.
He won't.
He won't.
Gaia built her children to win and yet still gave them empathy.
That has to mean something.
He lifts a hand and doesn't feel bad about the ripple of peace he imposes on every human mind around him. Gently, he bolsters their contentment, their sense of security, lends them a little of his own certainty that there's no danger here (not to him, not ever again) and that they'd all be done soon.
Everything's going to be okay.
Many of the watching humans sort of, shrug, and wander back to their duties. This includes some of the armed ones, who wander back to their previous positions.
The Tsahik - Mo'at? - blinks, once, but doesn't comment. Her companions seem a little more openly confused as even the remaining human soldiers take a step back and assume more casual postures, some even shouldering their weapons.
That little ping he felt before, out in the forest, spikes a little. In alarm?
"Okay." Harry agrees. "But in return, I'd like all of your people to leave. They make the camp anxious and I don't want any accidents to happen."
Some of the blue kitty-faces sour, but none argue when Mo'at waves a hand and says something in her language. Some back away slowly, others run to the forest and a few more move away to flying creatures or alien horses to range further afield. Almost all of them are gone in under a minute, leaving only Mo'at and a couple of attendants to walk slowly away with Harry.
He has to push a little harder to keep Mike from following him, but he manages it without hurting him.
Slowly – out of deference to his stubby little legs – the small group moves away from the camp, through the cleared land before it and into the trees. Not far. Just enough to feel the shade.
Mo'at crouches, a graceful descent from standing to squatting in a way that leaves her ready to move yet looks comfortable enough to be still for hours. Harry sits too, folding his legs like he's back in primary school. He's… less dwarfed, in this position, but still has to crane his head a little to meet her gaze.
Mo'at's attendants pull back a little. One sits in the lower branches of a tree and watches him suspiciously while the other roams outwards into the trees.
"Ha'ri Po'ta." Mo'at addresses him, golden eyes boring into emerald. "Tsahik of the sky people. Tell me, why have you come."
"Why do you call me that?" Harry asks in return.
"Eywa has seen you." The words are curt. "She speaks, but you do not hear. You do not see. Why have you come."
He takes a moment, considering. What to say. If he should. Whether it even matters.
That ugly skittering urge is still crawling on the outskirts of his mind and this time, without the weight of dozens of frightened people behind it, he crushes it.
Bloody hell Pandora is making him crazy.
"Do you know…" He tries to find the words. "What happened, to our Eywa? Earth?"
Golden eyes narrowed.
"No."
He's not sure he believes her, but…
"Our world is sick." He explains as simply as he can. "She might die. Most humans – Sky People – they don't care. Or, they do, but not those who have the power to change things. The-, uh, the rulers. They can kill anyone who tries to stop them. And I think, these days, most people have given up even trying."
"They do not listen to their Tsahik?"
Harry huffed a little.
"They don't… have the concept of a Tsahik. Not like you do. Not since Metatron, maybe." Her eyebrows lowered in confusion and he shook his head. It was irrelevant. His fingertips tingled. He needed to work. He was so close.
"On Earth, people like me died out hundreds of years ago. They- could do things like this."
He demonstrates – a nearby rock, the size of his fist, levitates into the air then, as the Na'vi in the tree grabs for her bow, he turns it into a little fuzzy kitten. White fur with little pink paws, a pink nose, blue eyes and a pink ribbon around its neck shaped like a bow.
He thinks his aunt had a plate like this once. Or maybe it was Umbridge.
Mo'at visibly tenses as the tiny carnivore lets out a high-pitched mew and twists, trying to get its feet under it. Harry picks it up out of the air – and it is an it, he never wants to think about the genitals of transfigured animals if he can help it – and pets its fur gently until it starts purring and pressing into his skin.
"A trick…?" Mo'at breathes, eyes narrowed at the bundle of cute like it's about to go for her throat any second.
"Sort of." Harry agrees. "It's real, but only for as long as I want it to be. It can't… eat, or grow up, or make babies. It's not really alive – it just looks and behaves like it is."
"What is it?" Mo'at asks with a twist to her lips like she's not quite sure how repulsed she should be.
"We called it magic." Harry let the kitten claw its way up his shirt – leaving tiny but visible marks where the thread was pulled. Multiple sharp eyes took note of the effect a 'trick' could have. "And it's just how we were born. With the ability to reshape the world around us by…" he waves his hands a little, then puts them down as sharp stares clearly saw them for the potential weapons they were.
"By shaping the energy it was made of." He finishes. There's no comprehension on any of the faces he can see.
Good.
"People like me" he continues, as the cat curls up on his shoulder and shoves a cold, wet nose into his neck "separated from the rest of our species several hundred years ago. We did it because normal people – the Sky People – started to attack us. We were more powerful than them but… they had many more people. More warriors. Also, a normal person – a sky person – could give birth to one of our kind, so a lot of us didn't want to kill them." This kind of explanation was what happened when you slept through History of Magic, he supposed.
"So, we decided to hide instead. We were very good at it and… we got used to it. It became normal. We heard news about the Mugg- the Sky People sometimes but… we didn't really pay attention. Because they couldn't find us, we thought nothing they did mattered.
Then, suddenly, it was too late. It took hundreds of years for our world to get sick enough to notice and by then… we were dying too. We'd been having less magical babies for generations but we were wrong about why. When some of us finally worked out what was happening my people sealed me away. They knew it was too late for them and they hoped that one day I could help things get better. I think… that they assumed all the Sky People would die first. But the Sky People were too good at surviving and, eventually, they found me. They woke me up. And we don't have things like Tsahik, so… I don't really mean anything to them. Not like you do to your people."
"But you hear your… Earth's voice." Mo'at said with certainty. "You speak her words to your people. I saw you. You spoke in silence, and they obeyed."
Ah. Yes. He supposed amoral mental compulsions would look a little like divine authority, from that angle.
"Our Eywa – we call her Gaia." Harry spoke slowly, wanting to tell her the truth, wanting to make what promises he could. What little of himself was allowed to exist independent of his purpose, wanted to help her and her people.
Compassion from the fox for the hen who, to feed his own, would take only eggs and not her chicks.
He reached out, sensing, feeling the hum of humanity back at camp, the scattered patrols and the strange someone he felt earlier now much closer, hidden out of sight but easily close enough to listen. Human? Didn't feel like it. But it had to be, or how was he sensing it?
He tried not to frown, wondering whether he should send them away as a potential spy for the RDA or if doing so might cause alarm for the Na'vi around him. He knew they had human allies, after all. If there was a random human-ish person-
Oh.
It must be one of the human-Na'vi hybrid bodies. That would explain the weirdness.
Okay. Okay.
So.
Probably not about to go spilling anything to the RDA.
Probably would cause a stir if he suddenly left or passed out. Could Harry maybe… cloak his perceptions a little? Like a dream while awake, let him hear a different conversation?
He considered it for a second but, although he didn't doubt for a moment that he could do it, he did doubt that he could do it while still holding an intelligible conversation with the woman in front of him.
A woman who was now glaring as his silence dragged on.
He took a breath and committed.
"Gaia… I don't know if she used to be like Eywa. But she's not anymore. She doesn't have people who interpret her will. Maybe they were all killed a long time ago, by people who didn't like what they were hearing, I don't know. But she hasn't had people to speak for her for so long that nobody thinks she does anymore, or ever did. So, nobody would listen to anyone to claimed to be."
Another breath. Part of him was shouting inside his head. To tell them anything was risky, especially with a hybrid human who had already demonstrated extremely flawed judgement once already. But…
But..
"I'm… more than that, in a way. People like me… we belong to her. Our eyes and ears are hers to see and hear at a level she normally couldn't focus on. We move where she wills it and do what she wills."
He pauses, to gauge her reaction. The woman is stone-faced. The semi-human he can feel is clearer, if not useful. Incredulity and disbelief.
"Before I was sealed away," He explains, taking the kitten from his shoulder and crushing it – rocks and dust falling from his hands instead of fur or blood "the people doing it told me that I was deliberately bred to exist. They'd been trying for hundreds of years. So maybe… I mean. On Earth, people and plants and animals aren't connected the way they are on Pandora. So I guess we just sort of evolved away from it. It was only through deliberate effort that I came out the way I did. And it's why I'm still alive even though my people died out. I'm the last one. So, it's my job to save her. No matter what."
"Save her." Mo'at repeated with savage disdain. "If the Sky People cause her to sicken, then how can you 'save her' from here?"
More ugly skittering thoughts. But not for these inconveniences in the path of his obligations, no. This time it's remembering hands upon shoulders, rings of people frightened but willing to die to make something live. So few, an almost insignificant amount.
He shakes it away.
"The ore they're mining." He explains numbly. "It's… energy dense. In a way they couldn't detect on their own. It can… act like food. For Gaia. It helps to restore her."
"You would take the bones of our mother to feed your own?" There was the reaction. Fury too high to be banked behind a storm-wall.
"Bones she isn't using?" Harry shot back, tired and impatient. "Bones that lie in the ground, feeding nothing, useless."
"They are not yours to take!" Mo'at shouts, rising to her feet with predatory grace. "You who destroy your Great Mother – you would seek to devour ours now in turn!"
"YOU CANNOT STOP ME!" Harry shouts back, Mo'at leaping back from him in alarm. There are arrows pointed at him, one flies-
But the haze of power around him burns it away before he even registers its existence. He's taller now. No-he's floating off the ground, the world changing colour because the seen/unseen shade of magic is rolling out from him like the lazy limb of something terrible.
He sees the fear in their faces – the human-ish one is bolting towards them-
He shuts his eyes.
Takes a deep breath.
Doesn't dare to reign the power in because he knows it's the only thing keeping him alive, but-
He lowers himself back down. Tries not to notice the plants growing rapidly under his feet, only to die too soon.
He breathes out.
He swallows.
Breathes again.
And opens his eyes.
"I have to do what I must, to save my world." Half apology, half warning. "But I do not mean you or your people harm. I do not approve of what the Sky People are doing here, just as I do not approve of what they have done to Earth. And I would sooner cull their numbers than yours."
That stops them. There's dozens of them now, circling him, afraid and angry and ready to kill-
But Mo'at is studying him with all the wisdom of a woman ten times his age who has a deity of her own whispering in her ear.
"So you say." The woman sneers "And yet, our homes are destroyed. The land ruined. All to dig up our mother's bones to feed to your own. You are 'doing harm' to us."
"The digs don't have to be done the way they have been." Spending time with the engineers and their many detailed arguments had taught him that. "It's just… easier. And cheaper. To do it the way they've done it so far. I could make them take care. The same way I made them calm down and let me leave, before. I could make them leave the topsoil alone. Make them burrow, and put up supports, and refill the spaces once they're done. I could make them take only from some places and not others. The ore – the, bones – they're very strong. Not a lot is needed. Just enough to help our Mother survive and then…"
And then, another circle.
One all around the world.
No volunteers needed.
He swallows back bile and stares her down.
"I want to help you." He admits. Or maybe, remembers that he would have wanted if he could think past what he is now.
"But, I have to help her. Once her life is saved… I could come back. And help you keep the Sky People away for good."
The fidelius charm would be enough, he thinks. There's so much power here. Enough humans have died here. One of the still-living humans who stayed behind, or maybe even the human-ish thing. Any one of them could hold the secret once he anchored it deep. Pass it to their descendants. By the time they and the secret died out…
Maybe it wouldn't be needed anymore.
One way or another.
Pandora
End note:
(Warning for potential religious triggers. If the suggestion that something in your religion may not be as it is – even only in fiction – is offensive to you, please don't read the below.)
Okay, so you know Harry's little squishy antennae things?
In the very first draft of the outline of this story, I gave him the full fairy treatment, wings and all.
In my head canon, fairies were never a separate species but were the 'most magic' form of humanity. As Earth dwindled, so did the species and you got 'mere' Witches and Wizards instead. This also originated the use of tools (harvested from magical species that toughed out the change in environment better than they did) in order to wielding magic at a level they'd once been capable of on their own.
Some highly magical pockets remained (stone circles were involved) and those children with the potential to grow 'correctly' if exposed to enough magic were stolen or swapped (changelings) to be raised in these places of intense magic until eventually even this wasn't enough and the existence of the Fae Folk faded to myth, with only the pain of stolen children during their dwindling years leading to the stories that remain today.
With how easy/unchallenged the re-writing of history seems to be in HP canon, it made sense that Wizards chose not to remember – or teach - what they used to be. But the Sacred Twenty-Eight (and more) pureblood families… maybe they still remembered. Maybe that's why the dwindling 'purity' of their species mattered so much.
Then, while doing some research, I realised that a hell of a lot of ancient artwork (Greek, Sumerian, Roman, Egyptian, Asian [I realise that's very broad], Islamic etc) depicted various types of 'divine/commanding people' with halos.
And I thought: 'If I were an artist in ancient times trying to visually represent, essentially, biological wi-fi… I would probably paint it like that'.
And that's why Harry doesn't have fairy wings. You're welcome/sorry.
(Oh, and head canon is that all those people the paintings/statues with halos were based off of, no longer had external growths because this was the post-plenty era of magic. Devolution isn't any faster than evolution.)