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planet earth

The darkness has swallowed the village completely as it was late at night and everyone was fast asleep in their Marui. However Leyra couldn't close an eye tonight, so she sat at the beach like she always does when she couldn't sleep and listened to the ocean.

The waves were crashing against the stones in the distance and birds were chirping silently while flying above the ocean. It's refreshing when there is no noice and screaming from the people of her clan and the voice of the ocean calmed her down.

A light breeze from the wind blows through her hair and the coldness of it leaves goosebumps on her blue skin. She felt the sand under hair fingertips as she drew lines into it and the sky was studded with stars, all kind of planets and moons.

Leyra heard light footsteps on the sand behind her but she couldn't care less to turn around. The person sat beside her on the sand.

"Why are you up?" Jake Sully asked her and looked at her concerned. He liked the girl like his mate Neytiri does and he noticed the strange behavior of his sons around her too. He felt like he had to protect her even though she isn't his own child.

"I couldn't fall asleep, and you?" she answered with a quiet voice and stared to the ocean, where the waves are becoming rougher with each minute.

"Yeah, me too." He said.

They sat in silence for a quite amount of time, enjoying the atmosphere.

"Can I ask you something?" Leyra broke the silence.

"Of course. Ask away." He simply responded.

"Do you sometimes miss home?" Jakes was confused for a second with what she meant by home.

"I mean earth." She clarified.

Jake needed to think about that question. He wasn't sure, because Pandora was his home now but he lived for years on earth.

"Sometimes, I guess." He answers truthfully. "I had a brother, a twin, on earth but he died early. He should have been here on Pandora, not me. His death gave me the opportunity to take his Avatar to be here and I often feel guilty. He could have had the life I live now."

Leyra listened to him carefully and was thankful that he shared his life story with her, with a stranger. It is freeing to talk with someone about the past without being judged right away.

"But I'm also really thankful. I was paralyzed as a human. I couldn't walk because I got shot in a mission for the army. I was so happy on my first day in my Avatar body. I couldn't believe I could feel my legs and walk, even run." He continued and a smile formed on his face at the memory of his first day on Pandora. Leyra was grateful that Jakes dream of walking again came true.

"My dad was human too." Leyra said after a few seconds of silence. "He told me he was in the Avatar program in the forest. You might have known him. He met my mother here in the Metkayina clan, because he was hiding due to the war the sky people had started. He didn't wanted to be apart of it."

"You are talking about him in the past. What happened?" he asked cautiously, not wanting to pressure her to answer. He could sense it was a sensitive topic for her.

"I- I don't really know. He just left me, when I was a small child. I didn't even know if his conscious was transformed into his Avatar body or not. I have no idea if he is still alive out there." She responded quietly as her emotions were eating her up.

"Why did he left?"

"My mother died when she gave birth to me and it was clear that she would, because the pregnancy was slowly weakening her and my birth was the last straw. I think my father couldn't stand me anymore because I was so similar to her. He said it was my fault that she died." She mumbled on the verge of tears and looked sadly to the sky. Seeing the brightest star, she thought of her mother. She never knew how she looked like or how her character was. She will never forgive herself for taking her mother's life.

Jake's heart ached for the girl and his fatherly instincts made him pull her into his chest, hugging her tightly. "It's not your fault, little one." He said while stroking over her head gently. "Your mother had chosen you to come to this world and Eywa knows what she's doing. She has great things in store for you. You have to believe in yourself, Leyra."

Leyra has shot down her wall that's she build over the years to hide her emotion from everyone and slowly broke down. She was sobbing hard into his chest, because she never felt protected by everyone like she felt now by Jake.

"I can't change your mind completely but I'll help you to understand that it's not your fault what happened." He whispers softly and takes her head in his hands while looking down at her. "For now on I'm always there for you, Leyra."

Leyra was thankful that she had met Jake Sully and his family. She felt more accepted by them in a span of few days than her whole life by the clan. She wiped her tears away and looked at Jake. She had a question she needed to ask. She wanted to know something about the place where her dad had lived.

"What is planet earth like?"

"A hundred and thirty years ago earth was very similar to Pandora. The planet had magical and enormous forests, that were deeply green, healthy and contained many different flora and different species of animals." He thought of how his home planet looked like before he was born. He had seen pictures, videos and documentaries about it and read several books about the nature.

"The ocean was a clean shade of deep blue with various sea creatures. There were regions with big mountains with snow on top and places were it was ice-cold. It was a balanced mix of different temperatures all across the globe." Leyra looked to the ocean in front of them. Does it look like it does here? She thought but Jakes was talking in the past tense. Something bad must've happened.

"We had a little moon, the stars where shining brightly in the night and sometimes you could see other planets from the solar system. Animals and humans were living in peace for a while. It was truly a paradise." He told her and remembered the time when he was a small child playing in the nature, too little to understand the power of destruction he already had.

"But the humans destroyed every single centimeter on that planet." Jake revealed.

"What did they do?" She asked softly and Jake noticed her wording. For the girl he wasn't a part of the human race. She saw him as a true Na'vi and he was relieved that she didn't thought that everything's was his fault.

"They were destroying the planet little by little until it was too late to be saved. Over the years humans would invent new things, new technologies to make their life easier, new supplies, new transport machines to go from place to place."

Leyra remembered the stories she was told as a child. The humans attacked the forest Na'vi with massive machines out of steel and iron, with guns and bombs. It was terrifying and now the humans are back on Pandora with even more horrible weapons, stronger than ever.

"They have robbed the nature by its resources. They were killing forests for land to build houses on. They've polluted the air, the ocean and the land. So many animals and plants got extinct because of gases and diseases that spread over the world."

She could feel the Pandorian nature in her whole body and couldn't imagine how painful it was for the earths nature to be ignored, robbed and destroyed. If that would happen with her home she would want do die with the nature, to be with Eywa again.

"They fought in many wars, killing each other and destroying their home with the animals that lived there. None of the newest investments could save the planet. Humans were selfish and they would take anything just to survive, but they didn't realized that they were killing themselves while they were destroying the planet. It was simply too late."

"The whole environment collapsed. The temperature was rising, the icebergs were melting, forests got burned, the population was growing too fast and no resources were left because they wasted it all. War has broken out again. Countries, you would say clans, fought each other for the place on earth. But the end result? Earth only got more ruined and nothing could help anymore. After that, scientists were searching for solutions. Sacrifice other humans to save a few of the race or find a new planet to destroy. They were searching for planets or moons that were similar to earth to continue live on so the human race wouldn't get extinct."

So that's why the humans came to Pandora and attacked the forest Na'vi, Leyra thought. They needed a new place to live because they destroyed theirs and couldn't save it in time. If they would have succeeded to take the forest in their hands, the destruction would have been far more now. Sadly they already had destroyed the Home Tree of the forest.

"We called the earth mother nature and we killed her."

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Leyra and Jake ^
[art by me]