Hey all,
Apparently, I'm on a serious one-shot kick. All though, this whole thing is supposed to be a series of one-shots, this will be a string of 3-4 more vignettes, i guess. They'll go chronilogically in order of the movie and they're in the same canon as "Old Coyote" and "Antartica". Actually, if you wanted to you, you could insert these one-shots with Grace's, This one, then "Antartica" then the next chapter/one-shot of this then "Old Coyote" but I digress...
So, since I wrote "Antartica"...something about Norm and Amanda caught my attention. And then Norm kept telling me to tell their story...yeah, these characters have taken over my brain,
Anyway, Amanda is my own OC, if you haven't figured it out yet and she's the only character I claim. Everything else belongs to James Cameron.
Enjoy!
"The course of true love never did run smooth."~William Shakespeare
"I don't quite know/How to say/How I feel/Those three words/Are said too much/They're not enough…"~ Snow Patrol "Chasing Cars"
I liked logic. I did. I ordered my world around it. There was order to everything and a reason behind it. Being practical was a matter-of-course and everything else fit: if I couldn't see it, touch it, or hear it, it wasn't real, at least to me.
All the things people found mysterious and incomprehensible all had explanations: Love was simply chemical attraction between two people's brains, faith only had power if you believed in it, fate was just a crutch that people needed. Hope…Well, I hoped for things. I hoped to get that early acceptance into Yale, I hoped for a future job on Pandora. I hoped for small things, things I could achieve. But did I hope big? No.
That is until, like all the great stories, I met a girl….
It was the second day of my freshman year at Yale; I spent most of the day before getting totally lost, losing my keys but was actually feeling pretty good at that point. I'd found my first Xeno-biology class with little trouble and still had my keys.
There was a flash of blue jeans and a dark green t-shirt as she settled next to me in the semi-dark lecture hall. She opened her backpack and pulled out a notebook, pens and a highlighter. As she returned to the sitting position, she pushed a long dark curly strand out of her eyes and then seemed to notice that she had chosen a seat next to me.
"Hi," she extended her hand to me. "I'm Amanda. Amanda Fuller."
All I could think was: why is she talking to me? There had to be three hundred people in this class, why me? Granted, I'd just spent the last four years being roundly ignored by my peers; male and female alike. Still I just couldn't fathom it.
"Do you have a name?" she prodded, a half and unsure smile on her lips, which naturally curved upward.
Stupid Norm! I cursed as I took her offered hand. "Yeah, sorry. I'm Norm. Spellman. Are you a Xeno-Biology major too?" Yes! Points for making conversation.
She shook her head. "No, I'm Xeno-Ecology."
I knew that hunger in her voice. "You want to go to Pandora, don't you?"
She nodded, a light flush erupting under her freckles.
"Me too,"
Dr. Shepard took to the podium then and we stopped talking. For the moment at least.
We were friends after that, Amanda and I. We stuck together though the rest of our time together at Yale. We were study buddies; especially when our subjects overlapped, which they did quite often. She called me "Biology" and I called her "Ecology". People thought we were nuts and we were. I'd never met someone who had the same passion for school, for learning as I had in Amanda. She was bright, focused, and resourceful but quietly confident. There was always a kind word, and a playfulness that she didn't seem to have with anyone else.
And stupidly, I fell for her.
No, fell was the wrong word, I realized. I'd always heard the phrase: to fall in love but that didn't describe what I felt for Amanda. I didn't feel like I had stepped off a cliff or jumped out of a plane. It was more like grounding. Like everything had settled into place and there wasn't anything else to guess or wonder about. It crept up on me slowly but hit me all at once, like a stealthy thanator.
It didn't make sense…Biologically, she only had a few of the traits that would attract the opposite sex but they weren't in the extreme. Amanda had long curly almost black hair that had a mind all its own. She had these cat eye glasses that framed her almond shaped chocolate brown eyes. They weren't just brown, but brown around the edges with flecks of gold around her iris. And something about the combination of all these traits; the physical and the personality, made her irresistible to me.
That and her eyes. Those eyes didn't miss anything and I think they're what did me in.
To this day, I don't really know what it was that made me realize how much I had grounded myself for her. I remember when I realized it though; we were studying for spring finals of that freshman year. It must have been…one or two in the morning and Amanda suddenly just put her head down on the table.
"Wake me up in ten minutes." She announced as she took her glasses off and laid them next to her elbow. "Just ten." She wacked the stack of books next to her. "Then I gotta get through most of these."
I promised that I would. But as I sat there, watching her sleep, I forgot all about school and the grades riding on these tests. I had one of those epiphanies that you hear that everyone has: I knew there was no other place I ever wanted to be. If Amanda was next to me, there wasn't anything else I could want. She may not have felt the same, or even knew that I'd become aware of this but I didn't care, I was next to her and that was all that mattered.
I never told her; I tried a couple of times, but couldn't. I could ruin everything if I opened my mouth and said those words. I decided that if I ignored them hard enough, these feelings would just disappear. Besides, if I told her, things would be weird if she didn't feel the same way and I still wanted her as a friend. She was my friend first.
So, I kept my mouth shut through sophomore, junior and senior year as we struggled through undergrad, through our introduction to one of the oldest legal stimulants: coffee, through the hazards of college dating (mainly hers, though I did my share) but we kept our eyes constantly on the prize: getting into the ATP (Avatar Training Program offered by the RDA) and going to Pandora. We worked hard through mid-terms and papers, sweating over GREs and letters of recommendation.
We ended up going to different grad schools, I went to Berkley, she to Brown. We kept in touch for a while. But we were so busy; it turned into a few random e-mails, a phone call every so often. Amanda graduated from grad school a year before I did; she got her Master's and was immediately accepted into the ATP. I followed in the year afterward but we still didn't see each other much even though now we lived in the same city again. I kept thinking that I had blown my chance and I would always regret it.
Then one day out of the blue I got a phone call. Amanda wanted to see me. Maybe all hope wasn't lost. I met her on a cold March day in a coffee shop in Seattle where you could look out the window and see the black ocean roiling in the rain.
The people sitting around me must have thought I was nuts because every time the door opened and the bell jingled, I turned, hoping it was her. I must have turned around to look half a dozen times, each time, though, I was disappointed. It was close to the time we'd decided on…maybe she was held up, maybe she missed the turn and-
Amanda walked through the door, the same but different too. She may have been a little older, but was just as beautiful as I remembered, still had those glasses and all that dark hair framing her face. I was done for.
"Hey, Biology," She smiled as she sat down across from me.
"Hey Ecology." I smiled right back. "So, what's up?"
We talked about our ATP training, grad school, re-living undergrad stories. I told her about Tom and how brilliant he was. She was excited to meet him eventually.
Amanda didn't look at me when the topic of Pandora itself came up. Someone who didn't know her the way I did would assume she was scared. Not Amanda…there was something else.
"What? Just spit it out." I insisted. "I know you're keeping something from me."
"I…"her eyes caught mine and she smiled slyly. "How do you always know?"
I shrugged. "It's a gift. Spill."
"I'm going to Pandora!"
That really wasn't what I was expecting but… "Wow. I thought you had a few more years to go."
She nodded. "Yeah me too, but they put me on the fast track. They don't have any ecologists and Dr. Augustine's offered to make me on."
"When are you leaving?" I wondered.
"Next week." She grinned hugely
We talked for a while longer but she had to go, cancel her lease or walk the dog or something I don't really remember what it was exactly. It wasn't important.
When she got up to leave, she stopped beside me. I was just about to ask her what was wrong when Amanda half turned, like she'd forgotten something. She leaned down and looked me straight in the eye before she kissed me on the cheek. "Meet me on Pandora," Amanda whispered like a promise and walked out of my life again.
I'd never been much of a fan of all the new music that was constantly being churned out; I liked the old stuff, stuff from the 20th and 21st centuries. Back when music was good. It was only fitting to hear that old song playing softly in the background, the one that talks about saying goodbye and how you die a little inside, as Amanda vanished from sight.
Tom always made fun of me for never making a move. He said he wanted to meet her for himself, but he never got that chance. It was true, though; I should have done something but she was gone, light years away. And there was a chance that I wouldn't ever get the chance to say what I wanted to. Some nights, when I couldn't sleep, I wondered what might have happened if I'd stopped her in that coffee shop, if I had told her the moment I knew all the way back in freshman year. Would it have changed everything? Anything?
I may not have believed in fate, but that's the funny thing about it, I guess. It sneaks up on you when you least expect it to find you. I got my chance though, to say the words I'd been waiting for almost ten years to say when I too got to Pandora a few years later.
I tried to focus on what Dr. Augustine was saying to Jake, saying that she didn't need him….something about Parker and then….
Amanda was there, behind Dr. Augustine, behind Dr. Patel at her own desk, her head in her hand as she focused only on the work before her. She had a lab coat, starchy white and professional but she'd let her long hair flow down her back. She bit the end of her pen and furrowed her eye brows. There we were, both of us, living the dreams we'd woven so many years ago.
I snapped back to the present moment when Dr. Augustine growled that she was going to talk to corporate and stormed off. Dr. Patel sighed as if it were a daily occurrence. He told Jake to use big words tomorrow.
"Amanda? David?!" He called. A man I assumed to be David appeared next to Dr. Patel. "Amanda!"
"What?!" Amanda called back, clearly losing her trail of thought. She hated that. She didn't even look up from her work.
"I need you to come show the new guys around!"
"Can't you get someone else…?" She stopped then, as she turned. The displeasure melted away and she stood.
I walked over, feeling ten feet tall. I hadn't seen her in God knows exactly how long but still I couldn't help but feel like that college freshman again…
"I can't believe you're here," she grinned as she looped her arms around me. I had to lean down and she had to stand on her tiptoes. I didn't fall, wasn't pushed out of an airplane, but I knew, like I had all those years ago, this was where I needed to be. Right here. On Pandora. With Amanda.
"My God…" She cupped her hands around her mouth in shock when she let go. "I'm sorry I would have said 'hi' earlier, I just totally forgot what day it was."
"You knew I was coming?"
She nodded. "Yeah I saw you and Tom were both coming…." She looked around, curiously. "Where is he? I want to meet him…" She glanced at Jake in his wheel chair, who was being shown around by David at the other side of the lab, and then looked questioningly up at me.
"That's Tom's twin, Jake. He's an ex-marine. Bullet severed his spinal cord." I replied quietly as we sat at her desk.
"I'm confused. Where's Tom?"
"He's dead…" It was the first time I'd said it out loud. It only made sense that Amanda was the one who heard it, too. "He got shot a week before we shipped out."
"Oh…Norm," she sighed and put her hand on mine. "I'm sorry. I know you two were friends. "
I nodded, focusing only on the warmth of her hand, the way it curved around mine. "It happened five years ago…Tom's been gone for five years. It feels like a week."
Amanda nodded. "Yeah, the time thing threw me off for the while too."
I didn't want to think about Tom anymore. "Just imagine when you go back." God was I stupid. I'd only been here for three hours and I was already talking about going home.
Amanda gave me that Amanda look, the same one that I saw that first day we met. "Can I tell you a secret?"
I smiled. Just like old times. "'Course."
"I don't want to go back. There's too much to see…" She pulled out chart after chart, showing me her findings; food webs, energy transference chains and sketches, and the first few pages of the book she was hoping to finish: "The Pandorian Ecology: A study by Amanda Fuller". "You've got to help me with this, Biology." She'd slipped back into our nicknames as if we were studying in the Yale library all those years ago.
"Of course," I promised as I fished a photo of a particularly nasty looking thanator out of the pile.
"David almost lost his tail for that," Amanda noted, coolly. "Gorgeous isn't it?"
I glanced up at her. "This…?" I wouldn't have said it was beautiful, per say, amazing, incredible and…scary were the words I was thinking of.
Amanda snatched the photo back, glaring at me from under her eyelashes. "I think it's beautiful."
"If you call six legs beautiful," I tried to grab it back.
"Yeah, well when you love something, it changes your perspective, doesn't it?" She insisted as we played keep way.
"I guess…" Did she know? She had to know…
"Oh come on, Bio. Don't tell me that you've never been so in love with someone that everything about them is beautiful to you!" She laughed; her eyes crinkling at the edges.
"Only once," I promised. And it was true.
"See," she put her hands on her hip. "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder."
"This, though," I grabbed at her motley collection of pens all with the caps chewed and bitten into a square. Classic Amanda. "This is not beautiful. I can't believe you still do this." I held one out to her. I may have ragged on her for it, but I thought it was adorable. Just like she said.
"No one steals them," she justified. "And pens are practically a currency here."
"Don't you remember how that pen exploded in Shepard's lecture? And you had blue all over you for weeks."
Amanda clapped her hand over her eyes, her cheeks flushing. "I can't believe you went there!" She punched me in the arm.
I laughed. "And then we went to the campus hospital because you were sure you'd die of ink poisoning."
She grinned "And we sat there for four hours, didn't we?"
I nodded. "We started playing connect the dots with the ink spatters to pass the time."
Amanda laughed. "They all though we were crazy."
"We were," I insisted.
She took the pen and her hair up into a messy bunch on the top of her head and stuck the pen in. A few un-tangled pieces fell and framed her sharp eyes concealed in her glasses. She looked at me, as if she could read all my thoughts. "I'm glad you're here. Just like we always said…"
And just like that, I was a college freshman again. She was beautiful and there wasn't a God-damned thing I could do to stop everything from rushing back.
So what did you guys think? I had a harder time channeling Norm's voice. At first it was too poetic, then it was too cynical (I actually got a few really good lines out but they seemed more like Jake), but I feel like this is more him.
Anyway, I'd love to hear!!! Happy Reading!
