(Necessary) filler chapter ahoy!
Thanks to everyone who drops me a line but particular thanks to Ferz whose random comment completely shattered a block that had been dogging me for weeks.
Short chapter because I then hit another block. I never normally ask, but, is there anything that anyone particularly wants to see while Harry is on Pandora? There's not much room for change in my plan but maybe thinking about how to fit it in will help spark some progress. :/
Pandora
The next day, a mixed group of humans and aliens came to talk to Baker and the other leaders. Mike - like most of the military - kept sharp and unfriendly eyes on them at all times. In deference to his bodyguard's blood pressure, Harry agreed to keep his nose out of the whole affair. It was no hardship. Not only was it really none of his business, but… well. Magic.
Mike rolled his eyes but followed him back to his bunk with a suppressed smirk. He even took the time to swing by the mess to grab them both snacks (once Harry was safely inside). One anchored eavesdropping spell later and the two of them could sit back and listen to the inter-species argument like a radio play.
They'd missed the start, but the going was good.
"Traitor is not just a word. You were placed into a position of trust - and you turned around and engineered wholesale slaughter on both sides of a conflict that didn't need to happen."
"Oh, goin' for the throat." Mike whispered, passing him the local equivalent of popcorn. It tasted a bit like salted strawberries and even though every bite registered as 'weird', it was oddly addictive.
"You're the ones who slaughtered defenceless people. I just tried to give them a fighting chance to defend themselves!"
"Who is he calling 'you'?" Harry wondered, not bothering to whisper. The spell didn't go both ways. "Baker arrived with the rest of us."
"He's using Baker as a stand-in for the RDA." Mike muttered back hurriedly, talking a bit over Baker's response.
"Sure." The word dripped with sarcasm. "When was this again? Cause it wasn't when when you were spying on their every move, reporting back on the layout of their home and how best to destroy it-" a couple of sharp noises happened - like bird calls or barks - the other aliens? "-and after the initial conflict was over with minimal losses, you not only went and stirred the pot again but called in thousands more to die!"
"Oh shit." Harry muttered around another mouthful. He'd read the same report everyone else had, about the battle that had taken place eight months ago, but he hadn't really registered that… yeah. The traitor Marine-Avatar-Driver had not only betrayed the humans and Na'vi both, he'd then gone and actively stirred up more trouble.
"Because I know what you do to people who surrender!" The must-be-Sully alien bellowed back."To people who give up and move on - only to get moved on again and again until they're barely surviving on the scraps of whatever bits of their own land you decide to give 'em."
"Wow, the guy's gone native." Harry shook his head.
"More like dissociative." Mike growled. "'What you do'? Must be nice to shed centuries of cultural guilt along with your meatsuit."
"And your brilliant solution was… what? To get even more people killed? Prolong the fighting? Spawn more tragedies, begetting a cycle of vengeance, on and on, until, what? Seriously, what? What was your end game here, Sully? Sticks and stones may have won you a battle but they won't win the war and you know that, better than any of them ever could! So why? Why did you do it?" To his credit, the Major seemed to genuinely want to know. He sounded almost… distraught.
Pulling back from the Schadenfreude-esque entertainment that came with hearing someone get a well-deserved bollocking, Harry guiltily realised that this wasn't just a military man being angry at a traitor. It was a man of empathy, resigned to the uglier parts of life maybe but one who tried to mitigate it when and where he could. It was a man, looking at a 'freedom fighter' and struggling not to see a monster.
"Because this - because they - are worth fighting for." Sully's voice was quiet and firm, conviction unwavering. "Better to fight for what's ours than just let you take it, without spilling a drop of sweat, let alone blood."
He put the packet of snacks aside, feeling suddenly sick. He tuned out the rest of the argument, even as Mike muttered occasionally at his side.
This was real. It wasn't just a story, passed along like juicy gossip. It was real, and violent. As desperately life-or-death as his own fight against Voldemort had once felt.
And he'd been unconsciously treating it like a TV-drama. Or ancient history. Over and done with, forgotten, irrelevant. Just a lingering problem to solve.
He crossed his arms and leaned more heavily against the side of his bunk. Absently, he wondered what the original purpose of the meeting had been, before it devolved into that. Sully, spoiling for a fight with the RDA (or maybe the whole of humanity?) as represented by one man. Baker, clearly wanting to shake the stupid out of a traitor who threw innocent, ignorant natives into a military meat grinder - seemingly in the insane hope that somehow enough bones would clog up the gears.
Well. He supposed he knew whose side he was on.
Surely it was a form of murder, to rile people up for a war you knew they ultimately couldn't win. The RDA was the bad guy here, no question. They were the classic 'evil corporation', come to steal the resources of a vulnerable people backed up by their own private army. But.
That didn't automatically make Sully the good guy.
He glanced at Mike (who was still paying attention), then up at the ceiling in the direction he liked to pretend Earth was in. What would he do, if it were him?
If he, a Muggleborn Wizard in the Wizarding World, somehow knew that the Muggles had discovered them and were coming for them. Clever, experienced, powerful Muggles who were not so far removed from their long history of atrocities as they liked to pretend. Who had an equally long history of dramatic apologies after the fact without ever actually giving back whatever it was they had taken. No use crying over spilt milk and all that. Knock up a monument and call it good.
What would he do, if he knew Muggles were coming for all the untapped resources of the Wizarding World and that nothing would prevent them from getting what they wanted, sooner or later, one way or another?
Wizards were powerful in their own way, much like the Na'vi were. Hell, the Na'vi were physically superior in every way to a normal human, but… Physical - or magical - superiority clearly wasn't always enough.
Muggles were many. They were clever. Maybe because they weren't the strongest or most powerful, they were good at compensating for their own shortcomings. The were good at building things to do what they couldn't. They were the undisputed masters of warfare on Earth, no sentient species ever disputed that, not even the Goblins. There was a reason they numbered in the billions and dominated the globe. There was a reason that Magicals had hid from them for centuries.
So, if he knew they were coming. Knew that the Wizards could win battles but never the war… What would he do?
He didn't need to think on it for long to know the answer and with it came an unexpected sense of kinship with the traitorous marine.
Because he would absolutely fight them regardless. He'd want to go down with his teeth in their fucking throat. He'd make a mess of any and everyone they sent to stop him, desperate and hateful, wanting to makethem to pay for what he knew they'd inevitably end up doing. To his world, his home, his way of life - warts and all.
Maybe he wouldn't, at first, but once the first witch or wizard was 'accidentally' killed…? Once an advance was made against Hogwarts?
It was animal instinct. Deep and powerful and it could not be rationalised away. Not when monsters were scratching at the door.
So yeah. He… understood. In principle. He understood the urge to fight a loosing battle because to do anything else was unthinkable. But, maybe because he was outside this particular fight, he understood Baker's and Li's and most of the others' feelings too. The feeling that what Sully had done was almost criminal.
Because from an outsider's perspective, Jacob Sully had straight-up gotten a lot of people killed who hadn't needed to die - and he didn't seem willing to stop. Despite surely knowing that, ultimately, he couldn't possibly win. Not with the RDA's sheer technological advantages. It might take a decade or more, but sooner or later an armada would arrive in orbit and then it would be over.
It was terrible to say, to even think, but.
Not fighting would have saved so many lives.
Ugh. It was an uncomfortable thought to have. It made him feel guilty. How disgusting was it to think badly of the victim for refusing to surrender to their attacker? But, Sully? He wasn't the victim. He wasn't an innocent 'them', he was a very culpable 'us', who'd inserted himself into a conflict and then escalated it.
It somehow made what he'd done - and what he'd inspired others to do - seem so much worse than it would have coming from anyone else. Like, y'know, an actual native desperately defending his home as opposed to a should-have-known-better, rabble-rousing tourist.
(What kind of man goaded people armed with bows and arrows into fighting flying tanks?)
Feeling his magic churn in reaction to his emotions, he canceled the spell with a twitch of his fingers. It wasn't… safe, here, to let himself get too worked up. The glut of energy all around him left him full to bursting with magic. Magic that had always lashed out when his emotions were running high. He needed to… to just step back. At least until the job was done and he (they, the terribly fragile and mostly friendly Muggles around him who could die so easily if his control slipped) could go home.
Mike seemed to sense the direction his mind was going in, patting him on the shoulder and collecting the remains of their snacks to stow away before letting himself out.
A large part of him wanted to do something. His 'saving people thing', Hermione would say. He'd taken it as an insult at the time, the way she'd said it, had taken it as blame. The truth had hurt, but he was a little older now. A little wiser.
There could be no winner here. There was no clear morally correct action that could be taken. The RDA wasn't going to grow a soul and step back from the world that was making them rich(er), or at least mine somewhere a little less populated. They'd sunk serious money into Pandora, it would be insane for them to even consider abandoning their investment.
Mankind had never, ever, moved beyond their own solar system - until Pandora. This wasn't just an expensive mine, it was colonisation of another world. It was a species-unifying event in human history and the RDA stood at the head of it all.
In short, the RDA were invested. They would never give it up.
And Sully should know that.
What was more likely, the RDA abandoning the mine and going home with their tail tucked between their legs? Or the RDA just clamping tighter on their control of Pandora-related media and doing whatever it took to resume operations as cost-effectively as possible?
Harry didn't have to grow up in this time to know that the odds of the RDA getting tired of the whole charade and just fire-bombing the forest weren't even worth betting on. A cheerful little media campaign back home about all the happy natives 'generously relocated with substantial compensation' would be all it would take to cover it up, especially out here. Hell, who would even be able to tell the difference if they were shown pictures of a completely different tribe in a different patch of jungle?
Huh, probably only the same people who had conveniently decided to stay on Pandora.
And what could he really do to change any of that? There was enough magic here that he could probably cast a global shield of sorts - but he didn't have the runic knowledge to anchor a spell of that magnitude to anything, so it'd fall as soon as he did. Back on Earth, there wasn't enough magic for him to do something… untoward, to change certain important Muggle minds. Nothing that would last longer than a second or two, assuming he could even bring himself to use such magic in the first place. Add to that was his clear and pressing obligation to Earth - he couldn't allow himself to get caught up in defending Pandora when his own home was dying. What was the expression? Put your own house in order before seeing to another's.
But maybe… if he could restore Earth… then maybe companies like the RDA wouldn't need to harvest other planets so greedily. Who was he kidding, they absolutely still would, but at least then it'd be clearly morally correct to stand up for the aliens getting shafted.
Just as soon as human survival no longer required it to happen, Harry himself would be able to stand up for them. Would be able to justify it.
Would you kill one person to save five?
A test from one of his edu-units abruptly sprang to mind.
It had been intended to help peel back the flesh of his thoughts and expose the inner workings - 'self reflection' or some-such rubbish - but Harry's answer had always just been 'no'.
Unless the one person dying was either himself or the person actively about to kill the five. He was pretty comfortable with those options.
Would you kill one tribe, to save a planet?
He'd flunked the unit. Twice. He remembered being so frustrated by it, by how useless it had seemed for every-day life.
Ha-ha, universe.
Ha fucking ha.
Pandora
Harry: i spent my whole life in one culture only to fall in love with a second one that i would fight to the bitter end to protect - even against the first
Jake: me too
Harry: …
Jake: …
Harry: …it's bad when you do it.