I've got several ideas for new chapters, some of which I'm already almost done with. This is going to be a series of individual one-shots exploring a character's thoughts, experiences, emotions, etc. at specific points in, before, or after the film. This chapter has been re-done as of 2/26/10, so be sure to re-read it if you haven't already!

Identity Crisis

Jake wheeled up to the desk: centered in front of him was a camera on a flexible mount, while to his right stood a monitor displaying what the camera was recording. He locked his wheels and glanced at the monitor as he adjusted it, trying to center himself in the shot.

Once he was pleased with the positioning he let out a sigh, rubbed his eyes, and stared at the monitor, face in hand. He watched the left side of his face being displayed for about a minute.

The Jake he sees in the monitor is by no means the same Jake from day one. His hair is getting long, messy, and slightly greasy; his beard is unkempt, and the color of his skin had all but left, leaving a pale façade that displayed the exhaustion he was experiencing. His shirt that once held taught over his toned upper body now lay loose over his neglected frame, and his eyes had lost that gung-ho sharpness and determination they had when he first came to Hell's Gate. I need a shower… he thought.

He had his finger on the record button for a short amount of time while he considered how he would start off the log. He waited a beat, then began:

"It's been roughly two months since I came to the Avatar program, and I'm starting to see why they have a psych guy back at Hell's Gate. Everything used to be so clear-cut: here's my side, and here's theirs. You do as you're told and the shit will run upstream, past you, straight to the superiors. But now, things have been getting harder and harder to sort. Every day I'm questioning what I'm doing, why I'm doing it, how it's going to end. It's just… it's like I don't belong in half of my life. I'm calling into question my whole identity. Sure, I know me, the me the Na'vi speak about when they say 'I see you', but I don't think I'm in the right place. I don't belong. I mean, what am I doing here?" Jake looked around, motioning towards the interior of the shack. "I'm in a little metal box on a floating rock, for Christ's sake. The only true freedom I've had in years is out there, but I need to be in here to get to it."

"Everything is backwards now. Like out there is the true world, and in here is the dream. Out there I'm accepted; well, sort of, but I have a shot. I could have a life out there. In here, though, I'm just some broken grunt. Selfridge and Quaritch are taking advantage of my every move, Grace still thinks I'm a tool, and Norm is still a little pissed about me taking his place as ambassador. But the Omaticaya, they are helping me. Neytiri actually looks forward to mentoring me. And now, everything she teaches me just seems… pure, logical. I go back to Hell's Gate and feel like I'm some higher person. All of the greed and selfishness that runs the colony feels like dirt in the air, and all I can think about is getting back to the Omaticaya; to Neytiri." A lengthy pause follows.

"It seems like I'm the only one that feels this way, though. I'm the one getting so attached to them, and I don't even have a way to cope like the others do." Grace stirs awake in the bunk at the far side of the room, undetected by Jake.

"Norm and Trudy… well, they have their little fling going for them," Grace is now standing, the noise she made getting up masked by Jake speaking, "and Grace has her disgusting cigarette fix to calm her nerves. She and Norm are scientists. They can easily remove themselves emotionally. I can't do that."

"Talking to yourself, marine?" Grace said forcefully, trying to startle him. With the acoustics of the small room working in her favor, her voice seemed to punch in from every direction.

"Christ!" Jake shouted as he whirled his head and upper body around to face her. "You're up early."

"You know, if you need someone to talk to you can try me." Grace said, practically ignoring his attempt at small talk.

"Somehow I don't think that would help so much."

"But talking to yourself does?"

"You should try it some time." He countered. They stayed there for a few seconds in silence, maintaining eye contact.

"It's not removal: it's isolation." Grace said as she folded her arms.

"What?"

"Emotionally. We don't remove ourselves emotionally. We isolate our emotions from our work. The way you say it makes it seem like we're robots."

"I'm still not entirely convinced you aren't." He said with a small smile.

"You know what, fuck off." Grace said, throwing her hands up and walking away. "Don't convince yourself you're the only one who got attached to the Omaticaya." She called out as she walked away.

"Wait, wait." Jake said. He unlocked his wheels and pivoted to face her. "I'm just busting your chops."

"Too late Jarhead. Get ready, the Na'vi wake up early."

Bright, artificial light poured onto Jake as the link chamber swung open. He squinted his eyes as he propped himself up, his elbows sinking into the cushiony green bed he was lying in. He no longer resisted whenever someone tried to help him into his wheelchair as Grace and Norm did today. 'It's a trivial thing to get over-protective about' he began thinking a few weeks ago. Out here no one cared whether or not he needed someone's help.

"You're still losing weight. Here-" Grace said, handing him a microwave burrito. He took the now alien food and bit into it with the same enthusiasm as a child eating spinach.

"We made a kill today. We ate it. I know where that meal came from." Said Jake.

"Other body. You need to take care of this body."

"Yeah yeah."

"Jake, I'm serious. You look like crap. You're burning too hard."

Jake plucked the lit cigarette from her mouth. "Get rid of this shit," he said, snuffing it out into the table for emphasis, "then you can lecture me."

"I'm telling you, as your boss and someone who might even consider being a friend someday, to take some down time."

"Not now. Tomorrow we leave for Iknimaya." He said as Grace walked over to the coffee maker.

"Yeah, you're gonna ride a banshee. Or die trying."

"Ikran, Grace. You should know that." Jake said with that same smirk from the morning. Grace shot him a death stare. He humored her and continued, "That's right, Grace. This is what I've been working for."

"And this is your check up from the neck up, Marine. You're getting in way too deep. Trust me, I learned the hard way." Those pictures. The ones she always looked at with such longing whenever she had the opportunity.

'Maybe I can finally find out some back story.' Jake thought.

"What did happen at the school?" Grace's head shot up as if she didn't expect the question. Yet, she was the one that tugged the conversation in that direction. 'She wants to tell.' He thought. Her eyes panned over to the photos: smiling children gathered around her kneeling Avatar. It was always a little odd jumping from Na'vi scale to human scale: in the picture they looked like any regular child, but in reality they would have been taller than most adult humans. Would have been.

Grace reflected on that moment: the day's lesson was an introduction to human technology. She thought they might have been wary of the camera (after all, once upon a time humans thought their own invention stole their souls) but they took right to it. They ran around, clicking photos of everything they could see, then looked at the screen on the back to see what they just captured. Over half of the photos had a stray blue finger covering some part of the lens during the shot, and they had not yet learned of focusing: How do you teach a child about things being blurry when they never have vision problems? And yet, those flawed pictures tell so much about the children that they're second only to meeting them in person. She sat down, holding her coffee in both hands.

"Neytiri's sister, Sylwanin, stopped coming to school. She was angry about the clear-cutting." She said after a short silence. She sipped the coffee. "Piece of crap machine can't make a good coffee." She muttered under her breath.

"One day, she and a couple of other young hunters came running in, all painted up, they'd set a bulldozer on fire, I guess they thought I could protect them." All of a sudden her voice shifted to a controlled tone, far too calm for the subject matter. She got up and took out a carton of milk. With one shaky hand she poured some into her coffee. "The troopers pursued them to the schoolhouse. They killed Sylwanin in the doorway. Right in front of Neytiri. Then shot the others. I got most of the kids out, before they shot me."

"Jesus."

"Yeah." Grace said. That calm monotone broke for a mere syllable, but it was all anyone needed to see that she was on the verge of tears. Still, she forced it down and continued. "A scientist stays objective -- we can not be ruled by emotion. But I poured ten years of my life into that school. They called me sa'atenuk. Mother." She turned around to face Jake. "That kind of pain reaches back through the link." She sat, and made direct eye contact with Jake. It was the kind of look Jake had received numerous times from numerous different superiors. It always preceded a key lesson to surviving the scenario. "It's not our world, Jake. And we can't stop what's coming. Learn what you can, but

don't get attached."

Jake nodded and propped his elbows onto the table, laying his chin into his clasped hands.

"Grace?"

"Yeah?" She traced the rim of her mug with her index finger.

"I'm sorry for what I said this morning. I… I had no idea."

"It's okay." Grace took a sip of coffee, this time a little more satisfied with the taste. "And if talking to the camera helps you out, go right ahead." She said. "Panzy." She tacked on, mimicking his I'm-pushing-your-buttons smirk.

Jake took a bite of his burrito. "Good talk."

Jake once again found himself at the desk facing the camera. He used the setup as a mirror once again, but this time was happier with what he saw. With his beard shaved and his body clean from yesterday's shower he looked better, although he still felt similar to yesterday. He glanced over his shoulder to ensure everyone was still asleep before he started his morning therapy.

"Grace told me about the school yesterday, about Sylwanin, Neytiri's sister. I can't help but think that nothing happened to those soldiers. They barged into the school and shot everyone, and for what reason? Because one of their Tonka Trucks were lit on fire? They probably came back to Hell's Gate and were honored as if they had done something good, as if they were heroes. What the hell kind of kindergarten logic is that? I realize that I'm against it now, but the worst is that three months ago I could have been one of the shooters; I would have been one of the soldiers that shot up the schoolhouse, that killed all of those children. That killed Neytiri's sister. That broken logic would have been all I needed to convince me to shoot children for God's sake."

"That story is all I needed. Quaritch offered me my legs to betray the Omaticaya, but it's not enough anymore. If I ever have to walk away from the Na'vi, I'm going to-" He paused to glance around. It's still dark out, and everyone else is still asleep in his or her racks.

"I'm never leaving. I'll play his little game, but only so I can stay longer."

The glow from the monitor illuminated half his face in the darkness. He glanced back over to himself in the monitor, then hit the record button. He looked to make sure the little red circle was flashing on the monitor. He once made the mistake of recording an abnormally long 20-minute log only to find that the camera didn't start recording when he hit the button.

Grace had walked in on one of his soliloquies, but she had no idea just how long he's been doing them. He couldn't tell if anyone else was affected by it, but his adventures and fantastic experiences as an avatar now leave him depressed as a human. Verbalizing these feelings has been therapeutic for him, and sometimes he felt it was one of the only things helping him hang on.

"This is log 92. I've been making a habit of waking up early to get the morning video log out of the way before Augustine gets up. The more I do early the sooner I can get back to" He paused a beat to re-choose his words "work." He knew these logs went to Quaritch and couldn't afford them finding out how he felt about the Na'vi.

"Today we're going to train my Banshee and practice flying with Neytiri. After yesterday I think Tsu'Tey is starting to show signs of respect towards me. It's still far too much to ask for his approval, though. Everyone else seems to be coming around, although I'm pretty sure most of the time they're talking behind my back." He gave a small laugh. "It's like being the new kid in high school."

"That's all I have this morning. I'll be back tonight." Jake finished after checking the clock. He pushed the power button on the camera as Norm and Grace began waking up.

And that's chapter one. Please, feel free to critique my work, and remember that if you want me to do something similar to the next few chapters for a specific scene/original scenario please tell me! I'm always open to ideas and anxiously await the day when I open my inbox and find a fantastic idea to go on!