Still gnawing at the bars of my enclosure about my Wanderer au for Spider.
Spider taking his life by the reins and living for himself and choosing not to go back.
Not to the Omatikaya. Not to the Sullys. Not to a place where he was always caught between love and rejection, between being theirs and being nothing.
He leaves with his ikran and travels.
Spider soars over vast oceans, over floating mountains wreathed in mist, over uncharted lands where even the Na’vi and the RDA have never stepped foot in. He learns from wandering clans, from nomads who do not ask where he came from or who he used to be. He listens to the hum of Eywa in the trees, in the waters, in the very air he now breathes.
And for the first time in his life, he is free.
The Sullys search for him. He knows this. He hears whispers of their desperate attempts to track him, to follow the ghostly traces of a human who needs no mask, who rides an ikran like he was born to.
They never find him.
Because this time, his life is his own.
I just watched Avatar: The Way of Water and came up with this bittersweet time-traveling au where Spider chooses to go his own way and practice self-care instead of staying where he is not wanted.
Imagine.
Spider’s last memory is the cold bite of Neytiri’s blade against his throat, her amber eyes filled with fury and grief. Then—nothing.
Yet, death does not claim him.
Instead, he awakens beneath the bioluminescent embrace of the Tree of Souls, his body weightless, his soul adrift. Eywa’s presence is everywhere—vast, ancient, and sorrowful. She tells him that his life was taken before its time, that he has honored her ways, and that she has always loved him. Eywa wants him to live again. To see the world beyond the forests and accept her blessings. He was meant for more.
And so, she gives him a choice: fade into the great cycle, or return.
Spider wakes gasping, his lungs—his human lungs—filling with Pandora’s air as if he had been born to breathe it. His mask is gone, yet he does not choke. Beside him, a presence stirs—an ikran, its sleek form rippling with twilight hues, its golden eyes locking onto his. It was his. Bonded. A gift, not tamed but chosen. Eywa's final gift.
Spider does not return to Hell’s Gate. He does not return to the Omatikaya. He takes to the skies, his ikran, his brother, carrying him over endless oceans and floating mountains, through mist-laden valleys and deep, untouched jungles. Spider becomes a phantom, a whisper in the trees, a shadow glimpsed soaring across the moons of Pandora, a traveling hermit always quick to spin a tale or offer advice.
Stories spread—of a lone human who flies Eywa’s skies and walks her lands without fear, a human who rides the largest ikran ever seen and calls it "brother," a human whose love for Eywa was so strong that she blessed him. Some call him a myth. Others, a ghost. The Na'vi speak of him in hushed voices, wondering if he was a sign of Eywa’s favor or her weapon against the humans who seek to corrupt her world.
Spider never sought out a home, but wherever he went, Pandora embraced him. Not as a human. Not as a stray. But as himself—the human who chose Pandora, and whom Pandora chose in return.