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meenawrites · 1 year

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Humanized Spider Thoughts

So... this makes me even more sad that his canon storyline but here I am thinking about it.

What if the Recoms / the RDA had made attempts to "humanize" Spider? How would that go? How would he react? How far would they go? How would the family react?

SO I'm going to try to keep this somewhat close to how Quarritch does respect Spider to a certain degree in canon but like his human memories and frankly RDA's orders make him think this is the best course of action.

So yeah, recoms hold Spider down as he attempts to bite and snarls and eventually begs them not to cut his hair. They don't really listen obviously, chopping off his locs in one go. They force wash his hair and his body clean of blue paint and scrub so hard that even the usual residue from the plant substance that stains his skin (think henna) goes away. Spider's left with kind of a mismatched chop of baby curls atop of his head and without his stripes, he feels more naked than he does in just his loincloth. They force him into human clothes (tank and cargo pants). The only win he gets in that situation is that he continues to kick off the boots they give him and they give up trying on that front.

Quarritch had a bit of a war in himself as he watched this process. Like from the person he remembers himself to be from the human memories, he should be all for this, but there's something in him that hates watching Spider scream and struggle so hard against the recoms and scientists that eventually he has to be sedated just for them to be able to finish his hair in peace. There's something horrifying in seeing the emptiness in his eyes as Spider sees his own reflection for the first time, when he moves to touch his hair but his hand hovers just above the cut ends, freezing there and something in his expression just breaks. (Miles is behind the one way mirror during this point so Spider isn't masking as much as he would if he knew he were there).

It's that pull of regret in Quarritch's gut that makes him save the few beads from the locs they'd cut off of Spider's head and secretly snag what he didn't know was Spider's small songcord he'd made himself and keep them on his person. He thinks about throwing them away multiple times but he never does.

Spider can't touch his hair during those few months, flinches whenever someone else accidentally brushes against his head (with him being so much smaller than the Na'vi it happens a lot). He can't bear to look at himself in any reflective surface because it makes him queasy. He hates the human clothes that make him feel more "other" and "outsider" than he already does, but every time he escaped in those early days to paint stripes on himself, the recoms would clean him again and shove him a shirt, and eventually Spider gave up, thinking it was better to just stay like that than to keep getting manhandled every time he tries to cover himself.

He's glad Quarritch lets him stay barefoot. He thinks it would have killed something more of him to be unable to feel the forest soil at his feet, the tickle of moss between his toes, the familiar grooves of tree bark as he jumped through the branches. It was his one constant reminder of Eywa's presence in everything, his sole salvation.

He becomes very quiet, way quieter than he's ever been in his life. The only times he perks up a bit is when Quarritch asks him to teach them about the Na'vi and a little of his old zest for life comes back when he's allowed to speak Na'vi and relive his days of tracking game in the forest.

Still, he tends to zone out a lot and violently flinch back to himself before getting a haunted look as he looked down at himself. Quarritch hears him cry at night when he thinks no one is listening, quiet, muffled sobs where he goes to touch his hair and his hands twitch away violently. Then go to hug himself only to have to same reaction and dig his hands into the dirt instead. It makes him feel so unpleasant watching it.

The experience of being forcefully stripped of his Na'vi - ness combined with the mental probing of his mind he was subjected to make Spider retreat into himself if only to protect his own mental state. Him zoning out it really him immersing himself in any pleasant memory he has in the forest, of Kiri painting stripes on him, Neteyam ruffling his hair, flying on an ikran with Lo'ak. He wraps his mind in the memory of lying on the forest floor at Kiri's side, breathing in the smell of the forest, letting it fill him up from the inside and pretending that he could feel Eywa cradling him, a Sky person, in its embrace, that he'd somehow tricked the Great Mother into treating him like a Na'vi and accepting him.

It gets worse when they get to the ship though. All his feet feel are cold human metal and he hates it. He can't smell anything but human sweat and protein bars and fuel when he's in the ship and it makes him physically sick. He's kind of just a walking shell at this point and what breaks him further is when they question the Ta'unui clan, when he's made to interpret for them, when Eywa's people see him and his humanized appearance for the first time and it makes him want to crawl inside himself and die. Then he has to watch them shoot an ilu, burn down villages, hunt a tulkun (one of the most beautiful creatures he's ever seen) while he's THERE and he LOOKS LIKE THEM.

He starts existing in a haze that his memories can barely protect him from anymore, sleeping whenever he can just to escape the feeling of existing like this. To say it scares Quarritch is an understatement. He's terrified to his very core when he compares the fierce fighter he met that fateful day in the forest and the ghost of a boy in front of him. So much so that before they try to draw out Jake Sully with the Tulkun hunt near the villages, Quarritch comes and gives him the beads and songcord he salvaged at the beginning of his captivity.

It takes a second for Spider to even realize what they are as he tries to crawl out of the numb state of mind he's drowned himself in. It's only when Quarritch leaves them next to him and exits the room that he recognizes them, parts of the person who was taken away from, forcibly changed. He recognizes the bead that Kiri had made for him, the one Neteyam had swiped for him from Jake's faulty attempts, and his sad excuse of a songcord. He's scared to touch them at first, as if they'll dissapear if he reaches for them, but he aches for it, and he holds them to his chest for hours. He keeps them on his person at all times. He can't actually put them on anything because of how short his hair is and the fact that he's terrified someone will take them away from him if they see them, so he stuffs them in a pocket of his cargo pants and can constantly be seen patting that pocket to make sure they're still there.

He's only roused to action again when he sees Lo'ak and friends held captive on the boat and it's like a cold bucket of water has been thrown in his face. It's spurring him, yanking him out of his own mind long enough to try and get to him.

But it takes Lo'ak a second to even recognize him, and in the brief moment they have together, his eyes widen and his voice kind of breaks as he sees what they've done to Spider, what he's become, and he can barely say "what did they do to you?" before they're pulled away from each other.

His best friend barely even recognized him, had been unable to, and that breaks Spider further when he didn't even think that was possible. It convinces Lo'ak even more though that they have to go back for him.

Spider still manages to crash the ship though, he's holding onto that rush of adrenaline he'd felt upon spotting Lo'ak as tightly as possible before it fades away and he retreats back into his mind. Lo'ak and Neteyam come back for him, and Neteyam cannot believe what he's seeing. He's seized by a furious, raging anger the likes he's never felt before when he finally gets a chance to look at Spider, to see the circles under his eyes and how he has thinned, to see his shorn curls and the clothes and the glassy look in his eyes. But he doesn't have time to do anything or say anything, he just has to get Spider out. He just has enough time pull him into a fierce hug that has Spider choking up before he's ushering them off of the boat.

And NETEYAM LIVES IN THIS AU BECAUSE I SAID SO, I CAN'T HANDLE SPIDER'S HUMANIZATION AND NETEYAM DYING OKAY IT'S ONE OR THE OTHER

So Neteyam just shot in like the shoulder or something or frankly maybe Spider sees it and jumps in front of him and he gets shot in the arm, nothing fatal or life-threatening. I'm going with the Neteyam is shot one for the rest of this.

They do leave him behind though to go back for Kiri and Tuk. Jake barely has time to kind of register just what fate he left Spider to when he sees him but he has to shove that down immediately because he has to go save his girls. Spider is honestly barely holding on mentally at this point. So many of the people he loved had seen him in this state, looking so human, in a state he hated himself in, and now Kiri of all people was about to. But he has to go save her and Tuk, there's no choice in the matter.

Kiri cries doubly hard when she sees him because not only does she understand how deeply what they've done has affected him but like her mom has a dagger to Spider's throat, about to kill the one person she feels most at home with, the boy she loves.

Gonna skip over the next part cause this is getting too long but Spider still saves Quarritch if only for the care he showed him and giving him back his beads. He still leaves him but now he doesn't know what to do. He's kind of lost who he is and he doesn't know if he can or should go back to the Sully family. He keeps swimming in their direction because he can't really stay in the middle of the fucking ocean while he decides. Unbeknownst to him though, as the Sully family gathers back together and takes in the fact that they're all alive, it's Neteyam who's like where the fuck is Spider? He hasn't been able to stop thinking about what he saw because damn it, he had already felt so guilty about his parents' choice to just leave the boy behind and hadn't stopped thinking about, but seeing what they'd done to him had ignited that ten-fold and he'd be damned if they lost him again.

Kiri snaps to attention then because she knows too and her and Lo'ak dive back into the ocean at their parents' protests to find Spider.

It's Kiri who comes upon him first. He's been treading water some ways away from where they were struggling to decide what to do and wanting nothing more but to STOP THINKING. He wants to duck underwater when she sees him but he's just so goddamn tired and she's swimming towards him with such purpose that he just lets her grab him and lets himself pass the fuck out.

Part 2 coming immediately after because this is getting too long

#Meena's humanized Spider AU #Neteyam lives #Spiri #Trauma #Spider Socorro #Quarritch #Spider Avatar #Avatar 2 #Avatar the way of Water #Neteyam #Tuk #Lo'ak #Jake Sully #Neytiri #Sully Family #kirishima eijirou

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