Tswayon. Fly.

Disclaimers:

1. Please see the disclaimers in my other fanfic, Choices.

I breathe in short, anxious pants. It comes out of me as croaks because my throat is dry. My tongue must have shrivelled up and died somewhere because I can't feel it anymore. I have gone completely numb.

Or have I?

Tiny, but strong, tingles crawl all over my skin, and I shudder involuntarily. I can't hide it anymore. I am shockingly nervous, beyond anything that I have felt in my one or the next.

Neytiri senses my apprehension, and her kind eyes crinkle up as she smiles in that reassuring, loving way that only she could send to calm my nerves. I'm feeling a bit better already – at least my stomach has settled down. She places her hand gently over my Exo-pack and I stiffen slightly at this. Not from her warmth and comfort that I can feel radiating through the plastic, but from the realisation that the barrier is there. It is a coffin that separates me from her, a cruel coffin that gives my frail human body life amidst the poisonous atmosphere of Pandora.

My resolve strengthens. There is a reason why I am going through with this. To be with Neytiri. To set my spirit free from the broken shell that was once me. To truly be one of the People.

I give a tight smile through the transparent plastic of the Exo-pak and Neytiri brightens at this. My heart constricts with emotion.

Suddenly, I realise that the tingles are not just a product of my uneasiness. Delicate, silver tendrils, roots of the sacred Tree of Souls, have gently wrapped themselves around my body, and I almost start with alarm. The last time I had seen this happen was when Grace was placed at this very spot – only the tendrils at her abdomen were mixed with threads of dark scarlet blood that were streaming from her wound. I am in the very position that Grace had been in when she died.

"You must pass through the Eye of Eywa," Mo'at had told me. Her eyes were solemn, then they clouded with sadness. "And return."

The catch. The disclaimer. The fine print that you should read before signing your life to it.

I grit my teeth and refuse to let that dark thought overwhelm me.

The chanting from the Omaticaya grows louder, like a beating heart and every heartbeat sounds as though it comes deep from within the earth. I give Neytiri one last look, trying to convey the strong heart that she had sensed in me when we first met, before I close my eyes for the very last time.

In the darkness, I wait patiently for whatever is to come, wondering what it will be like to be born again. I don't have to wait long.

A flash of light.

Then I am flying.

1.

I was born on August 2, 2121. They would come to discover Pandora exactly 7 months later, but I was not to know that. Even if I did, I would not give a damn because on that day, I was too preoccupied with the trauma of finding myself in a brave new world, with bright lights and strange, scary creatures in it. That mixture of disbelief and alarm was the most likely explanation behind the almighty shriek I gave when I was pulled out, as my mother had proudly recounted to me many years later. It was, she said, the loudest screech in the entire baby ward and also the biggest shock of her life. It confirmed the reason why she was still experiencing muscle spasms after she had pushed Tommy out.

She didn't know that she was having twins.

I wasn't too surprised at that. Tommy and I were both scrawny, little brats when we were young, and it wasn't until we were 14 and discovered a small, tattered book called The Wide World of Wrestling (compounded with the pubescent need to impress the ladies) did we start piling body mass on our tall, skinny frames. I could imagine Tommy and I fitting quite comfortably in our mother's womb, passing for only one baby, with Tommy sitting curiously on one side, probably marvelling at how many fingers he was growing, and me just rolling around and doing somersaults in our watery home. I think that, as our living conditions became cramped and I continued to train enthusiastically for the baby Olympics, I must have squashed poor old patient Tommy into a corner (he had most likely, by then, progressed to mental arithmetic and was calculating sums with his ten fingers) and that must have been the reason why I ended up being an inch taller than Tommy.

At least I was decent enough to let him go out first, though he always maintained – with a sideways snigger – that "he beat me to it" and, somehow, being four minutes older than me made him superior to me.

2.

I can't say where my childhood home is because I never had one. Or, from a different perspective, I had too many. We were always on the move when I was a kid, and I remember a distorted montage of homes that I had resided in before the age of 6. Most of their details are fuzzy to me, but there is one that I can remember with particular clarity.

I must have been around 3 at the time, because I had received the scar on my left elbow after Tommy pushed me down the stairs when I demolished his pet cabbage plant with my ass when we were 2, but not yet the bite marks from Mrs Struge's dog after he chomped on that now notorious backside as I was stealing berries from Mrs Struge's garden at the age of 4. We had just moved into a brand new apartment, a skyscraper that loomed higher than any building in its proximity, and our tiny dwelling was at the very top level. I was in awe of the big shiny doors that opened to reveal a marvellous lift, with equally shiny mirrors covering all four sides. If I stood at the centre of the lift, I could see myself being multiplied in the mirrors, an extensive line of wide-eyed toddlers that stretched to infinity. I thought it would be grand if I had a million brothers, though I supposed I could settle with just having Tommy.

My mother certainly appreciated the fact that we were only twins, not octuplets, because she was left to take care of us by herself. My father had done a runner the year before, when Tommy and I were just 2. The typical story would be that he went out one day for a packet of Marlboro cigarettes and never came back. Or perhaps he went out to take get the trash, but forgot where his home was. To this day, I'm not quite sure how my father made his dash for freedom, and, frankly, I don't care. My mother never mentioned him – it was her sisters that would whisper conspiratorially about his whereabouts – and my father never really spent much time at home even before his legs decided they needed some exercise, so I never really bonded with him. It was my mother who was the sun at the centre of my universe. Looking back, perhaps my mother's silence was due to the big hole in her heart that my father tore out when he left, and perhaps that was why we were moving so much – she was trying to chase her husband back.

In any case, she must decided that he was lurking somewhere in Cameron, Wisconsin, because that was where our apartment with the fantastic shiny elevator was. It had been a hectic moving-in day and my mother was flat out exhausted. I remember beads of sweat lining on her then still-smooth forehead and a plea for us to not cause trouble when she went across the street to buy us some sodas. I nodded my head vigorously as my mother was the smartest person I knew, and she gave a weak smile of relief and one of her funny waves – palm open and close – before firmly locking the door.

I remember spying Tommy propped against a cardboard box and totally absorbed in his picture book of the day. That was so typical of him. He was the more intellectual of us two, taking after our mother, and his brain was like this unstoppable machine, always hungry for more information. I, on the other hand, had inherited our father's wanderlust and my definition of "exploring other worlds" was strictly physical and in no way correlated with reading.

After crawling around the floor and inspecting every crack and crevice, only to be quite crestfallen in not finding as many bugs and roaches as there were in our previous shack, I was quite exhausted and ready to find a warm spot on the floor for an afternoon nap.

Then I spotted something more amazing than the hilarious mirrors of our lift.

There was a myriad of cardboard boxes scattered around the otherwise sparse wooden floor, and I realised that they formed a ridiculously awesome climbing path that led all the way to the sole locked window of our living room. I prodded Tommy to share in my amazement, but Tommy just looked up, nodded, and went back to his book. I took that as his consensus that I should climb on the boxes all the way to the window, open the window and greet our mother from there when she came back with our Dr Peppers.

Which was exactly what I did.

Granted the lock was a bit rusty and took a lot of fumbling to open up, but I was persistent and the wild gush of cool wind was sweet to my hot cheeks as I swung open the window.

The box that I was perched on was only slightly lower than the windowsill, but I could still poke my head out and look down at the streets below. It was a long way up and all the cars seemed like giant multi-coloured beetles whizzing around. It made me feel dizzy but thrilled at the same time. It felt like nothing was supporting me and, with a shout of joy, I stuck my arms out of the window too, savouring the vicious way the wind lapped at my sleeves.

Just as I was thinking that it would be funny to drop some object from the window and see who it would fall on (and their stupefied reactions), I spotted a familiar figure on the streets. In her sky-blue cotton dress and dark plait that hung over her shoulder, I saw my mother dodge incoming traffic as she hurried back to our apartment. I was convinced that she would be very proud of me for navigating all the way up from the boxes to the window, so I yelled out my favourite word in the entire world:

"Mar-mee!"

At that very sound, my mother froze in shock, looked up, and, realising that she had a toddler waving his arms very dangerously through an open window on the seventy-sixth story of a skyscraper, instantly dropped her bag of groceries and rushed into the apartment building. I took this as a sign of her delight at my mountaineering skills, so I was quite surprised to see her white face burst through the door and grab me away from the window. Her hugs knocked the air out of my lungs.

She never left us alone after that, not until we were 8 years old (which was also, coincidentally, the age when I had gained a small sliver of a thing called "sense of self-preservation"). By then, she had chased our vanishing father all the way to Australia, where we spent the next ten years of our lives.

3.

If you ask people outside of Australia where Ben Buckler is, most would give you a strange confused look, say no, they haven't seen your friend, then edge slowly away, concluding suspiciously in their minds that something is wrong with this poor fellow's head. But if you mention Bondi beach, their eyes would immediately light up before losing focus as they dream about the creamy white sands and the sapphire blue waters of the famous Australian beach. In reality, Ben Buckler is a small suburb just a walk up north from Bondi beach and the place where I spent most of my years in Australia.

The locals around there would like to say that Ben Buckler was a real guy many hundreds of years ago – a convict who was unlucky enough to be shipped away to a penal colony in New South Wales for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his starving family, received a stroke of good luck by escaping and hiding in a cave on the white cliffs of North Bondi, then had an unfortunate dose of bad luck again when he leant out too far from his cave one morning (perhaps stretching from a pleasant dream) and toppled into the raging currents below that consumed him whole.

It was a story that would deter most children from straying too close to the cliffs at Bondi, which – on hindsight – was probably the driving impetus behind the urban legend. But it had the opposite effect on me. I thought Ben Buckler had the right kind of idea, so most afternoons would see me rushing away from school, the institution that Tommy adored and I declared him crazy for liking, to engage in all sorts of illegal cliff-jumping. It was the fall in mid-air that I liked the best – that feeling of the wind rushing past me, racing from my legs up to my outstretched arms, was the closest thing I could get to flying. It resulted in an intoxicating surge of adrenaline that swept through my hot veins, contrasting wonderfully with the feeling of my skin turning ice cold as I plunged into the freezing waters. At the surface, the roaring waves would crash into my head, and down below, the currents would drag me around, tossing my body like a rag doll. Once I reached the surface again, I would gasp wildly for air, grinning as the salty sea breeze hit my lungs before the next wave would come along and sweep me under again.

Tommy couldn't see the fun in stimulated drowning, and as we approached the end of high school, he spent less afternoons mucking around with me and more time locked in his room with piles of science textbooks like looming mountains on his desk. I was proud of my brother Tommy. He was easily the smartest in our grade and the teachers' comments on his grade reports at the end of every term were always only a few sentences, usually raving about how he was "exceptionally gifted", "a delight to teach" and "the rare type of student that teachers would only meet once in a lifetime." I wish I could say that I had an equally stunning grade report, but I lacked the motivation that Tommy had. My mother always maintained that I could be as good as Tommy if I put my mind to it.

In fact, I believed that Tommy had inherited his passion and talent for biology from my mother. Over the years, my mother had started a successful small business selling hand-made gifts created out of shells. She crafted them herself, and her cowry clocks, mother-of-pearl haircombs and scallop brooches were always in high demand. Particularly at a time where the acidification of the oceans had eaten away most of the calcium-carbonate of the shells, and she was one of the few people who had an affinity for finding the precious remaining seashells.

I still recall those days spent at Ben Buckler as the happiest, if not the most carefree, moments of my life, and the salty, delicious smell of the sea has never left me.

The end came in the October of 2139.

It was a hot, sweaty afternoon as summer slowly started slinking in. My mind, as usual, was thinking about everything except what the teacher was saying – even more so because I was due to graduate in merely a few months. This inevitably meant that the final state-wide leaving exams were just around the corner, the reason why Tommy was staying up to midnight muttering chemical formulas under his breath. He wanted to go back to America and study science at MIT, so, as Mr Fitts droned on, Tommy was wearing a look of ardent concentration as he furiously scribbled down notes, sticking his tongue out at the corner of his lips. It was a trait that we both shared – except I did it when I was spaced out.

"Jake Sully! Jake Sully!"

I stumbled awake, my elbows that propped my head slipping slightly as I looked around the room. My eyes focused on the small screen on the front wall, where my principal's beady eyes were peering down at me. I thought he would berate me for being insolent as he did on the occasions that I was sent to his office in supposed shame, but Mr Kane's eyes seemed melancholy as he told Tommy and me to report to his office immediately. Tommy looked surprised, but I was suddenly overwhelmed with a sick feeling from the pit of my stomach.

We sat in front of Mr Kane's mahogany desk in uncomfortable plastic chairs, the kind that stuck to your skin whenever you sweated. Your mother has passed away, he said solemnly, his hollow words echoing away into the empty corridors of my numb mind. He presented the details in a clear and straight-forward fashion, and I caught a rare glimpse of the gentleness of Mr Kane's heart, in spite of his schoolyard alias as The Caner.

I have since replayed the scene of my mother's death over and over in my head, especially in the months following her death, trying to make sense of it all.

She had been washing seashells in the sink of her workroom. I envision her soft hands swirling the shells in the wooden bowl, forming a small eddy that dragged the salt away from the molluscan structures. She would have been thinking about what she was going to do once we got back from school, perhaps what dinner she was going to cook, or more likely, what words of encouragement she was going to say to try to motivate me into acing the final hurdle of exams. As she was thinking, she would have been staring at the photos of us that hung in her celebrated seashell frames around her workroom. A wry but thankful smile would have played at her lips.

She wouldn't have noticed the small octopus that popped out from one of her clamshells, annoyed by its non-consented whirlpool ride. It was a blue-ringed octopus so it would have had dazzling blue and black rings set in a stark contrast to its yellow skin. But many things in nature are beautiful, and my mother would have missed it amidst the vibrant hues of her numerous seashells. When the blue-ringed octopus bit her, my mother would not have realised because its bite is painless. Painless until the paralysis sets in. She would have been conscious, in full awareness of her surroundings, as her muscles began to clamp up, perhaps making some struggle to reach her mobile phone before falling flat against the hard concrete floor. She would have fought to breathe, but her lungs would have refused to move, frozen by the deathly venom of a beautiful octopus. A cardiac arrest is imminent in seconds, the doctors would later say. Death, in perfect silence, in minutes.

Tommy was beside himself, so I gave the eulogy at our mother's funeral. It was the first time I got drunk so I can't remember much of it, but well-wishers said that I did an admirable job. My mother was cremated and we decided to take her ashes back with us to America. Tommy had managed to pull himself together by the time of the final exams and performed so well that MIT had eagerly accepted him in their early round of decisions. I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to do, but I figured I didn't want to be left in Australia without my brother, so I decided to follow him back to America and join the Marines. With our mother's death, I determined that I could pass any challenge thrown to me by life.

The two-hour plane trip was quiet, as both of us were lost in our respective thoughts. Tommy, being the practical one, was most likely calculating the fastest routes that we should take to our mother's hometown, the final resting place for her ashes.

I was realising that you could never underestimate the power of Nature.

4.

Tommy once told me this ancient Greek story about a stunning woman with a rather plain name – Helen, I now recall – who managed to launch a thousand ships with the beauty of her face alone. At the time, I was fourteen and thought that was a pretty stupid reason to die for, no matter how hot this Helen turned out to be. Not even Stella Hodges, whom I had a completely ardent and completely unrequited crush on at the time, would have been able to have convinced me to take a few bullets. And the discovery of a whole battalion of men drooling over the very object of my affections would have put me off even further.

But looking back, I've realised that fighting for what you love, for what you believe in, are infinitely better reasons than the rationales behind the wars I have been involved in. Hell, even fighting for one foxy lady is a much better reason to go to war than for the old, obnoxious politicians who lie behind their foul, decaying teeth.

In Venezuela, the last war I was at, they told us that we had to fight for the American way, to defend our nation from the terrorists down south who were killing and raping the innocent. As a soldier, I took orders and didn't question what I was being instructed to do, though I began to harbour some reservations on the motives behind the instructions. I wondered what the supposed Venezuelan murderers were being drilled with by their commanders. Those bloody Americans again. They are going to kill you and rape your wives, before stripping your land bare. It is glorious to die for your country- I stopped the thought in its tracks because that's what you do when your conscience creeps up on you. You tell it to shut the hell up.

If only it was that easy to convince my buddy Flip to do so as well.

"Anyway, wonder what they're doing back home?" Flip's annoying voice was chirping through the communication collar.

"Sleeping!" I retorted and heard Flip's rusty chuckle on the other end.

Actually, Tommy wouldn't be sleeping. Any sane person who had just completed his PhD with honours in molecular biology at Harvard University would have thought they deserved some well-earned rest. Like I have maintained for my entire existence, Tommy was insane. Midnight would be considered an early night for him as he was busy studying (surprise, surprise) to pass the examinations into the Avatar Program. The Avatar Program was every scientist's wet dream – going to some distant moon in another solar system, collecting an infinite amount of information about Pandora's alien ecology, and doing all this in a hybrid human-alien body! To say that competition was fierce would be like saying that maybe toxic sludge isn't good to marine life, and Tommy was impossibly filling his mind with information like there was no tomorrow.

Which might be true in my case. I gave a dark laugh about that.

"What's so funny?" Flip demanded immediately and I sensed the figure on my right cock his head in my direction. If his visor was not down, I bet I would have caught glimpse of his wide baby-blue eyes staring at me in that larrikin manner of his.

Before I could reply, Lieutenant Spruce's urgent voice cut through the communication collar, "Motion noted at two o'clock. Get down boys!"

As I hit the ground, I looked at the top left screen on my visor out of habit. It was blank, of course. The radiator was engaged, sending out radio waves that scrambled the adversary's heat and motion detectors – only radio waves were impartial things and that meant that we couldn't use ours either. There were many things in this war that we couldn't use. And the stupid plant that was poking into my stomach uncomfortably through my camouflage suit was the reason why. We were in one of the few remaining rainforests in the world and Article God-Knows-What of Covenant Some-Important-International-Environmental-Law meant that we couldn't bomb the hiding terrorists because we couldn't destroy the precious trees, couldn't gas them out either because we'd also kill the precious animals, and couldn't even use tracking missiles because those damned precious trees got in the way. We had to minimise the impact of our warfare on the environment.

Some part of me thought this was hilarious because our bureaucrats had never paid such rapt attention to international law before. Which meant the real reason for our tip-toeing around the warzone was not international law. It only took me a few days after landing in Venezuela and being struck by the refreshing green of the rainforest for me to realise that the rainforest was the real reason why we were fighting in the first place. Like how Tommy and I would erupt into furious tug-of-wars when we wanted to the same toys at the same time, America must have spied some gloriously valuable resource hidden within the depths of the last remaining biodiverse place in the world – only there was a catch: someone else had claimed it already. Like how I would cry crocodile tears during our tug-of-war moments, appealing to my mother for ownership of the toy on the questionable grounds that Tommy had hit me over the head with it, America launched into a rallying speech about the threatening terrorists that lurked in the Venezuelan rainforests, thus justifying the war. Of course, every war has two sides, and I was pretty sure that our adversary was saying the same things about us.

I tightened my grip on my RX-10, slightly comforted by the familiar weight of the rifle in my hands. My battalion was deathly quiet, and every noise, no matter how small, hissed like a death threat. One bated breath …

"All clear!" Lieutenant Spruce barked through the collar and I jumped to my feet, noting with amazement the grass stains on my knees. It had been a while since I saw that.

We walked a while before Flip found his voice again.

"Those fucking-"

A splatter of thick, warm liquid smeared itself across my visor and I was too stunned to realise what it was at first. Then I saw Flip lying on the ground in front of me, half of his head blown away, revealing his white skull amidst a pool of red. It was like a grotesque, bloody stew.

My cry was stuck in my throat as bullets ricocheted across the air, and cold hard instinct took over. I dropped to my stomach in a millisecond and began firing at the ambushers, using the 360-degree vision of the screens on my visor to my advantage. I saw a couple of dark men fall and heard their choking screams as they coughed on their own blood, before shifting my attention elsewhere. I had to shift my attention elsewhere.

Men were falling around me and Flip's blood on my visor began to blend with others. A grenade exploded somewhere. Shattered pieces of wood flying all directions. More screams. Then a disembodied hand flew at my face. I had to duck as the hand sailed past, useless skin and sinews flapping in the wind, adding more blood to my uniform.

"RETREAT! RETREAT!" Lieutenant Spruce's voice roared over the chaos. "OUTNUMBERED! RETREAT!"

I stumbled back on my feet and began to turn, only to remember the carcass of my best friend.

"Flip…" I whispered and tried to find him in the bloody mess. I gagged at the smell of burning human flesh.

"NO!" A rough hand yanked my shoulder back and began pulling me away. "It's too late now. You won't be able to take him back if you're dead yourself!"

This hand kept on pushing me back, until I had no choice but to retreat, somehow finding enough feeling in my legs to start running like the wind. Running like my father.

I did not see who the hand belonged to, and, as I was dashing through the thick undergrowth, a thought began to form that I should find and thank the guy once I got back to base. The thought ended there because another explosion, directly behind me, lifted me off my feet, just as a piece of shrapnel buried itself into the small of my back. It was searing pain, more agonising than anything that I had ever felt. It was both intense and long in duration. Its momentum propelled me forward and I stumbled – fell – through the bushes. Fell through the bushes and into a waterfall below.

The moment I entered free-fall, it was as if my body had a mind of its own, thanks to my years of cliff-jumping. I barely savoured the wind whipping at my face, before I held my breath and plunged underneath the torrents. My legs must have been numb with the shock because, as I was dragged underneath the current, my legs refused to go in the direction I wanted it. I was lucky that day because the currents pushed me underneath the waterfall, and I managed to grab onto a small ledge, dragging myself out of the water.

I found myself in what had turned out to be a tiny, damp cave behind the furious waterfall, just big enough for a grown man to squeeze inside. I still couldn't feel my legs, but I was too exhausted to think why.

I leant my head back and closed my eyes, breathing deeply and trying to erase the stench of blood and flesh that seemed to haunt my body and mind. I thought about Flip and his last unfinished joke. Fucking what? Fucking terrorists? Fucking Lieutenant Spruce? Fucking … war?

Flip's mother only had him. It didn't seem fair; the war wasn't it worth it. What were we doing out here, what were we fighting for? An intangible glory and a few colourful ribbons?

I'm sure Flip's mother would find that comforting when her son is brought back in a cardboard box.

5.

My dead brother's face stared back at me. I wanted to think that he was at peace by then, despite the ugly wound at centre of his stomach where dried blood caked over his skin and flannel shirt. His face was completely free of worries, smooth and cold like a wax statue. I also wanted to think that those guys in the black suits were playing a horrible trick on me, but I couldn't. It's hard not to recognise your own face staring back at you. I placed two fingers over Tommy's eyelids and gently closed them.

For the first time, I felt lonely in this world. Disconnected somehow.

But I had to hand it over to those Suits – my name for the agents that were standing over my shoulder as I told Tommy's corpse that I hoped heaven had all books that he could ever want. And good pizza. The Suits seemed genuinely grieved by my brother's death. They managed to track down the fucker who decided he would kill for whatever paper was in Tommy's wallet. I could just imagine Tommy refusing to hand it over to him, trying to use his infallible logic to convince the fucker that there was more to life than just money. The fucker was incarcerated and I hoped that he would die in a rotting jail cell – hell, he certainly wouldn't be breathing if I came across him.

But I knew that the Suits weren't so desperate to find me, merely because Tommy was my brother.

The Avatar Program.

Tommy had been accepted after all; he was that good in beating a couple hundred thousand of scientists to it. And it meant that a part of him lived on – in his human-alien Avatar. Which only I could control because we shared the same DNA. Which was why the Suits so urgently wanted to contact me after Tommy's death.

I was lying in the back alleyway of a local pub when the Suits found me. No, I wasn't drunk. I just happen to like lying on my back, watching the night sky and the twinkling stars, wondering if there was more to life. That, and the fact that the bouncer had thrown me out a few seconds before, chucking my wheelchair in the trash dump beside me.

"I hope you realise that you just lost a customer!" I had shouted.

And no, the reason why I had been thrown out wasn't because I was drunk. If anything, it was because I wasn't drunk and could clearly see what was going on around me. The other people in there were too stoned off their faces, or just refused to see, the man on the barstool backhand his girlfriend. Her nose began to bleed in one scarlet trail, turning pink as it mixed with her tears.

I would have liked to have walked up to the man, intimidated him a bit with my height before beating the shit out of him. But I had to wheelchair myself to him. I know, a wheelchair in the 22nd century! God, this was pure proof of the awesome benefits of a veteran pension. At least I was offered one of those fancy new walkers that you controlled with your mind, but I didn't like the thought of my arms skinny and atrophied too.

In any case, my plan still worked quite effectively. I was able to wheel myself across the crowd unnoticed before pulling the dickhead's chair from underneath him, watch him hit the ground with a painful thud, then beat the shit out of him. It was because I was too good at executing the plan, too good at beating the shit out of him, that the brain-dead bouncer had to chuck me out.

"Your brother represented a significant investment. We'd like to talk to you about taking over his contract," one of the Suits was saying.

Like how Tommy was too smart for his own good, sometimes I reckon I'm too stupid for my own good. Agreeing to spend the next decade of my life at an alien moon, mind-controlling an alien body that contained bits of Tommy, and potentially getting eaten alive in that very body by the oversized monsters that inhabited Pandora – I made the bouncer look like a rocket scientist. But a part of me realised that I had nothing left on Earth. It was a bit like leaving Australia – I had no-one left to go back to.

Tommy wanted to go to Pandora to find answers. I too would go to find answers of a different kind.

The med techs allowed us to get a glimpse of Earth from outer space before drowsing us for cryo sleep. I can't remember much about that time because cryo really pounds your head around, but I remember doing my mother's wave – palm open and close – at the rapidly shrinking blue and white globe. Perhaps I was trying to say goodbye to my human life as I was flying away.

I soar through my thoughts, sensations and experiments in a sky of white light. Every now and then the whiteness shatters into a million pieces of colour, more vibrant than any rainbow on Earth, and I am overcome with the beauty of it.

I fly higher and higher, with this odd sensation.

Like I am going to meet someone ... and they are watching me.

"He's awake!" I hear Mo'at deep voice cut across the silence.

Soft hands cup my face and I know that it's Neytiri. I blink. She looks so beautiful and her eyes are poignant with emotion.

"I'm back," I tell her softly.

She nods, unable to speak as tears cascade down her face.

Her tears alarm me. I could not yet tell if they are tears of joy or sadness. A terrible anxiety sweeps through my body. What happens if it has not worked? And I am still hu-

Then I almost slap myself for my stupidity. Neytiri's hand is touching my face. Her warmth is on my skin. I raise my hand in front of my face and my heart explodes with a fierce joy. I decide that blue is going to be my favourite colour of all time. I leap up and embrace Neytiri in my Avatar body. No link connection is involved.

The silence erupts into a thundering roar of excitement and joy. I step back and remember that there is a whole crowd of Omaticaya surrounding us. They do not look as tall and intimidating as they did when I was brought to the Tree of Souls. I look at the body next to me. At first, I think it is sleeping but I realise with shock that the Exo-pak has been taken off. My former self, my human body, is lying motionless on the ground, silver tendrils of the Tree of Souls wrapping themselves around it. There is only one word I can say to the People who have made this all possible:

"Irayo."

Thank you.

The noise they make increases in volume to a deafening pitch and I look at Neytiri. She is laughing and crying, not sure which emotion is more appropriate. I mean, how do you react when you die and are born on the same day?

Like my first awakening in my Avatar body at Hell's Gate, I want to run as fast as I can, relish the sweet smells of the air and the glorious feeling of weight on my legs. But I am a Toruk Makto now, and I am not quite sure what the Omaticaya would think of their war leader jumping and shrieking. Like a baby.

Mo'at – bless her wise soul – senses my dilemma and announces to the crowd,

"Jakesully is fatigued with this ordeal. Let him rest first and we'll celebrate tomorrow!"

The Omaticaya cheer, hooting and whistling that send flying creatures into the air. Neytiri gives me a sideways smile and grabs my hand, leading me through the crowd. People part for us and I feel soft hands all over my body, touching me, making sure that I am not a unil. A dream. I am no longer a dreamwalker, but part of the Omaticaya.

Once we are out of earshot of the crowd, Neytiri looks at me, another cheeky smile forming at her lips.

We fly. Racing through the forests, exhilaration pumping through my blood with every leap I take. I love crunching dry leaves beneath my feet. This is freedom.

Neytiri reaches for my hand and we stop unexpectedly. I want to fly more, and she grins at the look in my eyes.

"I want to show you something," she says and leads me through the bushes.

We are standing on the ledge of a soaring cliff. I see distant moons glowing softly in the night sky, an array of sparkling stars, ikrans diving in the air, and the dark silhouettes of gnarled trees as if they are holding the sky up with their hunched frames.

We stare at the vision for a long time without saying a word. We don't need to.

At first, I try to guess what Neytiri is thinking, but I become lost in my own thoughts. Trying to piece together what has just happened to me. Trying to figure out why Eywa has sent me memories of my human life. I close my eyes and listen to the joyous shrieks of the ikrans, my heart flying with them.

Neytiri takes my hand into hers and I shiver at her touch.

"You saw Eywa today," she murmurs. "She is very beautiful."

"Yes," I open my eyes to look at her. My mind is filled with memories of this life and my former. I pause. "I think you've got it easy on Pandora."

"In what way?" She stops stroking my hands, and looks at me with inquisitive eyes.

"Well ..." I struggle to put my thoughts into words. "It's like you have concrete proof that she exists. You can form tsahaylu. You can connect with the Tree of Souls and See her for yourself, hear the whispers of your ancestors, and understand the souls of everything that lives on Pandora."

Neytiri tilts her head, trying to understand. "Yes," she says, "but is this not the case everywhere?"

"No," I look back into the black sky. It seems bleak but I remind myself that it does not have to be this way. "Back on Earth, we humans can't form tsahaylu. You saw my human body, right? We have nothing to form tsahaylu with."

Neytiri's eyes widen. "I thought there was something else you use," she ponders in amazement.

"No," I shake my head. "On Earth, there are many wars. People fight and kill each other all the time-"

"But Pandora is the same," Neytiri insists. "We have many stories of the battles fought between clans."

"Yes, but why did they arise?" I question.

"There are many reasons. Love, peace, defence …"

"But on Earth, people have many wars on whether there is someone like Eywa in the world. Even those who agree that Eywa exists fight each other, because they have different beliefs about Eywa. And we can never know for certain because, unlike Pandora, we have no proof, no physical connection to the divine."

Neytiri fills with understanding. "So when you ride a pa'li…"

"We just ride a pa'li," I finish for her. "No spiritual bond. No tsahaylu."

"Ah," she says, looking back at the night sky. She hesitates. "Does it feel … lonesome? Like you can't connect with anything?"

I think about this, mulling it over in my mind. Forming tsaheylu is one of the best things about being in my Avatar body. It has a physical pleasure, but also a mental one – knowing that I am one with the creature that I bond with, that they cannot live without me and I without them.

Can anything on Earth hope to compete?

Then the answer hits me, true and clear. I See myself for the first time, making sense of my experience with Eywa at the Tree of Souls.

When I was brought to the Tree of Souls, I was hoping to start life anew in my Avatar body, to forget the life I led as a human on Earth. But now I know that I don't need to choose one life over the other to be an Omaticaya. I can stay in my Avatar body and keep my human memories. Which Eywa has reminded me are incredibly important.

"No," I place a crooked finger underneath Neytiri's chin and bring my face close so she can See me. I try to explain. "I think we humans have to carry tsahaylu within ourselves. It is harder to find because it resides within ourselves, but is more potent that way." I sneak a smile at Neytiri.

"It means we can carry our Eywa everywhere with us. Humans have no Tree of Souls, which is fragile and can be destroyed, because it is within our own souls where the Eywa of Earth is truly found. We have forgotten about this a long time ago, and since then, we have been searching in vain for her, looking in the wrong places, looking for signs and outward displays that are nothing compared to the glory that we hold within ourselves.

That's how humans have lost their way and Pandora must not fall in Earth's shadow."

"Eywa is truth here," Neytiri says firmly, surveying me with a strange look on her face.

I too wonder where my words came from. Then I realise that they are Ewya's whispers.

"I think," Neytiri says slowly, making sense of it all, "Ewya has brought you here to find whatever you have been looking for."

"I have found it," I say, before cupping Neytiri's face in my hands.

The kiss is sweet and lingering.

At this point and after 7500 words, I myself am at a lost of words. I'm not sure where to start with this Author's Note, but I think that as you are reading this, dear reader, I will start with you. Firstly, a thank you for reading this fanfic.

Then, a sincere hope that it has made sense.

I have tried to extend the many illusions, metaphors and themes from Avatar, the film, into this fanfic and it's gotten pretty intense in the end. The imageries of flying, dreams, Eywa, and finding - as Jake put it - "something worth fighting for" are all up to your interpretation, and I don't want to influence that. Most of the ideas came from the film and I have just added the "What if?" part that defines a fanfic.

I will be vigorously editing this over the next few days, so please let me know what you think – like/dislike/any indication at all that my effort has been worth it – and I will be happy to incorporate your voices into my fanfic.

Thank you again for reading this and please don't forget to leave a review!

Oh, and if you have time, I invite you to check out my other one-shot, Choices, which revolves more around Jake and Neytiri's relationship.

:)

RC Mason.

Updated: 24 April 2011.