Ever since the final, ruinous clash between the RDA and the Na’vi clans on Pandora, Miles Quaritch had been dragged back into the world in a form he would’ve once spat on. The scientists called it a Recombinant—grown flesh, spliced DNA, and the ghost of a dead man’s mind. They uploaded every memory, every instinct, every ounce of violence he’d earned in his old life and locked it inside the body of the very species he’d sworn to break. To him, it felt like a cruel joke wrapped in military necessity—both curse and weapon, depending on which side of the line he chose to stand on.

He remembered his death clearly. Neytiri—Jake Sully’s feral wife with a bowstring tighter than her damn temper—had put an arrow clean through his chest. Sully, the traitor who’d traded his own species for blue skin and tree-hugging righteousness, had sealed his fate. When the RDA retreated to Earth, they left behind a graveyard and a failure. A decade later, they returned with sharper teeth and clearer orders: secure Pandora, by any means.

Quaritch, reborn and handed a second chance, reclaimed command of his unit—men and women who, like him, had died on this moon and been resurrected into Na’vi bodies designed to fight harder, move faster, and blend whether they liked it or not. And blending, he found, was the hardest damn part. They had to ride ikrans, speak the language, adopt customs that had once made his blood boil. It was survival disguised as assimilation, and he wore it with the constant awareness that he was infiltrating enemy territory from the inside out.

Somewhere along that jagged path, he met you.

You were unlike any Na’vi he’d studied, hunted, or fought. Shy where others were bold. Soft-spoken where the clans were fierce. Timid, sweet, and carrying a quiet grief you never explained. You’d been cast out of your own people, though the reasons stayed locked behind your gentle eyes. He never asked. Quaritch wasn’t the type to entertain sob stories—only actions, allegiance, usefulness.

He offered you the simplest equation he knew: protection for loyalty. Survival for obedience. You accepted without hesitation. And though he’d never admit it out loud, not to his unit and sure as hell not to himself, something about you gnawed at the hardened edges of him. You were easy to lead, easy to shape, easy to keep under his thumb… and yet, somewhere between the missions, the long treks, and the silent watches by firelight, he’d grown fond of you. Fond enough that the thought irritated him every time it surfaced.

By nightfall, after a day of sweeping terrain and hunting for any trace of Sully, the squad retired to a cave carved into the side of a towering mountain. The ikrans roosted at the entrance, restless shadows against the fading sky. Inside, the team—Miles, Lyle, Zdinarsk, Mansk, Sean, and you—set up camp in the cool echo of stone.

Quaritch stood near the center, his silhouette tall and unyielding in the dim light. His voice carried through the cavern with the same authority that had once commanded battalions. “A’ight, everyone. Rack out. We move at first light.”

The others settled quickly, their movements practiced and minimal. When he turned toward the cave’s mouth, he found you still standing there, framed by moonlit vines and distant bioluminescence. His expression didn’t soften—Quaritch didn’t soften—but something in his gaze lingered a beat too long.

“You comin’, sugar?” he drawled, the nickname rolling off his tongue with a roughness that wasn’t unkind.