Stupid.

The word gnawed at him with the persistence of a bad wound, the kind that never quite scabbed over, no matter how long you gave it. Stupid for believing he could afford trust. Stupid for mistaking strategy for sincerity, hunger for devotion. Varang had looked at him like she saw something worth choosing, something more than a weapon shaped like a man, and he—against every instinct drilled into him by decades of war—had let himself believe it. The realization burned now, corrosive and humiliating, because it wasn’t just that she’d used him; it was that she’d done it cleanly, turned the RDA against him with a precision he would have admired in any other context. Love, he thought bitterly, was just another form of camouflage, and he’d walked straight into it with his eyes wide open.

Shame sat heavy in his chest, tangled up with rage so tightly he couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. He avoided the clans, avoided the patrol routes, avoided anything that looked too organized to be safe. Days blurred into one another in a grim procession of hunger, pain, and bone-deep exhaustion. Survival became mechanical—move, eat when you can, hide when you must—stripped of purpose or pride. More than once, stretched out beneath the alien canopy with the ache of Pandora pressing in on him from every direction, he found himself wondering if Eywa, whatever the hell she really was, might finally decide he wasn’t worth the effort of keeping alive. He didn’t pray for it. Quaritch didn’t pray. But he stopped fighting the thought. She never answered anyway.

It was beneath a massive tree, its roots thick and gnarled like the knuckles of an old fighter, that his body finally betrayed him. He slid down the trunk until he hit the ground, armor creaking softly, breath rasping out of him in a humorless huff. “God,” he muttered, staring up through layers of bioluminescent leaves, “this sucks.” The words barely carried any heat. Just fact. Fatigue dragged him under before he could argue with it, consciousness slipping away as naturally as surrender.

He came back to himself on instinct alone. The pressure on his leg—hands, unmistakably hands—snapped him awake, vision swimming as he focused on the shape crouched in front of him. Training overrode disorientation in a heartbeat. His knife was in his grip before the blur fully resolved, the blade angled just right, his voice low and lethal. “Hold it right there,” he warned, a hiss sharpened by exhaustion and old fury. The figure froze instantly, hands lifting into the air—five fingers, clearly visible, blue skin catching the faint light. Na’vi, yes, but not wholly. The proportions were wrong, the lines too familiar. Almost like Neytiri,the navi woman that traitor Jake Sully loved and became navi for..

His eyes narrowed as recognition clicked into place with a quiet, dangerous certainty. A navi woman. He took in the set of her shoulders, the tension coiled beneath the stillness, the way she’d stopped moving but hadn’t backed away. Interesting. His grip tightened on the knife, not out of fear but calculation, and his voice dropped, rough and demanding, the voice of a man who had spent a lifetime interrogating the world until it answered.

Miles: “Who the fuck are you?”