Chapter Text
From the very beginning, Quaritch knows something is up. Ardmore switched his schedule around at the last minute that morning, ordered him and the rest of the squad to attend a debriefing about Sully’s whereabouts right after breakfast. It was tedious stuff, some know-it-all droning on about the forests and Na’vi that he’d already learned about a hundred times over. More talking than doing, that was the RDA’s new way of things, and it didn’t matter what he thought about it.
The meeting isn’t out of the ordinary except for a few key indicators. The soldier leading it is the shifty type, tall and lean like the scientists but not smart enough to be one, so it’s like he went into the military instead. He keeps glancing at the clock on the wall, eyeing fellow soldiers, and refusing to ever meet Quaritch’s eyes. Circling back to locations they’d already searched, restating the failures of previous missions, talking and talking but never really saying anything.
Quaritch tries to follow along, keep quiet and attentive. The rest of the squad are not trying nearly as hard. Mansk is blinking slowly behind his sunglasses, Lyle is balancing precariously on the back legs of his chair, and Zdinarsk keeps loudly snapping her gum at random intervals with a wicked smirk, trying to intimidate the other soldiers at the meeting. Any other day he’d tell them all off, but something keeps nagging at the back of his mind. Something is off. His tail thumps against the back of the too-small chair he sat in, revealing his agitation. The soldier leading the meeting points to an area of forest on the holographic map, and Quaritch reconizes it as the location of the old shack. Where he and the squad ran into the Sully kids, and lost several of their own in the ensuing battle with Sully and his wife.
That’s when it clicks.
Ardmore is stalling. She wants him out of her hair for some reason, too occupied and bored out of his mind to question what she is doing. And there’s only one aspect that they differ on so wholly that she’d want him out of the way while she worked.
Spider.
Quaritch shoots up from his seat with a loud bang, not even sparing a second to acknowledge the others in the room that go silent at his outburst. He beelines for the exit and fights to control his rising fury.
“Colonel?” Lyle calls after him, but receives no response.
The interrogation labs are on the other side of base, because of course they are. Probably all part of Ardmore’s plan to keep him away. It takes everything in him not to break out into a run. He’s never been more grateful for the longer strides this Na’vi body granted him. In what feels like both the blink of an eye and eons too late, the doors to the labs are in front of him. Two guards stationed in the hallway outside of the door make eye contact with him, and the shock on their faces when they see him is all he needs to confirm his suspicions. That tricky bitch, he thinks.
“Let me in there.”
One of the guards holds out a hand and says, “Colonel Quaritch, I’m sorry but this is a private interrogation–” With a snarl, Quaritch grabs him by the throat and slams him up against the wall so his feet dangle in the air.
The other soldier exclaims, “Sir! Sir you cannot go in there, on Ardmore's orders!”
Quaritch let the soldier in his hold struggle for a moment longer, choking and spluttering, before dropping him.
“That so?” He asks, and bursts through the double doors.
They fly open and hit the interior walls of the lab with a loud CRACK, announcing his arrival. The scientists inside cry out when they see him, either because they’re afraid of him or because they didn’t expect to be disturbed. Quaritch hopes it’s a little bit of both. They’re all standing around a blown up holograph of a human brain, and behind the observation glass, Ardmore stands on a raised platform in front of the neuroscanner. The sound of Spider’s screaming makes Quaritch’s vision go red.
“Get him the hell outta there!” Quaritch commands, stomping down the steps of the observation room into the labs below. He slams a hand down onto the emergency stop button for the neuroscanner, and he’s been here before. It’s all too soon that he is here again.
When the whirring of the machine slows and the lights blink off, Ardmore turns to him and has the audacity to not even look shocked.
“Colonel, you are interfering with a vital interrogation here,” she scolds.
The technicians surrounding the neuroscanner don’t move to undo any of Spider’s restraints, but they wisely scurry out of his way when Quaritch steps up to do it himself. “I don’t give a damn about your interrogations, the boy is off limits.”
Spider looks worse than he did last time. His eyes are wide open but glassy, twin streams of blood drip from his nose and past his lips. The restraints around his wrists and ankles have left angry red marks from how hard he was struggling. How long had he been in the machine before Quaritch got here? Could Ardmore have stuck him in as soon as Quaritch’s meeting started? Or even earlier, when he left the mess hall after breakfast?
“I will not have you ruining our mission just because you’re feeling sentimental over a traitor who, need I remind you, is not your son!” Ardmore follows him when he scoops Spider into his arms.
The kid is too damn still, not even blinking when he is jostled. Smoothing a hand over his sweaty forehead, Quaritch whips around and hisses at the General. It’s purely instinctive, not at all what he was intending, but it feels right all the same. General Ardmore blinks owlishly and takes a step back. Good. Any closer and Quaritch isn’t sure what his instincts would make him do to her.
Quaritch levels her with a withering glare. “Let me make myself clear to you, General. You touch him again and I will show you just how barbaric we blue people can be.”
Anyone in the way of the doors practically leaps out of his path when he turns to exit. Standing just outside the doorway is Lyle, mouth open and ready to ask what happened. But when he sees the too-small form of Spider in Quaritch’s arms, his mouth snaps shut. Dutifully, he follows Quaritch’s lead down the hallway, at one point snarling a “what are you looking at?” to a couple of RDA staff eyeing them. They all know the way to the cellblock. But at the fork in the hallway, Quaritch makes a left instead of a right that leads to the elevators that go below ground.
At this, Spider shifts in his hold, groaning pitifully. He looks at Quaritch, blinks twice before his vision clears enough to recognize who is holding him. But when he does, he doesn’t fight. If anything he relaxes more into Quaritch’s arms.
“Wut’re you doin’?” Spider slurs.
“Taking you back to somewhere I can look after you. How are you holding up?” Quaritch asks.
He makes another left and Lyle gets ahead of him to push open the doors to the indoor bridge that crosses to the squad’s specially built living quarters. The huge, glass windows surrounding the bridge show all the construction going on outside, nothing but shades of dirt tan and gray steel for miles. It’s no place for a child, especially not one as wild as Spider. And with Ardmore consistently going behind his back to torture information out of the kid, Quaritch knows he can’t keep him here for much longer.
“M’fine.”
Quaritch chuckles humorlessly at Spider’s stubborn response. Leave it to him to be half dead and still insist nothing is wrong. He’d say that Spider gets it from Paz, but the harsh reality is that Spider is probably used to having to care for himself after a lifetime spent following the Sully kids around like a kicked puppy. The way they just left him to die in the forest, Quaritch can’t be sure they didn’t rejoice the moment he was out of their hair.
“How many fingers am I holding up?” Quaritch doesn’t move his hands from cradling Spider to his chest. Spider wrinkles his nose.
“Is that a trick question?” He asks, and Quaritch smiles just a little.
“Yeah, you’re gonna be alright.”