Paz Socorro's Second Chance; Chapter 1:
What if Paz Socorro had come back like the rest of Quaritch's squad? What if she found out her orphaned son had been left to be raised on Pandora? That the humans who had stayed and the Na'ví they were allied with had helped to protect and raise and love him? And now they were once again trying to destroy the people on this planet? In which Paz Socorro is still culpable for the things she did before dying but that doesn't mean she agreed with it, she was doing a job and what she felt she needed to to protect her 4 month old son when she died.
Paz woke up choking on air that didn't feel right, her lungs dragging in a sharp, panicked breath that made the world lurch sideways around her. Everything was wrong - too tall, too heavy. Her hands were not hands anymore. Her fingers flexed and she jerked them up into her vision with a sound of confusion caught somewhere between a gasp and a growl.
Blue skin. Long limbs. A body that moved when she tried to move it and moved too slowly when her fear surged too hard to control it. For one terrible second, she thought she was still dreaming. Then she tried to sit up and nearly fell out of the bed instead.
Metal clanged somewhere nearby. A sharp voice barked for her to stay still. Paz snapped her head toward the sound so fast the motion made her dizzy, staring at the figures around her with wide, unfocused eyes. Shapes in white. Masks. Light reflected in glass. One of them stepped closer and she immediately recoiled, every instinct in her body screaming at her to fight, to run, to find a weapon, to get away from whatever the hell was happening.
“Easy,” the man said, lifting his hands.
His voice was familiar.
Too familiar.
Paz squinted at him through the haze of shock and alarm, trying to place the face under the unfamiliar body. The shape of him was wrong, but something in the posture, the cadence, the sharpness of his expression dragged an old memory to the surface. She knew that voice, that attitude. Her expression hardened. “...Quaritch?”
“Yeah, it’s me.” he said, like that was supposed to make things make sense. It didn’t, but part of her was glad that someone she trusted was here. That didn’t last long.
She stared at him for a long moment, breathing hard, trying and failing to make sense of the fact that the man in front of her was Miles Quaritch and also not Miles Quaritch at all. Her gaze flicked over him again and again, taking in the blue skin, the height, the Na’vi body fitted around his old certainty like it had been made for it. The realization hit her in pieces, none of them gentle. “What the hell is this?”
Quaritch glanced toward the side as if deciding how much to say and in what order. “You’re in an Avatar body.”
Paz’s brow furrowed sharply. She looked down at herself again, as if that might somehow make the answer less absurd. “No, I figured that part out.”
“Then you’re doing better than most of the others.”
Her eyes snapped back to his. “The others?”
He let out a breath through his nose and seemed to decide she was calm enough to be told the truth — or at least enough of it to keep her from ripping the pod apart. “You died, Socorro. All of us did. RDA brought us back in these bodies.”
The room went very, very still.
Paz’s face emptied out in a way that was somehow more frightening than if she had screamed. Her breathing slowed, but only because her whole body had gone rigid with the effort of holding itself together. Died. The word rang in her head with terrible, impossible clarity. Died meant final. Died meant over. Died meant she had been taken from her son and never even known it.
Her voice came out rougher than she intended. “-Miles...”
Quaritch blinked once. “What?”
“¿Dónde está mi hijo?!” That was when everything changed. Whatever thin thread of control she had been gripping snapped clean in half. Her eyes went wild, her hands clenched, and all the forced stillness in her body vanished under the weight of one brutal, immediate need. “Where is he?” she demanded again, louder this time, trying to surge up against the people trying to urge her back into the bed and nearly losing her balance when the unfamiliar body obeyed too slowly. “Tell me where Miles is!”
Quaritch’s face shifted, not into sympathy, exactly, but into the kind of hard, grim look that said he already knew this was going to be a problem. “He’s alive.”
Alive. The word hit her like a blow. For half a second relief flooded through her so fast it almost made her dizzy. Then Quaritch kept talking, and the rest of the sentence came apart underneath her feet.
“He’s with the Jake Sully.” Paz went absolutely still, not because she was calm. Because she wasn’t. Her mouth opened once, then shut. Her eyes flashed with a furious, dawning understanding so sharp it almost looked like pain. “You left him there.”
“Socorro—”
“You left my son on Pandora.”
Quaritch took a step closer, likely trying to steady her before she could go to pieces, but that only made it worse. “We didn’t exactly have a choice.”
Paz let out a sound that was halfway between a laugh and a snarl. “¿No tenías opción? ¡Pura mierda, pedazo de imbécil! ¡¿En qué coño estaba pensando al tener un hijo con un estúpido como tú?!”
-You didn't have a choice? Bullshit, you fucking moron! What the fuck was I thinking, having a child with a dumbass like you?!-
Something in his expression tightened. “He’s alive.”
“And?” she shot back, her voice cracking with rage now. “You think that makes it better? You think that fixes anything? You dragged us into a war, we died – he was an orphan and these people left him with the ones you were killing, now you’re telling me he’s alive like that makes up for all of that!?”
Quaritch’s jaw flexed. “We’re getting him back.”
That was the wrong thing to say, because Paz surged forward so hard she knocked one of the nurses near her to the floor, and when Quaritch instinctively moved to block her, she caught him square across the face with the flat of her hand. The crack of it rang through the room and for a moment, everyone froze.
Quaritch looked at her, stunned more by the audacity than the force of the blow. Paz was breathing hard, eyes bright with fury and grief and something far worse than either of them. “Don’t you ever talk about him like he belongs to you,” she hissed, after that any chance of calm was gone.
--
Paz caught Lyle near the edge of the hangar while the base was still half chaos from the last mission. He was trying to look busy in the way people did when they knew they might be intercepted, which was exactly why she stepped into his path. “Lyle.”
He stopped with a groan. “Im already working overtime making sure your boy toy doesn’t get us all killed again, what do you want?”
“That depends on how much you know.” His expression shifted, just slightly. Enough to tell her he already knew what she was going to ask. Paz lowered her voice anyway. “You were with him. With Spider.”
“Yeah.”
“What was he like?”
Lyle let out a slow breath and glanced away for a second, like the answer was going to be annoying to say out loud. “Annoying.”
That got her attention. “Annoying?”
“He talked too much, got in the way, asked a million questions, and somehow still managed to be useful.” Lyle shrugged, but there was something real in it. “Kid’s tougher than he looks. More stubborn too. Kept up better than most people expected.”
Paz studied him carefully. “Was he scared?”
“Probably,” Lyle said. “He didn’t act like it though.”
That was the part made her smile slightly, not because it was comforting exactly - because it sounded like the exact kind of person she would expect her son to be. Someone who had learned how to survive by not giving fear the chance to win.
Lyle shifted his weight and added, quieter, “He’s got that in common with you, you know.”
Paz gave a small, short nod. She didn’t trust herself to answer out loud, she could already feel the sting of tears threatening at the corner of her eyes.
--
Z-Dog found her later like it was nothing at all, like they were still just two woman stuck on an alien planet together and stuffed into the same unit. She leaned in the doorway of Paz room with her arms folded and said, “You look like you’re about to bite somebody.”
Paz didn’t bother hiding her scowl. “Do you have a reason for coming here?”
“Maybe.” Z-Dog tipped her head. “Maybe I heard you were sniffing around for Spider stories.”
Paz’s gaze sharpened. “And?”
“And I figured I’d save you the trouble of asking the wrong people.” Z-Dog pushed off the doorframe and stepped closer, voice lowering just enough to be private. “He’s a survivor. That’s the first thing anybody with eyes would notice. Kid’s been dragged through hell and still manages to keep moving.”
Paz’s chest tightened but Z-Dog kept going, matter-of-fact in the way only someone used to giving mission reports could be. “He’s small, yeah, but he doesn’t act small. He’s quick, mouthy, and he’s got guts. Doesn’t freeze when the rest of the room does.”
Paz almost smiled at that, but it came out more like pain. “That sounds familiar.”
“It should, you an Quaritch are both to stubborn for your own good.” Z-Dog gave her a look that was almost amused. “He talks back to everyone, too. Especially Quaritch.”
Paz huffed a quiet laugh through her nose. “Good, su padre es un imbécil..”
“Yeah, well.” Z-Dog glanced down the hall before continuing. “He’s not the kind of kid who folds easy. Even when he should.”
That made her worry, unlike the rest – it also felt like a reminder. She had been so caught up in everything happening so quickly, she was fighting a losing battle when maybe she should be pretending to play along. Paz looked down at her hands for a second, steadying herself before she trusted her voice again. “Thanks.”
Z-Dog’s expression softened by a fraction. “Don’t thank me yet. I’m just saying the kid’s got teeth, just like his mom.” That was at least something she could hold onto.
--
The marine biologist looked like he regretted being visible the moment Paz stepped into his path.
She caught him outside one of the observation areas, where the lighting was too clean and the air smelled faintly of sterilizer and saltwater equipment. He tried to sidestep her, but she moved with him.
“I need to know something.”
He gave a tired look toward the ceiling. “That’s almost never a sentence I like hearing from you people.”
“I’m serious.”
That made him stop. Finally.
Paz faced him squarely. “You were on the boat. You saw him.”
His face changed at once, subtle but enough. Understanding. “Spider?”
“Yes.”
He looked at her for a long second, then nodded once. “I saw him.”
“Was he all right?”
The biologist hesitated, and that was answer enough to make her stomach twist. Then he said, “He was alive. And he...”
Paz waited.
“He cared,” the man said, quieter now. “Not in the abstract way the RDA pretends to when they need something. I mean actually cared. About people who weren’t useful to him. About things that weren’t going to help him get ahead. He had a sense of right and wrong that didn’t fit any of this.”
Paz’s throat tightened.
The biologist seemed to realize she needed the rest of the truth, not just the polished version, and added, “He wasn’t acting like someone raised by monsters like they try to tell us they are. He was acting like a kid who’d learned how to have empathy and kindness from the people around him.” Paz looked away fast, blinking hard once.
That one sentence hit too close to everything she had been trying not to say out loud. The scientist said something else after that, something brief and careful about Spider’s loyalty and the way he stayed with the Sullys when he could have run, but Paz barely heard it over the ache in her chest. For one brief moment, all she could think was that her son had somehow found decency in the middle of a war he had never asked for.
--
Paz knew something was wrong the moment the shift changed.
The base had a sound to it when something important happened - a tightening in the air, a sharpness in the movement of the people around her, the way voices lowered but became more urgent all at once. She noticed it while she was in the mess hall, tray in hand, standing in line with the rest of the personnel who still pretended to eat like normal people even when half the world was on fire somewhere beyond the walls.
Then the doors opened and two soldiers came in fast, scanning the room like they were looking for a specific target. Paz set her tray down slowly as one of them spotted her immediately. “Socorro.”
She didn’t answer. She already knew by the tone that she wasn’t being called over for conversation. “Come with us.”
Paz turned to face them fully. “For what?”
“Now.”
She narrowed her eyes. “That’s not an answer.”
It was the wrong thing to say, and they all knew it. One of them stepped closer, hand already moving toward her arm in a way that made her body go rigid with instinct. Paz took a half-step back. Her mind was already moving before her feet were. “Where’s my son?” she asked, no one answered.
That silence told her more than anything else could have. Her stomach dropped, but her face went cold instead. “What happened?”
“Move.”
Paz looked between them, then toward the room, toward the exits, toward anyone who might help and knew better than to expect it. Every face in the mess hall had gone carefully blank. Nobody wanted to be the one caught paying attention. So she let herself be taken. Not because she had any intention of making it easy - she didn’t - but because fighting meant that she might not get answers about her son.
They walked her out through the hallways at a pace that felt deliberate. When they reached the cell block, the truth settled over her in ugly pieces. This was not a warning or temporary or them being cautious. This was them locking her away before whatever happened next could reach her. Paz stopped at the threshold and looked back once. “You’re not even going to tell me why?”
The man at her left didn’t meet her eyes. “Orders.”
“That seems to be the only language anybody here knows.” The door shut without either of them answering. The lock hit with a heavy metallic thunk that echoed through her chest like a blow.
Paz stood in the center of the cell for a long moment, breathing hard, listening to the silence on the other side of the door. Her own reflection looked back at her from the dark glass panel in the wall - blue skin, unfamiliar eyes, a body that still did not feel real enough to belong to her.
--
Lyle brought a tray a few days later, he did not look especially pleased to be doing it. He slid the food through the slot at the bottom of the cell door and stood there a second longer than necessary. “You can stop looking at me like that,” he muttered.
“Like what?”
“Like you’re deciding whether you want to punch me or interrogate me.”
Paz stared at him through the bars. “Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”
He let out a small snort of laughter. “Very reassuring.”
She crossed her arms and leaned back against the wall, waiting. Lyle sighed, then lowered his voice. “They brought the kid in.”
The room seemed to tilt, Paz went still and quiet for what felt like an eternity before asking. “Where is he?”
“Not where you are.”
“Lyle.”
He held up one hand. “I know. I know. Look, he’s in the base. Alive. And they’re all over him.”
She gripped the edge of the bunk hard enough to hurt. “Why?”
Lyle hesitated and that alone was enough to make her chest go tight. “Because he can breathe Pandora’s air,” he said finally. “That’s what has them worked up. They’re running every test they can think of. Scans, monitoring, observations, the whole thing. They want to know how. Why. Whether it means something useful.”
Paz stared at him, her face going blank in the way it did when she had too much anger to show all at once. “They’re studying him,” she said, her voice cold and flat.
“Yeah.”
“Like an animal.”
Lyle didn’t answer, which was answer enough.
Paz looked away, jaw clenched, and for a second the only sound in the cell was the thud of her own pulse in her ears. The thought of Spider under their lights, under their hands, watched like a specimen, it made something inside her twist hard enough to feel physicaly illl.
Lyle shifted uncomfortably. “He’s not taking it well.”
“Good.”
That made him blink. “Good?”
Paz lifted her eyes back to his, and there was nothing soft in them now. “Good. They should be afraid of him, they should be afraid of me to.”
Lyle did not smile, but there was something in his face that suggested he understood exactly what kind of threat she was making in that moment. That if she got her hands on the people treating his son like a science experiment it would be over for them. He left soon after, but not before pausing at the door and saying, “For what it’s worth, he’s still got fight in him.”
Paz closed her eyes and held that sentence like a lifeline after he was gone.
--
Z-Dog came a few days later, and she brought worse news dressed up like gossip. She set the tray down without looking especially interested in the food. “You look miserable.”
“I’m in a cell,” Paz said flatly. “What did you expect?”
“Fair.”
Z-Dog leaned against the wall outside the cell, arms folded, expression casual in a way Paz didn’t fully trust. It meant she was choosing her words carefully. “I heard Quaritch came to visit you yesterday.”
Paz’s gaze sharpened. “And?”
“And there’s someone else around now.” Paz already hated the way she said that before Z-Dog even explained. “Varang.” The disgust in Z-Dog’s voice was immediate. “Fire Na’vi. Mean as hell. Does not like you.”
“Do I know her?”
“Nope.” Z-Dog popped the p at the end before her mouth twisted into a scowl. “Doesn’t need to. Heard your name, started asking questions, and then got very interested in the fact that you were still alive.”
Paz’s expression turned hard. “Why would that matter to her?”
Z-Dog gave a look that made the answer obvious before she even spoke. “Because Na’vi mate for life, if they’re worth anything. That’s what she thinks, anyway. So you being alive is an insult to her.”
Paz stared at her for a beat. “An insult.”
“Apparently.” Z-Dog leaned her head back against the wall, eyes rolling slightly. “She acts like Quaritch has made some kind of commitment to her, between you and me I think shes a rebound. Hes always likes first woman but this one? She should probably be committed.”
Paz let out a humorless little laugh. “So she thinks what? I want her man?.”
“She thinks you’re competition.” Z-Dog shrugged, though there was a faint edge to her mouth like she thought the whole situation was ridiculous. “She wanted to know if you were dead, seemed disappointed when the answer wasn’t what she wanted.” Paz’s hands tightened into fists at her sides. The air in the cell felt smaller all at once.
“She wants me dead,” Paz said quietly.
Z-Dog didn’t bother denying it. “Yeah. Pretty much, by her own hand from what I gather.” The silence stretched for a minute, then Z-Dog exhaled and added, “I’m just saying, if she’s got her claws in Quaritch’s head now, she’s going to make this whole thing uglier than it already is.”
Paz’s smile, when it came, was thin and vicious. “As if he needed help making a mess of things.”
That earned the first real hint of amusement from Z-Dog. “Exactly.”
--
Quaritch came to see her again the next day. He arrived with the usual look on his face; controlled, sharp, like he had already decided how the conversation should go and was only here to see whether she was smart enough to follow along. He stopped at the bars and studied her for a long moment before speaking.
“You’ve heard the rumors.”
Paz didn’t move from where she sat on the bunk. “Which ones.”
His eyes narrowed slightly. “You know what I mean.”
“I’ve heard a lot of things I think are dumb as shit, Viejo. You’ll have to be more specific.”
That got the faintest twitch out of him, but it was gone before it could turn into a smile. “Spider’s being handled.”
“I’m sure you think that sounds better every time you say it.”
Quaritch ignored that. “The tests aren’t going to stop.”
Paz looked up at him then, expression cool and dangerous in a way that made it very clear she was one bad word away from becoming a problem. “You say that like it’s supposed to comfort me.”
“It’s supposed to prepare you.”
“For what?” she asked. “For watching you turn my son into a question you can’t answer?”
His jaw flexed.
Paz rose to her feet slowly and stepped closer to the door, because she wanted him to have no excuse for missing a single word. “You keep saying ‘we’ like you’re all on the same side, but you know what I think, Viejo?” His eyes locked on hers. “I think you don’t even know who you are anymore, and it’s showing.” The words landed hard enough to shift the air in the cell.
“To me especially. Because I know you better than any of the morons on this base.” Quaritch’s expression tightened in a way that told her she had hit exactly where she meant to. Then, because she was not finished, she looked him dead in the face and added, “I heard your little rebound wants me dead, she tries it I’ll take her out even if I go down to.”
Quaritch’s face went very still. Paz tilted her head, lips barely curving. “What? Didn’t know she wanted me dead? Or didn’t realize I knew?” He stared at her for a long second, the kind of stare that would have made most people back off. Paz did not.
Finally, he let out a slow breath through his nose. “You done, Darlin’?”
“No,” she said. “But you are.” That did it. He didn’t say anything else, just gave her one last hard look and turned away. The door to the hall shut behind him a moment later, the sound sharp enough to make the whole cell feel colder.
The second Quaritch was gone, Paz broke. It started with her shoulders going rigid and her breathing turning shallow, then too fast, then uneven in a way she couldn’t control. She sat down hard on the bunk and buried her face in her hands, but it didn’t stop the tears once they started.
Spider was in this base. Spider was being tested. Spider was alone in a room full of people who saw him as a problem to solve.
And she was here. Locked behind reinforced walls with nothing but scraps of information and the mercy of people who had once been her friends.
Her chest tightened so hard it almost hurt to breathe. She drew in air in short, shaking pulls, trying to force her body to calm down, but every attempt only made the panic feel more real. She pressed the heels of her hands into her eyes like she could force the tears back in by sheer will. It didn’t work. Her breathing hitched. Her throat closed. The sound she made was small and broken and humiliating, and she hated it.
She couldn’t help him.
That thought came back again and again.
She couldn’t get to him.
She couldn’t stop them.
She couldn’t even see him.
Paz bent forward over herself, shoulders trembling, and tried desperately to swallow down the kind of grief that made her feel like she was drowning inside her own skin. The cell was silent except for her breathing, and that silence was the worst part of all - because the silence gave her nowhere to hide from the fact that her son was still out there in the hands of the RDA and she was too far away to do a single thing about it.
For the first time since waking up, Paz fully understood just how cruel it was to be alive and powerless at the same time.
