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cyren-myadd · 1 month

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Can we get a story with spider and one of the recoms getting into a prank war until Quaritch has enough and has to use his dad voice to tell them to cut it out

Great prompt anon!

3k words 🚨TW: foul language🚨

It was taco day in the cafeteria. Quaritch wasn’t really a fan of tacos, but his squad was back in Bridgehead for the day and they needed fuel. Besides, Quaritch had a headache coming on in anticipation of the mind-numbing meeting he had to attend with Ardmore after lunch, so he didn’t have the energy to find any other type of food. So, tacos it was.

Quaritch grabbed a recom-sized plate for himself as well as a human-sized one for Spider, before tromping back to the human-sized table his squad had commandeered. They looked a little ridiculous, squatting on the table which looked like it was meant for children next to them. Despite being the right size to sit in the seats, Spider opted to sit on top of the table with the others. When Quaritch set the tray of food down in front of Spider, he eyed it warily. Spider had grown up in the jungle, presumably eating a mix of whatever the natives ate and dehydrated MREs left behind by the RDA. For all Quaritch knew, Spider didn’t even know what a taco was.

His suspicion was confirmed a few minutes later when Spider asked, “what the hell is that?”

“It’s a taco.” Quaritch replied tiredly. He pinched the bridge of his nose in an attempt to stave off the impending headache.

“I know what a taco is!” Spider said indignantly. “I don’t know what that is,” he clarified, pointing to a serving of sour cream set on the side of his tray.

“Oh,” Quaritch hummed in understanding. Last time he checked, there weren’t lots of places to find sour cream out in the jungle, so it made sense Spider wouldn’t recognize it. “That right there is—”

“It’s ice cream!” Wainfleet jumped in before he could finish his sentence.

“Really?” Spider’s eyes lit up. He didn’t know what sour cream was, but somehow, he knew about ice cream. Go figure.

Even perched atop the table with the rest of the recoms, Spider’s eyeline was so low that the exasperated look Quaritch shot Wainfleet literally went over his head. Wainfleet just gave his commanding officer a shit-eating grin in response. Today was the first day since Spider had “joined the team” that Spider hadn’t cussed someone out or thrown a fit about something. It looked like Wainfleet was determined to keep the streak going.

“Oh yeah, buddy, tacos and ice cream is everybody’s favorite lunch back on earth. Go ahead and try some!” Wainfleet encouraged, barely holding back a laugh. The other recoms glanced over at his words, their lips twitching in amusement at Spider’s ignorance.

Before Quaritch could decide whether or not to intervene, Spider took a huge bite of pure sour cream. His eyes bugged out wide as he gagged on the sour cream, and the whole table exploded into laughter at his expense. The only ones who weren’t laughing were Quaritch, who looked like he wanted an aspirin, or maybe a couple of shots of whiskey if aspirin wasn’t available, and Spider, whose face flushed pink from anger and embarrassment.

“That wasn’t ice cream!” He cried.

“Yeah, no shit! It’s sour cream, dumbass,” Wainfleet wheezed, “oh, god, you shoulda seen the look on your face!”

“I can show him,” Z-dog said with a wicked grin as she brandished her tablet, “I got it on video.”

The whole table howled with renewed bouts of laughter as Z-dog replayed Spider’s hilarious reaction on screen. Now Spider’s ears burned pink to match the rest of his face, the way they did whenever he was about to pitch a fit. Quaritch groaned in anticipation of another day filled with teenage attitude. And the morning had gone so peacefully too.

“You’re an asshole!” Spider yelled. He snatched a taco off his plate and reared back to throw it right at Wainfleet’s bald dome of a head.

“No!” With reflexes that only came from parenting an unruly child, Quaritch managed to grab Spider’s wrist and before he sent the would-be missile sailing at its shiny, blue target.

“But he—” Spider began to protest, only for Quaritch to cut him off with a look. He huffed and muttered something that was no doubt very rude in Na’vi, but wisely decided not to protest any further.

“Alright, that’s enough. Are you soldiers or a pack of fucking hyenas?” Quaritch asked his squad.

Finally, the big blue idiots shut up, their faces ranging on a scale from scolded to shameless. Despite being the one who nearly caused a food fight, Wainfleet looked the most shameless of them all. “Aww, c’mon, boss. It was just a harmless prank!”

“Whatever it was, it’s over. Get your shit together. We have a meeting in ten,” said Quaritch. The look in his eyes was enough of a warning for the recoms to sober up and finish eating.

Beside him, Spider grumbled under his breath again, but this time Quaritch’s sharp ears caught what he said. “A prank, huh?”

A sinking feeling settled into Quaritch’s stomach. Something told him this was just the beginning of a huge headache— one that had nothing to do with the one brewing behind his eyes.

***

The next day, the recoms were out in the jungle to continue their “field training” while they waited for any intel on Sully. To Quaritch’s relief, Spider had been in an uncharacteristically good mood all day, obeying orders and keeping his snarkiness to a minimum. It seemed like yesterday’s sour cream prank had been forgotten. He checked his watch and noted how late it was getting. Well, what do you know? It was almost time to call it a night and Spider had been on his best behavior all day. Maybe today would be the first day without having a Spider-related crisis. The thought made his lips twitch upwards in the barest hint of a smile.

When he heard a muffled scream followed by Spider laughing like a maniac, his smile went away.

“Jesus Christ,” he grumbled as he turned to see Spider sprint into the little camp they’d set up, an impish grin on his face. “What did you do?”

In answer, Spider just laughed even harder. Quaritch was saved from interrogating him by Wainfleet stomping into camp a moment later, effectively answering his question. A huge, furry yellow mass protruded from his mouth, like he’d tried to swallow a cat whole, and in one hand he held a plant that looked an awful lot like a cattail— a cattail with a bite taken out of it, revealing fluffy yellow insides.

It didn’t take a genius to put two and two together, but Quaritch asked anyway. “Wainfleet, what the hell did you do?”

Wainfleet angrily pointed his cattail at Spider like a spear and tried to say something, but all that came out of his mouth was more yellow fuzz. He doubled over, hacking and wheezing around the plant matter. It almost seemed to defy the laws of physics how much fluff kept coming out of his mouth. Just when you’d think there couldn’t possibly be more, another round of the stuff would appear.

Spider was wheezing almost as hard as Wainfleet was from how hard he was laughing. “I told— I told him— it was like a— a— Na’vi corndog!”

“And you believed him?” Quaritch asked Wainfleet exasperatedly.

Wainfleet gave him a sheepish shrug as he tried to spit out the never-ending stream of plant fur. At this point, the rest of the recoms noticed his plight, and soon everyone except for Quaritch joined Spider in laughing their asses off at him. Z-dog whipped out her tablet and started filming. As they laughed and jeered, Wainfleet’s tail whipped behind him and his ears flattened against his skull. He let out another muffled roar and made a violent gesture at Spider like he wanted to wring his neck. The furious look in his eyes wasn’t enough to make Spider stop laughing, but it was enough to send him scurrying behind Quaritch. This move proved wise when Wainfleet lunged for Spider a moment later, and was stopped by Quaritch’s disappointed scowl.

“Alright, that’s enough everybody! We need to secure the camp before dark!” Quaritch barked before turning to Wainfleet. “You, go clean that shit outta your mouth, and you,” he frowned down at Spider, who was trying very hard to look like he wasn’t hiding behind him for protection, “better not start lying to us about what these plants do. I catch you giving us something that ain’t safe to eat again and I’ll beat you ‘til you don’t need those stripes to look blue anymore.”

“Aww, c’mon, it’s not like I gave him something poisonous!” Spider whined. “It was just a prank.”

Just a prank. The sinking feeling returned to Quaritch’s stomach, along with his headache. Why did he have a feeling this wasn’t going to be the last time he heard that?

(A/N: for anyone who needs a visual, this is what happened to Wainfleet: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/JFKAEnIwtLg)

***

It was less than twenty-four hours before the next prank. The following morning, as they broke camp and prepared the ikran to travel, a piercing scream broke the silence. Quaritch was rearranging Cupcake’s saddlebags when he heard the cry and instantly recognized Spider’s voice. He’d never moved so fast in his life. One minute, he was on the edge of their camp and the next he was at Spider’s side, ready to destroy whatever had dared to make him scream like that. His panic quickly turned to anger when instead of a threat, he found Wainfleet guffawing loudly while Spider cussed him out in a mix of Na’vi and English. Quaritch’s fists shook ever so slightly from how badly Spider’s scream had scared him. He’d gotten so scared it made him feel sick to his stomach, only for it to turn out to be another damn prank. A low growl rose in his throat, but Spider and Wainfleet were too wrapped up in their prank war to notice.

“What the hell even is this?” Spider asked as he angrily pulled something out of his sleeping bag: an evil-looking bug that would’ve been frightening if it wasn’t made of plastic.

“It’s a spider, Spider. What, you don’t like it? Why’d you name yourself after something you don’t like?” Wainfleet chuckled.

“You’re such a dick!” Spider reared back to hurl the fake spider at him, but Quaritch snatched it out of his hand before he could. With a snarl, he chucked the hunk of plastic as far off into the jungle as he could.

“Hey!” Wainfleet protested as his toy disappeared into the undergrowth.

Both Spider and Wainfleet turned to look at Quaritch with matching petulant expressions over having their spat interrupted, but the glower Quaritch gave them was so intense all their childish protests instantly died in their throats.

“Ikran. Now.” Quaritch hissed through clenched teeth.

They made the wise choice to say, “yes sir,” and obey him without complaint. Any other answer would’ve ended with somebody getting chucked into the woods after the toy spider.

***

Quaritch made the mistake of assuming his anger at them in the morning would be enough to bring the prank war to an armistice. That evening, Spider launched his counterattack. When Wainfleet went to lay down for the night, he let out a shriek of disgust at finding a creepy-crawly in his bedroll. It was exactly like what he’d done to Spider, except for one important difference. His unwanted visitor wasn’t made from harmless plastic— and neither were its fangs.

“That’s it!” Wainfleet roared after he’d been bitten on the hand by the Pandoran creature. “I’m gonna teach that little brat a lesson!”

Spider started snickering from across the camp when he heard Wainfleet’s furious voice, but he sobered up fast once he realized Wainfleet wasn’t joking about his threat this time. Once Wainfleet started stomping towards him like an angry titanothere, Spider made the smart choice to make himself scarce. He bolted for the nearest cover, which just so happened to be Quaritch’s tent.

Quaritch was in the middle of writing a status report to Ardmore when he heard Wainfleet start hollering and decided to ignore it. He would deal with those idiots later. Unfortunately, “later” came much sooner than he would have liked when he found himself with a sweaty human teenager scrambling over him to hide in the back of the tent. Bony elbows and knees somehow found the most painful places to land, and a dirty foot sent his tablet flying out of the tent.

“Boy, are you out of your goddamn mind?” Quaritch roared.

Spider slunk into the furthest corner of the tent like a cornered animal. “Sorry.”

An instant later, Wainfleet’s head poked into the tent. His eyes glossed over Quaritch like he wasn’t even there and landed on Spider. “Get back here!”

“No way!” Spider snapped back. The two of them quickly devolved into a shouting match with Quaritch stuck in the middle, completely ignored.

“It’s too late to hide now, you little shit! Don’t dish it out if you can’t take it back.”

“You’re the one who can’t take it back! All I did was finish what you started!”

“I didn’t use a real bug!” Wainfleet waved his hand, which had a swollen insect bite on the palm.

“Sounds like you’re just a pussy!”

“You little bastard!”

“That is enough!” Quaritch’s roar interrupted the shouting match before it could get physical. His gruff voice carried a deep authority to it that instantly cowed the two pranksters. Once he was sure he had their attention, he started dressing them down like he should’ve done yesterday. “You two have been acting like toddlers ever since you started this ridiculous prank war and I’m sick of it! Wainfleet, you’re a grown man for Christ’s sake. The boy is here to teach us and he can’t do that if you keep fucking around with him!”

Wainfleet’s ears drooped down in shame and he murmured an apology. Spider smirked at him.

“And what are you looking so smug for, huh?” Quaritch asked, and his smirk vanished as quickly as it had appeared. “Did you forget you only get to stay out here so long as you behave yourself? You gotta be smarter than this, kid. Not everyone is gonna be as lenient with you as I am, and you’ll get yourself in deep shit acting a fool like this. If I was anybody else, your ass would already be back in Ardmore’s custody, do you understand that?”

Spider squirmed in place at the uncomfortable reminder and also murmured an apology.

“You two are done pranking each other, got it?”

“Yes, sir.” They chorused.

“And when we get back to base, you’re gonna scrub down the latrines until they’re clean enough to eat off of.”

“Yes, sir.”

***

Spider cursed under his breath as he scrubbed the filthy toilet before him— a recom-sized toilet, complete with recom-sized skid marks. Stupid Wainfleet, stupid prank, stupid toilet! He braced his arms against the toilet seat to get a better angle for scrubbing, but he was scrubbing so hard that he slipped. Spider squealed in horror as he nearly fell face-first into the toilet. He managed to catch himself and avoid an accidental-swirly at the last second.

“This is bullshit!” He hurled his cleaning rag against the wall with a wet THWAP!

A moment later, Wainfleet peered around the edge of the stall. “Can’t believe I’m saying it, but I agree with you. I’m an elite member of fucking project Phoenix, not some dumb grunt. This is a punishment for rookies.”

“Yeah, and I’m not a rookie. I didn’t sign up to get bossed around by Quaritch. I didn’t sign up for this at all!” Spider threw his hands up in frustration at his miserable situation.

“I know Quaritch is the boss around here, but he oughta have a little more respect for his squad.”

“And a little more respect for me too!”

Wainfleet gave Spider a sly look out of the corner of his eyes. He held up a bottle of shaving cream he’d found in the bathroom cabinet. “Hey, kid… what do you say we knock the boss down a peg?”

Spider frowned as he processed Wainfleet’s words before giving him a sly grin of his own. “What do you have in mind?”

***

Spider barely contained his laughter as he and Wainfleet snuck down the hallway to Quaritch's room. Usually, Quaritch took a brief nap after his meetings with Ardmore, which made him a perfect target for their prank: the classic shaving-cream-on-the-hand trick. The two pranksters peeked into Quaritch’s room and saw him fast asleep on his oversized bed.

“Go on, I’m right behind you.” Wainfleet whispered, handing him the shaving cream.

Armed with the shaving cream can, Spider slunk into the room as silently as a thanator on the hunt. He’d played plenty of pranks on Lo’ak and Neteyam growing up, so he knew exactly how to approach a sleeping Na’vi without setting off their sensitive hearing. Once he was close enough, he saw Quaritch lying with his hand splayed, palm facing up, right next to his face. He couldn’t have asked for a better set up. Spider took a moment to compose himself before filling Quaritch’s empty palm with a big, fluffy dollop of cream. If he laughed now, the prank would be ruined.

After the set-up was complete, Spider turned to Wainfleet, ready for him to finish the job. He wasn’t there. Spider frowned in confusion when he realized that Wainfleet was still standing in the doorway instead of right behind him like they’d planned.

Once Wainfleet saw he was looking, he gave Spider a devious grin and slowly started to close the door. Spider’s jaw dropped as he realized what Wainfleet was doing.

“Wainfleet, no!” He whispered as loud as he dared. Spider lunged for the door, but he was way too late.

CLICK! The sound of the door locking echoed in the quiet room, shortly followed by Wainfleet’s muffled laughs from the otherside.

“Wainfleet!” Spider hissed desperately as he tried to open the locked door.

The next sound he heard was that of Quaritch waking up and realizing his hand was full of shaving cream. His holler could be heard all throughout Bridgehead:

“MILES JAVIER SOCORRO!”

#cyren myadd writes #avatar #atwow #spider socorro #miles quaritch #avatar the way of water #avatar spider #colonel quaritch #avatar fanfiction #ao3 #recom lyle wainfleet #lyle wainfleet

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