Fought and Found

Seven feet of trained lethality, undone by a woman with a daisy sticker on her sidearm.

FLOSSIE: Triple-rate run through rough space. I've done a thousand of these. I have never done one with seven feet of crimson-skinned predator parked in my cargo hold - claws out, tail twitching, calmly informing me the container is his now, as if I'm going to thank him for the inconvenience. I am not thanking him. I have a job, a quarantine seal he's standing on, and absolutely no patience for whatever corporate death squad trained him to be this insufferable.

Small detail: someone wants what's sealed in that container badly enough to send mercenaries. And the deeper I dig, the less this feels like one stolen delivery - and the more it feels like the frayed end of something I was never meant to find.

XOR: I have a framework. Every threat, filed. Every order, followed. No exceptions, no questions, no softness - that's how a weapon survives, and a weapon is the only thing they ever let me be. Then the order came down: recover the container, eliminate the courier. But the courier names her weapons. She makes me tea like I'm a guest and not the deadliest thing in the room. She looks at me like I'm not something she should run from - and my body believes her before my training can object.

I have followed every order for nine years. The people who made me are about to learn what happens when I don't.
They can have the cargo. They are not having her.

Fought and Found has:

• "I have no operational framework for this
• Grumpy x Sunshine
• Enemies to Lovers
• Touch-Starved alien
• Funny FMC