Author's Notes

Prompt challenge: fall. I had trouble with this one, and I ended up with romance, something I don't write much, so… hopefully it's okay. Thanks for giving it a chance!

This story is set a little while after the accident where Snake Eyes saved Scarlett's life but was disfigured and lost his voice. The letter referred to in the first paragraph is the subject of another one of my stories, "A Ninja Commando's Christmas Letter". You absolutely don't need to read it to read this story: everything you need to know about it is contained in the first paragraph below, and it's debatable you even need to know that much.

Free Fall

Snake Eyes put the tip of his pen against the paper but for what felt like a long time, he couldn't think of how to start the letter. He wasn't going to give up, however. He had admitted his feelings to himself a couple of months back, while writing that letter to his dead parents as per his shrink's order; he figured it was high time he fully admitted them to Scarlett.

It wasn't that she didn't know how he felt at all: they were dating again, and she knew he didn't hold her responsible for his injuries, but they still weren't quite as comfortable around each other as they had been, and he wanted to make her see just what she meant to him. He was reasonably certain that he was acting like a damn teenager, but it seemed to him that acting like a damn teenager was the only sensible thing to do just now.

He wrote 'Dear Scarlett' at the top of the page, and as if by magic, the pen just kept on going, the words flowing out with no conscious effort on his part.

Dear Scarlett,

I've been meaning to tell you something for a while. You already know some of it, maybe a lot, but I never told you the important part yet and I figure it's about time I do. If I hadn't waited so long, I could have actually said it all instead of having to write it. I don't want to risk waiting any longer.

I was in free fall before I met you. Each time I thought I had hit rock bottom and couldn't possibly fall any further, things still managed to get even worse. At times, it felt like the ground was just caving in under me, pulling me under.

You know how it was for everyone when we came back from the war; most folks felt we should never have gone in the first place, to put it mildly, and for some reason, felt the need to tell the returning soldiers that. I'd just finished two tours that both ended with most of my squad getting killed, I'd almost died myself, and I wasn't sure our mission had had a point. The protesters at the airport did nothing to improve my mood.

I waited a while, flipping back and forth between being angry at the protesters and agreeing with them. I was the last one there from my plane, my family was late picking me up, and would you believe it felt like a low point in my life? It's not that it was a worse place to be than in the middle of the jungle, convinced I was about to die, but it came on top of it, it was part of it. It didn't help when I started to worry about my folks instead of just being annoyed they were so late. The thought crossed my mind that nobody was coming, that my parents and sister had decided not to bother to pick me up because they had gone anti war and anti soldier. I knew better, but it was easier to tell myself that than to start wondering what else could be keeping them.

After a long time, some brass came. It was Hawk, or Abernathy back then, but frankly, at the time he was just some officer I didn't know. He was very professional and compassionate, but that didn't make much difference considering the news he was bringing me: my family had been in a car crash and all three of them were dead. Like I was saying before, it felt like the ground just dropped under me. The world was spinning and I remember feeling like I was hurtling down and down and down, straight to hell. I've talked to you about all this before, you know how hard I took it.

I guess it kind of says it all that I ran off to Japan and joined a ninja clan. Crazy as it was, it did help: things were really looking up for a while. You know what happened next. It was like losing my family all over again: my master was dead and it looked like my friend, my brother, was the murderer. I don't even know if he's still alive and what's worse, I don't know whether I want him to be.

I'd had enough of losing everything, so I decided to give it all up on my own. I left. I figured if it was just me with nobody around, if I wasn't getting attached to anybody or anything, I couldn't be hurt like that again. It worked for a while, except I went and got a pet. A pet wolf, but still… it was enough for Stalker to use against me when he got it in his head to recruit me for GI Joe.

I turned him down flat at first, but I guess he's used to bossing me around because he didn't take no for an answer. He talked about duty, he talked about all the good I could do for my country... he talked a lot, and at one point, he said that if I was desperate enough for company to have a pet wolf, I couldn't be that happy to be alone. I don't think he knows what tipped the scales; he just knows that when he ran out of things to say and asked again if I'd come with them, I said yes. It's not so much because I agreed that I wanted to be around people again; it's just that he made me realize I was terrible at not caring.

It didn't feel like a good decision at first. Everything reminded me of something I had lost. The guys reminded me of the friends I saw die in the jungle, the training reminded me of training with Tommy's family, even if it was very different training, and there was this one girl in the unit with red hair who reminded me of Terri. I'm really glad I didn't have a shrink back then, I'm pretty sure he would have had a field day with me. There was nothing bad going on, and yet I still felt like I had been dragged back down, complete with the certainty that things were about to get even worse. It was a pattern by that point, you know?

And then, I got to know the red headed girl when we had our first hand to hand class and she was giving it. You knew right away I let you win, and you know it was because I didn't want to show you up. I don't think you realize it wasn't 100% selfless. Sure, it felt like I'd be an ass if I embarrassed the instructor, and I figured it had to be hard enough for you to be taken seriously, but I also didn't want you to make me wipe the floor with the rest of the guys instead of continuing to do it yourself: it was way too much fun to watch.

In what seems like no time at all, I was falling again, for you. It didn't feel like tumbling down a cliff or into a hole this time: it was the thrill of a parachute jump.

And then there was that mission. And everything else since. I don't even want to talk about it because it's just something that happened, and I want nothing more than to put it behind us.

Here's the story of my life as I see it: things kept crashing down on me, and then I fell in love with you. The end. Things aren't going to be perfect all the time; they might get downright bad. They did, so I guess there's no might about it, but what I mean is that they might get bad again. It doesn't change a thing: you're still my happy ending.

I say I fell in love with you, but that's not quite right: I'm still falling, deeper and deeper, and I'm pretty sure I'll never stop.

Snake Eyes signed and resisting the urge to re-read the letter, folded it and sealed it with a bit of scotch tape. He had to have a lot of faith in Scarlett to give her that letter: he didn't remember half of what he had said in it, but he was still pretty sure it was mushy enough to be prime blackmail material.

He was dining with her in less than an hour, in the mess hall; he'd give her the letter then.

Fin