Disclaimer: G.I. Joe and all associated characters and concepts are property of Hasbro Inc. and IDW comics. I'm just one of a large family of fans who likes telling family stories – no profit needed, no profit earned.

The full moon regarded the scene in the garden with an unblinking silver eye, distant and chill as the early spring air. It cast a silver sheen over the ornamental grasses and shrubs, the dwarfed trees, the stone wall just slightly taller than a man's head. The nearby buildings, Asian in architecture, seemed inked on the starry sky; warm golden rectangles of diffuse light, windows shielded by translucent shoji screens, glowed like floating lanterns. Unseen water gurgled somewhere close by, and from the other side of the wall, voices murmured and laughed in passing, then were gone.

The scene would have been one of peace, if had not been for the scent of blood, heavy on the night air.

Into this dream Scarlett stepped, walking carefully – she hadn't expected to find herself here, particularly not in human form, but she also knew that few things involving Snake Eyes would be what anyone expected. This was his dream, and her dream-self took the form he found most comfortable. Because her dreaming self was in wolfskin, however, her wolf-senses remained intact even when her form did not… and the metallic tang of blood filled her nostrils, mingled with the dispersing scent of animal rage, fear, and despair.

She found the dog first. It was a large Akita, copper and white, sprawled on the garden grass, its body still warm but very, very dead. Its muzzle was flecked with blood and its throat was torn wide, an angry red slash against white chest-fur. The ground beneath the dog was sticky with spilled blood soaking into the earth.

A whine, and Scarlett turned. In the shadow of the wall, barely visible, cowered a young black wolf, barely more than a pup – Lykoi, his blue eyes wide with fear. The smell of the dog's blood was strong on him, but even stronger was the roil of emotion – fear, guilt, shame, confusion. His ears were flat, his tail tucked, and he trembled in an agony of indecision: hide, or flee?

Snake Eyes…

Whether sensing or hearing her thought, the young wolf turned to her.

They'll kill me… His mental voice was lighter than his adult self, and it quavered with the fear of a child. She was the master's dog… when they find out, they'll… they'll…

The soft sound of wood sliding on wood, and the garden brightened slightly. A screen door slid open far enough to reveal a small, lithe silhouette.

"Kaminari?" A girl's voice, soft and filled with good humor. The young wolf cowered back, trying to vanish into the shadows. "Kaminari, where are you?" She stepped out into the garden, giggling. "Are you hiding from me, silly girl?"

Scarlett felt a wash of sick apprehension – whether it came from her own gut, knowing too well what was coming, or from Snake Eyes was irrelevant; she felt it as her own. She watched the girl move into the courtyard, her movements exaggerated as she played at sneaking up on her pet. Then she froze, her eyes riveted to the still figure in the grass, and a strangled cry choked from her throat.

"Kaminari!" the child wailed, flinging herself down beside the dog. Tears flowed freely down her face as she gingerly stroked the stiffening ears, the unresponsive cheek. "Oh, Kaminari…"

The sorrow in the girl's voice seemed to tug at the young wolf, and he stepped forward, seemingly against his own will. The girl could not hear him, but the movement caught her attention, and her face snapped up, her eyes locking with his. She gasped… then screamed.

His ears flattened, his lips pulled back in a terrified snarl – for a long moment the wolf-child crouched, the agony of indecision plain on his face. Shouts from within the building, the sounds of running feet – and suddenly his eyes shifted from blue to amber, and he leaped at the still-screaming girl. Her death was quick and bloody, but likely painless. Her body sagged across her dog, her blood staining the copper and white fur scarlet.

In a fluid motion, the wolf whirled and leaped, clearing the wall in one bound – and then Scarlett was alone in the garden. She had only a moment's glimpse of figures pouring from doors, some leaping through open windows, before turning and scaling the wall herself, following Snake Eyes deeper into the dream.

When her feet touched the ground, she was on American soil. Leaf litter, loam, the trunks of a deciduous forest before spring touched bare branches with green. North Dakota. A rustle, and she turned – and saw her own dead body sprawled in the leaves, eyes wide and startled in death, staring up at the leafless canopy and the low gray sky. Drag marks showed that it had been tugged from the open field where armed men patrolled – Lawhound and his team. Snake Eyes, the Snake Eyes she knew in human form, crouched naked beside her prone form, trembling hand drawing back from a throat torn wide and still bleeding. His human fingers were covered in her blood, and the bottom half of his ravaged face was smeared with it.

"This isn't the way it happened," she told him softly. "Not even close." His face snapped up to regard her, and his eyes were the amber eyes of a wolf. Slowly, gently, she dropped to a crouch, reaching out to him across her own still form, and lay a hand on his cheek, ignoring the stickiness of the blood. "And what you just showed me… before, in Japan. That wasn't the way it happened, either, was it? It's just how it feels to you."

He bared his teeth in a feral snarl, pulling back from her. She dropped her hand but continued, unfazed.

"It was your first time, wasn't it? Your first Change. And it scared the shit out of you, distorted what you remember."

He made a sound somewhere deep in his chest, something between a groan and a snarl, and was suddenly wolf again, glaring at her with his own blue human eyes.

What the hell do you know about it? You – you've always had your pack. You can't know what it's like!

"You're right." She sat back on her heels, regarded him evenly. "I don't know what it's like to grow up outside a pack. But I do know how bad my first Change was. Just because you're part of a pack doesn't mean the first time is easy… especially if you don't see it coming." She waited a moment. "I know you didn't kill that girl, Snake. Just like you didn't kill me… no matter how much you might have wanted to. Or still do, maybe." She grinned, tilting her head to the side. "My brothers used to say I have that effect on men. Just part of my Southern charm." He snorted, looked away. "You don't have to show me what really happened. That's personal… first times are. But if you want to tell me… I'll listen."

In an instant, they were back in the walled garden, under the full spring moon. She was in wolfskin now, and this time, Snake Eyes sat beside her, his black battle-gear on, his face obscured by the protective visor. Somehow, she wasn't surprised… even in a dream, he felt the need to protect himself from the memory. She leaned close to him, nudged his arm with her nose.

You're not alone, you know. We're in this together. He turned his face to her, regarding her silently, then gently caressed her cheek with one gloved hand.

I know, the gesture said, though he did not speak now.Thank you.

A strangled cry drew their gazes to a brighter corner of the garden – a door slid wide, allowing a gangly figure to stagger through. Blonde haired, blue-eyed, the boy looked nothing like the man Scarlett knew , but she had no doubt who he was. Ten years old, maybe twelve… that was the age when the Change came to most Lykoi children. The boy who would become Snake Eyes looked confused, ill, and terrified. His face turned to the moon above as one hand slid the door shut, and suddenly he doubled over, heaving and retching, vomiting on the garden grass. He rose, choking and gasping, eyes streaming tears, and stumbled away from the door. He reached a cherry tree, its blooms whitely luminous in the moonlight, grasped its trunk like a lifeline… then fell to all fours.

You need to disrobe before the Change. In a pack, when the first Change obliges and can be brought on during the First Moon ceremony, the shame of being naked in front of your entire family is excruciating – but it at least spares you the pain of Changing in human clothing.

Scarlett grimaced as she watched the boy's form writhe and heave, straining against his clothing, the weaker fabric giving way, but not all of it – not by far, She wanted to turn her face away from the scene before her… but more, from the memories it awoke in herself. She knew personally the pain of machine-stitched seams cutting into your shifting flesh, rending it, leaving it cut and bleeding as your body forced its way through the fabric, feeling the weaker weave ripping away as the hard, tight seams cut deeper and deeper until finally, fabric hit bone and burst apart – leaving only agony behind, a bone-deep wound that would not heal until wolfskin reverted to human form. When she could not watch more, she turned and pressed her face into Snake Eyes's shoulder, eyes closed, and waited for the sounds of pain to diminish as the wolf-form took ownership of the flesh.

Oh, Snake… I'm sorry, I'm so sorry… It was awful, I know.

When she turned her face once more to the garden, a young black wolf lay in the grass, panting, eyes glazed in pain. He was already bleeding from multiple wounds where the last of his clothing had held his human flesh in place, then torn through muscle and sinew. He was spent, entirely spent, and barely raised his head as a rumbling growl made the dog's presence known.

Kaminara stepped from the shadows, hackles raised, ears flat. Her eyes were dark and hard as she approached the strange form stiff-legged. She had not reacted to the boy's sudden arrival – she knew him, recognized him as clan. But this – this new creature on the grass was not clan, not one of her people. She did not waste energy barking an alarm. She knew what to do. This was an intruder, and she would deal with it as with any enemy. The strange beast would not survive long enough to harm her people as it had clearly harmed the now-vanished boy.

In an instant she had the wolf by the throat, shaking and shaking, her growls rising into snarls of fury. Beside Scarlett, Snake Eyes raised his hand to his throat, and she realized…

That's why you don't speak. It happened during that first Change. He didn't respond.

A second sound blended with the sound of the dog's fury – more a strangled roar than a growl as the wolf ripped its throat free of the dog's teeth, and suddenly, the young wolf was on his feet, resisting the dog's assault. His eyes flashed amber in the half-light, any trace of his humanity gone – faced with its own imminent destruction, the wolf had asserted its dominance, seizing control of body and mind, and now it fought with a single-minded intensity.

The fight was in most respects evenly matched. The dog, a warrior in her own right, fought with generations of her breed's protective nature on her side, fought with a mind and body honed and refined to be the perfect canine warrior. If her adversary had been a human, she would easily have overpowered him – fully grown men were known to fall under the frontal assault of a guardian Akita defending its home and family.

But this opponent was Lykoi, his strength fueled by a wild thing's drive to survive at all costs, his lupine intelligence augmented by the human mind behind it – for even though the wolf-mind was dominant, it could access the memory and skills of its human half. The wolf knew what the dog was, knew where to bite and where to hold, knew dimly of the boy's training in human hand-to-hand combat, knew of leverage and thrust that could give a smaller fighter the edge over a larger – and this wolf was the equal of the dog in sheer size and muscle.

A feint to the left, then a bounding leap – and the wolf had the dog by the throat, cutting off the windpipe in a savage clamp before the dog could bark one last warning. Using the dog's weight against her, the wolf whipped about, teeth set in the dog's throat-fur, and muscle and sinew tore loose in a spray of blood. The dog wheezed, then collapsed into a growing puddle of her own blood – she would die quickly. The wolf, bleeding from his own Change-born wounds and the dog's attack, dragged himself into the shadows and fell, gasping, in a heap of black fur.

The screen door the boy had so recently passed through opened, and a girl's form appeared. She called a name Scarlett did not recognize, stepped into the garden, then called for the dog. From here the scene was familiar – the stunned recognition of the fallen dog, the sobbing, the girl prostrate over her pet's body. But now another form, a grown man, appeared in the doorway. The girl half-turned, face a mask of tears, then fled into his arms. Her words were a gabble, but Scarlett recognized the dog's name and the word "uncle."

The man stroked the girl's hair, holding her for a moment, then ushered her inside. He slid the door shut behind her, turned to the garden – but his eyes rested on the dog only briefly. As though honing in on a sound, a scent, the man paced carefully across the grass – and knelt by the side of the wolf. The wolf, his eyes human-blue once more, scrambled to his feet, cowering, tried to flee – but the man spoke softly to him, words that even Scarlett's lupine ears could not detect.

The last thing she saw was the young wolf sagging to the ground, his eyes miserable, submitting to the man's touch as the master's hands began probing his wounds.

Scarlett shook her head, fragments of the dream clinging to her mind, and sat up. Beside her, Snake Eyes did not move – his body still pressed warmly against her own, his head resting on his paws as though asleep… but his eyes were open, gazing out across the open sage-tufted lands, focused on the far horizon, brightening with the first traces of false dawn.

She was only doing her job, he said. Kaminari, I mean. Her name – it meant 'Thunder Goddess.' Kimi told me it was because even as a puppy, she growled like thunder.

Kimi. That was the little girl? Scarlett laid her own head on her paws, turning her eyes to follow his gaze.

The Hard Master's niece. She was an orphan, like me… we were friends. Until that night.

It wasn't your fault. The harshness in her voice, the defensiveness, surprised her, and drew a reproachful glance from her companion. It wasn't! The dog – Kaminari – she was doing what she was meant to do.But she attacked you… you had to defend yourself!

Did I? His voice was softer now, and unexpectedly sad. Maybe. When the wolf took control… I was glad. But the wolf – he was so frightened, so full of the blood and the fight, that he would have attacked Kimi, too. He wanted to – take out the only witness, then run for the mountains, for the woods. I barely managed to hold him back… and even now, when I dream of it, I can taste the blood on my teeth…

They were silent for a long moment, and she felt him shift, ever so slightly, away from her. She sighed softly. It had been nice, while it lasted.

Is it a Lykoi thing? he asked, eyes still focused on the distance. That thing you did. Coming into my dream. Is it because your pack showed you how, or…

It's a Lykoi thing, she replied. Dreamwalking. You don't 'do' it. It just sort of… happens. It's like speaking with your mind – it's natural for us, when you're sleeping together, fur to fur, or… She paused, reconsidered her words, then continued. I'd have told you, but… well, the topic doesn't work its way into conversation very easily.

You've done it before?

All the time… with my family. It was part of the fun, camping out, sleeping in a puppy pile… my brother Sean liked to try to spook up our dreams, give us nightmares. My youngest brother Finn's dreams were fun… he had a great imagination as a kid. My folks, they'd join in, sometimes, to give us extra lessons that we'd need in the real world… Mom could shape the dreamwalk to whatever she wanted. I could never do that, not even with practice. Her voice took on a wistful note, and she pretended not to see him glance at her.

So that's how you knew my dreams weren't showing the memories right? His tone was so consciously neutral that she knew he was holding back his discomfort… trying to, anyway.

No, she replied. I knew because I know you, Snake. And because my grandfather used to read us kids Aesop's fables… he'd give us a quarter for each moral we could explain. He shot her a curious glance. 'The child is father to the man.' I knew you wouldn't hurt me, even in North Dakota, when you were so angry – so I knew you couldn't have hurt Kimi then, when you were first Changed, and so scared.

She could feel him turning this over, coming to terms with it. I'm sorry I didn't warn you … I should have tried, last night especially…

You were a bit busy trying to keep from bleeding to death, if I'm remembering right. He glanced at her, and now his voice seemed to be hiding a laugh. So. Do I need to worry about it happening again? You said, 'when you're sleeping together, fur to fur,OR…'

If she could have blushed, she would have… but the humor hiding in his tone was a welcome change, so she looked him full in the face, her jaw dropping into a wolf's grin.

That depends on whether you plan to be curling up with me again any time soon, she teased. Like I said-it just sort of… happens. Fur-to-fur… or skin-to-skin. The closer the contact, the stronger the connection. She gave that a moment to sink in, then shook her head in the wolf equivalent of a shrug, glancing away. At least, that's what Siobhan told me.

Uhmm. Right. I'll… ah… keep that in mind. He stood, too suddenly, and shook himself from nose to tail as she laughed silently at his discomfort. So… we'd better take a look at that shoulder, and start thinking of a cover story… He bent over her, nosing her shoulder. The bleeding had stopped, and the shoulder, though torn, looked much better in the faint light of approaching dawn. She turned her head, an action that no longer provoked a spasm of pain, and sniffed it.

No infection,she pronounced. I'll be sore for a few days… but it comes with the territory.

You're not worried someone will notice?He seemed astonished, staring at her. I've got some gauze and bandages back with my clothes… but it won't hide much if it starts bleeding again. And how do you plan on requisitioning enough to keep that bandaged and clean without a visit to the infirmary?

Now it was her turn to stare. What on earth are you talking about?

She blinked, shaking her head. You've never been wounded in wolfskin, have you? Don't answer that… stupid question for a ninja. Well, the short answer is… I don't need to hide anything. Once I Change, this will close up… and if there's no infection and no silver in the wound, the worst I'll have is a bad bruise. Broken bones, flesh wounds – it's all the same when you Change. It all heals up.

That's… handy.He seemed less surprised than speculative, as though assessing what advantage this could give him in combat. I suppose you knew that, growing up in a pack and all.

I kinda had to, Snake. I had four brothers – if things didn't heal up when I Changed, I'd have had a lot of explaining to do when people started asking about all those black eyes, bruises, bites, cuts, scrapes… but it wasn't something my folks taught us. We just sort of figured it out on our own.

So if things heal on their own when you Change…

Why didn't I Change last night? She bristled a bit at his tone. THAT was something my parents did tell us. You don't Change when you're hurt or sick. It's a natural thing for us to do – but you still need to have your head in place, and you still need to focus. If you try to Change when you're not healthy… well, it's not going to be pleasant.

Oh. His mental voice was subdued. I guess there's a lot I missed… being a lone wolf, so to speak. There was an awkward silence before he looked at her, catching and holding her gaze. In a quieter voice than she'd ever heard him use, he spoke again. Will you help me catch up?Learn to… to be more…

Learn to be part of a pack? She felt a warmth inside at his question, at his hesitancy. She wanted to nuzzle him, but held back. You'll pick it up in no time. She braced her paws, stretched, then rose and shook herself, grinned at him. We're pack now. A small pack… but a pack.

We're in this together. It was a statement, not a question.

You got it, big guy.She tilted her head, regarding him a moment longer. I'm going to touch you now. Try not to freak out, okay? Not waiting for his response, she moved close and rested her head on his neck for several heartbeats. Wolf hug, she explained. For last night. Thank you.

The expression on his face was unreadable as she stepped away, but he hadn't flinched or pulled back. Surprising her, he moved towards her then, and gently, hesitantly, returned the gesture.

You're welcome, he said. Then, matching his pace to hers, they started off for the arroyo… and the Pit.

-To Be Continued -