Author's Note: Hmmm. Apparently, Snake-Eyes' bacon preference made a bit of an impression. All I can say in Annie's defense is that she likes it still chewy, and good luck getting her to change her mind.

I'm sorry this latest update took so long—the Christmas holidays, especially when one is spending them at home with two large military brothers, tend to be a bit hectic. On the other hand, I managed to grill them for a lot of information on life in the Army and USMC, which was very handy.

Regarding the business of greenshirts and names: it's never really explained in the series how or when people get their code names. The system I envisioned here was that greenies, who might still wash out, don't get official registered code names until they officially join the Joes. Short Stack, who's on permanent assignment and is maintenance rather than combat, received one pretty quickly since she's assuming her duties immediately despite being a greenshirt. The ones who might still be washed out have to make do with the nicknames they're given by higher-ups. And, as my brothers rather graphically informed me, nicknames tend not to be complimentary. In the interests of keeping this at a reasonable rating, though, I've tried to tone that down.

Rating: T for language.

Disclaimer: G.I. Joe and all associated characters and concepts are property of Hasbro Inc, and I derive no profit from this. Please accept this in the spirit with which it is offered—as a work of respect and love, not an attempt to claim ownership or earn money from this intellectual property.

Edited to add: At the request of some of my reviewers, I've expanded the greenshirt hand-to-hand scene slightly to explain what happens when you put a quartermaster up against a ninja.

Chapter Four: Taking a Spill

Annie was still turning the morning's encounters over in her mind as she joined the rest of the staff for post-breakfast cleanup. Beach Head, redhead, Cinderella, Tommy, walking arsenal . . . much as she would have liked to continue convincing herself that everything was normal, doing so didn't seem to be an option any more. The weapons out of the armory had to be the final straw. Annie could either allow herself to believe that this was indeed a commando unit for insane people—or try to understand that this was a unit where the little rules simply didn't apply. The latter frightened Annie more than she was willing to admit. If the little rules didn't apply, then how was she supposed to order her schedule? How was she supposed to know what to do? But more importantly, why didn't they apply?

It had been Annie's experience that when people stopped caring about the small stuff, it was often because there was bigger stuff to worry about. And if some crazy masked man was walking around with a belt of knives, that stuff must be a hell of a lot bigger than Annie had anticipated.

She took a deep breath as she pulled the last of the steel trays off the steam tables. Fretting won't help, she told herself sternly for what felt like the fiftieth time that day. Work to do. You have beginning hand-to-hand in half an hour, and you have to check on the KP sergeant, he's in your group technically—and what the hell is that in the bottom of the tray, anyway?

Squinting, Annie reached in and pulled out a bullet. It gleamed brightly, despite the residual grease from thirty pounds of cooked sausage. She shook her head, somehow not surprised at all, and tucked it into the pocket of her BDUs.

The kitchen was bustling just as much now, although the tone of the work had changed. With the breakfast rush over, cooks and greenshirts were talking freely, chattering until the walls of the kitchen echoed. Annie tried to ignore the din as she carried the last of the trays over to the sink.

There, soaped almost to the shoulders and no longer wearing his helmet or muzzle, Sgt. Mutt looked much calmer, or less angry, anyway. He also turned out to have a pencil-thin mustache, which almost made Annie laugh until she caught the look in his eye. She turned the laugh into a cough instead. It was one of those things that shouldn't be funny until you thought about it—the fact that the mustache made him look as if his name was Uncle Frank, or maybe Uncle Steve, and he was the sort of uncle your parents never really wanted to explain about.

Pencil mustaches, preferences for crispy bacon, acting like an asshole and playing keepaway with the plate. These were all human things, and as a rule, not signs of insanity. (Although the jury was still out regarding the bacon.) Junkyard brushed by her legs, generously shedding dark fur onto her freshly laundered BDUs, and Annie was reminded again of the whole rules-not-applying business, and the train of thought that followed. She pushed that away and focused on the dishwashing, which was considerable.

When she next checked her watch, she realized she had only six minutes to get to her first hand-to-hand class. Dropping her dish cloth, she cursed and ran for the door, passing a quick word of explanation ("Gottagohandtohand!") to Murphy as she went out. Murphy didn't raise an eyebrow at that, nor did the rest of the kitchen staff.

(In fact, they started quietly placing bets. Quartermaster or not, Short Stack was a greenshirt, and watching greenshirt reactions to their first hand-to-hand session was a popular form of entertainment. Though he wasn't part of the kitchen staff, Mutt was graciously allowed to put fifty bucks on a classic stagger-and-collapse-with-added-swearing.)

The mess hall and kitchens were in the Pit proper, on the second level below the subterranean motor pool. The training area, however, was on one of the uppermost levels, and Annie knew she had better run like hell if she was planning to make it in time. She pelted down the corridor, narrowly dodging an ordinance man carrying a stack full of files, and made for the elevators: there was no possible way she could run all those stairs in time. In accordance with what Annie liked to think of as the Universal Law of Bad Shit Happening, the elevators were packed, and the seconds ticked off as the car rose agonizingly slowly.

At least she wasn't the only one worrying about being late. As she sprinted down the corridor towards the broad set of doors, she found herself inadvertantly falling in with about a dozen other greenshirts, most of whom were in identical states of panic. She recognized Spit-Shine from that morning, looking considerably less put-together than he had been before; his BDUs were rumpled, and there were large damp spots where he'd clearly been scrubbing the clayey mud of the greenshirt obstacle course out of them. Annie met his eyes for a moment, noting the beginnings of a shiner around one of them. Obstacle number seven: the swinging beam, Annie thought. Either that, or obstacle number one: the instructor.

The greenshirts, about twenty of them, streamed through the doors and onto a broad, brightly-lit training floor. It didn't look like any other hand-to-hand instruction area Annie had ever seen. During boot camp, she and the eighty-five other recruits in 4327 platoon had been herded outside onto a woodchip-strewn lot—just like a playground, she'd thought at the time—and been shouted through the basics of strikes, blocks, and falls by a large number of surprisingly short men who were often just waiting for someone to look at them funny so they could use the unlucky bastard to demonstrate on. This looked more like a jazzercise class, with one long wall covered in mirrored glass and most of the floor padded with crash mats. The greenshirts, many of whom already carried the marks from an early morning spent under Beach Head's tender care, were nervously lining up and standing to attention as a preemptive measure. If the hand-to-hand instructor was anything like Beach Head, then nobody wanted to give him any excuse to get angry.

But when the door opened again, a rustle went through the ranks. The first person through was a slender woman with long red hair tied back in a ponytail—the same woman, in fact, who'd gone through the mess line not an hour earlier. Following her were two men, built tall and lean. One was Mister Crispy Bacon himself, carrying significantly less weaponry but still not saying a word, and the other . . . the other was also wearing a mask. That didn't mean she didn't recognize him: his hands were familiar, and they'd recently been attached to a very elusive and increasingly annoying plate.

The bacon-eating walking weapon man turned. His eyes were still covered, but the visor moved as his gaze tracked over the line of greenshirts. It didn't pause on Annie, but she got the feeling that he remembered her. He stood like a man who remembered everybody, possibly so he could go back and assassinate them later.

"My name is Scarlett," the redhead said calmly. Annie heard a stifled cough from the ranks. It sounded, in fact, a lot like the same cough she'd used to cover her laugh at the Muttstache. "Until you graduate greenshirt status, however, you'll call me sergeant and sergeant only. These-" and she turned to the two masked men "-are Storm Shadow and Snake-Eyes. Snake-Eyes will be your primary instructor for most of this course, although Storm Shadow and I will alternate days assisting according to the schedule. That schedule has been posted, and I suggest you read it."

Snake-Eyes and Storm Shadow? Annie didn't turn her head, but she mentally ran down the ranks of the greenshirts. Among her fellow greenies were people named Bad Touch, Bluto, Popov, and Mothra, all of them victims of what Eighty-Six said was a pretty involved system involving giving highly successful Joes greenshirt-naming privileges. It was something she herself had only escaped by having a predetermined assignment instead of an open contract. When, she wondered, did people get the impressive names like Snake-Eyes and Storm Shadow? Were there box tops you had to collect?

"Snake-Eyes doesn't speak. He communicates in ASL." Scarlett's voice was brisk, as if she'd run through this speech a thousand times—and she probably had, considering how many full-fledged Joes there were around the base. "In class, either I or Storm Shadow will be on hand to translate for him. Most of the senior Joes on base known ASL as well. However, all infiltration and infantry personnel are advised to learn it.

"You will address Snake-Eyes as sensei and Storm Shadow as sir. Both of them are ninjas." She paused for a moment as, despite the group being at attention, a few whispers broke from the ranks. Her voice took on a dry tone as she continued, no doubt anticipating questions before they could be asked. "No, that is not an exaggeration or a misnomer. No, they don't turn invisible, fly, or transform into things. However, they can and will annihilate an opponent, and possibly teach you to do the same. But that requires respect on your part. If you're not willing to work hard, knuckle under, and stay quiet, then you might as well wash out right now. You know where the door is."

When nobody took the offer to wash out, Scarlett glanced up and down the line. "All right. First row, come with me. Second row, go with Storm Shadow. We'll be evaluating your one-on-one combat skills."

Annie had unwisely chosen the second row, hoping to stay out of sight. Well, so much for that bright idea. Scarlett and Storm Shadow neatly split the group in half, like sheepdogs rounding up a number of confused and close-shaven sheep, and the two halves moved to opposite sides of the training area. Snake-Eyes stood in the center, almost unmoving, but Annie could see his head turning as he watched first one group and then the other.

In addition to Spit-Shine, Annie was sharing a group with Blackout, Shark Bait, Sixty-Forty, Stooge, Mothra, Zipline, Gaijin, and Rabbi Lee. Storm Shadow's masked face twitched a little as he read off the names—especially that second-to-last one, for some reason—but if he was planning on laughing, he didn't seem about to do it right away.

"Shark Bait," he said, picking one apparently at random. "You're going to attack me. The rest of you, form a circle. We're going to do a bit of demonstrating."

He seemed to enjoy that last word a little too much.

Shark Bait, apparently seeing no other option, lunged for Storm Shadow. Judging by the tattoos on his exposed forearms and the unusual gait, he was a Navy man, probably no great shakes at hand-to-hand anyway. This was some comfort to the rest of the greenshirts when the air blurred, Shark Bait found himself clutching at something that wasn't there, two sharp thwacks accompanied his collapse as his knees abruptly gave out, and he collapsed to the mat with a yelp like a chihuahua that'd been stepped on. As Annie tried to focus, Storm Shadow . . . well, there wasn't another word for it . . . reappeared. His grin was obvious even through the mask, the bastard.

"Nice job," he said. There should be some kind of rule against the amount of sarcasm he crammed into those two words. "Stay there for a moment, 'Bait, I want everyone to see this. See how he landed? Those spread arms are characteristic of someone unprepared for a sharp forward collapse. He was overconfident and attacked without considering the possibility of a dodge. Notice his chin, too: he was lucky he fell to his knees first, or his jaw would've hit the mat hard enough for him to break a tooth." He turned back to the group and crossed his arms. "So, what lesson can we take away from this? Mothra?"

The man who answered to Mothra was tall and skinny, but there was no visible reason for his nickname. Probably a victim of some senior Joe with a random sense of humor.

"Be prepared, sir!" he answered promptly and crisply. A couple of heads turned. Annie could already see people mentally renaming him Boy Scout.

"Wrong. The lesson here is 'don't be stupid.' Being prepared is being not stupid, but stupidity covers a lot of things, and not doing any of them is the first rule of the dojo. If he hadn't started off by doing something idiotic, then I might've given him a chance to let him touch me." Storm Shadow turned back to the prone Shark Bait. "You can get up now, 'Bait. And don't be stupid in future. Understand?"

"Yessir," Shark Bait muttered, clambering painfully to his feet. Storm Shadow turned back to the group with another grin showing clear through the mask, damn him.

"All right . . . Mothra, since you're so keen, it's your turn next. Attack me."

* * *

Mothra, Zipline, and Sixty-Forty all went, with varying degrees of success. Mothra's keenness seemingly applied to his speed as well; Storm Shadow seemed to approve of this, because he gave Mothra three clear openings, two of which the lanky greenshirt spotted and went for. (Not that he actually managed to land anything.) He wound up on the mat, too, but in a slightly less humiliating position than Shark Bait, and Storm Shadow confined his remarks to a few mild insults before letting him up again.

Zipline was apparently one of the few who'd come into the Joes with a nickname already attached. Annie had heard him mentioned in the kitchen as an expert in guerrilla warfare over mountain terrain, and from his cocky stance and casual amble as he strolled across the mats toward Storm Shadow, he seemed to think he'd have relatively little trouble. After the ninja (Annie had to get used to thinking that word) knocked him off his feet twice in three seconds, Zipline changed his tactics, staying low to the ground and trying to foul Storm Shadow's footing. It didn't work, and the class winced in sympathy when a tabi-clad foot knocked the wind out of him.

Then came Sixty-Forty, and it turned out he had been well-named. He was a gambler, trying pretty much anything in hope of a payoff—in this case, attempting to land a crotch kick on a ninja. The thud his body made on the mat was so loud that, across the training area, the other group stopped what they were doing to look. Snake-Eyes, who had been watching Scarlett's group, shook his head and walked over to stand next to Storm Shadow instead. As Stooge was waved out of the line by Storm Shadow, the mute ninja signed something to the other. Storm Shadow responded with an illustrative gesture explaining just what Sixty-Forty had tried to do.

To the surprise of everyone, the silent, black-masked, highly intimidating commando slapped one hand against his forehead, clearly unable to believe that anyone could do anything so stupid. It was almost funny in a way, but nobody was laughing. He turned to the group and signed.

"Snake-Eyes," Storm Shadow translated, "says that if anybody is going to try to 'nut a ninja'—thank you for that turn of phrase, brother, I won't be able to get that out of my head all day—they should damn well be prepared to do it correctly. Was that a front kick or a muscle spasm?" He nudged Sixty-Forty with his foot. The greenshirt made a whimpering noise. "Get up. You're going to try that again."

It took a few moments for Sixty-Forty to clamber back to his feet; his face was greenish-gray, and he seemed not to quite believe what he was hearing. It was with extreme reluctance that he resumed his place on the training mat, facing Storm Shadow—who, incidentally, was no longer smiling under the mask. The ninja stood poised, totally relaxed, waiting for Sixty-Forty to make his move. Sixty-Forty didn't.

After about thirty seconds of staring each other down, Storm Shadow sighed. "I'm not going to twist your head off, you idiot. We're professional about things here. Nobody gets killed on there you go, greenie!"

Annie and the rest of the group watched in astonishment as Sixty-Forty, clearly hoping for the element of surprise, jumped forward and shot his foot towards the ninja's . . . ancestral stronghold. It was another fairly lame attempt at a front kick, with the gambling man leading with his knee. Storm Shadow caught the leg with contemptuous ease: his fingers flashed, pressing here and here, and suddenly Sixty was buckling as the nerve clusters in his leg sent a frantic SOS to his brain before shutting down. He tried to pitch backwards, but Storm Shadow still had a firm grasp on the offending leg, and one deft twist by the ninja left Sixty-Forty sprawled on the mat in an incredibly awkward position.

"You see?" Storm Shadow said. "In hand-to-hand, untrained fighters should never go directly for the obvious target. It's usually a trap. And as you can see, Snake-Eyes is now giving me a look, possibly annoyed by the fact that Sixty-Forty will not be able to walk for at least an hour. I, on the other hand, am of the opinion that pain is educational."

Watching the scene transpire, Annie recalled a saying that she had heard dozens of times since joining the Army. "The three most dangerous things you can hear in the military: a private saying 'I learned this in boot camp,' a second lieutenant saying 'based on my experience, and a warrant officer saying 'Hey, watch this.'" To that Annie now added a rider: "A ninja saying 'Hi.'"

Unfortunately, Annie didn't have long to reflect on that. Storm Shadow's eye was running over the line, and it was in a voice of insufferable confidence—that same voice that he had used when playing keepaway with the plate—that he called out "Short Stack!"

If he tried to humiliate her again, Annie vowed, she was putting bromide in his food.

"All right," the ninja said as Annie shuffled towards him. "Attack me."

Annie raised her fists and tried to conjure up everything she had learned in basic training. It wasn't that quartermasters weren't expected to fight—they deployed in combat zones, after all—but hand-to-hand wasn't usually a part of it. She had a vague memory of Master Sgt. "Munchkin from Hell" Ramirez shouting at her, or rather, up at her: "Do not get fancy! Do you hear me? This isn't a fucking wrestling match! You are not a fucking commando! You are not going to win any points for looking pretty while you die! Now drop the attitude and lay a fucking punch on me or so help me God you are-"

You are what? She couldn't remember. Storm Shadow was standing right there, staring at her through the gap in his white mask, an unreadable expression on his face. Annie clenched her fists and shifted into the foursquare fighting stance—left arm raised, right cocked in front of the face to protect it, knees bent. That, at least, she remembered.

There was a snicker from behind her, and Annie tried to clamp down hard on her nerves. Another one broke out, a sound that could only be described as a titter. Glancing back at Storm Shadow, Annie realized that she could read the ninja's expression a bit more clearly—and both his eyebrows were raised so high that they looked like they were making a break for his hairline.

"Is there a reason," Storm Shadow said slowly, "that you're humming 'Old MacDonald'?"

Oh, hell.

Annie's face turned bright red as she caught herself right in the middle of the E-I-E-I-goddamn-O. There was a reason why, despite being such a good shot, she'd never gone to sniper school. And that was that, when unduly terrified, she had a bad tendency to hum.

And it had to be Old MacDonald, didn't it?

Figuring her dignity was beyond repair, Annie gave up and launched herself at Storm Shadow. Something crashed into her stomach, the world gave a lurch and inverted, and Annie was flung up and over before landing hard on the mat, stars erupting in front of her eyes. Storm Shadow was kneeling on her back, both her arms hitched together and pulled up so high that she couldn't budge them an inch. Annie made a half-hearted wheeze and flopped on the mat, wondering vaguely if she could tap out with the toe of her boot.

"A distracted and humiliated enemy is an easy enemy," Storm Shadow narrated, absentmindedly giving her arm another yank. "All's fair in love and war, but contrary to popular belief, war is far more painful. Look for tells. An eyetwitch, an uneven stance, a nervous habit of humming nursery rhymes—and use that. Mock them shamelessly. Do anything to put them off-guard and keep them there. For example, I could point out right now that if I remember my kindergarten teacher correctly, old MacDonald did not in fact have a greenshirt on his farm. If he did, however, it would probably make a noise like the squawk you heard when she landed." Annie couldn't see his face, because her own was currently pressed into the mat, but the aura of smirkiness was absolutely impossible to miss.

At least, she thought glumly, it wasn't 'Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.'

* * *

It was later. More pain had happened.

The greenshirt hand-to-hand class disbanded quietly. There was no chatter, and certainly not much in the way of camaraderie. The sweat-streaked figures shuffled off the training floor in ones and twos, some nursing fresh bruises, all bone-tired, a couple mildly traumatized. Aside from Storm Shadow's small but worrying sadistic streak, the instructors didn't seem to hate or deliberately torment the greenshirts: on the contrary, they seemed to believe in what they were doing, because they expected everyone to be in top condition. And if they weren't in top condition, then those goddamn back-flipping silent-sneaking come-up-right-behind-you-and-scare-the-daylights-out-of-you-while-you-were-just-trying-to-practice-your-strikes ninja would make sure that they were. Or else.

Annie had not been transferred for her combat skills.

She was greeted with a sea of curious faces when she stumbled back into the kitchen. Whiskey Down paused, meat cleaver in hand, as Annie went straight to the door of the walk-in freezer and rested her head against the cold metal, breathing heavily.

"Well?" Chopper said finally. "Do you believe in ninjas yet?"

She considered that for a moment. The freezer door was so wonderfully cool, and her arms felt like they were about to fall off; answering a question was really not at the top of her priorities right then.

"I believe," she said finally, "that I should've joined the Air Force."

Annie's legs finally gave out, and she muttered an epithet as she pitched forward onto the floor. In the door of the kitchen, Mutt ceremoniously accepted his winnings.