Author's Note: Chapter five, as promised. Once again, I'm sorry I'm taking so long on this; real life keeps intefering with my writing. I broke my ankle a few weeks ago, and in between that and hashing out the details of my publishing contract (I never knew the process was so bloody complicated!), it's been harder to focus on fanfiction. However, as I've said before, I am going to be continuing this. Slowly but surely.

This is a bit of a two-parter update—in addition to this new chapter, I've also expanded a part of the last chapter which dealt with Annie's first hand-to-hand session. Also, if you're bored, you can check my author profile for links to a few pictures I've drawn based on my (and others') fanfiction.

Acknowledgments: The idea of the ninjas escaping from the infirmary was obviously inspired by CrystalofEllinon and her hilarious stories about just that topic. Medical confinement is always a bitch (she said, glaring at her ankle cast), and it makes sense for the medical personnel to take increasingly desperate measures to keep their patients actually in bed.

Information on the treatment of and attitudes towards quartermasters in the Army, US Marines, and Air Force was provided by my older brothers bulletsponge and shrapnil77, and my fellow member of the Why God Why? board, Penguin. Penguin also graciously provided me with some of the insults that the Air Force likes to aim at the other branches. Thanks, guys.

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.

Chapter Five: Customer Feedback

In five years of quartermastering, Annie Gorshin had become acquainted with one undeniable fact: support personnel get treated like crap.

There always was, of course, a certain amount of healthy competition between the various branches of the military. The Navy tended to refer to the USMC as "jarheads" or "Uncle Sam's Mentally Challenged," while the Marines stuck to "squids" and various unprintable, unpolitically-correct phrases. Barracks wits all across the world liked to point out that, spelled backwards, "US Army" could stand for "Yes, my retarded ass signed up." Nobody liked the so-called Chair Force, because as the saying went, "their PT is from the barracks to the chow hall." The Air Force would respond in kind: "Marine: Muscles Are Required, Intelligence Not Essential." Nobody liked anybody else. If you believed barracks rumor, everyone in the Army was just too dumb to join the Marines, and the Coast Guard had a minimum height requirement so they could walk home in case their ships sank. The tradition of inter-branch rivalry was cheerfully abusive, and although it could sometimes get out of hand, they would all work together when they had to.

For the most part, though, the branches were united only in their disdain for their support personnel. This boiled down to one simple reason: QMs and desk jockeys didn't get shot at.

Before signing up, Annie had done her research, pawing through volumes of military memoirs and books on the famous battles in U.S. history. She remembered Army cartoonist Bill Mauldin talking with contempt about "garritroopers," men on the World War II Italian front who were "too far forward to wear ties and too far back to get shot." Support personnel were the rear echelon, the people who pushed papers instead of battle lines. Quartermasters were there to count socks and office supplies. Cooks were there to produce unmentionable messes that passed for food. They weren't real soldiers.

It was actually a relief, in the couple of days following her first tumultuous hand-to-hand session, to find that in that respect the Joes were still a bit like the regular military. Granted, there was none of the open contempt that she had sometimes encountered. But between being a greenshirt, a QM, a cook, and on permanent assignment to the Pit, Annie was not exactly a figure of consequence. And that, too, was a relief. She would accept that there were damn . . . ninjas . . . on the base, and maybe that General Hawk wasn't quite as cracked as she'd previously thought, but the whole place was still crazier than she liked and the ability to fade into the background was very useful.

Oh, there were still problems. Take Clutch, for example.

Clutch was a good guy, a motor-pool jockey of the first order and a demon driver. He also seemed to have a regular sideline in pranking greenshirts, especially the kind that had funny names. On the afternoon following that first, painful hand-to-hand session, Annie was passing the motor pool when Clutch called to her.

"Hey, greenie!" he called out. There were no other greenshirts around, and Annie stopped, turning to face him.

"Yes, sergeant?"

"Everybody's busy, and we need some equipment forms. Go down to Ordinance and ask them for a stack of 3542s, okay?"

Annie nodded, not letting her expression show anything. She walked to the staircase, closed the door behind her, waited a moment, and then pressed her ear against the door. The motor pool guys were laughing their asses off: from the sound of it, Clutch was having trouble breathing. Hidden behind the door, Annie grinned.

Maybe quartermasters weren't in the line of fire, but they knew the operation of the base inside and out. Getting stacked meant having horrible and humiliating things happen to you, like being ziptied and hung from the rafters on your birthday. 3542 wasn't a form number, but the MOS of the second-most-senior ordinance man, whom Annie had met her first day on base and whose callsign was Bad Dog for a reason. Making a greenie go to Ordinance and ask for a stack of 3542s would be funny, but only for the people that weren't doing the asking.

"Nice try, sergeant," she muttered to herself. Then she went down to the ordinance shop to tell Bad Dog that Clutch had tried to drag him into a stupid prank.

She hoped Clutch could drive really, really fast.

In response to the general they're-there-but-they-don't-really-count attitude of the grunts, the support personnel had formed their own network of allies within the Pit. The plumbing guys talked to Electrical, who talked to Custodial, and Custodial talked to everyone. Nobody ever outright said as such, but Annie soon learned that the kitchen was the hub of the information hotline: there was always a reason for a maintenance man to be there, and of course, a full Joe or two might accidentally drop useful information while on KP. Support personnel were everywhere, they saw everything, and they talked to each other. It compensated for some of the nastier parts of the support-versus-combat rivalry.

Unfortunately, said rivalry proved to be one of the few normal things around the place. On Annie's second day in the kitchen, she was part of a small group cleaning out the last of the dinner trays (and finding another bullet, this time swilling around in the gravy from that evening's country-fried steak; what was wrong with these people?) when, after making a trip to the storage closet for more soap, she turned around to find Snake-Eyes right behind her.

"Christ!" she said involuntarily, dropping the gallon jug of dish soap. The air blurred, and Snake-Eyes caught it before it hit the ground.

She couldn't speak sign, but his slow and careful gestures indicated that she shouldn't worry; he was just passing through. Annie watched, not quite certain what was going on, as the commando boosted himself up onto one of the long counters and began to fish around on top of a cupboard.

" . . . can I help you, uh, sir?" she said finally. Sir? Sergeant? Sensei? They weren't in the dojo, and Whiskey Down had said the ninja's rank was classified. If she'd got the mode of address wrong, though, it didn't seem to bother Snake-Eyes: he waved her off and leapt down from the counter a second later, carrying a small package wrapped in yellow-white rice paper.

The only other cook in the kitchen was S.O.S., who as the second most junior QM now shared washing-up duty with Short Stack. He was of a notably nervous disposition, but didn't bat an eye when he closed the huge dishwasher and turned to see Snake-Eyes signing vigorously at a mystified Annie. The ninja wanted something—he was repeating a sign over and over, but this one was a little more obscure than the simple shrug of "don't mind me." The hand gesture looked a bit like a one-eared elephant, though Annie guessed that that wasn't what he was after.

Probably.

"Teapot, sir?" S.O.S. called out. "Got it right here." He turned back to the counter and retrieved a small item wrapped in cloth. Snake-Eyes cocked his head inquisitively, and S.O.S. shook his head. "Hand-washed, sir. None of us would dream of putting this through the dishwasher. Not with that glaze on it."

The ninja accepted the teapot with a nod of thanks and vanished again, as silently as he had appeared.

"What-" Annie began.

"It's a ninja thing," S.O.S. said, mopping his damp hands on a dish towel.. "They've got kitchenettes and break rooms on the lower levels, but after Leatherneck went rooting through the cupboards for Tom Collins mix and accidentally smashed an antique tea cup, all the ninjas keep their pots and things down here. Makes everyone happier."

"And the thing on top of the cupboards?"

"Tea."

"Why'd he put it up there?"

"Someone might steal it."

"Who would steal tea?"

"Storm Shadow, Scarlett . . . pretty much anybody. It's a competition thing."

"Why?"

S.O.S. gave her a look of exasperation. If it weren't for the forty-year difference, it would've been an identical copy of Whiskey Down's.

"Ninja," he said.

Annie was beginning to loathe that word.

There were always certain words and phrases which carried particular intimations in the regular military. "Sir," for example, only applied to officers—that is, anybody on the level of warrant officer or higher. If you were an E3, like Annie, the phrase to mind was "Hey you," because that was pretty much all anyone would call you. But in the Pit, "ninja" seemed to be a Get Out of Jail Free card for perpetrating weird shit, because . . . well, because you were a ninja.

"Medical leave" was another one. Joes felt about medical leave the way vampires felt about artificial tanning: sure, it wouldn't kill them, but what was the point? Unless the Joe in question was actively oozing blood and/or had been ordered to stay put by a significant senior officer, medical leave just wasn't in the cards.

And that was another interesting aspect of Pit life—one that Annie was introduced to on the same day after she and S.O.S. had the abrupt encounter with Snake-Eyes in the kitchen. Namely, the fact that while medical personnel were much higher up than quartermasters in rank both and the estimation of the troops, they were often got exactly the same amount of serious attention paid to them.

Annie had seen this firsthand, too. When she'd come on duty for the dinner shift, she'd been ordered by Murphy to leave off grilling the bratwurst: instead, as the most junior cook, she was now being handed "bucket duty." She would get to see the infirmary up close.

Bucket duty was the preparation of special meals for the heavily incapacitated Joes who were staying in the infirmary, and it was a junk assignment. Every time a Joe was sent into the infirmary, the chief medical officer (whatever his name was; the forms were just signed "Doc") would send instructions to the kitchen regarding what they could and couldn't eat, usually as a result of whatever cocktail of medications they were on. The resulting meals had to be very carefully prepared, and were often ludicrously bland despite the cooks' best efforts. This resulted in said cooks getting shit from patients who sure as hell didn't want to be eating thin soup when they were feeling like they'd been run over by a truck, and often had been.

And it was called bucket duty for a reason. Patients feeling the aftereffects of anesthesia might not be able to keep a meal down, and it tended to—as Chopper put it—"make you think twice about recycling, if you know what I mean."

Whenever Roadblock was in the kitchen, he took over bucket duty with an aplomb that made the rest of the cooks forget that it was a lousy job. But that was Roadblock for you: he was the only person who could make bucket chow taste good. Perhaps there was some ancient art of Roadblock-Fu that taught you how to season a dish without actually using any spices. Annie, however, would have to make bland food from the standard recipe and take the bitching from the infirmary cases.

Murphy handed her the list. There were three Joes currently on bed rest in the infirmary: Dusty, Snow Job, and Spirit. Two were on the kind of heavy painkillers that made them good for pretty much nothing; they'd reached the point where they were off IV and could take semisolid food again, but it was possible that they would be demonstrating why bucket duty had the name it did. The third was apparently under observation for a concussion, and could be given the same thing everyone else was getting. With that in mind, Annie got to work.

Soup, mashed potatoes, orange juice. Vanilla pudding for afterwards. Bland, wholesome, inoffensive, and not too hard to throw up. Annie filled the containers, put lids on everything to prevent spilling, and co-opted a wheeled cart to get everything down to the Infirmary. She went through the motions on automatic pilot: after only a few days in the kitchen, she'd begun to get used to the routine, and didn't expect any surprises. Nobody even looked at her twice as she trundled the cart down the hall towards the elevators.

At first glance, the infirmary was just like every other infirmary she'd ever seen, albeit bigger than usual. It felt both soothing and professional: this was a place where injured men and women came to get better, doubtless attended by the most expert personnel. The walls were painted a soft yellow, and the privacy screens set up between each bed were covered in dappled blue fabric that was probably very soothing to someone with a sick headache. To her left was the head doctor's office, and further down were the double doors that led to intensive care and the OR. Boilerplate infirmary. It wasn't until she looked carefully that she realized there was something slightly . . . off . . . about the whole thing. She didn't know what, but it nagged at her.

"Dinner?" a soft voice said. Annie jumped a little, making the cart rattle, but the man now emerging from the side office didn't seem to warrant the alarm. He was of medium height and slender, with thick-rimmed glasses, a slightly unruly thatch of hair, and a sergeant's stripes on his sleeve. There was a faint tan line around his eyes that didn't quite match the shape of the glasses—he probably wore goggles when he was on a mission. Field medic, Annie thought.

"Um, yes, sergeant," she said articulately, and fumbled for the paper she had been given. "I've got the normal meal for, uh, Dusty, and painkiller rations for Snow Job and Spirit."

"They're down at the end of the ward," the field medic said, inclining his head towards a cluster of privacy screens by the back wall. Annie nodded to him and glanced around again as she lifted one of the trays off the cart, wondering what it was that was bothering her so much. Yellow walls? Nah. There wasn't anything unusual about that. The machines weren't making any noise.

"It's the ceiling," the medic said amusedly. Annie jumped again and almost dropped the tray, then gave him a quizzical look. "You've got that look," he clarified. "Every time a greenshirt comes in here for the first time, they can never quite understand what's different about this place. Look up at the ceiling."

Annie did so. It took one look, and then another, before she realized what the problem was. What she'd taken for a delicate pattern of interlocking squares was actually a metal grid, painted white and bolted into place over ceiling tiles of the same color. She shot a curious glance at the field medic, who laughed softly.

"Ninja," he said.

For a moment, Annie thought she was hearing echoes.

"They were getting out," he clarified. "No Joe likes bedrest, but ninjas are impossible. They were actually lifting up the ceiling tiles and escaping into the vents. Now the only way they can get out is to smuggle a blowtorch in with their gear, and I'm pretty sure even Snake-Eyes can't do that." He grinned a little, totally at ease with the fact that he was yet another person in this insane base who was cheerfully reordering his life around a group of lunatic masked commandos. Annie had stopped rolling her eyes at the word "ninja," but it would take more than a couple of days for her to get used to flagrant flouting of every military regulation in the book. She wondered, for the thousandth time, just how effective G.I. Joe had to be for this much weirdness to be tolerated.

Then, against all odds, she caught herself smiling. A laugh bubbled up inside her, the first since she'd been transferred to this loony bin, and she let it out. Annie's laugh wasn't exactly dignified—a hoarse cackle with a snort at the end—but it felt good to laugh about something. The field medic shook his head a little as she put the tray down on the cart and, quite frankly, giggled.

"I'm sorry, sergeant," she said, catching her breath and tried to maintain a hold on her professionalism. Yeah, good luck with that, Annie. "I'll carry on, sergeant."

How exactly did you explain to a full Joe what a relief it was to learn that there were other people who got just as little deference as the quartermasters did? Desperate enough to keep their patients in bed that they actually bolted a grate to the ceiling . . . oh God, she was going to start laughing again. She ducked her head over the cart and gave it a push, trying not to make eye contact with the field medic in case her sense of humor got her written up.

She had regained her composure by the time she reached the end of the ward. The three beds at the end had had the screens between them removed, probably so the men in them could talk freely; instead, the screens had been moved to surround all three of them, blocking the lines of sight and creating what looked to Annie like a defensible position.

Two of the men were bantering freely, calling insults and bad jokes between the beds at each other and occasionally punctuating a remark with a raised middle finger. The fact that they were both on the ends, and that the man between them appeared to be meditating, bothered them not a whit. When Annie moved a screen and peered into their enclosure, though, they stopped immediately and looked up. The meditating man, an Indian by his color, opened one eye.

"Chow," Annie said briefly and began to shift a few more of the screens.

"Bucket chow," clarified the most-battered of the three, a red-bearded giant with an IV in his arm and a plaster leg splint that went clear up to the thigh. "Now I wish that Viper had finished the job."

A piece of wadded paper bounced off his head, courtesy of the blonde man on the other side of the Indian. "What're you complaining about? I've been lost out in the desert for days—no food, no water but what you can gather from the plants and no navigating except by the stars. You ought to be grateful for what you're getting."

That would be Dusty, then—the desert trooper. And given a choice between the remaining two names, she would hazard a guess that the red-bearded man was Snow Job. He sure didn't look like a Spirit.

"'Lost' in the desert?" Snow Job said quickly, grinning.

"Well, lost by your standards," Dusty responded. "Navigating the desert is more art than science. Especially since when I'm at work, I can't just pick water up off the ground—not like some second-rate troopers I could mention."

Snow Job scoffed as Annie put down the last of the screens and began to unload the cart. "You freeze your balls off at sixty Fahrenheit, and you're talking to me about second-rate? No, scratch that, you deliberately pissed off Beach Head to pulled out of winter ground-combat training, and . . . never mind. It's not worth arguing about." He shook his head sadly. "Some guys just don't have what it takes."

"Spirit, tell this guy to lay off," Dusty said. "I think he's jealous." Spirit proceeded to ignore both of them.

Snow Job responded with a creative gesture that Annie had never seen before but was definitely worth remembering. (And she'd thought she was putting off her education by joining the Army . . . ) She finished loading the first of the trays and moved around to the far side of Snow Job's bed, depositing the food on the telescoping metal table that bed-bound patients used to eat off of. The red-bearded man grimaced as she pushed the little table up against the side of his bed, and for a moment, his face was greenish-white under the beard. Annie wondered if she should jump back out of the splatter zone—but no, he wasn't going to yurk up. This time, anyway.

Spirit seemed totally unconcerned with the fact that he, too, was getting the blandest possible foods. Dusty, on the other hand, practically smirked when Annie put down the tray with his dinner, and seemed to take a perverse pleasure in covering his food with as much salt and pepper as humanly possible. Snow Job grimaced again and stared at his vanilla pudding mournfully.

"Anything else I can get you?" Annie said. It was an automatic question, honed by years of waitressing, but two of the injured troopers seemed to take it as a suggestion.

"Some real food."

"Another pillow."

"And I do mean real food. Not vaguely flavored food substitute. I've eaten MREs that looked better than this."

"Oh, and Lifeline. He's the one who put me in the bed by the Eskimo."

Spirit cracked one eye open. "A gun with two bullets and a transfer to North Korea."

"I'll . . . I'll get right on that," Annie began. She shifted the cart and hastily began shoving the privacy screens back into place. Snow Job and Dusty barely seemed to notice that she was leaving; they were back to insulting each other, this time through mouthfuls of food. To her surprise, Spirit flashed her a quick, wry grin as she pulled the screens closed. And then the tiny asylum was cordoned off again, and Annie was pushing the cart back down the long ward.

The field medic nodded to her as she left. For the first time, Annie noticed something else—his sleeves were rolled up, and there were bruises on his forearms. The exact same kind of bruises she'd had after being pounded into the mat by Storm Shadow for what felt like the length of an opera.

It was with a considerably lighter heart that she pushed the cart back to the kitchen. Even if you're at the bottom of the scale of deference, it's nice to know that there are people not too far above you.