Author's Note: A little moment with two people stuck in a kitchen.
The idea of the item abandoned in the walk-in fridge was the result of mad Twitter humor between Annie, Karama9, Dragogirl13, CrystalofEllinon, and wolfyhound. Blame them. And feel free to draw your own conclusions as to what it was doing there.
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 10: Fun-Sized
The day . . . proceeded. That was about all Annie could say for it. The sun continued its inexorable march across the sky, the shifts changed, Pit security wasn't breached, and Annie continued to draw breath.
Though after her two o'clock hand-to-hand session, it was a near thing.
At least Pitfall conditions meant that meals were easier to manage. After the relatively normal breakfast, all nonessential foods were packed away for transit; only the perishables that they absolutely couldn't transport were left out, to be used up as best the cooks could manage. Annie spent most of the afternoon dragging her way through the process of boxing up the kitchen utensils, at the same time helping to supervise the small brigade of greenshirts who had been tasked with packing the Pit's three hundred sets of cutlery and dishes. The Joes would be eating off paper plates that evening.
Lunch was easy: sandwiches, and lots of them. Dinner was tougher. A lot of the leftovers that they had available were the tail-ends of perishables—some vegetables, some meat, a few seasonings. After a bit of thought, Whiskey Down authorized the unpacking of several ten-pound bags of rice, and the quartermasters began to assemble the odds and ends into something resembling chop suey. This didn't go over very well—Tunnel Rat was overheard to remark that "shap sui" could be translated as "garbage bits" from Cantonese, but he'd never considered it applicable until now—but it kept body and soul together, as Annie's mother liked to say. And there was enough for everyone, which by the third-grade level that Annie's brain was operating on, made it a success.
By twenty-hundred hours, there were only a few people left in the kitchen. Annie was checking the equipment manifestos and checking off that all the portable items had been packed up; there would be a complete set of kitchen gear waiting in the new base, but somebody had to go over everything and wouldn't you know it, that fell to the most junior quartermaster. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see a few figures in the usual green and tan cammies—mostly greenies milling around, cleaning and sweeping.
"You need to loosen up," someone said calmly.
Right.
Behind.
Her.
Annie squawked and whirled, instinctively swinging the clipboard as if she were swatting the world's largest fly. Or in this case the world's largest Dusty, who jumped almost as high as she did and barely ducked the ballistic office supply.
As she realized that it was not, in fact, a ninja, Annie let out a breath and retrieved the dropped clipboard. "Christ almighty," she said, rubbing a hand over her face, "Sergeant, please don't do that. Ever."
"I thought you'd heard me." Dusty shrugged one shoulder, as ambivalent as ever. Nearly being brained by a list of kitchen equipment didn't seem to faze him. "You all right?"
"I'll live, I think. What are you doing here?"
The desert trooper jerked a thumb at the industrial-sized walk-in fridge, the only piece of equipment not yet decommissioned. Both the door to the fridge and his t-shirt were spotted with brownish grease, and he was carrying a wrench in one hand. "Removing the freon canisters. Nobody knows how long this place is going to be shut down, and those things are considered a biohazard threat."
"So you're here in your unofficial capacity. Okay." Annie's hands were still twitching a little, both with exhaustion and as the aftermath of an extremely stressful day. What a way to tell her to calm down—sneak up behind her, just like the spectre of pointy disobedient mind-fucking death that she'd had to deal with before-
Then, incongruously, a thought struck her, and she began to smile. "Wait a minute," she said. "You're here . . . as a refrigerator repairman. And you, wearing a tight t-shirt and carrying a stereotypically manly piece of equipment, decide to sneak up behind me and tell me I need to loosen up?"
She leaned back against the counter, clipboard in hand, and laughed. "Oh God, Dusty," she managed to say as she struggled to catch her breath, "I think I've seen this scenario before. If only you were a pizza delivery boy or a plumber—it would be the perfect weird ending to a horribly weird day."
Dusty cracked a grin and shrugged again, crossing his arms as Annie went off into another fit of giggling. "Feeling better?" he said as she subsided.
". . . yeah. I think I do." The quartermaster took a deep breath and mopped the tears of laughter out of her eyes. "Sorry about that. What can I do for you, sergeant?"
"I was actually going to tell you that I found something. Kitchen crew has to report all found items to the higher-ups and the head quartermaster, don't they?"
Annie raised an eyebrow. "Actually, yes, we do. How'd you know that?"
"I've been on KP a lot."
"Really? I thought you spent most of your time in the infirmary. What the heck did you do?" The minute the words were out of her mouth, she stopped. Exhaustion, and the strange relationship between quartermaster private and KP-monkey sergeant, had made her forget regulations for a moment. "Wait—never mind. Sorry, sergeant. None of my business."
"Nah, I don't mind." Dusty stepped away from the counter, leading her towards the deactivated refrigerator. "For future reference—never take a dare from Short-Fuze. The man plays dirty. And Duke wasn't too pleased with having his childhood affinity for gospel choir become common knowledge."
Annie tried, and failed, to picture the broad-shouldered blond Top in a choir robe. "Should I be hearing this?"
"Common knowledge is common knowledge." Dusty stopped in front of the refrigerator, bent down, and rooted around. Several of the heavy shelves had been braced in deep grooves on the floor of the refrigerator unit, and when those shelves had been removed, a whole wealth of small lost objects had been found collected in the grooves. Loose change, bullets . . . Annie's eyebrow raised when she saw the object Dusty produced.
"A ka-bar?"
"It was wedged in there, way at the back. I'm not surprised it got overlooked." The desert trooper handed her the ka-bar. It was a nice piece of equipment: well-worn, but obviously well-cared-for, with a high-end leather sheath that had seen a lot more wear than most. The initials C.K. had been embossed in the leather, along with a manufacturer's logo.
"Nice," Annie said, taking the ka-bar and examining it. "I didn't even know Ferragamo made knife accessories. C.K.?"
"Probably Cover Girl."
"Why would Cover Girl leave a knife in the freezer?"
"In this unit, it's best not to ask." Dusty shot a glance at her. "Take the ninjas, for example." Annie's eyes narrowed, and Dusty raised an eyebrow at that. "Something wrong?"
"I don't like that word."
"Got a grudge against the dictionary?"
"I don't like what it's become." Annie crossed her arms and, out of nervous habit, shot a glance at the ceiling tiles. They were all still in place.
"Care to elaborate?"
"It seems like a . . ." The quartermaster groped for words. "A get-out-of-jail-free card. Everybody looks the other way because they're so effective and have such a useful rep. Store tea on top of the shelves? Ninja. Ignore dress codes? Ninja. Terrify a QM? Who cares, they're a ninja. Break out of the infirmary so often that the medics have to weld a grate to the ceiling? Ninja. And you heard what they almost did to that prisoner. How long before it becomes 'Maimed a greenshirt? Ninja!'"
Dusty didn't frown; Annie didn't think he knew how. But his smile slipped a couple of notches. "Storm and Snake don't need me to talk for them," he said, running a hand through his loose blond hair. "But I think you should have fair warning.
"Ninja is a stupid word." Her surprise must have shown on her face, because for a moment, Dusty's grin reappeared. "It's stupid because people have these ideas that go with ninja. You should see some of those movies that Scarlett drags out and makes Snake and Storm watch. Invisibility, dragons, stuff like that. So when it's got that association with stupid things, it's harder to take them seriously. Or worse, you forget that it's a title people earn."
He paused and absentmindedly wiped a bit of grease off his hands with a rag, seemingly unconcerned with the fact that he was talking about . . . well . . . ninja. Annie bit her lip, unwilling to admit that he might have had a point. She had been just a little too terrified that morning to be mature about the whole business.
"Snake is crazy," Dusty added after a moment. "So's Storm. But they're good commandos. Saved our bacon a lot of the time. Sure, maybe the Joes are a little freewheeling. But—" And for a moment, Annie might have seen a flash of temper on that amiable face "—just because they act out on their enemies doesn't mean they'll do the same to their friends. You should fear 'em, sure. But you have to respect 'em too. And that means knowing that they wouldn't put your rookie ass in danger."
What might have been annoyance vanished almost before it had appeared, and Annie wasn't even sure she had seen it. It was just Dusty again: bit of a grin, blond hair bleached almost white, tan lines on his face where he wore his goggles in the desert.
For a minute, she couldn't think of anything to say. Dusty turned his back and, humming an aimless tune, opened a panel on the refrigerator's motor and went to work with the wrench.
"Fair warning?" she said finally.
"Yep." He didn't turn around, but his stance was loose and his attitude relaxed. "I was out in the desert with a buddy once—Mainframe. Good guy. There was a kid talking back to him, saying he wasn't a real soldier because he worked with computers. I knew different, but I let it be. Mainframe didn't need defending. And neither do the ninjas." He paused for a moment to loosen a particularly reticent, greasy screw. "The difference is that Mainframe doesn't have half a dozen sticks up his ass labeled 'Clan honor,' 'Respect for the sensei,' 'Proper discipline,' and probably 'Don't look at me funny.' Doing Mainframe's job right means hacking a computer. Doing Snakes' job right means teaching you how to turn some guy inside-out using two spoons and a dirty look."
For a few long moments, the only sound in the kitchen was the squeaking of Dusty's wrench and the distant scrape of another greenshirt with a broom. Then Annie drew in a long breath.
"Thanks, Dusty," she said. "That's good to know. But it doesn't help when they're putting all that skill towards making me miserable."
"Maybe you just need to learn to curb your temper." Annie glared at him, but Dusty remained unruffled. "Don't shoot the messenger, private. I'm just saying."
He disappeared back into the freezer, and Annie leaned against the wall and drew in a long breath. Be calm. Be calm.
He had a point, she had to admit. The ninjas were . . . effective. Supposedly, anyway, and he'd been there much longer than she had. Dusty would know. But the idea of freewheeling agents like that rankled. Annie was under no illusions about her particular skills; there was only one thing that qualified her for membership in this elite unit, and that was her ability to cook breakfast really, really fast. This wasn't the kind of thing legends were made of. If there were no rules, then there was nothing to prevent everyone else from being as incredible as they could . . . And that left Annie Gorshin, Short Stack, as just one more cook cleaning up after the men and women who made history. The thought rankled.
But she had to have goals. And she had to have some kind of pride in what she could do, or she knew she would go insane. And maybe setting herself against two of the deadliest warriors on the planet wasn't the way to do that.
"You're right," she said. "And I might still wash out. But I appreciate the heads-up."
"Just don't spread it around the rest of the greenshirts, would you?" Dusty said, glancing up. The brown grease had spread all over his hands again, and had even transferred to a smear on his cheek, but it didn't seem to dampen his spirits. "I put forty bucks on six washouts this week, and it helps if they're all demoralized."
" . . . You know, I was almost feeling good until you said that."
"Sorry. Spend too much time around Beach Head and you get into the habit of sadism."
Annie smiled a little, thinking back on that morning's adventure. Up until the ironing board incident, she had to admit that it had been going rather well. And the sour look on Storm Shadow's face . . . "I hear you on that."