Author's note: I'm not usually one for random drabble fics, and especially not for writing them. However, I've wound up with too many short scenes that either don't fit with the current story arc or are too short for a full chapter or oneshot, so this is where they will be housed. The snippets in this chapter are all set (in chronological order) during Second Chances.

Disclaimer: I don't own anything except my OCs. Everyone else belongs to Hasbro or Marvel.

These Are Days

Sleeping Dog, Stupid Dreadnok

Buzzer was not amused. He long passed amused (the mood he'd been in since the kids showed up this morning) and hit annoyed as soon as he saw a dog walk through the garage door with one of his new housemates.

"Hey, no animals in the house!" He protested. Kids he could stand. After all, they'd practically raised Zanya… After that experience, Buzzer learned he could handle children. But the canine would have to be kicked to the curb. He'd preferred to feed it to alligators in the swamp, but the temporary base they were in (Zartan still hadn't explained the need for moving into the Cobra housing edition) wasn't anywhere near the swamps.

"Says who?" The gangly blonde girl standing next to the mutt folded her hands across her (barely existent) chest.

"Says the ones who live here, that's who." The blond-ponytailed Englishman growled. She stared back, looking thoroughly unimpressed by his outburst. The nerve of her! She should be quaking in terror right now! "Kick him back out on the street where he belongs! Ain't got no use for somethin' 'ats gonna crap in our rooms during the night."

The dog (more like an over-grown puppy) made a whimpering noise and looked up at the girl. "Nobody is turning my dog into gator food." Her voice dropped into a low growl as she spoke, clearly unafraid of him. What was with this brat? She should be backing away in terror from him, not giving him death glares!

"And what are you going to do to stop me?" He challenged her. By now, the other Dreadnoks and half the new kids had dropped what they were doing to watch the fight.

"Well, for starters, I can make you sleep outdoors tonight." He instantly perked up at the sound of Zartan's voice. A quick glance toward the kitchen area revealed the rather unhappy form of his boss. Well… maybe he could be convinced into kicking the mutt out? Did he even know the kids brought a dog with them?

"But it's a damn bloody mutt!"

"The 'mutt' was part of the contract with the team." Zartan replied coolly. Oh, so he did know about the dog… crap. That would make it harder to get rid of.

"It'll mess up the place." Buzzer pleaded with his boss.

"He will not! He's housebroken and he takes baths, which is more than I can say for you!" The little (tall, but still a featherweight) blonde girl protested, earning a rather noisy cackle from Zarana. Damned neon-haired bitch… only reason she was in charge over him was because she was the boss's sister.

"She has a point." Zandar simply shrugged. Buzzer frowned. It looked like he would have to be sneaky to get rid of the dog.

…Which was why he waited for everyone else to go to sleep that night before making his move. The digital display on his watch told him it was well after one in the morning; Zartan might be awake on guard duty, but that was usually spent outside. And he knew the dog and his scrawny little bitch owner were in Zanya's room. Zanya slept like the dead, so if he was careful there would be little chance of waking her. Everything worked out perfectly, he thought to himself.

He was so close. Standing right outside the door, doorknob grasped firmly in his left hand as he carefully attempted to turn it and…

"Just what the hell do you think you are doing?" An enraged growl met his ears. Apparently, Zartan decided the inside of the base needed guarding tonight as well.

The blond Dreadnok swiftly released the knob and turned to face his employer head-on. He was in trouble, and he knew it. The boss had his 'answer me wrong and I carve you like a turkey' look on his face tonight. "Uh, fancy meeting you here."

"You have fifteen seconds to move away from that door before I start holding auditions to find your replacement." Zartan didn't feel like chatting tonight, although Buzzer still wasn't sure why he was so mad. He was just trying to get rid of the goddamn dog and put a healthy fear into its owner. Its owner, who was sleeping in Zanya's room. He was just going into Zanya's room to…

Ah, shit. "Damn lousy flea-ba—Ow!" His muttering turned into an undignified yelp when Zartan grabbed onto the blond man's ponytail and yanked it toward him, taking Buzzer's head along for the ride.

"The dog?" The human chameleon snarled, his voice taking on an icy tone. "You were sneaking into my daughter's room in the dead of night because of the dog?!"

"Well, when you put it that way, it sounds stupid." Which wasn't the case at all. He'd planned this out for hours…although apparently forgetting the simple rule that no one went into Zarana's or Zanya's rooms after hours.

"Oh, does it now?" Buzzer gulped despite himself. He didn't like that wicked gleam now present in his employer's eyes.

"Clean the bathrooms?" He asked hopefully. Dreadnoks, and himself in particular, saw that chore as the worst thing to do on base, but at the moment he would do anything to avoid getting his ass kicked.

"Oh, no." Zartan grinned. "I have a much more…personal punishment in mind."

And the next morning, when confronted by his cohorts (and the damn nosy kids) about the rather copious amount of bruises he had all over his body, Buzzer had to sit still and hang his head in shame while Zandar gleefully explained to the other Dreadnoks that their comrade intentionally broke the most sacred rule the group had. While the dog smiled at him…mocking him… and he couldn't do a damn thing about it.

Bloody son of a bitch!

Semantics

Zartan was less than amused with the direction this conversation decided to turn. While he couldn't accuse the youngsters comprising the team known as Shadowatch of asking stupid questions, they certainly had a knack for finding awkward ones. Less than a month after he'd hired them, they were already finding ways to annoy him. What was supposed to be a lesson on different Joes the team might encounter and a brief history of said Joes quickly turned into a headache when Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes names showed up in conjunction with the word 'ninja'. That naturally led to a question and answer segment, which brought him to their latest disagreement. "For the last time, I am not a real ninja. Real ninjas have clans, honor, tattoos, and blood feuds and all the ceremonial crap that's completely unnecessary for running a family business."

"But you've killed ninjas before, right?" Kristen "Vampira" Mortisson asked eagerly, long dark hair framing her pale heart-shaped face like silk curtains. "And you trained undercover with ninja clans, didn't you?"

"Well, yes, but that was for infiltration purposes only."

"So? You still trained with them and got to learn their secret moves." Neal "Thunderbird" Sharra prodded, dark brown eyes curiously regarding his new instructor. "Doesn't that at least make you half a ninja?"

Idly wondering exactly which deity he'd pissed off badly enough to earn this fate, Zartan sighed. Half a ninja—could someone please just shoot him now and be done with it? "It still is not the same thing."

"Why not?" Andrea "Atlantis" Creed countered, blue-on-gold eyes issuing a sort of silent challenge to him. "You have a clan right here. By their terms, you'd be the clan master. You've trained alongside the real ones and killed their masters before they could use their 'spooky ninja mojo' to stop you. That means you out-ninjaed several ninjas."

Obviously, a vocabulary lesson was going to be in order. He felt rather sure that 'mojo' and 'out-ninjaed' weren't actual words according to Webster's dictionary. "The ninjas don't see it that way."

"They're biased and weighed down by ceremonial crap. Of course they don't." Andi folded her arms.

"Yes, but the ceremonial crap is part of the whole 'authentic ninja' package." He replied. "Without that, you're merely an advanced martial arts practitioner."

"Does it have to be strictly their personal clan ceremonial crap to count, or can we make up our own?" Kristen wondered out loud, scratching her head. "Because I'm pretty sure asking the boys to wrestle alligators was some kind of weird initiation ceremony…"

"No, no, no, we're talking magic here, not just fraternity-level hazing initiations." He corrected her.

"Again, according to the official SHIELD file on you, you know a spell or two." Apparently Andi liked to argue and didn't want to lose this debate. He shouldn't have had this much trouble getting her to back off. However, his only having to deal with the Dreadnok's 'disputes' for the last few decades seemed to have left his own debating skills somewhat rusty.

He wasn't even going to ask how they got a hold of SHIELD's files. "Nothing like what a real clan master is capable of casting."

"Still miles above anything we can do." She snorted. "Far as I'm concerned, you're a ninja and this is your clan."

"That's all well and good, but don't go around repeating that to the real ninjas." That damn kid was going to drive him to an early grave, he just knew it! "They'll likely kill you simply for saying it."

"Whatever." She rolled her eyes. "Are we going to go back to talking about the files now?"

"Yes."Zartan answered, trying to hide the relief that everything was going back on track in his voice. "Now, if you will all turn to page six in your folders…"

Insomniacs Anonymous

It was no secret among the Dreadnoks that Zartan simply didn't sleep if he didn't absolutely need to. A lifetime spent pissing off some very dangerous groups of people made the assassin overly paranoid, which in turn lead to his nocturnal habits of making security patrols and watching the foreign language channels on their (stolen) satellite TV. He was usually the only one awake after midnight, but since the group of mutant teenagers known as Shadowatch moved into his temporary base near the Terror Dome (until he knew whether or not to keep them permanently, he saw no need to take them to the Dreadnok's actual base), he found himself listening for panicked screams from the children's rooms.

As much as he hated to admit it, nightmares were not an event he and his siblings planned for. The kids had been with them less than a month and already managed to wear holes in Zandar's and Zarana's sleep cycles. Despite the fact that her new roommate proved to have some of the most violent dreams, Zanya managed to sleep right through the screams and moans.

The layout of their temporary home looked, from the street, like all the other two-story homes in the high-end housing edition owned by Extensive Enterprises. The ground floor consisted of a living area, guest bathroom, kitchen and dining area, and a laundry and general storage area next to the door leading out to the garage. All the bedrooms were on the second level, along with another general-use bathroom. The basement, however, was an extensive set of storage and training areas with still another bathroom. When everyone slept, noise travelled very well throughout the base.

Which is why, when two doors softly clicked open and shut and the shower turned on, he knew someone was awake after hours. He muted the television, opting instead to determine who was out of bed at such an ungodly late hour. When the water shut off and footsteps sounded against the floor, he immediately crossed Chaos and Vampira off the list. Both of them could levitate and thus wouldn't risk alerting anyone to their plans by stepping on creaky floorboards. The steps were too soft and cautious to belong to any of the Dreadnoks; their trips through the hallway sounded like a cattle stampede. Golem, due to his size, also made rather loud footfalls.

His gaze turned to the hallway leading from the living room to the stairs, bright green eyes all but glowing in the dim light as he waited for his late night wanderer to finally arrive on the first floor. The tall, lanky form of a teenage girl appeared on the landing. The mottled icy-blue patches of scales stood out in the darkness and the pale golden spaces where a more normal person's eyes would have been white had a soft glow of their own. She looked around cautiously, coming to a dead stop when she saw him looking at her. Even in the near-darkness, he could tell she was scared of something (quite possibly him, but that remained to be seen) and fully prepared to bolt back up the stairs.

"It's two-thirty in the morning." He held her terrified gaze, silently ordering her not to move. "What the hell are you doing taking a shower and sneaking downstairs at this hour?"

Her dark blue eyes glanced ashamedly down at the floor. "Can't sleep." She murmured so softly he barely heard her. There was a haunted look about her that spoke volumes more than she was willing to say.

"Nightmares, then." And bad ones at that. What in blazes did Colonel Fury do to these kids to make them all so skittish?

Her scales turned a rather amusing shade of purple—an indicator that she was too tired to maintain control of her powers and thoroughly embarrassed. "I didn't know anyone was already down here. I'll just go back to my room…"

…damn those wounded puppy-dog eyes of hers. Zanya never managed to get the puppy eyes thing down, but this one could do it without even meaning to. "If you're going to sit up for a while, you may as well stay down here." He sighed. "This way I don't have to wonder what the hell you're doing."

She paused—apparently weighing her options—before cautiously slinking into the living room and sitting on one of the couches. She glanced up at the television and frowned. "Is that in Chinese?" She tilted her head to the side slightly, trying to decipher what the actors on screen were saying. He chuckled.

"Japanese, actually, but that was a good guess." He answered, unmuting the television so he wouldn't have to read lips to keep up with the dialogue.

"Most people turn on the news when they're up this late. Or Telemundo." She remarked. "Odd how their soap operas sometimes make more sense than the English ones."

That certainly got his attention. "You speak Spanish?" It hadn't been listed in the resume the team handed in, but since she also omitted her ability to shape-shift he couldn't say he was shocked.

"My foster parents had a revolving door of Hispanic maids and cooks back in Texas; all of them spoke fluent Spanish and started teaching me how to speak it. I guess they had a revolving door of French-speaking ones when they lived in Canada, but I was too young to remember any of them." She shrugged awkwardly, turning her focus back to the television. It was the most he'd ever gotten her to say about her childhood or her family—a subject the other kids happily chatted about amongst themselves.

"I suppose that made learning Italian a lot easier." He remarked, earning a surprised stare from her.

"How…how did you know?"

"It's an easier transition from Spanish to Italian than it is from Spanish to any of the languages spoken in Bangledesh." The mercenary pointed out. "Therefore it is much more likely that during your leadership of the team you picked up Italian."

"What, are you some kinda terrorist Sherlock Holmes?" She remarked, curling up into a ball on her couch. He chuckled softly, turning his attention back to the television.

"I'm not quite that gifted, my dear; just very observant." Maybe she and the other kids weren't going to be a complete pain in his ass after all?