Fic: Welcome to the 38th Parallel (1/1)
Title: Welcome to the 38th Parallel
Author: Melyanna
Summary: Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard has only just taken command of the 8063rd MASH unit when I Corps throws him a curveball - a very intelligent, very young, very female surgeon.
Notes: Blamed almost exclusively on auralan. Someday I will learn to keep my mouth shut. (Probably not.) This is set during the Korean War, inspired by the television series M*A*S*H. Some things are stolen outright - we will call them homages. ;) And in case you didn't catch this already, yes, this is another crack AU.
Many thanks to freifraufischer and miera_c for their beta work.
The CO’s office didn’t look all that different now, despite a change in command. Marshall Sumner’s personal effects had been removed, but they had been minimal to begin with. The place was sterile. John Sheppard supposed that was fitting for an office in a hospital, but it made him uncomfortable. He just hadn’t had the time to move any of his belongings into the room.
Of course, that might make a person wonder why he, the new commander of the 8063rd MASH unit, was sitting at his desk staring at nothing, but the truth of the matter was that he didn’t think he could move a muscle. In the last two weeks, he hadn’t had more than three hours of sleep at a time, and in between naps he’d spent nearly all of his time in the operating room, post-op, or putting out fires around the base, literal or otherwise. He didn’t know how he’d managed not to kill anyone, but his feet were so tired that even the world’s most uncomfortable chair - the one behind his desk - was appealing.
Gingerly, not wanting to knock anything off his desk or offend his aching body, John put his feet up and leaned back. He folded his hands over his stomach and sighed. This was the first quiet moment he had in ages. At first he'd been grateful for the insanity - it was keeping his mind off of matters back home - but there came a point where that was no longer an adequate tradeoff. Tonight he needed some real sleep.
No sooner had the thought formed in his mind than there was a knock on his door. “Chuck,” he called to the company clerk, “you better have good news for me.”
The door opened a little, and John opened his eyes. “Sir, the lieutenant’s arrived,” the sergeant said.
“Show him in,” John replied.
There was an odd look on Chuck’s face, John decided, but he didn’t give it too much thought. At least until he stood back and let the officer in. The lieutenant was tall and dark-haired. And wearing a skirt.
He barely managed not to swear. I Corps had said they were sending a surgeon, not a nurse.
Still, he looked her over somewhat out of reflex - she looked good in that brown dress uniform - and when his eyes finally reached her face she looked annoyed. “You’re Lieutenant Weir?” he asked, reluctantly getting up.
“Yes, sir,” the woman replied, saluting sharply. “Lieutenant Elizabeth Weir reporting.”
“John Sheppard. At ease, Lieutenant.” John maintained eye contact with her for a moment - she had pretty green eyes - before sifting through the stuff on his desk. “You’ll have to forgive me,” he said. “I think I didn’t look at your papers closely enough.”
He glanced up at her again and saw that she looked rather irritated already. “I take it you weren’t expecting a woman,” she replied.
“I asked for a surgeon.” She bristled at his words, and John quickly added, “And whatever that says about me, when I conjure up an image of a surgeon, that surgeon isn’t wearing nylons and heels.”
Elizabeth looked down at her shoes in disdain. “Believe me, I hate this uniform as much as you would.”
John smiled. “I think I like you.”
Her cheeks turned pink.
“Anyway, sorry,” he continued, finally fishing out the paper he was looking for. “Typewriter smudge,” he said, pointing out the line where her first name was supposed to be. “All I knew was that I was looking for a Lieutenant E. Weir.”
“Understandable,” she replied. “I should probably stop getting so defensive about it, but I have to ask: did you look at the line where it says I graduated from Wellesley and then the Medical College of Pennsylvania?”
“What’s your point?” he teased.
“Those are women’s colleges.” Apparently she didn’t catch that he was kidding.
“Well, that explains why my alma mater never played yours in football.” She looked only mildly amused. “Yeah, I didn’t really read most of this. To be perfectly honest, I saw they were sending a new surgeon and was so happy I took a five-minute nap. We’ve been too busy in the last couple weeks for me to pay attention to a lot of details.”
Now, of course, that he wasn't getting this kind of information while trying to save someone's life, his brain was trying desperately to process the implications of this. Living quarters, how she was going to get along with the nurses, plus how he was going to break it to pretty much everyone that Tokyo had sent a woman to do what most people considered a man's job even when it wasn't in a war zone. . .
“They told me in Tokyo that you were new to the command,” she said, sounding rather curious.
“I’ve been at this base since I was drafted,” John replied. “But I was just promoted. I’m still not used to it, I guess. I’ve spent most of the last two weeks in surgery, and chain of command stuff tends to matter less in there.”
“I’d think it’d matter more in there,” Elizabeth replied, raising a brow. "It has to be much more of a high-pressure situation here than the kind of surgical work I was doing back in Japan.
“Well, you’re going to want to rethink that,” he said. “You’re a lieutenant, which means half the nurses outrank you. But when you’re putting someone’s intestines back the way God intended, you have to be the one in charge of things.”
The woman narrowed her eyes. “You’re not regular Army, are you?”
John shook his head. “Not exactly. I volunteered in World War II,” he explained. “Had to jump out of the airplane I was trying to fly and ended up with a medical discharge. Then this little police action started and I got drafted.”
“I see,” she said quietly.
He sensed she was holding something back, and he frowned. “What about you?” he asked. “You’re going to be the only doctor here who actually volunteered, and I’m wondering why.” She looked hesitant to answer, so he smiled tiredly. “Hey, if you’re escaping a tyrannical mother who thinks you should have married your high school sweetheart instead of going to college in the first place. . .”
That got her to laugh, finally. “No, it’s not that,” Elizabeth said. “I’m a surgeon. I really wanted to go where people needed a surgeon. Everything I’ve seen back home seemed to indicate that this was the place.”
John nodded. “As long as you’re not under any delusions about your work here.”
She frowned, and John found himself a little alarmed at how cute he thought that looked. “What do you mean?”
“You’re not here to fight communism, no matter what they told you in basic training,” he said. His tone allowed no discussion on the matter. “We’re here to fight death. When a body’s bleeding, it doesn’t matter to me what kind of uniform is getting stained.”
Wide-eyed, she nodded. Then in the distance, John heard the tell-tale thumping of rotors beating the air. “Come on,” he said, coming around the desk and grabbing her by the arm on his way out of the office.
“What’s going on?”
“We’ve got incoming.”
He dragged her into the surgeons’ changing room, where the unit’s other doctors, Rodney McKay, Carson Beckett, and Marcus Lorne, were changing. Earlier John had spotted Lorne playing in a game of football with some of the enlisted men. He was already stripped down to his shorts and was in the process of changing into a clean undershirt, and Elizabeth blushed bright red when she saw him mostly undressed. It surprised John, and it got him thinking that she’d had a rather conservative upbringing, and probably pretty well-off too.
On his part, Lorne grinned at her as he pulled a shirt over his head. John made a mental note to warn Elizabeth about him once this session was over.
By that point, Rodney noticed them. “Colonel, who’s this?” he demanded.
“This is Doctor Elizabeth Weir,” John replied, trying to remain as casual about it as he could. “Our new surgeon.”
The men all stopped what they were doing and stared. “Really?” Carson said, water running over his hands at the sink.
“How old are you?” Rodney blurted out.
John rolled his eyes. “Sorry, Lieutenant,” he said to Elizabeth. “Rodney here has no social skills.”
“I’m twenty-six,” she answered anyway. “I have a bad habit of finishing school early.”
“That’s remarkable, love,” Carson said. John suspected that out of anyone else’s mouth, that would have come off as offensive, but the Scotsman’s accent seemed to make everything sound better. “Even quicker than you, Rodney.”
“For the last time, Carson, I would have graduated much earlier had my schools allowed me to.”
“Guys,” John interrupted, getting everyone’s attention again. “Like I was saying, Rodney McKay is the socially inept one, and he’s also our neurosurgeon. Carson Beckett over there is on loan to us from the British, and the one who’s finally got all his clothes on is Marcus Lorne, our anesthetist.”
Marcus had indeed finished getting dressed while Rodney and Carson were bickering, and he held out his hand to Elizabeth. She shook it tentatively. “Nice to have you aboard, Doctor,” he said.
Elizabeth opened her mouth to say something to him, but she was interrupted by Rodney. “So I take it we don’t have to clear out space for a new bunkmate after all?” he asked.
John made a face at him. “I think she’ll probably end up with Major Heightmeyer.” At Elizabeth’s curious glance, he added, “The head nurse. She’s got room for another cot.”
“I don’t want to inconvenience anyone,” she said.
“This whole damn war’s an inconvenience, Lieutenant,” he replied. “The nurses’ area is that way. You’ll probably be more comfortable in there.”
She nodded and disappeared behind a white curtain that divided the space. “Well, let’s go,” John said to the others, who’d all watched Elizabeth leave. “Can’t stand up our dates today.”
Elizabeth walked into the next space feeling inordinately nervous. She had known abstractly that MASH units got busy in a hurry - “when it rains it pours,” one colonel had told her - but she’d expected to have at least enough time to get out of her dress uniform before heading into surgery.
She'd been in Army hospitals for a while now, but the sparseness of this one was startling. The walls were just wood, and almost everything was some shade of green or brown. Even the wood shelves had been painted dark green. The only other color she saw was the white of gowns and the curtain behind her. The room was also far too crowded.
The nurses were all so busy that they didn’t notice her entrance, and Elizabeth decided to stay where she was, off to the side, until some of them had cleared out and there was more room for her to get into a surgical gown and get scrubbed up. In the meantime, she realized that the women around her were all talking about the new doctor expected to arrive.
“So what’s his name again?” one asked.
“E. Weir. Lieutenant E. Weir. We don’t know his first name.”
“He must be pretty new to the service if he’s still a lieutenant.”
“Probably pretty young, too.”
“Who cares how old he is, as long as he’s cute!”
“Hey, weren’t you saying just last week that you’d had enough of surgeons?”
“I think she said she’d had enough of these surgeons.”
“Right. Fresh meat.”
The curtain swept open behind Elizabeth, and the rustling of fabric made the nurses all look toward her location. Another woman with wavy blonde hair entered the space, and the nurses all stopped gossiping immediately. The new arrival looked at Elizabeth, though, and said, “Who are you?”
“I’m Elizabeth Weir,” she replied. “Lieutenant Elizabeth Weir. I’m the new surgeon. Colonel Sheppard thought I’d be more comfortable scrubbing up in here than with the men.”
She spared a glance at the other nurses and saw anything from shock to disappointment on their faces. “Well,” said the blonde woman, “I’m Major Kate Heightmeyer, head nurse. Clean gowns are over there, masks on that shelf.” She glanced down Elizabeth’s uniform with a critical eye. “I’ll send someone to get you a pair of shoes and socks. You won’t make it through this in those heels.”
Elizabeth nodded, and the woman disappeared. She turned her attention back to the room and smiled. “Sorry to disappoint, but yes, I’m the new doctor,” she said.
The other women laughed a little, and a young black woman stepped forward. “I’m Lieutenant Emmagan,” she said. “Let me help you.”
Elizabeth smiled at her. “Thank you.”
John was standing at the far end of operating room, waiting for his first patient to be brought in, when Elizabeth entered on the other side. The first two tables were already occupied by Carson and Rodney, both of whom were already operating on patients. “Lieutenant, there’s a free seat back here,” he called.
She passed by the first two tables, her freshly washed hands held in the air. Her face was obstructed by a mask, of course, but when she was close enough, John could see that she was nervous. “Hey,” he said quietly, “just take a deep breath.”
After a moment of hesitation, Elizabeth nodded. Then two more patients were brought in, and they both got to work.
John’s first patient took less than an hour to patch up, so while the medics were carrying the patient to post-op he wandered to Elizabeth’s table. “How’s it going, Doctor?” he asked.
“It’s taken this long just to stop all the bleeding, sir,” Elizabeth replied. “I’ve never seen this many holes in a person. How in the world did he take so much shrapnel?”
“Fragmentation grenade, probably,” John said, taking a look at the small bowl she had deposited shrapnel in. “This guy got lucky. If that last piece had gone half an inch to the right, it would have hit the spine. He could have been paralyzed.”
Across the room, Rodney laughed shortly. “I could have taken care of that.”
“Of course you could have, Rodney,” John said, immediately switching over to his must-humor-Rodney-before-his-ego-fills-the-room voice.
Elizabeth looked up at John skeptically. “But half an inch would be in the-”
Quickly John leaned down and whispered, “Just play along.”
She looked at him like he was crazy, but still repeated, “Of course you could have, Rodney.”
“Anyway,” John continued as Elizabeth returned to carefully removing the last piece of shrapnel, “good work.”
“Thank you, Doctor.”
“Eins. Zwei.”
Elizabeth was counting as she pulled bits of shrapnel out of a young man’s leg, a habit she’d picked up back when she’d first started operating on people. It helped her concentrate.
“German, Lieutenant?” Lorne said from his seat at the other end of the patient.
Elizabeth looked up and smiled at him even though he couldn’t see most of her face. “Sorry. I speak a lot of languages.” She pulled out another two pieces of shrapnel. “Trois. Quatre.”
“Careful there, Doctor,” Carson Beckett called. “He likes girls who speak French.”
Elizabeth raised a brow at the anesthetist, and he shrugged. “I like girls in general.”
“Thought so.” She turned her attention back to the leg in front of her. “Pyat'. Shest'. Siem'.”
“That’s it, I could never date you.”
Behind her mask, Elizabeth grinned.
Kate Heightmeyer was pacing along the length of the operating room. “Well, at least if the Soviets capture us all, we’ll have a translator,” she remarked.
“Don’t suppose you speak Korean, do you?” Colonel Sheppard asked behind her.
“Not yet,” Elizabeth replied. “It didn’t take me too long to pick up conversational Japanese, though, so hopefully I will soon.”
“That’s good to know.”
Rodney called for the medics to bring in another patient, and Lorne moved on to that table. Elizabeth, in the meantime, began stitching up the gash on her patient’s leg. However, her methodical stitches soon caught Major Heightmeyer’s attention. “Doctor,” she said, coming by, “what are you doing?”
“Closing,” Elizabeth replied. “With any luck, he’ll barely have a scar.”
“That isn’t the kind of work we do here,” Kate said sternly. “We keep them alive, we get them stable, and we send them to people who have more time. You can’t spend this much time sewing someone up when there are boys out in pre-op whose lives depend on them getting in here.”
Elizabeth swallowed and did her best to hurry. “Yes, ma’am.”
She closed as quickly as she could, and while medics carried her patient out, Carson said, “Doctor Weir, could you step over here for a moment? I need an extra pair of eyes, and yours are younger than mine.”
“Carson, I’m hurt,” Lorne said as Elizabeth came over to Carson’s table. “You usually ask me to help.”
“You’re working, she isn’t,” Carson replied. He looked up at Elizabeth. “Do you see any more bleeding?”
“More suction,” she said to the nurse. “There’s a small puncture over on this side,” she continued after a moment. “You’d never see it from your angle.”
Medics brought in another wounded man, and Elizabeth pulled off the gloves from her last operation. “Thank you, Liz,” Carson said as she walked away.
She winced a little. “I’d really rather you didn’t call me that.”
“All right,” he said, but then Lorne jumped in.
“Lizzie?” he suggested. “Lisa? Beth? Eliza?”
Elizabeth shook her head vehemently as she got back to work. “There isn’t a diminutive of my name that I haven’t heard, and there isn’t one I like,” she said.
“Hey, Princess,” Sheppard called. Elizabeth looked up and he grinned behind his mask. Next to him, Kate gave him a disappointed look, and he cleared his throat. “Sorry, Lieutenant,” he said to Elizabeth. “Just a joke.”
“Hey, I answered to it, didn’t I?” she replied, looking at him sheepishly. That just made him grin again.
They passed a little bit of time with only the usual back-and-forth of the nurses and surgeons, until Carson pulled his gloves off and asked, “So, Elizabeth, what were you doing before you came here?”
Before replying she asked the nurse assisting her for a clamp. “I was in an Army hospital in Tokyo, actually,” she replied. “I was doing follow-up treatment on a lot of patients who came through MASH units, including this one. Then my commander got an urgent request to send someone here, and I raised my hand.”
"Could have been sent here anyway," Sheppard said quietly. "With the Chinese getting involved, I'd bet everyone in Tokyo under forty is in danger of getting sent here."
“So you’ve seen our work before?” Rodney asked.
“Yes, I think I recognize your stitch technique,” Elizabeth said. “Very distinctive.”
“Really?”
“No, but I’m sure it’s very good,” she teased.
“She’s a fast learner, Colonel,” Lorne said.
“Well, it’s not like handling Rodney is a huge chore,” John replied.
“Excuse me, I do not need to be handled,” Rodney said.
“Of course not, Rodney.” Elizabeth heard this from both sides of the room, as both Carson and the colonel had said it at once.
One of the doors opened then, and Chuck entered. “Colonel Sheppard, we’ve got a small problem,” he announced.
“What’s that, Sergeant Sunshine?” John asked.
“There’s a patient whose blood type is A-, and another who’s O+,” the sergeant said. “We’re completely out of those, and running pretty low on O- too.”
“And I take it our A-, O+, and O- personnel have already given as much as they can to the cause?”
“Yeah, we’ve already drawn too much from them, actually.”
“Well, that’s just peachy.” John looked up. “Doctor Weir, any chance you’ve got one of those blood types?”
“A-, as it happens,” she replied. “I’m almost finished here.”
“Good. Lieutenant Emmagan, head to post-op and get everything set up so we can do this as quickly as possible.”
“Yes, sir,” the nurse said, hurrying out.
A few minutes later, Elizabeth finished up repairing her patient’s small intestine and turned to the nurse assisting her. “Close for me, will you?” she said. “I need to let Dracula have his merry way with me.”
“Dracula?” Lorne asked as Elizabeth pulled her gloves off and headed to the door.
“It’s a long story.”
The nurse was ready and waiting for her in post-op, a long room lined on either side with beds. Elizabeth was pretty sure that they didn't have enough beds for the number of patients coming in, and she wondered what they'd do with the rest. “Doctor, if you’ll have a seat,” she said, gesturing to the chair next to her.
Elizabeth sat and let the nurse go about her work. As Emmagan inserted the needle into her arm, she winced. “It isn’t normal for a surgeon to be squeamish about blood,” Emmagan commented.
“Only about mine,” Elizabeth replied. “I kind of like keeping it inside me.” She watched the young nurse as she finished things up. “I didn’t catch your first name before.”
“Teyla,” she said. “And it’s all right. I don’t think I told you.”
“Well, thank you for your help earlier, Teyla,” Elizabeth said. “Is there anything I can do for you?”
Teyla handed her a cup, smiling kindly. “Keep yourself hydrated in there,” she replied. “It’ll help. I’ve done a lot of these marathon surgery sessions, and it helps if you’re not parched.”
Obediently, Elizabeth drank the entire glass of water.
“Lieutenant,” Kate Heightmeyer called from the door to post-op. The new doctor was still sitting down in one corner. “We need you back in surgery.”
“Ma’am, it’s only been-”
“Stand up,” Kate ordered. The younger woman did as she was told. “Are you dizzy?”
“No,” Elizabeth replied.
“We need you back in the OR,” Kate said. “I was serious about what I said before. There are a lot of luxuries you won’t get here, and time is one of them.”
Elizabeth hurried out, and Kate turned around to see that John had been watching at least part of the exchange. “We’ve just had a few new arrivals, Kate,” he said. “Come help me with triage.”
She followed him to pre-op, where five boys were lined up and awaiting examination. As they moved through them, John quietly said, “You should cut her some slack.”
“Just because she’s new?” Kate asked. “I don’t think that’s reasonable.”
“She’s been here eight hours, Kate.”
“I went and looked at her file again,” she said. “Her parents are her next of kin. They live in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Boston.”
John checked a soldier’s dogtags. “Is that a good thing?”
“It’s a pretty wealthy area of Boston,” Kate replied. “She went to Girls’ Latin and graduated at sixteen. Graduated from Wellesley at nineteen and still got into medical school even though she was that young. That’s the kind of thing that happens when Daddy donates a new lab building.”
“Kate, I think you’re overreacting,” John told her bluntly.
“I’m worried, John,” she said. “I’m worried that Tokyo sent us a sweet young woman who’s never had to pick up her socks before, let alone live in a tent.”
“Well, she’s going to be living with you,” he replied, “so have fun with that.”
“John,” she pressed.
“Kate.” He looked up at her across from a patient. “At the moment, I see a damn good surgeon. I don’t care that she’s a woman or that she’s young or that she’s from a rich family. And right now I’m telling you: back off.”
She stared him down for a moment and exhaled a little loudly. “Yes, sir,” she said. It was the first time she’d called him that.
“Kate.”
She shook her head. “You’re in command now, John. You outrank me. We might as well get used to it.” This wasn't like her and they both knew it, but apparently John was willing to let it go.
They took care of the patient between them, and then Kate couldn’t resist any longer. “Has she sent you the papers yet?” she asked quietly.
John froze for a moment, his hand over a bandage. “Yeah,” he replied, not looking at her. “Got them two days ago.”
“I’m sorry,” Kate said. “Have you decided whether or not you’re going to grant her the divorce?”
He shook his head. “I wrote to her when the papers came. Told her things were too hectic here for me to make a decision that big.” He sighed and stood up straight. “I wanted to be angry with her and tell her I wouldn’t let her marry this other guy, but the truth of the matter is I never could tell her no.”
Kate reached out and touched his arm gently, but he seemed to shake it off. “There’s work to do,” he said, heading back to the OR. She couldn’t help but remember that he’d said the same thing when he’d first gotten the news of his wife’s affair.
Elizabeth came back to the operating room after fifteen or twenty minutes. “Did the vampires drain you dry?” John teased, trying to lighten his own mood.
“Pretty much, sir.” She walked up to her table, where a patient was waiting. “What have we got here?”
“He was driving a jeep with supplies up to one of the aid stations,” a nurse explained. “A shell hit the road right in front of him and he swerved into a ditch.”
“All right, let’s get to work,” Elizabeth replied.
Having looked over that patient earlier, John was pretty sure what Elizabeth was facing. The blunt trauma sustained in the accident had resulted in a ruptured spleen, and she got to work removing it and repairing other internal damage to the soldier. However, in the middle of the operation, the nurse monitoring the patient’s vitals suddenly sat up. “Doctor, his pulse is dropping drastically.”
John looked up from his own patient as Elizabeth reached over to feel the man’s neck for a pulse. “Right, he’s going into cardiac arrest,” she said, her voice higher than usual.
She gave out her orders with seeming confidence as she started chest compressions, and she did everything she was supposed to, but it was too late. She couldn’t revive him, and within minutes the patient was dead.
Her voice was shaking as she told the medics to take the body away. A sergeant asked if he needed to bring the next patient in, but she looked up at John across the operating tables. He jerked his head toward the door. “Take a minute if you need it, Lieutenant,” he said.
Elizabeth nodded once and escaped. When she came back, it was obvious to John that she had been crying.
Surgery only lasted ten hours that day. It was well into the evening before they were all out. John wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed, but he had things to finish up in his office. Kate had dug up Lieutenant Weir’s paperwork while they were in OR and had left him a note telling him to look at it more closely. After a quick perusal, he discovered that I Corps had sent her promotion papers ahead of her. He headed off to find Elizabeth.
When he stepped out of his office, he saw that her luggage was still sitting next to Chuck’s desk. Curious, he headed toward the nurses’ changing area. He pulled the curtain back enough to take a look, and there was Elizabeth sitting on the floor, her surgical mask still in her hands.
John knocked lightly on the wall. Startled, Elizabeth started to push herself up, but he waved her off. “Don’t trouble yourself,” he said, coming in to sit beside her.
“I’m sorry, sir,” she replied. “I’m not having the best first day ever.”
“No one does here.” John leaned against the wall and slid down to the floor next to her. “It’s always hard to lose one. And harder when you can look at the man and know he can’t be as old as you. Even as old as you, instead of the rest of us.”
His light teasing drew a hint of a smile from her, but it soon faded. “So what did I do to run afoul of Major Heightmeyer?” she asked.
“Nothing. Don’t worry about her.” Elizabeth gave him a skeptical look, and John sighed. “It really wasn’t your fault. Kate’s taking out some frustrations on people, which is healthier than holding it all in, I suppose.”
“What kind of frustrations?”
John clasped his hands together, arms resting on his knees. “About two weeks ago the base was shelled,” he said. “Colonel Sumner was the commander at the time, and he was one of the ones killed in the initial attack.”
“That’s awful,” Elizabeth said.
“Yeah, and our own wounded were just the beginning,” John continued. “That surgical session felt like it went on for months. Kate and I were the top-ranking officers in the outfit at that point, and we split the operations down the middle. I’d even say she did more work than I did to keep this place running. When I Corps got around to addressing the situation here, I got the promotion and the command and most of the credit.”
“Aha.” Elizabeth ran her fingers down one tie of the surgical mask. “So what do I do to get on her good side?”
“Just stay out of her way for a while till it all blows over.”
“That’ll be difficult. Apparently I’m bunking with her.”
“Yeah, sorry about that.” John sighed. “Most of the time, she’s calm and reasonable and the best nurse I’ve ever worked with. But she’s touchy about promotions and that kind of thing.”
Elizabeth frowned. “Why would she care so much?”
“Well, hopefully she won’t kill me for telling you this,” he replied, “but she was a POW in the last war. I’m not sure she was twenty years old yet when it happened, but she was one of the nurses who didn’t evacuate from Manila before the fall of Bataan. Her and about seventy other nurses. Men who got out of Bataan alive were promoted and awarded the Silver Star. Those women got the Bronze Star, the POW medal, and that was it. There are certain career paths that are closed to those women now because they were prisoners of war, and I think for Kate that still stings a little.”
Staring straight ahead, Elizabeth nodded, clearly lost in thought. At length, she asked, “Where were you, when you were shot down?”
“Northern France,” he replied, wondering about the abrupt change in topic.
She nodded again. “That’s where my brother was,” she said. “When he died.”
John was silent for a moment. “How did he die?”
“Shot in the stomach,” Elizabeth replied. “They got him to an aid station, but before a doctor could look at him he went into cardiac arrest.”
“Like the kid today?” John asked, suddenly understanding that she hadn’t run out to cry just because she’d lost a patient.
Her eyes squeezed shut, she nodded. “You asked me before why I’m here,” she managed to say. “My brother is the reason I became a surgeon. And I think he’s a big part of why I came here.”
Tears started to run down her cheeks, and John awkwardly put his arm around her. She turned to him, burying her face in his shoulder as she cried. Part of him was saying that if she froze up every time she faced a patient who had abdominal injuries, she’d be useless to his command, but at the same time he didn’t want to see her desensitize herself to human pain and suffering. That could be dangerous too.
“Listen,” he said when she’d calmed down a bit, “we do a lot of good work here. We save a lot of lives. But we can’t save everyone. Some people are just so broken when they come in here that we can’t put them back together. Even if your brother had had a surgeon working on him immediately, he probably still would have died. Most men who get injured that badly do.”
“That’s not very comforting,” she said, wiping her nose with the back of her hand.
“I suppose not.”
She looked up, still leaning against him. “What about you?” she asked.
“I was the anomaly,” John replied. “Trust me. I should have died in Chartres.”
She nodded, and they just sat there in the silence that ensued. John rubbed his hand up and down her arm, thinking to himself that it had been a long time since he’d been this close to a woman, close enough that he could smell faint whiffs of shampoo even though she hadn’t washed her hair in a day. Close enough that one side of him was much warmer than the other. It was a good thing he was so tired.
And with that thought, he looked down at his wedding ring and finally made himself move, gently pushing her back. “I have to get to bed, and you probably should too,” he said.
Her eyes crossed momentarily. “Give me a minute to figure out how I get off the floor,” she replied.
John chuckled at that and pushed himself up. “Come on, Doctor,” he said, helping her stand.
He looked her up and down, taking in her very rumpled uniform, and suddenly remembered why he'd gone looking for her in the first place. “Oh, I forgot,” he said. “Kate dug the rest of your paperwork out from the pile of stuff on my desk and found something you might be interested in.”
Despite her tiredness, she looked curious. “Oh?”
“Turns out you’ve not just been transferred,” John replied, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a rank insignia pin. “You’ve been promoted.” He didn't mention it, but it occurred to him then that this had probably played into Kate's general mood. After all, Elizabeth had just been promoted for doing little more than raising her hand. Still, he took her hand, dropped the pin into her palm, and genuinely added, “Congratulations, Captain.”
She started to smile, but it was engulfed by a huge yawn and they both laughed. John decided then that he liked seeing her laugh like that.
Finally, Elizabeth rubbed her face with one hand. “I still have to move my stuff.”
“I’ll get some enlisted men to bring it to you,” he replied, guiding her out of the room. “Normally I’d offer to help, but I don’t think I have that much energy left in me.”
“Right now I just hope I can get all the way to bed.”
“You and me both, Princess.”
He wasn’t quite sure why, but she blushed.
(...yes, there's likely to be more stories where this came from. ;) )
Author: Melyanna
Summary: Lieutenant Colonel John Sheppard has only just taken command of the 8063rd MASH unit when I Corps throws him a curveball - a very intelligent, very young, very female surgeon.
Notes: Blamed almost exclusively on auralan. Someday I will learn to keep my mouth shut. (Probably not.) This is set during the Korean War, inspired by the television series M*A*S*H. Some things are stolen outright - we will call them homages. ;) And in case you didn't catch this already, yes, this is another crack AU.
Many thanks to freifraufischer and miera_c for their beta work.
The CO’s office didn’t look all that different now, despite a change in command. Marshall Sumner’s personal effects had been removed, but they had been minimal to begin with. The place was sterile. John Sheppard supposed that was fitting for an office in a hospital, but it made him uncomfortable. He just hadn’t had the time to move any of his belongings into the room.
Of course, that might make a person wonder why he, the new commander of the 8063rd MASH unit, was sitting at his desk staring at nothing, but the truth of the matter was that he didn’t think he could move a muscle. In the last two weeks, he hadn’t had more than three hours of sleep at a time, and in between naps he’d spent nearly all of his time in the operating room, post-op, or putting out fires around the base, literal or otherwise. He didn’t know how he’d managed not to kill anyone, but his feet were so tired that even the world’s most uncomfortable chair - the one behind his desk - was appealing.
Gingerly, not wanting to knock anything off his desk or offend his aching body, John put his feet up and leaned back. He folded his hands over his stomach and sighed. This was the first quiet moment he had in ages. At first he'd been grateful for the insanity - it was keeping his mind off of matters back home - but there came a point where that was no longer an adequate tradeoff. Tonight he needed some real sleep.
No sooner had the thought formed in his mind than there was a knock on his door. “Chuck,” he called to the company clerk, “you better have good news for me.”
The door opened a little, and John opened his eyes. “Sir, the lieutenant’s arrived,” the sergeant said.
“Show him in,” John replied.
There was an odd look on Chuck’s face, John decided, but he didn’t give it too much thought. At least until he stood back and let the officer in. The lieutenant was tall and dark-haired. And wearing a skirt.
He barely managed not to swear. I Corps had said they were sending a surgeon, not a nurse.
Still, he looked her over somewhat out of reflex - she looked good in that brown dress uniform - and when his eyes finally reached her face she looked annoyed. “You’re Lieutenant Weir?” he asked, reluctantly getting up.
“Yes, sir,” the woman replied, saluting sharply. “Lieutenant Elizabeth Weir reporting.”
“John Sheppard. At ease, Lieutenant.” John maintained eye contact with her for a moment - she had pretty green eyes - before sifting through the stuff on his desk. “You’ll have to forgive me,” he said. “I think I didn’t look at your papers closely enough.”
He glanced up at her again and saw that she looked rather irritated already. “I take it you weren’t expecting a woman,” she replied.
“I asked for a surgeon.” She bristled at his words, and John quickly added, “And whatever that says about me, when I conjure up an image of a surgeon, that surgeon isn’t wearing nylons and heels.”
Elizabeth looked down at her shoes in disdain. “Believe me, I hate this uniform as much as you would.”
John smiled. “I think I like you.”
Her cheeks turned pink.
“Anyway, sorry,” he continued, finally fishing out the paper he was looking for. “Typewriter smudge,” he said, pointing out the line where her first name was supposed to be. “All I knew was that I was looking for a Lieutenant E. Weir.”
“Understandable,” she replied. “I should probably stop getting so defensive about it, but I have to ask: did you look at the line where it says I graduated from Wellesley and then the Medical College of Pennsylvania?”
“What’s your point?” he teased.
“Those are women’s colleges.” Apparently she didn’t catch that he was kidding.
“Well, that explains why my alma mater never played yours in football.” She looked only mildly amused. “Yeah, I didn’t really read most of this. To be perfectly honest, I saw they were sending a new surgeon and was so happy I took a five-minute nap. We’ve been too busy in the last couple weeks for me to pay attention to a lot of details.”
Now, of course, that he wasn't getting this kind of information while trying to save someone's life, his brain was trying desperately to process the implications of this. Living quarters, how she was going to get along with the nurses, plus how he was going to break it to pretty much everyone that Tokyo had sent a woman to do what most people considered a man's job even when it wasn't in a war zone. . .
“They told me in Tokyo that you were new to the command,” she said, sounding rather curious.
“I’ve been at this base since I was drafted,” John replied. “But I was just promoted. I’m still not used to it, I guess. I’ve spent most of the last two weeks in surgery, and chain of command stuff tends to matter less in there.”
“I’d think it’d matter more in there,” Elizabeth replied, raising a brow. "It has to be much more of a high-pressure situation here than the kind of surgical work I was doing back in Japan.
“Well, you’re going to want to rethink that,” he said. “You’re a lieutenant, which means half the nurses outrank you. But when you’re putting someone’s intestines back the way God intended, you have to be the one in charge of things.”
The woman narrowed her eyes. “You’re not regular Army, are you?”
John shook his head. “Not exactly. I volunteered in World War II,” he explained. “Had to jump out of the airplane I was trying to fly and ended up with a medical discharge. Then this little police action started and I got drafted.”
“I see,” she said quietly.
He sensed she was holding something back, and he frowned. “What about you?” he asked. “You’re going to be the only doctor here who actually volunteered, and I’m wondering why.” She looked hesitant to answer, so he smiled tiredly. “Hey, if you’re escaping a tyrannical mother who thinks you should have married your high school sweetheart instead of going to college in the first place. . .”
That got her to laugh, finally. “No, it’s not that,” Elizabeth said. “I’m a surgeon. I really wanted to go where people needed a surgeon. Everything I’ve seen back home seemed to indicate that this was the place.”
John nodded. “As long as you’re not under any delusions about your work here.”
She frowned, and John found himself a little alarmed at how cute he thought that looked. “What do you mean?”
“You’re not here to fight communism, no matter what they told you in basic training,” he said. His tone allowed no discussion on the matter. “We’re here to fight death. When a body’s bleeding, it doesn’t matter to me what kind of uniform is getting stained.”
Wide-eyed, she nodded. Then in the distance, John heard the tell-tale thumping of rotors beating the air. “Come on,” he said, coming around the desk and grabbing her by the arm on his way out of the office.
“What’s going on?”
“We’ve got incoming.”
He dragged her into the surgeons’ changing room, where the unit’s other doctors, Rodney McKay, Carson Beckett, and Marcus Lorne, were changing. Earlier John had spotted Lorne playing in a game of football with some of the enlisted men. He was already stripped down to his shorts and was in the process of changing into a clean undershirt, and Elizabeth blushed bright red when she saw him mostly undressed. It surprised John, and it got him thinking that she’d had a rather conservative upbringing, and probably pretty well-off too.
On his part, Lorne grinned at her as he pulled a shirt over his head. John made a mental note to warn Elizabeth about him once this session was over.
By that point, Rodney noticed them. “Colonel, who’s this?” he demanded.
“This is Doctor Elizabeth Weir,” John replied, trying to remain as casual about it as he could. “Our new surgeon.”
The men all stopped what they were doing and stared. “Really?” Carson said, water running over his hands at the sink.
“How old are you?” Rodney blurted out.
John rolled his eyes. “Sorry, Lieutenant,” he said to Elizabeth. “Rodney here has no social skills.”
“I’m twenty-six,” she answered anyway. “I have a bad habit of finishing school early.”
“That’s remarkable, love,” Carson said. John suspected that out of anyone else’s mouth, that would have come off as offensive, but the Scotsman’s accent seemed to make everything sound better. “Even quicker than you, Rodney.”
“For the last time, Carson, I would have graduated much earlier had my schools allowed me to.”
“Guys,” John interrupted, getting everyone’s attention again. “Like I was saying, Rodney McKay is the socially inept one, and he’s also our neurosurgeon. Carson Beckett over there is on loan to us from the British, and the one who’s finally got all his clothes on is Marcus Lorne, our anesthetist.”
Marcus had indeed finished getting dressed while Rodney and Carson were bickering, and he held out his hand to Elizabeth. She shook it tentatively. “Nice to have you aboard, Doctor,” he said.
Elizabeth opened her mouth to say something to him, but she was interrupted by Rodney. “So I take it we don’t have to clear out space for a new bunkmate after all?” he asked.
John made a face at him. “I think she’ll probably end up with Major Heightmeyer.” At Elizabeth’s curious glance, he added, “The head nurse. She’s got room for another cot.”
“I don’t want to inconvenience anyone,” she said.
“This whole damn war’s an inconvenience, Lieutenant,” he replied. “The nurses’ area is that way. You’ll probably be more comfortable in there.”
She nodded and disappeared behind a white curtain that divided the space. “Well, let’s go,” John said to the others, who’d all watched Elizabeth leave. “Can’t stand up our dates today.”
Elizabeth walked into the next space feeling inordinately nervous. She had known abstractly that MASH units got busy in a hurry - “when it rains it pours,” one colonel had told her - but she’d expected to have at least enough time to get out of her dress uniform before heading into surgery.
She'd been in Army hospitals for a while now, but the sparseness of this one was startling. The walls were just wood, and almost everything was some shade of green or brown. Even the wood shelves had been painted dark green. The only other color she saw was the white of gowns and the curtain behind her. The room was also far too crowded.
The nurses were all so busy that they didn’t notice her entrance, and Elizabeth decided to stay where she was, off to the side, until some of them had cleared out and there was more room for her to get into a surgical gown and get scrubbed up. In the meantime, she realized that the women around her were all talking about the new doctor expected to arrive.
“So what’s his name again?” one asked.
“E. Weir. Lieutenant E. Weir. We don’t know his first name.”
“He must be pretty new to the service if he’s still a lieutenant.”
“Probably pretty young, too.”
“Who cares how old he is, as long as he’s cute!”
“Hey, weren’t you saying just last week that you’d had enough of surgeons?”
“I think she said she’d had enough of these surgeons.”
“Right. Fresh meat.”
The curtain swept open behind Elizabeth, and the rustling of fabric made the nurses all look toward her location. Another woman with wavy blonde hair entered the space, and the nurses all stopped gossiping immediately. The new arrival looked at Elizabeth, though, and said, “Who are you?”
“I’m Elizabeth Weir,” she replied. “Lieutenant Elizabeth Weir. I’m the new surgeon. Colonel Sheppard thought I’d be more comfortable scrubbing up in here than with the men.”
She spared a glance at the other nurses and saw anything from shock to disappointment on their faces. “Well,” said the blonde woman, “I’m Major Kate Heightmeyer, head nurse. Clean gowns are over there, masks on that shelf.” She glanced down Elizabeth’s uniform with a critical eye. “I’ll send someone to get you a pair of shoes and socks. You won’t make it through this in those heels.”
Elizabeth nodded, and the woman disappeared. She turned her attention back to the room and smiled. “Sorry to disappoint, but yes, I’m the new doctor,” she said.
The other women laughed a little, and a young black woman stepped forward. “I’m Lieutenant Emmagan,” she said. “Let me help you.”
Elizabeth smiled at her. “Thank you.”
John was standing at the far end of operating room, waiting for his first patient to be brought in, when Elizabeth entered on the other side. The first two tables were already occupied by Carson and Rodney, both of whom were already operating on patients. “Lieutenant, there’s a free seat back here,” he called.
She passed by the first two tables, her freshly washed hands held in the air. Her face was obstructed by a mask, of course, but when she was close enough, John could see that she was nervous. “Hey,” he said quietly, “just take a deep breath.”
After a moment of hesitation, Elizabeth nodded. Then two more patients were brought in, and they both got to work.
John’s first patient took less than an hour to patch up, so while the medics were carrying the patient to post-op he wandered to Elizabeth’s table. “How’s it going, Doctor?” he asked.
“It’s taken this long just to stop all the bleeding, sir,” Elizabeth replied. “I’ve never seen this many holes in a person. How in the world did he take so much shrapnel?”
“Fragmentation grenade, probably,” John said, taking a look at the small bowl she had deposited shrapnel in. “This guy got lucky. If that last piece had gone half an inch to the right, it would have hit the spine. He could have been paralyzed.”
Across the room, Rodney laughed shortly. “I could have taken care of that.”
“Of course you could have, Rodney,” John said, immediately switching over to his must-humor-Rodney-before-his-ego-fills-the-room voice.
Elizabeth looked up at John skeptically. “But half an inch would be in the-”
Quickly John leaned down and whispered, “Just play along.”
She looked at him like he was crazy, but still repeated, “Of course you could have, Rodney.”
“Anyway,” John continued as Elizabeth returned to carefully removing the last piece of shrapnel, “good work.”
“Thank you, Doctor.”
“Eins. Zwei.”
Elizabeth was counting as she pulled bits of shrapnel out of a young man’s leg, a habit she’d picked up back when she’d first started operating on people. It helped her concentrate.
“German, Lieutenant?” Lorne said from his seat at the other end of the patient.
Elizabeth looked up and smiled at him even though he couldn’t see most of her face. “Sorry. I speak a lot of languages.” She pulled out another two pieces of shrapnel. “Trois. Quatre.”
“Careful there, Doctor,” Carson Beckett called. “He likes girls who speak French.”
Elizabeth raised a brow at the anesthetist, and he shrugged. “I like girls in general.”
“Thought so.” She turned her attention back to the leg in front of her. “Pyat'. Shest'. Siem'.”
“That’s it, I could never date you.”
Behind her mask, Elizabeth grinned.
Kate Heightmeyer was pacing along the length of the operating room. “Well, at least if the Soviets capture us all, we’ll have a translator,” she remarked.
“Don’t suppose you speak Korean, do you?” Colonel Sheppard asked behind her.
“Not yet,” Elizabeth replied. “It didn’t take me too long to pick up conversational Japanese, though, so hopefully I will soon.”
“That’s good to know.”
Rodney called for the medics to bring in another patient, and Lorne moved on to that table. Elizabeth, in the meantime, began stitching up the gash on her patient’s leg. However, her methodical stitches soon caught Major Heightmeyer’s attention. “Doctor,” she said, coming by, “what are you doing?”
“Closing,” Elizabeth replied. “With any luck, he’ll barely have a scar.”
“That isn’t the kind of work we do here,” Kate said sternly. “We keep them alive, we get them stable, and we send them to people who have more time. You can’t spend this much time sewing someone up when there are boys out in pre-op whose lives depend on them getting in here.”
Elizabeth swallowed and did her best to hurry. “Yes, ma’am.”
She closed as quickly as she could, and while medics carried her patient out, Carson said, “Doctor Weir, could you step over here for a moment? I need an extra pair of eyes, and yours are younger than mine.”
“Carson, I’m hurt,” Lorne said as Elizabeth came over to Carson’s table. “You usually ask me to help.”
“You’re working, she isn’t,” Carson replied. He looked up at Elizabeth. “Do you see any more bleeding?”
“More suction,” she said to the nurse. “There’s a small puncture over on this side,” she continued after a moment. “You’d never see it from your angle.”
Medics brought in another wounded man, and Elizabeth pulled off the gloves from her last operation. “Thank you, Liz,” Carson said as she walked away.
She winced a little. “I’d really rather you didn’t call me that.”
“All right,” he said, but then Lorne jumped in.
“Lizzie?” he suggested. “Lisa? Beth? Eliza?”
Elizabeth shook her head vehemently as she got back to work. “There isn’t a diminutive of my name that I haven’t heard, and there isn’t one I like,” she said.
“Hey, Princess,” Sheppard called. Elizabeth looked up and he grinned behind his mask. Next to him, Kate gave him a disappointed look, and he cleared his throat. “Sorry, Lieutenant,” he said to Elizabeth. “Just a joke.”
“Hey, I answered to it, didn’t I?” she replied, looking at him sheepishly. That just made him grin again.
They passed a little bit of time with only the usual back-and-forth of the nurses and surgeons, until Carson pulled his gloves off and asked, “So, Elizabeth, what were you doing before you came here?”
Before replying she asked the nurse assisting her for a clamp. “I was in an Army hospital in Tokyo, actually,” she replied. “I was doing follow-up treatment on a lot of patients who came through MASH units, including this one. Then my commander got an urgent request to send someone here, and I raised my hand.”
"Could have been sent here anyway," Sheppard said quietly. "With the Chinese getting involved, I'd bet everyone in Tokyo under forty is in danger of getting sent here."
“So you’ve seen our work before?” Rodney asked.
“Yes, I think I recognize your stitch technique,” Elizabeth said. “Very distinctive.”
“Really?”
“No, but I’m sure it’s very good,” she teased.
“She’s a fast learner, Colonel,” Lorne said.
“Well, it’s not like handling Rodney is a huge chore,” John replied.
“Excuse me, I do not need to be handled,” Rodney said.
“Of course not, Rodney.” Elizabeth heard this from both sides of the room, as both Carson and the colonel had said it at once.
One of the doors opened then, and Chuck entered. “Colonel Sheppard, we’ve got a small problem,” he announced.
“What’s that, Sergeant Sunshine?” John asked.
“There’s a patient whose blood type is A-, and another who’s O+,” the sergeant said. “We’re completely out of those, and running pretty low on O- too.”
“And I take it our A-, O+, and O- personnel have already given as much as they can to the cause?”
“Yeah, we’ve already drawn too much from them, actually.”
“Well, that’s just peachy.” John looked up. “Doctor Weir, any chance you’ve got one of those blood types?”
“A-, as it happens,” she replied. “I’m almost finished here.”
“Good. Lieutenant Emmagan, head to post-op and get everything set up so we can do this as quickly as possible.”
“Yes, sir,” the nurse said, hurrying out.
A few minutes later, Elizabeth finished up repairing her patient’s small intestine and turned to the nurse assisting her. “Close for me, will you?” she said. “I need to let Dracula have his merry way with me.”
“Dracula?” Lorne asked as Elizabeth pulled her gloves off and headed to the door.
“It’s a long story.”
The nurse was ready and waiting for her in post-op, a long room lined on either side with beds. Elizabeth was pretty sure that they didn't have enough beds for the number of patients coming in, and she wondered what they'd do with the rest. “Doctor, if you’ll have a seat,” she said, gesturing to the chair next to her.
Elizabeth sat and let the nurse go about her work. As Emmagan inserted the needle into her arm, she winced. “It isn’t normal for a surgeon to be squeamish about blood,” Emmagan commented.
“Only about mine,” Elizabeth replied. “I kind of like keeping it inside me.” She watched the young nurse as she finished things up. “I didn’t catch your first name before.”
“Teyla,” she said. “And it’s all right. I don’t think I told you.”
“Well, thank you for your help earlier, Teyla,” Elizabeth said. “Is there anything I can do for you?”
Teyla handed her a cup, smiling kindly. “Keep yourself hydrated in there,” she replied. “It’ll help. I’ve done a lot of these marathon surgery sessions, and it helps if you’re not parched.”
Obediently, Elizabeth drank the entire glass of water.
“Lieutenant,” Kate Heightmeyer called from the door to post-op. The new doctor was still sitting down in one corner. “We need you back in surgery.”
“Ma’am, it’s only been-”
“Stand up,” Kate ordered. The younger woman did as she was told. “Are you dizzy?”
“No,” Elizabeth replied.
“We need you back in the OR,” Kate said. “I was serious about what I said before. There are a lot of luxuries you won’t get here, and time is one of them.”
Elizabeth hurried out, and Kate turned around to see that John had been watching at least part of the exchange. “We’ve just had a few new arrivals, Kate,” he said. “Come help me with triage.”
She followed him to pre-op, where five boys were lined up and awaiting examination. As they moved through them, John quietly said, “You should cut her some slack.”
“Just because she’s new?” Kate asked. “I don’t think that’s reasonable.”
“She’s been here eight hours, Kate.”
“I went and looked at her file again,” she said. “Her parents are her next of kin. They live in the Beacon Hill neighborhood of Boston.”
John checked a soldier’s dogtags. “Is that a good thing?”
“It’s a pretty wealthy area of Boston,” Kate replied. “She went to Girls’ Latin and graduated at sixteen. Graduated from Wellesley at nineteen and still got into medical school even though she was that young. That’s the kind of thing that happens when Daddy donates a new lab building.”
“Kate, I think you’re overreacting,” John told her bluntly.
“I’m worried, John,” she said. “I’m worried that Tokyo sent us a sweet young woman who’s never had to pick up her socks before, let alone live in a tent.”
“Well, she’s going to be living with you,” he replied, “so have fun with that.”
“John,” she pressed.
“Kate.” He looked up at her across from a patient. “At the moment, I see a damn good surgeon. I don’t care that she’s a woman or that she’s young or that she’s from a rich family. And right now I’m telling you: back off.”
She stared him down for a moment and exhaled a little loudly. “Yes, sir,” she said. It was the first time she’d called him that.
“Kate.”
She shook her head. “You’re in command now, John. You outrank me. We might as well get used to it.” This wasn't like her and they both knew it, but apparently John was willing to let it go.
They took care of the patient between them, and then Kate couldn’t resist any longer. “Has she sent you the papers yet?” she asked quietly.
John froze for a moment, his hand over a bandage. “Yeah,” he replied, not looking at her. “Got them two days ago.”
“I’m sorry,” Kate said. “Have you decided whether or not you’re going to grant her the divorce?”
He shook his head. “I wrote to her when the papers came. Told her things were too hectic here for me to make a decision that big.” He sighed and stood up straight. “I wanted to be angry with her and tell her I wouldn’t let her marry this other guy, but the truth of the matter is I never could tell her no.”
Kate reached out and touched his arm gently, but he seemed to shake it off. “There’s work to do,” he said, heading back to the OR. She couldn’t help but remember that he’d said the same thing when he’d first gotten the news of his wife’s affair.
Elizabeth came back to the operating room after fifteen or twenty minutes. “Did the vampires drain you dry?” John teased, trying to lighten his own mood.
“Pretty much, sir.” She walked up to her table, where a patient was waiting. “What have we got here?”
“He was driving a jeep with supplies up to one of the aid stations,” a nurse explained. “A shell hit the road right in front of him and he swerved into a ditch.”
“All right, let’s get to work,” Elizabeth replied.
Having looked over that patient earlier, John was pretty sure what Elizabeth was facing. The blunt trauma sustained in the accident had resulted in a ruptured spleen, and she got to work removing it and repairing other internal damage to the soldier. However, in the middle of the operation, the nurse monitoring the patient’s vitals suddenly sat up. “Doctor, his pulse is dropping drastically.”
John looked up from his own patient as Elizabeth reached over to feel the man’s neck for a pulse. “Right, he’s going into cardiac arrest,” she said, her voice higher than usual.
She gave out her orders with seeming confidence as she started chest compressions, and she did everything she was supposed to, but it was too late. She couldn’t revive him, and within minutes the patient was dead.
Her voice was shaking as she told the medics to take the body away. A sergeant asked if he needed to bring the next patient in, but she looked up at John across the operating tables. He jerked his head toward the door. “Take a minute if you need it, Lieutenant,” he said.
Elizabeth nodded once and escaped. When she came back, it was obvious to John that she had been crying.
Surgery only lasted ten hours that day. It was well into the evening before they were all out. John wanted nothing more than to crawl into bed, but he had things to finish up in his office. Kate had dug up Lieutenant Weir’s paperwork while they were in OR and had left him a note telling him to look at it more closely. After a quick perusal, he discovered that I Corps had sent her promotion papers ahead of her. He headed off to find Elizabeth.
When he stepped out of his office, he saw that her luggage was still sitting next to Chuck’s desk. Curious, he headed toward the nurses’ changing area. He pulled the curtain back enough to take a look, and there was Elizabeth sitting on the floor, her surgical mask still in her hands.
John knocked lightly on the wall. Startled, Elizabeth started to push herself up, but he waved her off. “Don’t trouble yourself,” he said, coming in to sit beside her.
“I’m sorry, sir,” she replied. “I’m not having the best first day ever.”
“No one does here.” John leaned against the wall and slid down to the floor next to her. “It’s always hard to lose one. And harder when you can look at the man and know he can’t be as old as you. Even as old as you, instead of the rest of us.”
His light teasing drew a hint of a smile from her, but it soon faded. “So what did I do to run afoul of Major Heightmeyer?” she asked.
“Nothing. Don’t worry about her.” Elizabeth gave him a skeptical look, and John sighed. “It really wasn’t your fault. Kate’s taking out some frustrations on people, which is healthier than holding it all in, I suppose.”
“What kind of frustrations?”
John clasped his hands together, arms resting on his knees. “About two weeks ago the base was shelled,” he said. “Colonel Sumner was the commander at the time, and he was one of the ones killed in the initial attack.”
“That’s awful,” Elizabeth said.
“Yeah, and our own wounded were just the beginning,” John continued. “That surgical session felt like it went on for months. Kate and I were the top-ranking officers in the outfit at that point, and we split the operations down the middle. I’d even say she did more work than I did to keep this place running. When I Corps got around to addressing the situation here, I got the promotion and the command and most of the credit.”
“Aha.” Elizabeth ran her fingers down one tie of the surgical mask. “So what do I do to get on her good side?”
“Just stay out of her way for a while till it all blows over.”
“That’ll be difficult. Apparently I’m bunking with her.”
“Yeah, sorry about that.” John sighed. “Most of the time, she’s calm and reasonable and the best nurse I’ve ever worked with. But she’s touchy about promotions and that kind of thing.”
Elizabeth frowned. “Why would she care so much?”
“Well, hopefully she won’t kill me for telling you this,” he replied, “but she was a POW in the last war. I’m not sure she was twenty years old yet when it happened, but she was one of the nurses who didn’t evacuate from Manila before the fall of Bataan. Her and about seventy other nurses. Men who got out of Bataan alive were promoted and awarded the Silver Star. Those women got the Bronze Star, the POW medal, and that was it. There are certain career paths that are closed to those women now because they were prisoners of war, and I think for Kate that still stings a little.”
Staring straight ahead, Elizabeth nodded, clearly lost in thought. At length, she asked, “Where were you, when you were shot down?”
“Northern France,” he replied, wondering about the abrupt change in topic.
She nodded again. “That’s where my brother was,” she said. “When he died.”
John was silent for a moment. “How did he die?”
“Shot in the stomach,” Elizabeth replied. “They got him to an aid station, but before a doctor could look at him he went into cardiac arrest.”
“Like the kid today?” John asked, suddenly understanding that she hadn’t run out to cry just because she’d lost a patient.
Her eyes squeezed shut, she nodded. “You asked me before why I’m here,” she managed to say. “My brother is the reason I became a surgeon. And I think he’s a big part of why I came here.”
Tears started to run down her cheeks, and John awkwardly put his arm around her. She turned to him, burying her face in his shoulder as she cried. Part of him was saying that if she froze up every time she faced a patient who had abdominal injuries, she’d be useless to his command, but at the same time he didn’t want to see her desensitize herself to human pain and suffering. That could be dangerous too.
“Listen,” he said when she’d calmed down a bit, “we do a lot of good work here. We save a lot of lives. But we can’t save everyone. Some people are just so broken when they come in here that we can’t put them back together. Even if your brother had had a surgeon working on him immediately, he probably still would have died. Most men who get injured that badly do.”
“That’s not very comforting,” she said, wiping her nose with the back of her hand.
“I suppose not.”
She looked up, still leaning against him. “What about you?” she asked.
“I was the anomaly,” John replied. “Trust me. I should have died in Chartres.”
She nodded, and they just sat there in the silence that ensued. John rubbed his hand up and down her arm, thinking to himself that it had been a long time since he’d been this close to a woman, close enough that he could smell faint whiffs of shampoo even though she hadn’t washed her hair in a day. Close enough that one side of him was much warmer than the other. It was a good thing he was so tired.
And with that thought, he looked down at his wedding ring and finally made himself move, gently pushing her back. “I have to get to bed, and you probably should too,” he said.
Her eyes crossed momentarily. “Give me a minute to figure out how I get off the floor,” she replied.
John chuckled at that and pushed himself up. “Come on, Doctor,” he said, helping her stand.
He looked her up and down, taking in her very rumpled uniform, and suddenly remembered why he'd gone looking for her in the first place. “Oh, I forgot,” he said. “Kate dug the rest of your paperwork out from the pile of stuff on my desk and found something you might be interested in.”
Despite her tiredness, she looked curious. “Oh?”
“Turns out you’ve not just been transferred,” John replied, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a rank insignia pin. “You’ve been promoted.” He didn't mention it, but it occurred to him then that this had probably played into Kate's general mood. After all, Elizabeth had just been promoted for doing little more than raising her hand. Still, he took her hand, dropped the pin into her palm, and genuinely added, “Congratulations, Captain.”
She started to smile, but it was engulfed by a huge yawn and they both laughed. John decided then that he liked seeing her laugh like that.
Finally, Elizabeth rubbed her face with one hand. “I still have to move my stuff.”
“I’ll get some enlisted men to bring it to you,” he replied, guiding her out of the room. “Normally I’d offer to help, but I don’t think I have that much energy left in me.”
“Right now I just hope I can get all the way to bed.”
“You and me both, Princess.”
He wasn’t quite sure why, but she blushed.
(...yes, there's likely to be more stories where this came from. ;) )