Chapter Text
Trapper’s gone, no note, just a sweet kiss on the cheek from Radar, and Hawkeye is alone.
He misses him. Frank says something stupid, and Hawkeye automatically hears Trap’s voice in his head with a quick response. The food in the mess tent is as bad as always, and he turns to complain to Trapper about it, but he’s not there. There’s some complications with a kid in post op, and his first instinct is to get Trap to consult on it. But he’s gone, and Hawkeye is alone. He’s so
angry
, and it’s seeping through his every word right now. It’s not fair to the people around him, and he’s angry about that too.
Radar tells him they’ll have a replacement surgeon in a couple of weeks, and Hawkeye is equally glad that they’ll be getting a replacement at all, and to have a little time to get his head on right.
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It wasn’t even difficult.
That’s what Josephine Felten always thinks to herself. One would like to think scamming the admissions department at a nationally renowned medical school would be impossible, but it just goes to prove that they never so much as glanced at her first three applications.
She has a half glass of wine after every shift that has lost her a patient during or after surgery, which means she has roughly a half glass of wine per month. Her success rate is 98.9%, which is higher than any other surgeon at Seattle General, and to her knowledge, no one has ever suspected that she’s a woman. She assumes this is because she was born to this. Born to this passion, born to this field. Meant to be.
She’s certainly worked hard enough to make all of this happen, God knows. Sure, there’s obviously some natural talent, a natural propensity. She doesn’t get faint or throw up at the sight of blood, the concept of stitching through someone’s flesh has never turned her stomach, things that are to the benefit of her chosen field, of course, but still. She’s practiced, and studied, and worked harder than anyone she studied with, interned with.
After high school, which her highly Catholic parents didn’t even want her to attend, she applied for three years in a row to the University of Washington’s state of the art medical program. Denied each time, and never told why, but she knows. People don’t think women can be doctors, much less surgeons. Maybe they’re cut out to be nurses, but that’s just because men don’t like to do what they’re told so much, don’t like to take imperious orders from other men - can’t handle it well enough to be nurses.
She was 21 when the hare-brained scheme came to her, and she enacted it before she had a chance to sleep on it, recognize the ridiculousness, and talk herself out of it.
She very carefully changed a few forms, altered a few letters here and there, and voila! She applied as a man, Joseph Felten, and lo and behold, they accepted her. Med school, internship, residence, and a position at Seattle General for the last two year. She’s been head of the class for as long as she can remember - she’s smart, she’s quick, her hands are nimble and strong.
There are some hard moments - it’s difficult, sometimes, to hide from everyone she knows. Her family thinks she trained as a nurse, and when she visits them, she wears a pretty floral dress, and tells them about the aspects of her work that a nurse would know - dressing wounds, stitching things up. Sometimes she gets a little bold, and talks about being a surgical assistant; as close as she can get to talking about her real work - being elbow deep in people, fixing what’s gone wrong inside of them.
At the hospital, she dresses in trousers, button down shirts, and a tie. She has always been a slight build, which helps when she binds her chest. Her shirts are a bit looser than fashion would dictate; it hides the swell of her hips, any leftover curvature around her breasts that the binding doesn’t completely fix. She uses a little charcoal to carefully thicken her eyebrows, squares off what sideburns she has, and adjusts her walk, adjusts the register of her voice.
She knows she still comes across as a bit feminine, but to this point, no one has ever questioned her to her face, so she assumes she’s doing well enough, even if she isn’t doing it perfectly. She goes by Joe, but she likes to hear it as ‘Jo’. She doesn’t socialize outside of the hospital. She knows that to truly pull this off, to truly go to the heights that her work can take her, it’s going to be a lonely road. She can’t get too close to anyone, because she can’t trust anyone with her secret. She’ll never know who would blow the whistle, and all her work, all her sweat and tears will be thrown to the wind. This is her passion. This is her work, saving people’s lives, and she will do it, to the detriment of all else.
And then?
Well, and then she gets drafted to a MASH unit in the Korean war, and everything falls apart.