Chapter Text
Kate stared around the room in front of her in shock and disbelief. The last thing she remembered…she couldn’t remember anything specifically, actually. Which would be frightening, except for the place she found herself now trumped that. Wherever this was, it was some sort of rudimentary operating room that, without a doubt, was not compliant with either OSHA or AMA standards. It looked like something one might find in an apocalypse, a makeshift hospital in a flimsy-walled building hardly more than a tent. Six operating tables, somewhat less makeshift but certainly far below the standards of any NYC hospital, were crammed together with barely enough space between them for the surgical personnel to move without colliding with each other. The surgical tools, even the personal protective equipment, looked like they were relics from the last century—and not the end of it, but the middle. She was only partly surprised there was no ether inhaler used for anesthesia!
As the archer slowly became immersed in the cacophony of the open room, she came to realize that she herself was wearing a surgical gown, mask, cap, and gloves—she was a doctor?! The sounds began to even out and separate into something relatively comprehensible—six life-saving operations underway at once. Something about the Chinese and the Yalu and more casualties incoming. Something about…
“When we’re done here today, what do you say you come back to my tent and I’ll help restore the feeling in your fingers,” one of the other doctors suggested humorously to a nurse assisting him.
“Hawkeye, you can flirt with my nurses on your own time.” A stern, commanding female voice sounded from another operating table.
Hawkeye? It hadn’t sounded like Clint.
“Yeah, Pierce; this is the government’s dime, and you’ve got a job to do.” The doctor at the same table then piled on.
“Thank you, Frank; I’m up to my eyebrows in GI guts and shrapnel thanks to our friends from the other side of the Thirty-Eighth Parallel, so I forgot what I was doing here,” the first doctor—Hawkeye, or Pierce—retorted.
“Doctor? Doctor? Doctor Bishop! He’s starting to bleed out.” A nurse at Kate’s own operating table broke through her disconnected attempts to make sense of her environment.
“Oh, shit!” the raven-haired now-surgeon muttered. What the hell was she doing? Where the hell was she? One minute she was cuddling with Yelena and the dogs on the couch after a particularly stressful patrol—she had remembered that much—and the next, she was here—wherever that was—with some young man’s life in her very much unqualified hands.
“Kid, I know you were just drafted and you’re fresh out of med school, but you’ve got this. You know everything you need. Just breathe,” the man operating at the next table encouraged her, his voice calm, kind, and grandfatherly.
Literally nothing the kindly old man said was true. Kate did not have this. Kate did not know everything she needed. Kate definitely was not fresh out of med school, and she couldn’t be drafted. She was freaking out inside, because the only thing she’d recognized so far was the name ‘Hawkeye,’ and the snarky, flirtatious, late-20s doctor was definitely not Clint. This Hawkeye seemed like he had more in common with her than her mentor (although her flirting, while more awkward, was less sexist).
Wait, drafted? She was in a war?! Kate couldn’t keep trying to make sense of things, however, because her patient began to go into cardiac arrest.
“Shit. Fuck,” she muttered, before taking a deep breath and trying to understand the problem at hand: saving this young man’s life. Shockingly, when she focused, she suddenly found that she did know what to do, as though surgical techniques and skills were sitting in her subconscious. Her hands began to move, unbidden, with practiced ease—though urgently—not unlike how they pulled an arrow from her quiver, nocked it, drew it back, and let it fly. It was a fluid motion, no dithering, no uncertainty—second nature.
Once she found herself in the rhythm, the newly-minted surgeon made quick work of finding and fixing the bleeder, which in turn restored the young man’s blood pressure and allowed them to guide his heart back to normal operation. Her hands worked quickly and decisively, patching up the young soldier’s insides—not letting herself think about how he looked younger than her, barely older than Peter, sent by his country to die in a foreign land in defense of freedom (or something like that, considering South Korea—the south side of the Thirty-Eighth Parallel, something a part of her mind had managed to piece together—would find itself governed by a series of military and presidential anti-Communist dictatorships for most of the years prior to her actual birth).
“Blood pressure rising,” one of Kate’s nurses reported hopefully after she had stopped the bleeding.
“Normal sinus rhythm,” another added soon after. “Nice work, Doctor.”
“Let’s get the rest of this shrapnel out of here, and then we can celebrate,” the archer-cum-surgeon found herself saying. “Sponge.” “Forceps.” “Suction.” The process continued for some time, with the raven-haired woman calling out for a tool and one of her nurses responding, allowing her to examine the young soldier’s chest cavity for additional shrapnel and damage. Once she was confident that there were no more pieces of metal or damaged tissues, Kate was relieved to announce the final step in the surgery: “OK, let’s close him up.”
The other doctors also finished up at around the same time…thankfully, today appeared to have been a slow day, with just the handful of surgical cases. For some reason, though, the misplaced archer felt that the light caseload was rarely the norm. Still, it was a lucky break for her as she got her sea legs, as it were.
“See, you knew everything that you needed,” the kindly old man commented. “That was a great save, Doctor.”
“Thank you, sir.” She didn’t know why she responded that way; once again, it seemed second nature.
“It doesn’t get any easier, but experience makes it not as hard,” the old man added gently, something of a nonsensical aphorism, but reassuring in its own way. “And can the ‘sir’; in the OR, we’re all doctors, not soldiers.”
The young woman nodded in assent.
Kate couldn’t even clean and bandage a small cut to Yelena’s satisfaction. And, yet here she was, performing life-saving major surgery in a rickety building in the middle of the Korean War. Wait, Yelena! What had happened to her? The archer still didn’t recall much more than that the pair had been in the loft, on the couch, with the dogs, last Kate could remember.
As much as the raven-haired woman missed her favorite assassin, she hoped very much that Yelena was still in the loft and not…lost out here somewhere, decades in the past, in the midst of a war—the very first ‘hot war’ of the Cold War era. She knew the Widow could take care of herself—better than Kate on that front, usually—but it didn’t stop the archer from wanting her girlfriend safe. That came with the territory, with love. She knew the blonde would be worried, though, so she would have to keep her eyes peeled for any anomaly, anything that looked like a way home…or at least a way to send a message. The chances that her cell phone was back in…wherever she slept…the barracks?…were slim, and, even if so, of it working were probably nil. Kate really wished she had paid more attention in her history of communications technology class in college, but she was fairly certain that there was no cell service for a few decades yet.
What she did know—or at least thought she knew—was that there were no female doctors in the field in the military during the Korean War. Nurses, yes. Doctors, no. Yet these other doctors—and the nurses, too—seemed not to notice that Kate was a woman. She was certain that the one—Frank—would have had something to say about it if they had noticed (maybe his nurse, too; she seemed like she could have been Regular Army, from what little the archer had picked up in the OR). So…out of place in time, in location, and in occupation—in more ways than one—yet somehow not seen as such by the others. Everyone had reacted as though it were completely normal for there to be a female surgeon in the field. Whatever had happened, what ever this was, it was weird; it might even top Kamala’s stories—and one of those had Kate and Yelena becoming werewolves the first time they were in the same city!
“Good work today, all of you,” the kindly old man announced as the orderlies began wheeling the patients into post-op. “Be sure to show Captain Bishop here a proper 4077th welcome,” he continued, before adding, “But not too much of one, Pierce, Hunnicutt” while shooting a look at Hawkeye/Pierce and the doctor next to him, another tall, late-20s man, dirty-blond with a receding hairline.
“Yes, sir, Colonel Potter, sir,” the smarmy doctor they’d called Frank replied, in the process also identifying the grandfatherly man as ‘Colonel Potter,’ presumably the outfit’s commanding officer.
When Frank started to make a beeline for Kate, his nurse spoke up in a sweet but commanding tone. “Major Burns, a word, please,” causing the man to stop in his tracks and whirl around.
“Yes, Major Houlihan, of course,” Frank Burns responded, nearly stumbling over his words—and his feet.
Major Houlihan, the aforementioned nurse, then nodded at Pierce, Hunnicutt, and Kate, and acknowledged their departure with a “Captains.”
“Major,” Hunnicutt replied.
At the same time, Hawkeye/Pierce instead answered, “See you soon, Margaret,” in a vaguely teasing manner, before turning to Hunnicutt and adding, “C’mon, BJ, let’s get out of these suits so we can show Captain Bishop around like Colonel Potter ordered.”
“Following orders? Who are you and what have you done with my friend?” teased Hunnicutt.
“When it comes to being welcoming, I make an exception for a quality surgeon. Especially if it helps keep Frank’s hands off a patient.”
Kate was slowly piecing the personnel together. The old man, Colonel Potter, was in charge. Majors Frank Burns and Margaret Houlihan, the whiny doctor and the no-nonsense nurse. And Captains Hawkeye/Pierce and BJ Hunnicutt, one a bit of a prankster and the other more straitlaced, but both more genial and easy-going than the Majors. (Maybe being uptight came with the promotion to Major? But then again, Colonel Potter seemed kindly—and with the patience of a saint, if he had to put up with banter like that every time in the OR—so maybe it was particular to these two Majors.)
Still, Kate was glad to be done with her very first surgery, and getting out of the surgical gear and getting a tour seemed like a good idea. She followed the two men out the other door into the scrub room to clean up, and the door swung closed behind her. Welcome to Korea, she guessed.
Yelena awoke with a start, confused as to why she was curled up on the couch with two dogs and no Kate. The confusion quickly became a panic when she realized Kate was nowhere to be found in the loft and had left no note. Worse, all of the archer’s shoes were still in a muddled mess by the door (it took Yelena twice as long as it should have to count pairs!), and even her phone was sitting on the end table in its custom purple Hawkeye case (“Branding,” Kate had explained.)
The last thing the blonde remembered was the two of them cuddled together on the couch watching something on television. Really, watching was a misnomer; they were far more focused on each other after the stressful patrol they’d had—a Tracksuit had come out of nowhere and gotten the drop on Kate, and things had gone to hell very quickly at that point. So a little relaxation was in order, along with gentle touches and soothing words. Then Yelena remembered trying to make Kate feel better by asking the archer to show her the Hawkeye coin trick again. But neither of them had a coin, so Kate had taken something off an arrowhead and used that instead, hitting the TV like the champ she was.
The Widow’s head whipped around to the TV, just in time to hear a familiar voice. “Thanks, Doctor. It’s all so crazy and overwhelming.”
“It always is. Every single day. War is what man created to make hell look good, and politics is what man invented to give everyone an excuse to hate, and you’re stuck in the middle of them both, kid.”
Yelena recognized Kate and her ponytail, now nodding at the black-haired doctor who had just spoken, as the two and another man pulled off blood-stained surgical gowns.
“You can call me Hawkeye; all my friends do,” the dark-haired man continued.
“Thanks, Hawkeye,” Kate beamed, as she continued to strip off her used surgical PPE, revealing not her trademark black pants and purple archery top that she had been wearing earlier that evening, but a pair of olive green fatigues.
“Do they call you anything, or is it just ‘Doctor Bishop’?”
“My girlfriend calls me ‘Little Hawk’ sometimes.”
“You’re not that little,” Hawkeye replied in confusion. “You’re not one of us trees, sure”—he gestured to himself and the other tall man—“but it’s not like you’re Radar.”
“She’s three inches shorter than me,” the archer responded with an enormous grin.
Yelena’s stomach twisted. The good news was that Kate still remembered her…that Kate still was Kate, even in these awful circumstances piled on top of awful circumstances. The bad news was Kate was trapped somewhere else, somehow.
Hawkeye let out a chuckle and clapped Kate on the back. “C’mon, Little Hawk, I’ve got something that will make you feel at home. Tastes like battery acid, but it’ll take the edge off. I wouldn’t recommend trying to get drunk with it, though, because that’ll take your stomach off,” he joked.
Yelena watched in disbelief as the pair, joined by the other tall, late-20s doctor, this one dirty-blonde with a slightly receding hairline, made their way from the “hospital” building towards the personnel tents. Then the opening credits to M*A*S*H played, and the Widow’s jaw dropped. Kate Bishop…was in their TV.
“So…do we have you on the signpost already?” BJ asked Kate as the trio walked across the compound, gesturing to the directional sign outside of a central tent.
“Coney Island’s close enough, I think,” the archer-slash-doctor responded with a chuckle.
“Ah, a New Yawker,” Hawkeye exclaimed, putting on an accent that waffled between New York and Down East. “Crabapple Cove, Maine,” he added, gesturing to himself.
“Mill Valley, just outside San Francisco,” BJ contributed.
“Manhattan,” Kate offered with a smile.
“Oh ho ho, a big shot,” Hawkeye chuckled. “Just like in the OR,” he smiled, praising Kate’s work.
“Swamp?” Kate asked in confusion, as the trio turned towards the tent near the directional sign; the green canvas structure had the word scrawled on the top of its door.
“The finest accommodations in all of Korea,” the dark-haired doctor proclaimed.
“Don’t believe a word he says,” BJ countered, shaking his head playfully.
“Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like The Swamp…not home, that’s for damn sure,” Hawkeye explained, opening the door and ushering Kate inside with them.
The misplaced archer took in the…lived in…quarters; home it definitely was not, and the state of disarray made her loft look like a pristine penthouse. Although, to be fair, she also had a lot more space to clean, and this was only 244 square feet. A makeshift potbelly stove in the center for warmth, a cot at each of the four corners (the nearest of which was draped with a red bathrobe), three of which had matching footlockers, assorted tables and shelves made from surplus ammo boxes, and…was that a…still?!
“Is that…?” Kate inquired, flabbergasted.
“Best gin this side of the minefield,” Hawkeye replied, already rounding up the glasses. “My first tentmate, Trapper John McIntyre, and I built it.”
“Out of parts scavenged and scrounged from who knows where,” BJ filled in. “Heating coil came from an ammo truck, funnel’s from the generator shed…”
“And the filters are shredded skivvies—Frank’s, to be exact.” Hawkeye nodded towards the bunk with footlocker on the other side of the door. “Whenever he’s whining about not having any, it’s because we needed to change the filters,” the doctor chuckled.
“That is so cool. Wait, the minefield?!”
“Some desk jockey with fewer brain cells than Frank decided that the best way to protect the camp from the North Koreans was to lay a minefield beyond the northern perimeter of the camp,” Hawkeye explained.
“The edge of it makes for a nice place to take a date, or so I’ve been told,” BJ shrugged, rotating his hand to make sure his wedding ring flashed in the light.
“You really don’t know what you’re missing, BJ,” the dark-haired doctor teased. “The serenity of nature and enough TNT to decimate a battalion.”
“Thanks, but I’ll stick to Golden Gate Park.”
Kate, meanwhile, had been studying the still intently, her curious tinkerer’s mind working out how she could build one of these back in the loft. Oh, shit, the loft. Her heart sank. The guys had been such a good distraction that she had forgotten all about her situation for a bit. And…that was a good thing, in general, because she’d need to figure out how to exist in this world without driving herself crazy over her fate, but at the same time, this was not her real life, and she wanted to get back to Yelena, Lucky, and Fanny.
While the lost archer had been examining the still, Hunnicutt had been operating it, filling three martini glasses with the battlefield’s finest gin. “One rotgut martini for the good doctor, coming right up,” he announced, then handed Kate and Hawkeye two of the glasses before taking the third himself.
“Welcome to Korea, Kate Bishop. May your stay be brief and unmemorable. Cheers!”
“Cheers,” Kate toasted as the three doctors clinked their glasses together.
“I’ll drink to that,” BJ added.
The archer-cum-doctor sipped her martini before momentarily nearly choking on the low-quality alcohol. “Blhblhblh,” she shook her head rapidly, ponytail flying behind her, trying to ease the taste. “Woo!” she added once it was all down the hatch.
“You’ll get used to it,” Hunnicutt offered from experience.
“I’m mostly a beer person.”
“Think of it this way…any hard stuff you try after this will feel smooth as silk.” All three laughed in response.
The two men decamped to their cots while Hawkeye directed Kate to the airplane seat between his cot and the still. The trio of doctors sat and drank in silence for a few sips, enjoying the downtime and the company—and the absence of the men’s tentmate, Frank Burns. Hawkeye had reigned in his gift of gab (and accompanying sense of humor) to give their new arrival some space to process.
“How do you do it?” Kate asked, breaking the comfortable silence. “Stay sane, not be driven mad thinking of home?” Her brain had caught back up to her thoughts from when she examined the still.
“Some days you’re so busy all you can think about is the GI in front of you and patching them up, one after another,” Hawkeye answered.
“It’s the slow days that are the worst,” Hunnicutt added. “We try to find ways to keep busy, things to occupy your mind.”
“Sometimes Frank and his big nose, big foot, or big mouth provide those,” Pierce butted in, employing a pejorative tone when referencing Major Burns. “Other times it’s Klinger,” he laughed, a smile crossing his face. “There are enough characters here…”
“Including yours truly,” BJ interjected, nodding towards his tentmate.
“Let’s not forget about you, BJ,” Hawkeye teased right back.
“We’ve got the usuals, movies in the mess tent, books from the library—but always knock before entering, because Hawk here might be having a rendezvous with something other than great literature, if you know what I mean…”
“Hey, I can’t help it if my old man only ever read one book, The Last of the Mohicans, and therefore I find the library more useful for a little light war romance,” the dark-haired doctor protested jovially.
At that moment, Kate put two and two together…Natty Bumpo…Hawkeye…Hawkeye Pierce. She smiled broadly at the realization.
“Someone’s always organizing something, too, competition or raffle or something like that,” BJ continued. “But I won’t lie to you; sometimes it’s hard.”
“Mail days are the ecstasy and the agony,” Hawkeye interjected again.
“But we’re all in this together. You’ve got us. Father Mulcahy is always available. And Colonel Potter’s on his third war; he’s got some good stories—and some surprising words of wisdom.”
“Third war?!” Kate couldn’t believe anyone could survive the rigors of one war, but three of them?!
“Lied about his age to enlist in the First World War at 15. He was cavalry, but they were sent to the trenches instead. Went to medical school after that and was a doctor in the last one, and now he’s pushing retirement, but one more war came first,” BJ explained.
“The War to End All Wars didn’t…funny how that works,” Hawkeye added.
A silence settled over The Swamp after that reminder…here they were, two wars later, still fighting. The Chinese civil war was over, except it wasn’t. War raged in French Indochina, just as here in Korea, between client states and proxies and Great Powers behind the curtains. War was…what had Hawkeye said? ‘What man invented to make hell look good.’
“How long have you two been here?” Kate finally broke the silence with a question.
“Since the beginning of time,” Hawkeye replied, although the archer understood him to mean since the start of the war, or nearly so.
“Only a few months, but it feels like years,” BJ added. “Time doesn’t move the same here, or that’s what it seems like.” He reached out his glass towards Kate’s, clinking them together. “But we’re all in this together, and we’re going to make sure we all make it out of here together.”
The haunting chords of “Suicide is Painless” played once more, this time over still shots from the episode emblazoned with production credits. Yelena stared at the screen of their TV, still in disbelief.
“Next on MeTV, ‘Hogan’s Heroes’ followed by ‘Perry Mason’ and ‘The Twilight Zone,’” the announcer proclaimed following the credits, before cutting to commercials.
“No! No no no no no no!” Yelena screamed at the television, her heart beating like a herd of charging elephants, and a black hole opening up inside her gut and devouring everything inside her. This could not be fucking happening. She could not have lost Kate to their television! How… What… Why… No… The ever-composed Widow began to short-circuit and fell backwards onto the couch…and began to sob uncontrollably.
Lucky let out a long, sad whine…almost a lamentation, before joining Fanny and cuddling with his other mother. The Akita nuzzled the blonde’s tear-ruined face, while the retriever rested his head on Yelena’s lap, continuing to emit the occasional whine.
After what seemed like forever but was perhaps only a dozen minutes, Yelena had exhausted her supply of tears. The warmth and affection of the dogs had grounded her even as she exhausted herself—they missed Kate Bishop as much as she did…and they were relying on her to bring her back.
“Bint Clarton,” the assassin began, invoking their voice assistant (Kate had thought the name was hilarious), “When does ‘M*A*S*H’ next appear on television?”
A voice that sounded like a very drunk, very happy Kate Bishop answered, “‘M*A*S*H’ airs Monday thru Friday from 8 PM to 10 PM on MeTV. The next episode airs in 22 hours. Would you like me to record it?”
“No, thank you.” 22 hours! 22 hours before she would know if Kate was still in their television. 22 hours before she could know if Kate was safe. 22 hours… She was spiraling again. The blonde took deep breaths to calm herself down, although the void in her gut continued to grow.
‘Think, Yelena, think. Actions. Control the situation.’ The first thing she did was to run through the television settings, disabling the ability to change the channel or turn the set off. Then she removed the batteries from the remote. After that, the Widow carefully constructed a protective cover out of stiff foam and prevented the pressing of the physical power button. She secured the power cord to both the television and the outlet. She double-checked the loft’s generator system, making sure it was in order.
Finally, the exhausted and somewhat frantic—but more controlled now—blonde sat down in front of Fanny and Lucky. “Do not turn the television off. Do not do anything to the television. Do not do anything near the television,” she warned the pair. “If we want to get Kate Bishop back, we must keep everything just as it is. If not, we may lose her forever. Do you understand?” Both Fanny and Lucky barked, and the Widow prayed it meant that they did. Both then approached her and licked her face, giving what little comfort they could to the broken assassin.