I guess you could say McMurphy and Richard get an angry warrior moment. Also a "but with great composure" moment that I stole shamelessly from Cordelia's Honor.

Colleen woke late at night to the feeling of someone's hand on her head, the fingers brushing across her temple and then into her hair, raising a few strands from the rest before dropping back to her forehead and doing it again. Kass, she thought. Or maybe Winters, the sweet new girl. Holly certainly wouldn't be so gentle. Holly was the kind of girl who squashed cats' heads under heavy strokes until they hissed and ran. This felt nice. Very nice.

She opened her eyes and saw Richard sitting beside her.

Richard?

"Ah," he said when he caught sight of her bewildered stare in the light of the swing arm lamp over her head, its bulb pointed away from her but casting a soft yellow glow over both of them. The window behind her was black with the night, and they were shielded from the rest of the quiet ward by the curtains around her bed. "The sleeper awakes."

"What are you doing?"

"I'm trying out a new career," he said. "Nursing—how hard can it be after medical school?"

She was not at all up for this right now. "You'd fail Bedside Manner 101."

"Not if I had the right patient to practice with."

His fingers lingered on her forehead, feather-light, inquisitive and familiar all at once.

"God help me," she muttered. But don't let him stop doing that, she prayed, traitorously leaning into his touch.

"Are you worried about your reputation for toughness being trashed? I won't tell anyone about this little interlude. We'll keep it just between us. My heroic, yet tender care of you, how much you liked it..."

"I think I'm going to vomit."

"Oh, McMurphy, don't be such a—"

"No, really, get the bucket—!" The last of her sentence disappeared as she hurled up the two sips of broth she'd had earlier that evening. Luckily, Richard positioned the bucket just in time.

He silently offered her a cloth after she was done. With a baleful look, she took it and wiped her mouth. Then, exhausted after less than thirty seconds upright, she collapsed against her pillows and shut her eyes.

"I guess if that's the response my attempt at nursing gets, I should quit while I'm ahead," Richard said softly. She heard his chair scrape across the linoleum.

"No," she said before she could think better of it. Then, hating herself a little, she murmured, "Stay."

After a moment, she heard the chair scrape again. With some effort, she turned her head and cracked an eye. He was back at her bedside, watching her with an almost contemplative expression. After a long moment, his gaze grew uncomfortable, and she turned away, closing her eyes again. "Do something useful," she said.

"Like what?"

"I don't know. Tell me a story. Sing a song. Recite a poem." Just do something besides stare at me like that.

"There once was a girl from Nantucket..."

"Forget it." She flung her arm over her face. This served her right for trying to be self-indulgent, even for just a moment.

"All right, all right." He was silent for so long that she wondered if he'd actually left, but when she peered out from under her elbow, he was still in the chair, staring into the distance.

"Once upon a time," he finally said. It took him some time before he leaned forward slightly and continued. "There was a doctor. And a nurse. They worked at a hospital together in a godforsaken country far away from everything they knew and loved."

"This story sounds familiar."

"Shh," he ordered, glancing down at her. "There was a war going on. Lots of casualties every day. They had to clean up the mess and patch up those they could."

"Thought you were telling me a story, not just describing our lives."

He glared at her. "The war was against aliens. They came down in their flying saucers and started trying to take over the world with their ray guns and mind control. Even people stationed at the evac hospitals were in danger of abduction in the middle of the night."

She raised an eyebrow, but said nothing.

He continued. "The doctor and the nurse didn't always get along, but they had a hell of a working relationship. Always perfectly...in sync. The doctor had never felt anything like it, despite his years of experience and international reputation."

She snorted theatrically. He poked her shoulder. "Neither had the nurse," he said.

It was true. Colleen had been an OR nurse for two years before joining up, but she'd never been able to anticipate what the surgeons needed as consistently as she did with Richard. They could say more to each other with a look than others could with dozens of words.

Not that she would ever admit it to him.

"And then one day the aliens turned their mind control ray on the nurse and forced her to eat terrible, parasite-laden dishes prepared by their head alien chef. Naturally, she got sick as a dog."

"I remember there being a dare involved," she muttered.

Richard ignored her and stared absently at the space over and to the right of her head. His hand, seemingly without much direction on his part, crept back up to her hair. He started the soft strokes she'd found so pleasant before, and equally nice now. "Admittedly, it wasn't the most obvious way to attack the enemy, but it may have been a gambit in a long-term plan. Or, let's face it, they're aliens. Who knows what they're thinking?"

He was rambling now, but she didn't mind. She liked his voice. He sounded a little like an old movie star, with those broad, East Coast vowels and clipped consonants. She closed her eyes again to better enjoy it.

"While she was recovering in the hospital, the doctor couldn't seem to stay away from her bed."

She cracked an eye open. Another sarcastic remark balanced on her lips, but she held it back at the strange expression on his face, one that seemed almost—

"Not that she had anything he couldn't cure, of course. He'd had plenty of experience with strange alien diseases by that point." His voice turned dreamy, matching the far away gaze he kept on the dark window above her head. "The incident just reminded him, rather insistently, that there were things he wanted to say. To the nurse. Things he wanted to do with her that weren't just fixing up broken soldiers or drinking in the bar. And it led him to wonder why he had never said or done any of them."

Colleen felt panic rise in her throat. She wondered if she should pretend to be asleep, and then if Richard was deliberately not looking at her so she could. Before she could decide, he met her gaze. His fingers stopped moving through her hair, but he left the tips on her scalp, the heel of his hand resting ever so lightly on her cheek. The slight, steady pressure was more intimate than the movement had been.

Somehow, she found her voice. "What—what did he do?"

She saw him swallow. "I have no idea." He tilted his head in a half-shrug, a bit sheepishly. "Actually, he'd never planned to say any of that in the first place."

The ball was in her court. One word from her, she knew, and they would both forget this conversation had ever happened. They would go back to easy banter in the OR, drinks at the Jet Set, and parting, always, for separate tents after a long night in the hospital or the bar. She would go back to wondering if his mouth was good at other things besides witty repartee, and whether he could dance to the slow songs Boonie sometimes played late at night, and what it would be like to look at him across a table at a nice restaurant in Da Nang instead of over the body of a bloodied soldier. And she would never find out any of those things.

Suddenly the girl who'd insisted to Nellie and Jan and everyone else that there would be no doctors, and especially no married doctors, seemed very far away.

Though Richard wasn't married anymore, come to think of it.

"Do they show movies on this base? Or do the aliens' disruptor fields interfere with the projectors?"

His sharp intake of breath was audible. "They show movies. In fact, I think Barefoot in the Park is showing next week." That was, in fact, the exact film on the bill for the officers' club the following Wednesday. Dr. Keffer had a thing for Jane Fonda.

"Then I think he asks her to go with him."

"And does she say yes?"

If she'd taken her own vitals right now, she would've been very unhappy with her current heartrate. She fought not to let her voice tremble as she whispered, "Yes."

Yes.

Then she winced. "Assuming she'll be able to get out of bed by then."

"You will."

There it was, that little twist that threw off the thin veil of fiction and brought the last ten minutes into the glare of reality. The one that dragged their simmering attraction out into the light and gave it a name. Richard smiled as he rubbed his thumb across her temple.

"Richard," she said, hoping he wouldn't stop, "why now?" Why not, at least, when she was upright?

He shrugged. "Seeemed right somehow, I suppose."

"You realize I've spent the last two days throwing up everything I've eaten, much of it while in your presence."

"But with such style." He grinned at her until she couldn't help the twitch of her lips in return. But then he turned serious again, his hand on her head pausing once more. "When you went home last month, and you were late coming back..." He took another breath. "I suppose it put some things in perspective."

"I did come back," she offered. Her limbs were lead-heavy with exhaustion, but she managed to move her arm enough to touch his wrist with her fingertips.

"You did," he said as her eyes started to close. Very gently, he wrapped his hand around hers. "You look like you could sleep for a week."

"Can't," she murmured. "I've got a date on Wednesday." She could practically hear him smile as he squeezed her hand. "Hey," she said, her words starting to slur. "Do that thing again. With my hair. I liked that."

She heard him chuff a disbelieving laugh before he extracted his hand from hers and started brushing his fingers across her forehead and into her hair. "I always suspected you'd be demanding in bed."

If she'd had the energy, she would've swatted him. Instead, she drifted off to sleep with a very satisfied smile on her face.