The Earth Kingdom's weather patterns, Jinora Gyatso has already decided, are very, very confusing.
She'd been flown in this morning to Gaoling, where the shelling isn't nearly as bad and planes can leave in and out with little to no difficulty. In fact, the town is quite peaceful, and if it weren't for the soldiers patrolling there with semi-automatic weapons slung over their shoulders, she'd have forgotten that there is a war on at all. Uijeongbu, however—that's where she's been assigned to—is entirely different. As Corporal Nilak drives her through a lush forest, she takes note of just how hot it is over here. Unlike Republic City, where it had been snowing when she'd left, Uijeongbu is hotter than the inside of a sauna. The speed of the car creates a decent breeze, but sweat stains have already formed under her arms and her hair is ruined. She's not usually the type of person to care about this sort of thing, but she wants to make a good first impression at her new job.
After what seems like forever (and after they've hit every damn pothole on the way), the jeep pulls up to the 6152nd Mobile Army Surgical Hospital amid a cloud of dust. Jinora immediately takes the time to look around her new home while Corporal Nilak and a woman that she doesn't know busy themselves with taking her bags out of the trunk. From what she can see, everything is spread out in a rough horseshoe with a large compound of level ground in the middle. At the closed end of the horseshoe is the main hospital building, made out of wood with a tin roof marked by a large red cross; everything else is made of canvas. Strung out to the left of the main building are (with signs in front of them) the Mess Hall, PX, Showers Tent, Barber Tent, Psych Tent, and Enlisted Men's Tent. On the right side are (with signs in front of them) Postop, Officers' Tents, Nurses' Tents, and finally, the Officers' Club. Some people are playing kuai ball in a sand pit. Others are eating lunch outside. Still others are chatting. Almost none of them are in full dress uniform, which relieves her. Maybe it's not that formal around here, so maybe she can get away with wearing nothing but her civvies. Her dress uniform is a bit too itchy for comfort.
"Captain Gyatso?" Jinora turns around to see the woman who'd helped with her bags staring at her impassively. "Captain Gyatso, my name is Sergeant Moon, I'm the company clerk. I'm supposed to take you to see Colonel Varrick."
"Oh!" Jinora sticks out her hand, but when Sergeant Moon doesn't shake it after a few seconds, she awkwardly retracts it. "Hello, Sergeant. Yes, er. I'd like to see the colonel right away. Where exactly should I put my bags?"
"In the Swamp," suggests Corporal Nilak. Sergeant Moon nods, and Jinora is left wondering whether she'd missed an inside joke. The Swamp? What's the Swamp? The Foggy Swamp, perhaps? No, that doesn't make sense. Either or, her bags are carted off to another tent by the ever-so-helpful Corporal Nilak, and she follows Sergeant Moon into Colonel Varrick's office.
Once inside the military office, where Jinora sees a man standing behind a desk with his back to the door, Sergeant Moon salutes him. "Colonel Varrick, sir! Reporting with new personnel, sir!"
"New personnel?" asks Colonel Varrick, sounding scandalized. "Zhu Li, what in the hell—" He turns around midway through the word, gets one look at Jinora, and starts tripping over his tongue. "—I mean, what the heck are you talking about? Ah yes. Heck. I meant heck. Hello, new personnel. I'm Colonel Iknik Blackstone Varrick, and you must be Jinora Gyatso."
"Excellent observation, sir," Sergeant Moon deadpans. "I also notice that you never curb your language around the nurses and me."
"Yes, well," Colonel Varrick stammers, obviously trying to come up with some sort of explanation. He sends the sergeant a desperate look for help, but Sergeant Moon rolls her eyes. "I feel as though I should make a good first impression. We've sorely been in need of a new chest surgeon, haven't we, Zhu Li?"
Sergeant Moon nods. Jinora feels as though she's watching a kuai ball match.
"Anyway." Colonel Varrick turns back toward Jinora, and she inwardly notes that he's wearing a lab coat and safety goggles. Eccentric, she thinks before tuning back into the conversation. "Pleasure to meet you, Captain Gyatso." He freezes, looking like he's been caught stealing a cookie from the cookie jar. "Er, it is Captain, isn't it? Or do I call you Doctor?"
Jinora smiles, trying to put the colonel at ease. "Either title will be just fine," she assures him. "I don't discriminate."
"Excellent. Now that we've got that settled, I believe that you're going to be staying with Captain Wen and Major Lieng in the Swamp." There it is again. The Swamp. Now what in the Four Nations is this mysterious Swamp? "Zhu Li, would you—"
"I'll go and get him to clean the place up and dispose of his anti-regulations alcohol."
"Damn it, Zhu Li, will you at least let me say it?" he snaps, although there's no anger behind the glare he sends Sergeant Moon's way. They're obviously very close, despite Colonel Varrick's eccentricity and Sergeant Moon's stoic attitude. "Anyway. Yes. Zhu Li, do the thing. I'm going to discuss Dr. Gyatso's résumé with her."
With a snappy salute, Sergeant Moon exits the room, leaving Jinora alone with the obviously nervous Colonel Varrick. She looks around her new commanding officer's office and notes that, along with two cabinets filled with bottles of alcohol, there is a taxidermy platypus-bear in the corner, gazelle-deer heads on the wall, fuzzy rugs on the floor, and a sleek mahogany desk that the colonel is standing awkwardly behind. It's not quite like any office she's ever seen before and anyway, the décor doesn't explain why Colonel Varrick's wearing a lab coat and safety goggles. "So," he says, getting down to business. "You have your résumé prepared, right?"
"Oh! Uh, yes." Jinora flushes, remembering where she'd left it. "At least, it's in my bag. But I have it memorized." She quickly lists where she did residency, her mentors, her alma mater, and while Colonel Varrick is taking furious notes, Sergeant Moon returns with a messy-haired green-eyed man in tow, who is also wearing civvies. He looks her age, maybe a year older. He looks like he's of Earth Kingdom descent, which sparks a bit of pity inside her because how can he stomach his country going to war?
"I could only find one of them, Colonel," Sergeant Moon apologizes. "I think that Major Lieng is with Major Iluak right now."
"That's fine, he'll meet Jinora later." Colonel Varrick does the introductions before Jinora can even open her mouth. "Captain Kai Wen, meet Captain Jinora Gyatso, the latest addition to our medical team. She'll be bunking with you and Major Lieng in the Swamp, so I surely hope that you've done what Zhu Li asked and cleaned up the place."
Captain Wen blinks. "Uh, begging the Colonel's pardon, but when you said that me and Mako would be getting a new person to bunk with us we—at least I—didn't think that she would be a girl." He flushes. "Why can't she bunk with the nurses?"
"Because she isn't a nurse, Kai," Colonel Varrick explains. "She is a doctor, and doctors bunk with doctors, just like nurses bunk with their fellow nurses. I don't hear Nurse Yamato complaining that he has to bunk with the female nurses."
"I don't think that Nurse Yamato is the one with the problem," Captain Wen snickers. "What I'm saying is that we don't want Captain Gyatso to feel uncomfortable, Colonel. I mean, we're men. She's a woman."
"Excellent observation," Jinora deadpans.
Captain Wen makes a condescending noise in the back of his throat. "Oh, she speaks!"
Jinora tries to rein in her rapidly-increasing temper. Everything about Captain Wen just seems to be pissing her off today. "Look," she says shortly. "I was drafted here, same as you. We're all grown, responsible adults, and I see no reason why we cannot all share a tent together for the time that we are here. If our difference in genitalia is the only thing that is bothering you, then—"
She's interrupted by the sound of him laughing. "You've only been here for like five minutes, haven't you?" She's not quite sure if he's insulting her or not, so she keeps silent. "Look, Cap, I really don't care. If we have to bunk with one another, then so be it." Suddenly, he waggles his eyebrows in what must be a failed attempt to look charming. "Just try not to fall in love with me and you'll be set."
Jinora rolls her eyes. "Your dubious charm aside, I'm engaged." She raises her left hand, showing off her engagement ring from Akash and really, why hadn't she just tossed that in the trash where it belonged? It's not like she actually wants to marry him. Then again, her new insufferable roommate doesn't have to know this. "Seems as though you're out of luck, Captain Wen."
Captain Wen holds up his hands in a gesture of surrender. "Message received." He suddenly bends into a deep bow, straightening up and adopting a snooty voice that sounds like it belongs to every groveling politician that had ever come to her father's door to beg him for his vote in the next election. "May I escort you to the Swamp, Captain Gyatso?"
For the first time since entering Colonel Varrick's office, she smiles, and then she returns the bow. "Lead the way, Captain Wen."
The Swamp lives up to its name. There are three canvas cots with sleeping bags on them, a plank floor, an oil stove in the center of the room, electric lighting, a few crude shelves made from assorted crates and such, along with one table and three chairs in the back with dusty cards on top of them. Captain Wen's third of the room is a pigsty: his cot isn't made, his scrubs are strewn on the floor, there's an alcohol distillery chugging along behind his cot, and she almost catches a glimpse of a sex magazine on the ground before he casually sweeps it into a crate. Major Lieng's third of the room is much neater: his cot is made, no clothes are on the floor and the only thing that bothers her is the unopened package of condoms resting on his dresser drawer. She voices her concern but Captain Wen only laughs at her. "He isn't going to use them on you, Cap," he says. "He's saving them for someone special—I think they've been in Uijeongbu longer than I have."
Corporal Nilak and Sergeant Moon have already dropped her bags off by her cot, which is favorably situated in between the oil stove and the door. There's a photograph on the floor that doesn't belong to her, though, and she picks it up. Shown in the photo are Captain Wen, whose arm is thrown around a man with shaggy hair and a pageboy cap. They're both grinning at the camera. "Who's this?" she asks.
It's as though a dark cloud passes over Captain Wen's face as he catches sight of the photograph. "That's Skoochy."
It's clear from his clipped tone that he doesn't want to talk about him. Because she's an idiot, however, she keeps pressing. "Where is he now?"
A muscle in his jaw twitches. "The big hospital in the sky. Any other questions?"
Before she can start profusely apologizing for what she's said, a man with amber eyes and spiky black hair comes stumbling into the Swamp, muttering under his breath. He starts digging through the crate beside his bed and then looks up. "Kai, where did you put my scrubs?"
Captain Wen rolls his eyes. "Hello to you too, Mako. Would you like to continue blaming me for things I don't know about or would you like to introduce yourself to Captain Gyatso?"
Mako startles, like he hadn't realized that Jinora was in the room at all. "Ah. Um. Hello, Captain. I'm Major Lieng. Are you the new chest surgeon?" At Jinora's nod, Mako smiles. "Thank Raava. We've been in need of one for ages."
"I hope to be of good use, then," Jinora replies. "And you don't have to call me Captain all the time, Major. My name's Jinora."
"Alright then." With that settled, Mako turns back to Captain Wen. "Kai, don't think you can pull off this innocent little boy act just because Captain Gyatso's here. Where did you put my scrubs?"
"Raava's sake." Kai spreads his hands out in disbelief. "Did you look in the laundry? Sergeant Moon came around and dropped them off there this morning. I already picked mine up."
Mako's cheeks flush. It's apparent that he hasn't even considered that option. "Oh. I'll—I'll go and look there." With a polite nod at Jinora, he leaves the Swamp as quickly as he'd come in.
Captain Wen steps closer to Jinora, and for a brief moment she thinks that he's about to kiss her but then he jerks his chin upward. She looks up and sees a pair of scrubs lying on the rafters, along with a pair of shoes and a box of stationary. "I see Major Lieng was correct in suspecting you, Captain Wen," she says evenly. "Do you pull pranks on him often?"
Kai shrugs. "Uijeongbu gets boring if you don't know how to loosen up. Once I put ether in his aftershave; now that was fun." He eyes her curiously. "You going to tattle on me, Cap?"
He's challenging her, she can see it in his eyes. She can also see that if she does choose to tattle on him, she'll be on the recipient end of his pranks too. "I won't, on one condition." He raises an eyebrow, and she takes that as her cue to continue. "If you stop calling me Captain. My name's Jinora."
"Alright, Jinora," he says. "Call me Kai."
"Kai," she repeats, and saying his name feels like a breath finally released and Spirits damn it, what is wrong with her today? "Alright, Kai."
The sound of sirens suddenly jerks them apart. Captain Wen—Kai—immediately flies to pick his scrubs up off the floor, brushing them off. Jinora's left standing dumbly in the center of the room, still holding that damn photograph and wondering what in the world is going on.
Kai's halfway to the door before he notices her still standing there. "Follow me," he says.
Dropping the photograph on Kai's cot, she does as he says and follows him out the door.
The admitting ward is full by the time Jinora's scrubbed up and more wounded than she can count are being brought in by corpsmen. Major Lieng is currently examining a patient who is letting out a number of unintelligible sounds mixed in with clear and frequently repeated curses and pleas. Colonel Varrick and another nurse are currently operating, as is Kai. Jinora approaches one soldier and a nurse whose name she doesn't know removes some of the bandaging done in the field, revealing an abdomen with part of its contents on the outside. She doesn't wince or grimace, having seen much of this during medical school. It feels like everyone's eyes are on her as she says, "This is a two-person job. How much blood has he had?"
"This is his second pint now."
"Colonel!" Colonel Varrick looks up for a split second and grunts to show that he's paying attention before returning to his patient. "Colonel, this one's ready but we won't know all the damage until we get in and see what's happened."
"Korra, help Jinora," Colonel Varrick orders the nurse next to Jinora. "Zhu Li, I'm finished here. Get this kid into post-op."
A moment later, there are three operations going on at once and the room is silent except for the occasional cough, cry from a wounded soldier or the clink of surgical tools. Jinora stands over the soldier with the gaping wound in his abdomen; her nurse, Korra, assists her when she can. Their job here is to cut out a section of bowel damaged by a shell fragment and then start sewing the divided ends together. She can feel a bead of sweat make its way down her forehead, but before she can ask for help Korra takes care of it with a businesslike pat of cloth. She manages a grateful eye flick and then immediately returns to her patient, operating on autopilot.
Once she's done, she barely gets a second to relax before Sergeant Moon and Corporal Nilak bring a new person onto her table. This time it's a chest problem, and the horrible thing is that she finds herself relaxing. Chest problems are her specialty. It looks like this is a pulmonary laceration. Great.
She feels like everyone's eyes are on her again as she performs the operation. Blood spills from the wound and onto her rubber gloves, but she continues. It's gory and the wound is deep, but she continues. As the surgery continues, she slowly realizes what had happened: someone had attempted to perform CPR on this soldier, and the broken ribs as a result of this CPR perforated the lung. She moves quickly to fix this before the soldier chokes to death on his own blood.
The tension breaks as she finishes the job, and Colonel Varrick lets out a low whistle of appreciation as she, with Korra's help, begins to close up. "I'm done here. Get this man to post-op."
After two bowel resections and a leg amputation (on the latter she is helped by Mako), she gets to work with Kai.
"I've listened to the kid's chest with a stethoscope," says Kai, "and percussed on the chest. He's got a perforated bowel and his femur's definitely fractured. There's at least a pint of blood in his stomach and probably the same amount in the chest. Clear?"
"Crystal," Jinora answers. "And I'm sure that you've also noticed that this soldier has a hemopneumothorax because—well, look at the X-rays, it's all there in black and white. The shock from the blood loss's probably amplified by the contamination of the abdominal cavity by bowel contents." She pauses, getting her thoughts in order. "So what we're going to do is expand his lung and hit him with, say, two pints of blood and an antibiotic—"
"All to minimize the peritoneal infection." She can see that Kai's beginning to understand. "Don't we still have to open up the kid's chest and his stomach?"
"No, not at all," Jinora replies, showing him. "See? Look here. The chest wound's minimal. All you have to do is place a chest tube between the sixth and seventh ribs, hook it to underwater drainage—"
"And his lung will re-expand."
"Yeah. See, if he was going to bleed from the lung he would've done it by now. Our main priority here is getting the air out and waiting until his general condition improves; then we can tap it. Right now we just have to get the patient out of shock and in good enough shape to have his thigh debrided and belly cut."
"Someone get her a closed thoracotomy kit, now," Kai orders. Two corpsmen nearly trip over themselves getting her one.
Quickly, she dons a new pair of gloves, accepts a syringe of anesthesia from a nervous corporal, permeates the space between the ribs and the skin, takes a quick breath and pushes the needle into the pleural cavity. As she pulls back on the plunger she gets air and knows that she's in the right place. She inwardly notes the angle of the needle, pulls it back, takes the scalpel from Korra, incises the skin a half inch long and shoves the scalpel into the pleural cavity. Bubbles of air appear, and as she inwardly rejoices she works on autopilot, grabs the chest tube with a clamp and shoves the tube through the hole. Korra quickly attaches the other end to the drainage bottle on the floor, Kai blows up the balloon on the catheter and now the bubbles start to rise on the surface of the water in the bottle.
"Lung isn't expanding," Korra says.
"I know, I know, wait." She drops to her knees on the floor and, as she begins to suck on the rubber tube attached to one of the two tubes in the bottle, the upward flow of bubbles increases. The lung starts to expand.
"Holy shit," Kai swears. Colonel Varrick looks at her like she's hung the moon and the stars. Even Mako looks impressed, beneath his surgical mask. "Not bad, Jinora."
It's clear that she's passed her unofficial initiation with flying colors, but she doesn't have time to revel as she returns back to her table and begins operating again.
"You did a good job today," Kai tells her about six hours later, when they're all back in the Swamp. Mako had crashed immediately and although Jinora's exhausted beyond belief, she can't fall asleep. Neither, apparently, can Kai.
"Oh. Uh, thanks," she says. The praise makes her blush and her eyelids droop. "You know, if you want to learn more about chest surgery I can show you what I know."
Kai's words are said around a long yawn. "Thanks," he says. "That's real nice of you."
The wounded come and go in spurts. It's hard to predict when their next barrage will be, but Jinora quickly learns that when she hears shelling, the chances of wounded coming in increase significantly. She also learns that the food is horrible here, and writes home to her mother to ask for some care packages. She works together with Kai in the operating room a lot, and her nurse is usually Korra or Opal.
Over the next two weeks, Jinora learns a lot about the people at the 6152nd. Korra's the head nurse, and while Mako outranks Kai, Kai is still the head surgeon. Kai also lets her in on the not very well kept secret that Mako likes Korra and that he's actually saving the condoms for her. Opal and Captain Bolin Lieng, the camp psychiatrist and Mako's younger brother, have been dating for the last two months. Bolin's sort of a foil to Mako: while Mako is stiff and stern, Bolin is nice and laughs a lot and tells wild stories at the Officer's Club every other night. Apparently he'd once dated the mover star Ginger Zhang, which none of them believe until he shows them pictures to prove it. Opal's quickly becoming one of Jinora's best friends; she's quick-witted and funny and kind and doesn't take shit from anyone—she also has four brothers, which makes Jinora sympathize with her. She knows the struggles of having a lot of siblings firsthand. Kai informs her that Colonel Varrick and Zhu Li have been engaged in what they think is a secret, torrid affair ever since setting foot in Uijeongbu but in reality everyone knows about it.
(She tries asking people about Skoochy, whoever he is or was, but every time she asks, she's met with a wince or a grimace and is told not to ask about him. Eventually, she stops asking, but the curiosity doesn't stop burning inside her.)
And then, of course, there's Kai. Kai, who'd spent the first ten years of his life bouncing around in the foster system before being adopted by a man named Yung. Kai, who spends his time now by wisecracking, brewing moonshine, carousing with the nurses and pulling pranks on Mako. Kai, who's one of the best doctors that she's ever seen and he seems to know it. Kai, who's only thirty-one and is already head of surgery.
Kai, who's unlike anyone she's ever met.
Sometimes she gets a weird feeling in her stomach after he manages to make her laugh—a weird feeling like nerves and guilt stewing together. It's not that she likes him; that would be ridiculous, she's an engaged woman for Raava's sake. It's just that…well, he intrigues her. And she's always enjoyed being intrigued.
Sergeant Moon comes around on Jinora's twenty-seventh day at the 6152nd with a pile of mail. Kai gets two letters and a care package. Jinora gets the same. One of her letters is from Akash, and the other is from her family. One of Kai's letters is from Yung, and the other is from his councilman, begging him for a vote. She finds it hilarious that even in Uijeongbu they can't escape the horrors of junk mail.
"What does Yung say?" she asks him.
Without looking up, he answers, "He misses me, it's been raining lately and he's been planting panda lilies. That and some other things." He looks up now. "How's your fiancé?"
She's already opened the first page of her letter from her mother. "Oh, I don't know, I didn't open his yet." Nor does she particularly care to. Uijeongbu may be crazy but at least being here means that she doesn't have to be at home. She sets her mother's letter down for now and opens up the care package to reveal boxes of candies and homemade (albeit slightly crumbled) egg cookies. "Want an egg cookie?"
"Nah, I'm fine. I've never been the biggest fan of those." He's distracted again, still reading Yung's letter. "Ha. He wants to know if I've tried to do that thing where I stick someone's hand in a bowl of water and it makes them wet themselves. I haven't. That's a good idea."
She smiles. "I see that pranking runs in the family."
Kai snorts. "Yeah, Yung's just fostered my pranks rather than suppressed them. He's a good guy, Jinora, you'd like him." He pauses. "What's your dad like?"
"Busy," she says after a moment's hesitation. "He's the governor of Republic City, so he's always pretty busy. He spends time with our family whenever he can, though." His only flaw in Jinora's eyes is that he thinks she and Akash are compatible with one another. Honestly, can't he see that Akash is a pig? "He's a good man."
Kai nods, and she nods, but before they can get back to their respective letters, Sergeant Moon's stoic voice comes over the compound speakers:
"Attention, incoming choppers, all medical personnel please report to the operating tent…Attention, incoming choppers, all medical personnel please report to the operating tent…"