Medecinus (Latin: The Art of Healing)

Summary: Doc knows what his job description reads... and he knows very well what it actually involves. (Some BH/CG; SE/S)

Carl Greer was often conscious of being in an odd place, even considering the looser and more casual social structure of G.I. Joe. He was an officer, yes—and by dint of that fact, he outranked virtually everyone in the Pit except for Hawk and Ace—but he wasn't a commander. He was a soldier, Airborne-certified—and he stood by the idea that, bare-handed, he could probably wrestle all but the biggest and most stubborn Joes to the ground still—but he wasn't a combatant. At least, not if he could help it.

He still counted himself blessed to be where he was—because nowhere else in the world would someone like him have been counted as a friend and a teammate and an equal as well as an unpleasant necessity. No, no part of his job even vaguely resembled the standard way a doctor operated, but he'd never regretted the choices that he'd made to get where he was.

No… even if it was two in the morning, and he was looking across the mess hall with an obviously bad-tempered drill sergeant standing between him and the coffee machine.

Beach Head didn't like him. Carl didn't think it was personal, really—just a confluence of unfortunate coincidences. For one thing, whenever he'd been on overnight shift or trauma call, he was exempt from PT—which Beach did take very personally indeed. For another, Beach didn't like anything about the medical system, apparently on principle—probably because they periodically took him off the field for small things like, oh, compound fractures of his tibia.

For a third, Beach Head didn't think a whole lot of officers as a whole, and… that was that. No-one liked being ordered back into bed, but Beach Head took it as a personal insult, and Carl had, well, had that displeasure a time or two.

But Beach wasn't paying attention to him—in fact, the expression on his face as he stared down into his coffee cup was so savage that if the contents had had any sense, they'd have curdled in fear. If it had been any other Joe glaring into his cup like that, Doc might have thought that what was in that mug was either rotten milk or twenty-proof.

He didn't look up when Doc walked past him and filled his mug from the freshly brewed pot. He didn't look up when Carl, cautiously, curiously, stopped in front of him. Yes, Wayne Sneeden was an intimidating man, even for a Ranger and drill sergeant, but...

"Can I sit down?" Doc asked.

Then Beach looked up.

"Fuck, no," the Ranger growled, his voice deeper than even his usual baritone, sharply threatening—his hazel eyes sharp and ferocious. "My shoulder's fine. Stalker took care of it. It doesn't need checking out."

Well, that was another thing about G.I. Joe—Beach was one of the rare individuals who actually cared about and generally followed the rules, but… much looser command structure.

"I'm not here to look at your shoulder," Carl replied, mildly. He wouldn't have minded the chance, but he certainly hadn't expected it: saying that Beach Head was a noncompliant patient was closely akin to saying that a rabid wolverine was a bad pet.

But Carl Greer had his ways. Beach had been shirtless when he'd gotten out of the transport—true, most of Doc's attention had been on Cover Girl, but long experience with stubborn Joes meant that he always took a quick survey of everyone. He'd gotten a good enough look at that shoulder when Beach had been fussing over getting the woman in his arms onto the stretcher—the site had been clean, dry, the stitches Stalker had put in black streaks across an intact, nonerythematous wound. No drainage or purulence. Yes, Stalker had put the stitches in too far apart, and the wound gapped in places, but Beach was moving well, and smoothly. Carl was pretty sure that the laceration, while impressively long, hadn't gone through muscle.

Their Master Sergeant would probably get a wicked scar out of it, but… he'd seen the man's body on his examining table before, another scar would hardly make a difference.

"Oh," Beach muttered. "Good." His expression didn't soften significantly. But he didn't say anything else when Doc sat down across the table from him, either.

Doc just smiled, a little.

Yes, he could order the hardheaded idiot to let him take a look at it. But he preferred to save his command authority for things that actually mattered.

As in… something life-threatening.

And yes, there had been occasions when he'd had to use his captain's bars in order to save someone's life or limbs. Beach Head wasn't the only stubborn, reckless Joe on the team—entirely too concerned for someone else's welfare to take care of his—or her—own.

Yes, Carl was pretty sure that there were doctors who would consider this a nightmare post—a rash of contaminated wounds every other mission, a compound fracture every other month, and a pack of hardheaded, altruistic, totally noncompliant patients every single day.

He loved his job. He really did.

Beach Head was the one who broke the silence—his gaze still narrowed, suspicious. "If you're thinkin' about painkillers, you can damned well stop thinkin' it. I'm fine."

This time, he laughed. "I wasn't." Though… his lips twitched. The rest of the Joes wouldn't thank him for it. Beach Head didn't like narcotics—he didn't like Tylenol­—but he was going to be waking up stiff and aching and ready to shred someone with his teeth for awhile. "You know, we have this old trauma surgeon saying: 'eat when you can, sleep when you can, and don't mess with the pancreas.'"

Beach made a noncommittal, bored noise, but he stopped glaring into the contents of his cup. After awhile, he finally snapped, "What the fuck is that supposd to mean?"

"Well." Carl studied the Ranger with a crooked smile—no, Wayne Sneeden did not like being confounded. "I'm not going to say anything about your shoulder, but… your first night back from a mission, and you're not sleeping, you're not eating, and I can almost guarantee that that foul coffee is messing with your pancreas."

Beach Head gave him a long look—glanced down at the full travel mug in Carl's own hand—and… raised an eyebrow, perfectly silent.

This time, Carl had to laugh. No, Beach didn't like him much, but he'd always known that the man was both a lot more clever than he let on, and a lot more subtle than anyone ever gave him credit for. It was probably one of the most dangerous things about him.

Luckily, Beach wasn't the only one who could be subtle, when he had to be.

Doc held up the latest issue of JAMA. "I… sometimes have a hard time sleeping after an emergent surgery, like tonight." He liked to be productive in his insomnia, and he was very much behind on his CME credits. "Too much adrenaline."

It wasn't his imagination: every muscle in the big Ranger's arms bunched. Doc blinked. "Emergency surgery?" Then, after a long moment with thoughts warring across Wayne's face like gladiators, "Goddammit. How'd it… go?"

Doc studied him, curiously. Wayne really didn't like doctors, did he. "As well as could be expected, I guess—taking out someone's spleen is always messy."

"Fuck." But despite the rage in his tone, Beach Head lowered his mug back to the table with a very gentle, very careful 'clink.' It was the only thing gentle about him—he didn't raise his voice, but the intensity in it filled the room. "Damn it, what the Hell happened to her?! That shrapnel wasn't anywhere near her belly—"

Oh—no wonder. Well. Doc tried not to smile at how thick his teammate's Southern accent had just gotten. "She? No, Corporal Krieger didn't need surgery, Master Sergeant, and Scarlett's totally fine—we're just keeping her overnight for observation," he replied, gently. "There was a training run that got sent onto the field the week after your team was deployed, and, well…" his mouth quirked. "One of the new recruits decided to go on with training even though he had mono. I don't think he'll make that mistake again."

Beach blinked, then grunted. "Oh."

The tension look a long moment to leave the big man's clenched fists, resting on the table. Doc waited. His years at Harvard and Johns Hopkins hadn't taught him patience—his teammates had.

Finally, "How's my girl doing, then?"

He'd give Beach Head that—his expression was calm again, bored and forcibly polite—a perfect façade; interesting, considering just how much time their drill sergeant spent underneath a balaclava, but… Carl allowed himself a small, carefully reassuring smile. There were a half-dozen women on the team proper, and a full complement of female support staff, but 'my girl' only ever referred to one person. Heaven help the Joe who decided to comment on that, though. "Well… it's a good thing that your team got out when it did, but she'll be okay."

"'Okay?' That don't mean anything to me, Doc." Beach Head frowned, and took a sip of his coffee, considering. "How long is she gonna be out of commission?"

"It depends."

"It ain't a difficult question." Wayne didn't shift in his seat when Doc gave him a hard glance, unlike most of the Joes—he met the look evenly. Doc's estimation of the big man tipped up a little higher. "Look, Cinderella already leans way too hard on the fact that she tools around in a tank; she gets any skinnier and she'll be needing extra PT for years to catch back up."

Or not. Doc raised his own eyebrow. "It's not that easy. Let me get this straight. You were on your way out after your objective was completed, but… backup pinched you in on the Cobra front, cut six of you off from the main group. She took a metal piece through the thigh when they took her tank—a big piece of shrapnel, through-and-through, but the wound wasn't healing right?"

Beach Head nodded, his lip curling before he shook himself. "Yeah. Pretty much. We were hikin' through some pretty nasty swamp territory on our way to the EZ—had to take a serious detour, an'… Hell, Doc, we were carrying her by the third day out." He didn't look away, but his eyes were cool and flat and blank, his voice as monotone as an accounting report. "The girl couldn't walk—she'd barely take water, and she was just plain burnin' up."

Of course, what Beach Head wasn't mentioning was that he'd flatly refused to let anyone else carry Cover Girl—Doc had gotten that bit of information from Scarlett. Who was currently, mercilessly, teasing the tank driver with it. Or maybe interrogating her—it was hard to tell the difference with Red, sometimes.

But he'd certainly seen the way Wayne had held Corporal Courtney Krieger when he'd walked off the heli—their lovely tank driver cradled up to his chest, her face resting in the crook of his shoulder and his head bowed to her. And the look on the Ranger's face when he'd accidentally jarred her injured leg getting her onto the stretcher, and she'd made the most pathetic little involuntary noise… well.

It wasn't that that raised his eyebrows, necessarily. After all, interunit relationships were what they were: rare, turbulent, often noisy, often rumored far more than real. What did surprise him was that with the way they all practically lived in each others' back pockets in this particular unit, a brush in the hallway could spawn a week's worth of gossip… and there certainly hadn't been any rumors about those two floating around the Pit!

This both was and wasn't surprising, considering one of the 'those two' involved.

And despite the fact that Beach was well-known for calling her by a multitude of affectionate and/or condescending nicknames, and she was well-known for being the single person who could throw a wrench, no pun intended, into his occasionally rather inhumane plans.

So… yes, his eyebrows had gone up a little when he'd watched what had happened and had spoken to Courtney, but no, Doc wasn't really all that surprised. He didn't claim to understand it, but… that was about par for the course, too, and it didn't mean that it wasn't there.

"Yes…" Doc acknowledged. "She remembers that, actually."

Beach's eyebrows twitched, but he definitely looked up—before he schooled his expression back into professonal interest. "Oh, yeah? She's talkin' again?"

Hmmm. "Yes… her memories are a little patchy, and she's still pretty sick, but a few good boluses of fluids and antibiotics woke her right up. The problem with thigh wounds is that there's a big vein and artery bundle that run right through the inner thigh—you probably know that." Doc gestured. Beach didn't bother nodding. "So an infection so near—like in her case—can get to the blood pretty quickly, and that's what happened to her. But she's on the right medications now, and she's a very tough young lady."

It was true—even if it wasn't the whole truth: cellulitis, bacteremia, dehydration, shaken together with swamp water and hundred-degree weather; it was an almost foolproof recipe for sepsis.

Luckily, the wound itself hadn't needed debriding, but Cover Girl herself had been worse than he was making it sound—she'd rolled onto his table with every SIRS criteria in the book—plus bottoming-out blood pressure and a nasty case of delirium. Not septic shock, but there'd been that bad moment after that first infusion of normal saline, and he'd called for an ICU bed, put activated protein C and pressors on standby. She hadn't needed any of the above, thank God—her blood pressure didn't respond until after they'd hung the second bag, but it had finally responded—but… still.

But… no, he didn't think Beach Head needed to know that, necessarily. Not after seeing the way the man had just closed his eyes for a long moment, his breath coming out in a slow, slow, very quiet sigh—only just barely noticeable from the heave of his shoulders.

"Well, obviously if she's talking she's okay," Beach finally grumbled. "Though I gotta say… God help you, Doc. She's damned hard to shut up."

This time, Carl did laugh. He was all-too-sure that Courtney Krieger probably said the same about Beach… but it didn't seem like a good idea to point that out when the Ranger was actually looking a little more relaxed. Or, at least, a little less like a bear worrying at a trap around its paw… or worrying, anyway. It wasn't anything so noticeable as the expression on his face—more the way he leaned back in his chair for the first time since Doc had entered the mess hall, and stood to refill his coffee mug.

He drank it without creamer, but, surprisingly, with sugar. Doc felt his eyebrows rise. And when Beach Head sat back down, his tone still held a certain uneasy curiosity, but his eyes were steady hazel, virtually unreadable again. "Doc… hey. Seriously, aren't you not supposed to be sharing out that kind of medical shit?"

Ah, indeed, and wasn't that just the question of the night? "Not without her say-so, no, but actually, Cover Girl told me to tell you when I saw you." This time, Doc chuckled, and shook his head. "I thought you'd be asleep by the time I got back, but here you are—so I suppose she knows you better than I do."

Beach Head's eyebrows didn't twitch, this time—but his eyes definitely flickered. "Why the Hell would she do something like that?" he demanded.

She hadn't said. Or at least her mouth hadn't said.

"Didn't want her mission leader to worry, I imagine," Carl murmured, very carefully; he hoped his face looked as neutral as it felt. "Or blame himself, I think."

"The Hell," but the big man's voice didn't have the venom in it that it often had, and his head dipped. His eyes were hot, narrowed, and that raw intensity was back in them. "It was my job to get them outta there with their skins in one piece, so how the fuck is it not my fault?"

"You might as well blame me for not being out on the field with you to treat her when she first got injured, Master Sergeant," Carl informed him, briskly. Beach Head blinked—then scowled. Doc held up a hand to stop him. No, it wasn't the same thing, he knew that, but it didn't make the point any less valid. It wasn't that he didn't get how Beach Head felt—he did. There was command, and there was responsibility, and… yes, he understood responsibility very well, indeed. "Or Wild Bill for barrel rolling away from a bogey and making Scarlett hit her head. You didn't have the Intel you needed, you didn't have the supplies, and you were cut off. You did get them out alive. What people do with their skins is up to them."

The Ranger just looked at him, his face sharp and closed as an armed nuclear warhead.

"Well… them, and possibly the nice people who hit Joe tanks with RPGs and fire missiles at extraction helicopters," Doc added, wryly, after a moment. Proper blame where blame was due—and in fact, there were only two things that Scarlett and Courtney were currently agreeing on: first, that Beach Head had done one Hell of a job getting their six-man team out of a FUBAR of a situation, and second, that they were going to pester Hawk for the next available chance to go snake-hunting, just as soon as they got their hospital discharge papers.

God help the snakes.

God help Hawk.

"Fuckin' Cobra," Beach Head snarled, finally, deeply enough for it to rattle, and he swigged his coffee.

Carl's mouth curved in a faintly amused smile as he raised his coffee tumbler in a toast. "Amen." On that, at least, they definitely agreed, and he almost felt sorry for the next Viper that Beach Head encountered. Almost. "Well… she and Scarlett are keeping each other occupied." Such that it was—he really they were just having fun annoying each other. And he was really hoping that Scarlett wouldn't bother Cover Girl enough that the tank driver felt the need to contribute to the redhead's concussion, and wasn't it almost funny that this was actually a very real concern of his? "But as to your original question… she'll be in the hospital for a few days. Maybe a week—less, if my wife has anything to say about it."

Beach Head grunted again—then he blinked, his eyes widening, and Doc saw that hazel gaze flicking to his hands. "What the Hell? Doc, you married?"

Carl couldn't help it—he laughed, stroking a thumb over the well-worn, thick gold wedding band on his finger. The last time he'd heard such incredulity in Beach Head's voice was the day Snake-Eyes and Scarlett had come to PT holding hands. "Eleven years."

"Huh." Beach Head looked like he was swallowing something hard and indigestible, and Doc grinned. He couldn't remember the last time anyone had managed to put an expression like that on the big man's face without it resulting in push-ups. "She a nurse, or something?"

And thank goodness the love of his life hadn't heard that—Beach Head might have been a big, cantankerous drill sergeant, but Talia Greer, M.D., was a petite, cantankerous trauma surgeon, and she would probably eat him alive. Carl smirked at the thought. Talia hadn't gotten her position yet the last time Beach Head had been hospitalized."Actually, she's the floor attending—the head physician—of the trauma unit and the STICU—the surgical trauma intensive care unit."

This time, Beach Head's blink lasted a long moment. "Ah." Then, "Sweet Jesus."

"Amen to that, too," Doc laughed. That was what most people thought upon meeting his lovely wife, but most people's voices didn't have a faint tinge of dismay to them. "And before you ask, yes, we see each other on more than just holidays… or at least we do now that we live in the same state again." That had been the problem with the team moving out of Fort Wadsworth as, er, hastily as they'd had to—she'd still been under contract in New York.

"Wasn't gonna ask," Beach Head grumbled. "I already thought you were nuts, Doc, but now I'm pretty damned sure you're nuts."

He had to admit, the bluntness and the honesty were refreshing, but that was one of the other things that he liked about working for the military. "Because I'm married? Beach Head, you have to have considered it at some point."

"Fuck, no. The way I live? You kiddin'?" Beach Head snorted, and shook his head.

Carl gave him a level look. Beach didn't say it with the kind of panic that seemed to overrun some bachelors at that particular thought, but Doc hadn't thought he would—actually, he even sounded a little amused. A little. But then, Doc knew all about lifestyle concerns—and they were very valid, and very real—and he knew a whole lot more about excuses. "There are other Joes who are married."

"Yeah, but I'm bettin' they all came into the Joes with their ball and chain already," the Ranger pointed out. "If someone's got time for dating on this service, then I ain't workin' them hard enough."

Hmmm… he wasn't going to mention Snake-Eyes and Scarlett. And if Beach Head didn't know about Flint and Lady Jaye, well… it was hard to imagine anyone being that oblivious, so Carl simply had to assume that Beach was going to ignore it until, like with the martial arts Team Supreme, he was forced to acknowledge it. "It's normal to want some companionship."

"'Companionship?'" Beach scoffed. "And what the fuck is at all normal about our job, Doc?"

Point. But Carl shrugged, and sipped his coffee, tapping his rolled-up magazine thoughtfully on the table. "I'm not talking about Happy Hour drinks and weekend getaways, Beach. Attraction's a hard thing to fight when you live like we do, and… you know that sometimes there aren't any second chances."

Yes. Cover Girl could have died. Would have. A few more days out—or even if that shrapnel had flown an inch to the right. He'd seen the bleak realization of that in Beach Head's eyes when he'd walked into the mess hall and seen the man scowling into his nonalcoholic drink. He could see it in the Ranger's silence, now.

Doc knew he was lucky—watching the woman he loved go to war wasn't something he ever had to be concerned about, but no, it wasn't easy. No woman, he'd once thought, could be happy sharing this odd, impossible life with him. And it was true that he didn't get to spend true quality time with Talia as often as he liked, rather than the frenetic pace of hospital life or the exhausted stupor they often sank into at the end of the day.

But would he give up their rare afternoons of popcorn in front of the TV with both of them half-dozing on each other, or the brief snatched lunches in the cafeteria, or the letters he found waiting for him every time he came back from being out on the field with his team? Give her up? Just because it was hard?

Talia would kill him if he tried.

The thought made him shake his head, and chuckle.

"That ain't goddamned funny, Doc," Beach Head growled.

"No, it's not," he smiled, and shook his head. "Just thinking: if any of us were looking to trot down the path of 'normal,' we wouldn't have joined the Joes. So how exactly are the standards of the nine-to-five club defining how any of us interact with the opposite sex?"

Beach Head didn't flinch, but he did shift uncomfortably in his seat, muttering something under his breath, against the rim of his mug. Something about 'well, there ain't gonna be no interactin' on my watch.'

And then, even softer, just the barest movement of his lips and with hazel eyes no gentler, but suddenly a little distant—'Goddamned girl.'

Doc didn't smile—something about Beach Head's expression suggested that doctor or no, officer or no, he would be made to regret it if he did—but he did let his tone slide comfortably back into brisk hospital professionalism. He didn't really want to give Beach Head an aneurysm. "But… we weren't talking about that kind of interaction, were we. Cover Girl's—well, she's stable, but even when she's out of the hospital, she's going to need a PICC line for a few weeks… it's a kind of big IV that goes from her arm all the way into the veins to her heart. So no PT for her for awhile."

No, it wasn't his imagination that Beach—who routinely came back covered in blood, often his own as much as someone else's—went a little green around the edges when he mentioned that IV. But Doc knew better than to smile about that, either.

"She is doing better, though. You could visit her, you know," he commented. "Scarlett's probably going to be discharged tomorrow," provided they don't kill each other, "but Courtney's probably going to be a few more days in the hospital's care." I'm sure she'd like to see you.

But he didn't say that, either.

Temptation wasn't so much a flicker across Beach Head's face as it was just the briefest pause before he muttered, "What am I, her goddamned babysitter? I ain't got time for hand-holdin', I got a ton of paperwork to do."

Doc shrugged. Stubborn was a Joe job description, too. "You only need one hand to sign papers. You can hold hands with the other."

And Beach Head could take that exactly as he liked.

Some men needed a gentle, subtle nudge, and some men needed an Acme anvil on their heads.

Yes, he'd gotten very, very good at this calm, bland expression in his years working with the G.I. Joe team. Or at least Doc hoped so, because otherwise he suspected he really was going to finish the next PT session too sore to stand straight in the OR.

Which surprised him more—the fact that Beach didn't sputter or bluster or throw a fit, or the fact that the corner of his mouth actually twitched in what almost looked like a smile—before it vanished, leaving him looking as annoyed as ever?

Carl resisted the urge to take off his glasses and rub his eyes. True, it was late, but… had he really just seen that?

"Girl's a pain in my ass," Beach Head growled, apparently to himself, instead, looking into his mug and pushing back to his feet. "An' this coffee's damned terrible. I'm goin' to bed."

This time, Carl did smile—that sharp-edged, angry tightness was gone from his teammate's posture. "Good night. I'll be doing my workout by myself in the afternoon, after I wake up, but… you know that already."

Beach Head grunted, and this time, that glint of hard, unamused, unapologetic drill sergeant gold was back in his eyes. "You hit your billet now, Doc, you can damned well make it to PT tomorrow morning."

On three hours of sleep? Actually, yes, he probably could, but… "No, I'm not going to hit my bunk quite yet," Carl informed him, shaking his coffee tumbler—yes, still a good amount in there. "Still have things to do."

Beach Head snorted, loudly. "Yeah? Like what?"

"Well, I expect Snake-Eyes will be showing up, soon," Doc replied, casually, flipping his medical journal open to the table of contents and skimming it. "He was next on my schedule."

Beach could take that as he liked, too.

There was a long, dangerous pause.

He didn't look up.

Carl Greer grinned at the creative, just-short-of-subvocal stream of invective that trailed Beach Head on his way out the mess hall door, took another sip of his terrible coffee, and turned to an article on artificial blood products. He probably wouldn't have too long to wait before the next grumpy, worried man appeared.

Yes… his profession put him in a very odd place in the Joe social structure, but… Doc really did love his job.

~fin~

Start: August 2, 2009
End: August 3, 2009

Once again, another story written for my not-a-drabble trade with Author376... this one was for the cue "What's Normal?"