Consequences of Love and War: Chapter 37
A/N: Unfortunately for me (fortunately for you), I've been spending most of my long weekend on the couch, all congested and sick. I blame everyone who has had to report to sick call with a cold; if they could have just stayed at home, they wouldn't have gotten me sick, too. Oh, well. It means you get another chapter today.
Dr. Alyse Aachen continued to feign sleep long after she woke, and whether that was from a night's sleep or a nap, she had no idea; time had lost all meaning long ago. She didn't know what it was—a scent, a sound, a charge in the air—but she knew that it was Corpsman Stemplinski guarding her, and getting into an argument with the twenty-something medic with an attitude problem really wasn't going to help the whole headache situation much. The only eating once a day was bad enough in that department.
She tensed slightly at the sound of the door opening, but still didn't open her eyes. The low voices—more to keep from waking her than to avoid detection; if they were on the part of base she thought they were, nobody would hear them anyway—told her that Specialist Jenkins had come to relieve Corpsman Stemplinski. Although she wouldn't put either of the medics on her list of favorite people, she would much rather deal with Jenkins than Stemplinski. And she was sure Jess and Ellie would turn that into an Army vs. Navy joke.
After the closing of the door indicated that Stemplinski had left, probably to begin his shift at the clinic Alyse was assigned to, she remained in her faux-sleeping pose for another few minutes before blinking and yawning as if she had just woken up. She had no idea if her acting fooled Jenkins or not—back when they were roommates at University of Washington, Ellie always said she was a terrible liar—but the young medic didn't seem bothered by it even if he had noticed that she was already awake when he walked in. "Good morning, ma'am," he said with a nod.
"It's morning?" she asked as she blinked against the brightness hitting her eyes before slowing rising to a sitting position, folding her legs under her to sit cross-legged on the cot.
"Yes, ma'am," Jenkins replied, glancing down at his watch. "About 0900. I brought you some Pop-Tarts for breakfast." He reached into one of his lower cargo pockets—Alyse never ceased to be amazed, and a little jealous, of how many pockets those Army uniforms had—to pull out the silver foil package. "Brown sugar and cinnamon."
"Thanks," she replied as she took it. She had eaten half of the first pastry before speaking again. "Everything going okay at the hospital?"
"Yes, ma'am," Jenkins replied, getting comfortable on the room's other cot. "There's a rumor that General de la Cruz is thinking of moving the detainees to another base."
"They're worried that their location might have been compromised because of me," she stated. Jenkins' fair skin blushed bright red before nodding.
They sat in relative silence for a few minutes as Alyse finished the first Pop-Tart and got started on the second. "Why are you doing this?" she finally asked. "Stemplinski I can almost understand. He's a bit of an ass and doesn't always think things through before acting, but you… You're a nice guy. Not exactly the type I would peg to hold a doctor hostage."
Jenkins blushed again as he murmured something that almost sounded like an apology. He stared down at his hands, clenched together on his lap, before he slowly moved, reaching for that same iPod he kept in his uniform pocket, the one he allowed Alyse to watch Pete's press conference on. He scrolled through for a moment before handing it over. "That's my wife, Kirstin, and our daughter Amie—Amelia." The infant had one of those toothless baby grins on her face, a pink bow somehow attached to the few wisps of blond hair on the top of her head, her eyes as bright and blue as those of both of her parents. "She was born five weeks before I deployed."
"That must have been difficult," Alyse said honestly as she handed the iPod back, still wondering where this was going. Jenkins nodded, his eyes returning to that small screen.
"She had a lot of problems after she was born," he finally said. "A few hospital admissions. Meconium ileus, feeding problems, pneumonia…" His voice trailed off, remembering those weeks. "She was diagnosed the day I left Kuwait for Afghanistan."
"Cystic fibrosis," Alyse said, not even having to guess. Having done her pediatrics rotation in medical school at the largest dedicated children's hospitals in an area that served six states, she had seen it all, including the genetic disease that affected both the respiratory and digestive tracts and was seen almost exclusively among those of northern European descent. The resident on the team had listed 'parents look pale' in the criteria for testing babies with unexplained illnesses for cystic fibrosis, and the two blond-haired, blue-eyes Jenkins parents fit that bill.
Specialist Jenkins nodded. "Yeah. Kirstin told me the next time I got a chance to call." He glanced down at the picture again. "They moved back to North Dakota while I'm gone," he said, his voice somewhat distant. "We weren't at Drum long before my unit got called up, and Kirstin didn't get much of a chance to get to know the other wives, and she wasn't working yet because of Amie and…" His voice trailed off before it picked up again. "We grew up in the same town and all of our parents still live there, so they can help her with Amie while I'm gone. There's just so much to do and so much to remember and Kirstin going through all that while dealing with the fact that I'm here has been a lot for her. Dr. Mascio, over at the CSH, is a pediatric pulmonologist, so I've been talking to him about some of this stuff." He lapsed into silence again, still staring at the picture. "The fact is, all this stuff… It's going to be expensive, and, well, you know how much I make as a medic, and Kirstin and I got married right after high school and she never went to college. She's a good waitress and does really well with tips, but not well enough to pay those kinds of bills. And with all that we're going to have to do to take care of Amie, she's probably not going to go back to work anyway. Stemplinski heard me talking about this one day and told me that he knew a way I could get the money." He finally looked over at her. "I didn't know it had anything to do with you, Dr. Aachen. I'm sorry about that."
She stared at him for a moment, trying to reign in her anger. "And you didn't wonder how any way of getting two and a half million dollars was legal?" He blushed bright red again.
"I know, it was stupid," he confessed, "but I thought it would be something like selling opium or poppies or something like that. I didn't think it was kidnapping." He turned back to her. "Sorry," he repeated.
"Stop apologizing," she snapped. He blinked in surprise at her sharp tone. "I've worked with you, so I know you're pretty intelligent, so I'm really trying to convince myself that this is because you're in your early twenties and people in their early twenties don't think things through—and I've got stories, which you will never hear—and not because you're an idiot, but that's really hard, because this is quite possibly the most idiotic thing I've ever heard." He blinked again. "You're a soldier!" she continued. "You're active duty! All of your medical care and the medical care of your dependents is provided to you for free. You don't have to pay a goddamn cent for any of it. Even after you leave the Army, because Amie has CF, she'll still get free medical care. Or, she would have, if you hadn't done this." She gestured wildly around them.
"What do you mean?" he asked.
"You kidnapped a military officer!" she exclaimed, wondering how this wasn't registering with him. "And don't think that you're going to get away with it, because you're not. No matter how this ends, whether the two of you kill me or not, that's a felony, and you are going to spend the rest of your life in Leavenworth. Your wife and daughter will get none of your benefits. Including medical care." She stared at him and saw the exact second when realization hit him. "You let an older and more experienced corpsman talk you into a felony, and because you didn't think things through, Kirstin and Amie are going to be paying for that." She squeezed her eyes shut and massaged her temples with her hand. This was definitely not helping the headaches. She could already tell that this would be a big one. "God," she muttered. "I was wrong. This is worse than any of Pete's novels. At least those make sense."