Dear God, how good the water felt. She took a deep breath, letting the lavender scent fill up every crevice of her head, and sank deeper into the tub.
For the first time in forever, it felt like the world around her had stopped, like her soul finally had a chance to catch up with her body.

Ever since the 4077th had started to come down, she had felt like she was caught in a maelstrom, constantly moving, spinning, and being tossed.
Moving through the dry Korean landscape with dust on her face and the memory of his lips on hers, the people she cared most about getting smaller and smaller as the jeep moved away. When they were long since out of view, she had turned around and sat back down in her seat, staring at the countryside rolling by, wiping tears she didn't want the driver to see from her eyes.
How many times she had done that, hiding the evidence of heartbreak while moving away. Sitting in the backseat of her father's car, clutching a stuffed animal or some other token of affection handed over with the promise of staying in touch, the friends she had finally dared to make left behind. Trying so hard not to cry, because daddy's brave little soldier didn't cry. Brave little soldiers kept quiet and tried to swallow the big lump in their throats that grew bigger with every passing mile. Brave little soldiers stared out the window, silently hating all happy families in their forever homes. Brave little soldiers dried their stupid, treacherous eyes before anyone could catch them doing what brave little soldiers were not supposed to do.
Brave little soldiers grew up but never stopped crying for friends left behind, apparently.

Another camp had come down around her, and then she had been spinning under chandeliers in the dancehalls of Tokyo, the city full of war-weary people, excited to be going home but determined to get everything out from the last days on another continent.

Then tossed in the turbulence up among the clouds, with the patchwork of American soil reappearing down below. The squares of the fields, the lines of the roads, and the billowy forests - now shimmering with the saturated colors of autumn and not the green haze she left behind 100 years ago.
Her head had spun even more when she thought about the people walking around down there.
The young farm boy who had once been a damn good company clerk.
A country doctor with a gone fishing-sign on the door. More of a husband now but once the best commanding officer a MASH unit had ever seen.
A widow who never got to see her husband return.
A surgeon with a big smile and perhaps not a cheesy mustache anymore, tossing a beloved little girl in the air.
Another surgeon, now making a small town say "ah" and probably flirting up a storm with someone sweet and untouched by three years of horrors.

When she got off the plane, no one had been waiting for her, of course. Her eyes had scanned the crowd anyway just so she wouldn't miss anyone tall and a bit hunched. The tears she once again had to fight back were happy ones, of course, the happy tears of being home and absolutely nothing else.

The city had felt like it was spinning too, the unknown streets, restaurants, shops, clubs, and lights. So many lights.

Her new workplace had long, winding corridors that made her feel like a mouse in a maze, but she would master them, of course, because she excelled at anything she set her mind to. She wasn't afraid of corridors, stairwells, or elevators, and she did not miss a dusty camp where the OR was just a short walk away.

In her new apartment nothing scurried in the dark, the walls didn't move in the wind, and the roof didn't leak, not like her tent back home. No, her mind was still spinning, this was home, her tent had been leaking and swaying in the wind back in Korea and where it once stood was just nothing now. A nothing in a world and a lifetime away.

Her new apartment had pencil marks on the kitchen doorframe. Someone small had grown bigger here. None of the houses she'd lived in had pencil marks on the doorframes. This was a good sign.
She was in the three-hour bubble bath she had promised herself. The world was warm and quiet and lavender scented, and maybe she was just allergic to lavender because the brave little soldier's eyes started to feel a bit strange again.

She let her hand slip down to her lower abdomen and ran her fingers over the small scar. God, she would have killed him if he had sewn in his initials, as he had threatened to do while he and BJ walked her to the OR. Or maybe it would have been nice. A memento.
Not that her whole body didn't remember him.
Remembered the way he would cover the scar with tiny butterfly kisses. The way his breath had tickled the fine hairs on her neck that last morning when they were lying close in her cot as the camp around began to wake up. Neither of them wanting the day they had desperately longed for to begin.
The way they had been fire and passion together, in every interaction that ever meant anything. It had been companionship; stress relief, and it made the thin line of sanity they were both dancing on seem a bit wider. Like a tether. That was cut off now.
Now, she was just floating. Floating in bubbles and the scent of lavender with a small scar on her stomach. Like a tether.

She felt soft. Melted. The Major made of ice had finally melted. The Snow Queen. Which was a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen, who was Danish and not Swedish, as Per had told her. Per, who had beautiful, kind eyes and warm hands. Maybe she should look him up. She could move to Sweden and become a milkmaid. Or did milkmaids live in Switzerland? Were there even milkmaids anymore? What a stupid thing to think about. She scoffed at herself and reached for her wineglass.

"I don't want no more of army life, gee ma, I wanna go home," she sang quietly while swirling the wine. And home she had gone. Home to a town where nothing was familiar, the faces all wrong, and the walls didn't even move in the wind like they were supposed to.
But that was okay, she had time. Time to get to know a world that wasn't controlled by army rules and regulations, a world that had moved on merrily while the few of them were caught in their own little private corner of Hades.
Time would clean the dust from her lungs and patch together the wounds of her heart.
She had time to be kind, the luxury of being nice and not barking orders. To finish up with a patient and not have a deluge of others waiting, trying not to bleed to death or failing to do so.
And if time didn't help, she would just have to adapt anyway. That's what she always did, whether she liked it or not.

The world started to spin again, so she clutched her glass, sank down even further, and took a deep breath.