Author's Note: So, I would first like to apologize for my lateness in getting this posted. As soon as I had posted my first chapter, I got sick and was using my free time to sleep. And when I wasn't sleeping, I was re-writing this chapter. I went through three or four different versions before I landed on this one. Read on, and let me know what you think!

And by the way, thank you for all the positive encouragement I received. I really appreciate it!

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Chapter 2

It was five in the morning on Elizabeth's tenth day at the 4077th. Between the intense heat and mental exhaustion, she couldn't sleep and she'd written a third letter to her father instead of sleeping.

Elizabeth was still in her pajamas, not exactly military uniform…close fitting cotton cropped pants and a tank top…and she was making her way to the office to put her letter in the outgoing mail. She was sweating while she walked; it was unbearably hot even though the sun was just starting to get up from its own bed.

She was watching her feet for a quick second and managed to collide with something solid. A solid someone. Luckily, the someone she'd collided with caught her by the shoulders before she was knocked onto her rear end.

"I'm so sorry, Elizabeth," the someone said.

She focused and realized it was BJ. He was in his grey warm-ups was clearly out for some early morning exercise.

She shook her head. "No, no. I was the one being silly and not paying attention."

"You're up very early," he told her.

"I was about to tell you the same thing," she replied. "I couldn't sleep. I'm taking my letter to the office to be mailed."

BJ smiled warmly. "Got a guy back home?"

"Just my dad," Elizabeth returned his smile. "Do you get up early every day to run?"

"When I haven't been in the OR all night. And not when it's raining. But I try to work out a bit," BJ told her. "Since you're already awake, would you like to get some coffee? Or the Army's synthetic equivalent of coffee?"

She chuckled. "Sounds good. I can drop my letter off on the way."

BJ accompanied Elizabeth to the office and they found Radar furiously scribbling instructions as he took a call. He was wrapped in his robe while wearing his wool cap and holding his teddy bear. "I'll let Colonel Potter know and we'll have someone out to help you as soon as we can, Nurse Cratty. I promise," he said before he ended the call.

"What's going on, Radar?" BJ asked.

He blushed bright red at Elizabeth in her non-conservative pajamas.

"Um," he swallowed while he re-focused. "Nurse Cratty has woman…young girl…well, she's having a baby."

"Did they time the contractions?" Elizabeth asked.

"Time the what?"

"Where is this Nurse Cratty and how do we get there?"

"I need to let Colonel Potter know…"

"We can take a jeep. It's about five miles down the road," BJ said to Elizabeth. "I'll go get the jeep."

"I'll go grab supplies."

"I'll meet you out front in five minutes," BJ told her.

Both of them moved in opposite directions and Radar turned after each before running for Colonel Potter's tent.

…

BJ and Elizabeth were loading supplies into the jeep when a pajama-clad Colonel Potter and Radar joined the two of them.

"Radar told me what was going on with Meg. I want the both of you to report back to me as soon as you get there," Potter ordered.

"Of course," BJ told him.

"It's five miles down the road; help the girl and get back to the camp ASAP."

"We will do our best, sir," Elizabeth told him.

"Do me a favor, BJ? Don't lose her," he pointed to Elizabeth. "Her dad'll have my butt in a sling…pardon the language, Lizzie."

She smiled. "Pop likes you," she told him.

"Not if I lose his daughter, he won't," the colonel replied to Elizabeth.

"We'll be back as soon as we can," BJ assured him again.

He nodded and the two of them climbed into the jeep. BJ started it and they started on the road out of camp.

…

"How long has it been since in our last update from BJ and Lizzie?"

Radar checked his watch. "It's ben ten hours, sir. And no one is picking up when we call over there."

"You should try again and keep trying, Radar."

"I'm going to keep trying them," Radar said at the same time.

…

BJ and Elizabeth came into camp an hour later. Their jeep was in between two buses full of wounded soldiers. BJ was driving the jeep still, but Elizabeth was doing chest compressions on a wounded man that was riding in the backseat. BJ had no idea if the camp knew they were coming back – their radio had been damaged on the way back, but since the wounded had been announced, all of the doctors and nurses in the camp were waiting for them.

They pulled to a stop and BJ moved to help Elizabeth.

"How's he doing?"

She was checking his heart rate now that they had come to a complete stop. "I have a pulse – a low one, but at least it's there."

"Talk about making an entrance," Hawkeye said to BJ as he approached the jeep.

"Not exactly the entrance we wanted to be making, but we weren't picky given the circumstances," Elizabeth replied.

"What do we have?" he asked about the patient.

Elizabeth took a chance to breathe and adjust her hair out of her face.

"They started shelling a unit we were passing on the way home," BJ said. "This fella took a couple of hits to his abdomen and we lost a pulse for a while. Elizabeth seemed to have brought him back, though. He needs to get into the OR immediately."

"I'll start triage out here. You guys go get scrubbed up," Hawkeye said.

He signaled a couple of orderlies and they came over with a gurney. They gingerly put the unconscious man on it and listened to Hawkeye's instructions. They immediately rushed the man over to the OR.

Colonel Potter and Frank Burns were scrubbing when the BJ and Elizabeth walked into the room. They'd taken the few seconds to change into new, clean scrubs and were quickly starting to get cleaned up.

"BJ, Elizabeth, where in the Sam Hill have you been?" Colonel Potter asked them in a loud voice.

"After we got to Nurse Cratty's place, we helped deliver the baby, but they started shelling and knocked out the phone lines," BJ told them.

"We found ourselves helping out the wounded on our way back. And now we're here," Elizabeth said.

"I'm happy to see you've each made it back in one piece," Potter told them.

Frank was silent as they scrubbed. But he was making faces.

"You got something to say, Frank?" BJ asked as he saw the smug look on the man's face.

Frank shook his head. "Nope."

Elizabeth didn't want to get in the middle of things, considering how tired she already was, but it was extremely tempting. She already knew how Frank Burns felt about a woman surgeon and she knew that she was about to get very angry at this man if she said anything. And she very much suspected that this was yet another complaint about her mere presence in the scrub room.

But BJ didn't let the topic go. He'd seen firsthand what skills Elizabeth had as a surgeon and he wasn't about to let Frank discount her. And he was just as tired as she was.

"Frank, you sure look like you've got something to say. You should just say it so we can mock you for it and move on," BJ told him in a semi-annoyed tone.

BJ hadn't really experienced women doctors himself, but he knew a good one when he saw them. And Elizabeth had done a terrific job delivering a breach baby for the young Korean girl at Nurse Cratty's place and then she'd taken a bullet out of a man's arm in the field less than an hour later. There was no doubt in BJ's mind that this woman was just as good at her job as any of them, and better at it than Frank Burns would ever be.

"I just don't think that being out in the field in the middle of an enemy attack is any place for a woman. She could have been captured, being weak, and then…"

Elizabeth cleared her throat while she rinsed the soap from her forearms. "But I clearly wasn't captured, Major Burns. I don't mind that you have this particular opinion about me, but I would truly, truly appreciate it if you would keep it to yourself. Especially when I haven't had any sleep, because I'm liable to punch you in the nose."

She finished scrubbing and moved into the OR to begin work on the young man she'd kept alive on the way back from the battle site.

"How are his vitals?" she asked Nurse Able.

"He's holding steady. BP is one hundred over sixty, a little low. And heart rate is sixty-four."

"Hard to believe he had nothing when we first found him, right?" Elizabeth asked.

Nurse Able nodded.

"Well, let's get started."

The rest of the doctors and nurses, as well as orderlies and all manner of personnel were bringing wounded into the OR. BJ was set up to Elizabeth's left and Hawkeye was on her right.

They worked for another eight straight hours, only getting a minute or two between each next patient.

Elizabeth removed the shrapnel and bullets from the young man's abdomen. She had to re-sect the bowel and sew up the pancreas, but his blood pressure and heart rate rebounded and came up to solid, normal numbers.

She was out taking a break when Hawkeye joined her.

"That was some nice work in there, doctor," Hawkeye said.

She nodded. "Thank you," she replied, rolling her neck and shoulders. Her the muscles in her arms were screaming in agony as they protested the amount of work they'd done without relief that day. She'd first delivered a baby, followed by an unrelenting amount of chest compressions, and then she'd been in surgery into the night.

"I've never seen a woman re-sect a bowel before," Hawkeye said. "It was kind of sexy."

She looked at him with a mixture of confusion and repulsion for a quick second before she realized he was joking.

"Never a dull day around here, is there?" she asked.

"Only when Frank's left in charge," he told her.

Elizabeth wasn't sure about the man who sat across from her. Doctor Benjamin Franklin Pierce. One of the most skilled surgeons in existence. And he spent most of his free time either fraternizing with the nurses or using his illegal still in his tent. Elizabeth had no issues with either of those things – people had to do what they could to make the most of the free time because their work time was incredibly intense. But she couldn't help but believe Hawkeye had some kind of underlying motive when he said things to her. Every once in a while, the tone would catch her just like Major Burns' tone did – that he couldn't stand to see a woman running a surgical team.

But he was charismatic for sure. And he had a great smile, whether it was sincere, or not. Elizabeth did find him attractive, but there wasn't a chance she'd let herself get involved with him; he probably had no interest in her whatsoever. And even if he did, it was going to end up like it did back in Chicago with John, and she couldn't do that again.

She shook herself mentally and focused back on Hawkeye, who was still sitting directly opposite her on the bench.

"What are your plans for tonight?" Hawkeye asked.

She rolled her shoulders again. "I'm hoping to get some sleep. Do you ever get used to it here?"

"Not a chance," Hawkeye said. "And if you do, you'd probably be on the first shipment out of here with a section eight…because you'd be legitimately crazy."

He stood, stretched his own back.

"You should come down to the officer's club later, I'll buy you a drink,"

He nodded politely in her direction and moved back into the OR. "Okay, who is my next victim?" she heard him say while he walked into the room.

…

A total of twenty-three wounded came in and they'd lost only one. Elizabeth's first that day. The man with the belly wounds. She knew it had been a long shot, but she'd thought she'd worked hard enough and fast enough to save the kid. He was only nineteen years old. But there had been nothing they could do. He'd coded in post-op and the nurses couldn't bring him back.

Elizabeth had taken it harder than she thought she would have. She'd lost patients before, but this was different. This kid was different. She had thought that since she'd been able to bring him back once, he'd stay that way. But she was wrong.

She'd finished in post-op and gone to take a shower. It was two in the morning now; she was running on sleep from two days ago now. She decided she would go over the officer's club – she could certainly use a drink.

But while she was showering, she heard voices outside the building.

"She's probably not going to come," a voice she recognized as BJ's said. "It's been a long day and she'll probably go to sleep."

"Probably cry herself to sleep. Did you see the way she was fighting tears in post-op?" another voice said. It was definitely Hawkeye.

"Like I said, it's been a long, exhausting day and I am also going to go get some sleep," BJ said. "I don't blame her one bit for needing to get some rest."

"It was probably difficult for her out in the middle of a warzone, too," Hawkeye said. "I'm sure she was a lot of help there."

Elizabeth heard Hawkeye chuckle. It was like he knew she was in there. That he wanted her to hear what he was saying. She started to dry herself off so she could get dressed.

"Hawk, I had no idea you felt this way about women in the army," BJ said.

"I just think that women are too emotional to be surgeons. Doctors, sure. But army surgeons? Making decisions on what limbs or organs the soldier keeps or whether a patient is too bad to fix up? Doesn't seem like the best place for a woman. I've seen our nurses fainting at the sight of some of these patients, BJ. No, she should be back home, working on a pediatrics practice instead of out here. I'm not sure what she's trying to prove, but…"

Elizabeth pushed out the shower building door with incredible force. She'd heard everything the pig-headed Hawkeye Pierce had said. Now she was sure of what she thought of him. He was a smug SOB who had more time on his precious hands than he knew what to do with. And his words had cut straight through her.

She took one look at the man still standing there, mid-sentence, and slapped him across the face as hard as she could before she took off down the path to her own tent. Somewhere in the back of her mind she knew she shouldn't have laid a hand on the man, but she was too tired, too upset, too…everything, to worry about it now.

The two men watched Elizabeth stomp back to her tent until they'd lost sight of her in the shadows and darkness. Hawkeye held his cheek where the impact had left a painful sting. He'd been slapped many times; he'd need several extra hands to count the amount of times, in fact. But this was the first time he'd regretted the reasoning behind it. Perhaps Elizabeth wasn't as weak as he'd originally thought.

BJ looked at him with a semi-amused look on his face. "You okay?" he asked, almost laughing.

Hawkeye nodded. "I'm fine," he said. "Thanks for defending my honor there."

"Oh, I think you were doing a fine job yourself," BJ said. "You want to go get that drink now?"

"I'm going to need a triple."

…

Author's note: Okay, let me know what you thought!