Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Radar was standing in the middle of camp and staring at a gap between two of the tents directly across from the Swamp. Unsurprisingly, this had garnered the attention of the Swamp’s inhabitants. Hawkeye finally rolled out of his cot and over to the gin still to prepare for the day.

“He’s finally lost it,” Trapper said, holding up the tent flap. “Radar O’Reilly, the only man in Korea who knows what’s good for him, and we’ve broken him.”

Frank tutted. Hawkeye could feel the daggers being stared at him even while he slopped together somethings resembling martinis for himself and Trapper. “It’s probably all the nonsense you two tell him!” Frank argued. “Corporal O’Reilly is an impressionable young man, and you two–”

“Leave it alone, Frank,” Hawkeye said, joining them at the tent screen. Very nonchalant. He could do nonchalance. Chalance, on the other hand, not his forte. “If the kid wants to talk to ghosts, let him talk to ghosts.” He handed Trapper a martini and downed half of his in one go. “Personally, I’d like it if he got an apology from that young man who bled all over me yesterday.”

Trapper snorted. “He couldn’t help it. You were shoulder deep in his insides.”

Hawkeye shrugged. “I was just trying to correct his mistake, Trap. Everyone knows you’re supposed to keep shrapnel in your pants, not your lungs.”

The banter didn’t do its usual job of pulling Trapper in. Instead he was staring at Radar, frowning, swirling his gin aimlessly in the glass until Hawkeye reached out and tipped his elbow up for him.

“Look, don’t worry about Radar,” Hawkeye said, leaning on Trapper’s shoulder. “The kid’s a rock. A gullible rock, sure, but a rock. He’s probably just read one too many of those comic books or gotten caught up in something Klinger said. If all else fails, we’ll pay a nurse or get him hooked on eight hour gin like the rest of us.”

Trapper jostled him off his shoulder. “Shut up, will ya? I’m trying to think.”

Hawkeye draped over his shoulders even more aggressively. “Oh, I’m sure you’re trying, but–”

Frank slammed the door open and stepped out into the lane. Hawkeye slammed the rest of his gin and went for a refill. It was after ten, he was almost certain. Five o’clock somewhere.

“Corporal O’Reilly!” Frank shouted. “What are you looking at?”

Radar adjusted his glasses and sniffled a bit, but he didn’t turn around. “Waiting, sir.”

“For what?”

“Um, well,” Radar said. He twitched, and a moment later there was a massive racket from the nurses’ tent next to him. Probably the stovepipe falling down again. “I don’t know, sir?”

Frank turned back to Trapper and Hawkeye, expression pinched. More pinched than usual, anyway. He waved a hand at Radar at them and stomped back into the Swamp.

Then he stood there, holding the door open.

“You’re letting a draft in,” Hawkeye said. Frank gestured again at the door and made a noise that was halfway between a grumble and a squeak. Hawkeye held back a smirk and added, “Use your words, would you, sweetheart?”

“Go help him!” Frank shouted, finally. “And that’s an order!”

Trapper downed the last of his gin and sidled out the door. “Well, why didn’t you say so? You know we lowly captains always listen to majors.”

“Yeah,” Hawkeye added, following. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you needed to take a break from all the yelling to get your voice back. No talking until the end of the war, at the very least. Doctor’s orders.”

Frank closed the door. Then he locked it. Since when did their tent have a lock? “That little twerp might not be my cup of coffee, but he’s the best thing for morale this place has had since the war got started! Now I’m not letting you two back in here until you’ve fixed him, do you understand?”

“What’s there to fix?” Trapper argued. He wrapped his bathrobe tighter around him against the breeze. Hawkeye followed his example. Maybe there was a storm rolling in. Trapper rattled the door handle and took a step back, scowling. “I’d bet my kids that something shows up where he’s watching in the next hour.”

“You can keep your kids,” Hawkeye said. “Nobody in their right mind would bet against that.”

“Shush, Frank’s thinking about it. It’s a generous offer, you know.”

Hawkeye left Trapper and Frank to argue and wandered over to Radar. The kid was nice. Freaked him out, every once in a while. Hawkeye didn’t believe in the supernatural as a rule, but the kid sure seemed to be somewhere over the border of Highly Observant and well into the territory of Actually Psychic.

“Radar,” Hawkeye said, softly. Radar barely glanced up before going back to staring at the empty space. “Something bad?”

Radar thought for a moment, fumbling his hand up to his mouth to chew on his nails before seemingly remembering that everything in this godforsaken place was covered in dirt and germs and ending up wringing it in the hem of his jacket instead. “Just different, sir.”

“Normal different or Korea different?”

“Um. Both, I think.”

“Oh, goody,” Hawkeye sighed. He shot a mournful glance at the nurses’ tent and sat on one of the crates Trapper John had kindly dragged over.

At least it wouldn’t be a long wait.

Sarah Jane Smith, reporter, UNIT associate, all-around liberated woman, thank you very much, was unfortunately stuck in a good friend’s office with nothing much to do. The Brigadier had finally figured out that the correct way to convince the Doctor to do paperwork was to give him someone to make fun of while he did it, which meant that Harry, the office’s owner, was currently indisposed.

She felt bad for Harry, on occasion. He really was clever, just saddled with the inability to understand things outside the scope of his experience. In other words, if it wasn’t 1980s England, a navy ship, or an operating room, he was completely incompetent. It had made for quite the tiffs between him and the Doctor before he went back to full-time at UNIT.

Sarah missed travelling with him. She loved the Doctor more than life itself, that much was obvious from the fact that she kept travelling with him when all he did was get them into dangerous situations. He was her best friend, and she certainly hoped she was his. And he never pressured her for more or asked why she wasn’t interested, like so many men did.

But everything was different with Harry gone. He had made it work so well, since the Doctor regenerated from velvet jackets and Venusian aikido to a tendency towards snide sarcasm and that scarf, and then he left them. The Doctor was closed-off and tetchy lately, only touching her when he needed to keep her from danger. Probably because he missed Harry too, even if he’d never admit it. Maybe that was why he was doing paperwork in his old lab instead of running off the moment the danger was over.

She’d asked him so many times, and he never acknowledged anything had changed.

Sarah finally tried to get back reading when there was… a noise. A very familiar noise. A whooshing, grinding sort of engine sound.

Then the TARDIS was there, in all her police box shaped glory, in the corner of the room. Sarah threw her book in her satchel and stood to knock on the door.

“Showing off, are we?” she asked, loud enough to be heard through the doors. “You’re just as likely to end up halfway across the universe as you are one room over and you know it!”

The TARDIS door opened. An unfamiliar man smiled down at her.

Sarah took a step back. He wasn’t… he wasn’t really unfamiliar. Too much hair and an abysmal sense of fashion tended to point to one person in particular. He’d changed faces before.

“Drive the TARDIS through a paint factory, did we?” Sarah asked.

The Doctor pouted and brushed a speck of lint from his horrendously unpleasant coat. “Considering your Me wears that awful scarf everywhere, I daresay my outfit choices have improved. Isn’t this Harry’s office?”

“He’s helping you with paperwork.”

The Doctor shuddered as he stepped out of the TARDIS and closed the door behind him. He picked up the Rubik’s Cube from Harry’s desk and fiddled with it. “Where are you right now? I was aiming for just after Devesham.”

He was, in fact, right on the money. Devesham had been full of androids and the short, gray fellow who had been controlling them. “Oh, very good. Finally passed your driver’s exam?”

“Only in the sense that it’s far easier to target a specific time zone with another TARDIS around.”

“Hmm.”

The Doctor set down the toy, having thoroughly failed to solve it, and started rifling through Harry’s filing cabinet.

He was always the same, even when he was different. Restless, intrusive, and entirely too clever for his own good. Faintly cute, no matter which version of him it was, because she’d somehow managed to start thinking that with the first one she’d met, and he had looked to be about twice her age. She thanked her lucky stars every day that she could flirt a little bit and still have him know she wasn’t interested in anything more than what they had.

“Why are you here?” she asked, hiking herself up to perch on the edge of Harry’s desk. “You told me you’re not supposed to cross your own time stream.”

The Doctor startled and shoved the hand-full of paper clips he’d gathered into a pocket. “Oh, no reason. Not to see you.” Before Sarah could even open her mouth to argue, he added, “Not that it’s not good to see you of course! My Sarah Jane, lovely as always. No, I’m off to smooth over a time fracture and thought Harry might be interested.”

“Harry can’t tell one end of a Dalek from the other!” Sarah protested. “Why do you think he’s going to find a– well, a you-know-what, interesting?”

“It’s not your problem, Sarah Jane,” the Doctor said. He rolled his eyes at her and she thought about whacking him. “Entirely out of your jurisdiction. Now, if you’d be ever so kind, go play with Scarfy and let Harry know he’s missing an appointment.”

She stared at him. The Doctor smoothed the lines of his technicolor dream coat and sat in Harry’s desk chair, picking up the Rubik’s Cube again.

Sarah Jane crossed her legs and leaned in. “Exactly how long has it been since I stopped travelling with you?”

“I don’t often have cause to measure time in years,” the Doctor snapped. Deflecting.

“How many people, then?”

The Doctor looked away. “I don’t remember. Some of them overlapped. Ten, maybe.”

“Well. I’ll excuse you exactly once, then, because the You out there would know far better than to imply that something isn’t my business.”

“I didn’t imply, I said in a very straightforward manner that–”

Sarah held a finger to her lips. The Doctor stopped. “I’ll be coming with, by the way, and there’s not a single thing you can do to stop me.”

She hopped down from the desk and bent to fix the way her trouser cuffs had ridden up. The Doctor was there a moment later, mucking with the lay of her scarf until it settled flat. Her Doctor hadn’t done anything like that since Harry left.

“The time fracture is in a very dangerous place in history,” the Doctor warned. “If you got hurt I not only wouldn’t forgive myself, but it could mean the complete collapse of my timeline! You still have plenty of travelling with Scarfy before I should be taking you along with me.”

“I won’t get hurt, then,” she said, forcing a smile. The Doctor frowned but let her go when she pulled away. “I’ll get Harry?”

“It doesn’t seem like I can stop you,” the Doctor complained. He tossed her the Rubik’s Cube. Solved, now. When had he done that? “Go on, I’m bored already.”

She threw the Rubik’s Cube at his head and went to find Harry before she could see if it hit.

The Doctor, Sarah’s Doctor, was laying on top of one of his lab benches, down to his shirtsleeves and waistcoat, his head and scarf lolling over the side. Harry was in a nearby chair with a clipboard on his lap, desperately trying to get the Doctor to cooperate.

“Please, Doctor,” Harry was saying. Sarah leaned against the door frame to watch them. “The Brigadier wants to know how these androids work so we can fight back against them, not so we can make our own!”

The Doctor rolled over so he was laying on his stomach, draping his arms over the side like a particularly morose looking cat. “And I’ve said, time and time again, that I refuse to trust humans, particularly UNIT, with alien technology!”

Harry scoffed. “What, would you rather Torchwood get their hands on all this?”

The Doctor was up like a shot, snatching the clipboard away from Harry and pushing things out of the way to sit on a different table. He stopped for a moment to wave to Sarah Jane, kicking his feet back and forth, before biting his lip and staring at the paperwork.

“Oh, Dr. Sullivan,” Sarah called. Harry craned his neck to look over his shoulder, smiling when he spotted her.

“Hello, Sarah Jane,” he said, joining her in the doorway. “Finally got bored of waiting in my office, eh?”

“Just in time for an interesting lesson in Doctor Management, I see. What’s Torchwood?”

Harry flushed red. “No need to worry about that, old thing. UNIT business, you see. Rather out of your jurisdiction.”

Sarah whacked him in the shoulder. “You spend too much time with him.”

“Says you!” Harry argued, shielding himself from another blow as she dragged him into the hallway. “You’re the one who’s still– ow, now really!– still travelling with him!”

“And you’re the one who can make him do things! Come on, I’ve got a surprise in your office.”

Harry dug in his heels, pulling Sarah Jane to a stop without any effort. He was a good sport; he played along with her, even when he could overpower her. Sarah always looked for that in her friends, including the Doctor. “Now, hold on one moment,” Harry said. “What’s going on, Sarah? You promised there would be no more practical jokes, and I really can’t see you going back on your word, so–”

“Oh, just… come on!” Sarah grabbed his arm and yanked, getting him to stumble into motion again. “I promise you’ll think it’s interesting.”

“Interesting is no good!” Harry protested, letting her drag him along. “I came back here to get away from interesting!”

She shoved him through the door of his office. The Doctor had completely dismantled all three filing cabinets and was sitting in the wreckage, throwing paper airplanes at the waste bin he’d propped on one of Harry’s shelves across the room.

Harry looked back at Sarah Jane. She shrugged.

“Hello again,” Harry said with a sigh, patting the TARDIS as he passed. “Where are we going this time?”

The Doctor carefully finished another paper airplane, chucked it into the bin, and looked up with a smile. “Harry Sullivan! How much do you know about the Korean War?”

Hawkeye sprawled on his belly over the crate he’d been sitting on, his hair and boots both dragging in the dirt. “Trap, do you have gin yet?” he mumbled.

“The deck’s missing seven cards and the martini glasses are in the Swamp,” Trapper said. “With Frank.” Hawkeye looked up just in time to watch Trapper refold his legs, right on top of left instead of left on top of right. He probably had better things to do than try to get a look at his bunkmate’s thighs, but the way he was thrown over the crate was making him slightly light-headed. Trapper looked back at the Swamp. “If he's so concerned about Radar, why doesn’t he come out here himself?”

“Major Burns thinks I’m weird, sir,” Radar said. “He thinks I can read his mind.”

“Everyone can read Frank’s mind except himself truly,” Hawkeye said, groaning as he tried to pull himself back to a seat. His back was going to pay for that little stunt. “Besides, he should know you can’t read minds. You’d have an aneurysm if you thought half the things I think about.”

Radar wrinkled his nose. “Captain McIntyre showed me your magazines once.”

Hawkeye looked up. Trapper smirked at him.

“Fink!” Hawkeye shouted. “You no-good rat! You’re the one who cut out all the pictures of John Wayne, aren’t you!”

“A man’s gotta entertain himself,” Trapper said, barely restraining a giggle. Hawkeye scrabbled to haul himself off the crate and fell on his back in the dirt.

“I’ll kill you, McIntyre!” Hawkeye shouted, gesturing wildly and waiting for his back to start cooperating. Trapper howled with laughter from somewhere next to and above him. “I mean it! You give me back those pictures or so help me, I’ll–”

There was a sound. Not the sound of guns or bombs or choppers but the gentle turning thrum of a different kind of engine fighting its way into existence. Hawkeye lifted his head just enough to turn his gaze to Radar’s staring spot.

A box. Blue, big enough for a person to get inside, emblazoned with “POLICE” and smaller text Hawk couldn’t make out across the top.

It hadn’t been there a few moments before.

“Oh my god,” Radar said. “Oh my god! Do you sirs know what this means?”

“Too much gin?” Trapper said.

“Not enough gin,” Hawkeye mumbled, dropping his head back in the dirt.

Radar stepped forward and held his hand up to the door. He was practically vibrating with excitement, anticipation of whatever was inside.

“It means the war’s finally over.”

Chapter Text

By far the most fun part of TARDIS travel, in Sarah Jane’s opinion, was the wardrobe. There were a shocking number of advantages to a ship bigger on the inside: options for bedrooms and a library more impressive than the one in Alexandria (not really that great, she had to say) and sometimes just wandering the corridors between adventures, but the wardrobe was magnificent. Anything you wanted the TARDIS could put together for you, skirts and dresses and trousers and frilly little tops that really showed off her collarbone.

And Harry never bothered with any of it. He stuck to his uniform, sometimes a similarly-colored suit jacket if he was feeling particularly adventurous. Sarah Jane had seen him in something other than Proper Navy Attire perhaps thrice in all the time she’d known him, and every time it was a grey cable-knit sweater that would have looked at home in a 19th century lighthouse.

Sarah pulled her orange Wellies on over the fatigues provided by the TARDIS, added the yellow raincoat that she liked so much, kept the scarf she’d been wearing in Devesham, and fished an army green jeep cap out of her pocket. It had definitely been a greyish beanie the last time she looked. It was nice of the ship to try, but she would miss that beanie.

She stepped out of the dressing room into the wardrobe hallway, running her fingers along the walls. Harry was at the end of the hall in front of the mirror, struggling to straighten his tie.

“You said ‘this time,’” Sarah said instead of greeting him. Harry frowned at her from the mirror. “How many times has he come back for you?”

Harry adjusted his cap and started buttoning his dress jacket. “Twice, before this. A young chap in a pinstripe suit and a trench coat and a blonde with a taste for cricket. But you’ve met some of the others, haven’t you?”

“Not on purpose. We just sort of… stumbled into each other. But he comes back for you.”

“You’re worrying too much, old thing,” Harry said. “The very moment you stop travelling with him, he’ll start bothering you. I promise.”

“I hope you’re right,” Sarah sighed.

The pulsing of the ship’s engines around them slowed, then stopped with a thunk. There was always a different feeling with being on solid ground as opposed to in flight, but Sarah couldn’t have named what it was if she tried. The Time Lords probably had a word for the feeling.

The Doctor whisked in from a different dressing room. He had changed his waistcoat to something as equally bright as the previous one and done absolutely nothing to the rest of the outfit. Maybe he and Harry could go halves on a closet, considering they needed about four hangars between the two of them.

“Well?” the Doctor said, spreading his arms and giving a little twirl. “You still haven’t told me how you like this one, either of you.”

“It’s very nice, Doctor,” Harry said. Sarah recognized the little hitch his throat made as he struggled to hold back a laugh. “A bit loud though, wouldn’t you say?”

“Oh, I’m not talking about the clothes! Me! I’ve had this body for quite a while, you know.”

Harry crossed his arms. “I’m talking about you.”

Sarah snickered. “I’d still like to see you as a woman.”

“Just you watch!” the Doctor said. He let Sarah adjust his cravat, evening out the loops of the bow. “It’s a fifty-fifty shot each time, and yet every single one of me has been a man! It’s– It’s outrageous! Unfair! Reprehensible! I’m beginning to think they did something to me when they executed me for treason.”

“Who did what?” Harry squawked. Sarah ignored him.

“Do you think you’d wear dresses?” Sarah asked. The Doctor’s face crinkled up. She made a concerted effort to stop thinking about a version of the Doctor that was a woman.

“Sarah, my dear, I would wear dresses now if I could find one I liked as much as this coat,” he said. “Though with all the running and ending up-side down I ought to wear tights, and really, those are far more hassle than they’re worth, getting runs– running causing runs, running from–” the Doctor stopped, frowning. Sarah was now very pointedly not thinking about how good this Doctor would look in the right dress, maybe even something patchwork like his coat– “There’s some sort of joke there, I know it.”

“Excuse me,” Harry said. The Doctor’s attention snapped to him, eyes wide. “I suspect that, wherever we’ve landed, they’re likely curious about why a police box has appeared out of thin air.”

“Oh, not to worry,” the Doctor said. “Walter will explain.”

“Where the hell did that come from?” Klinger asked.

The scene in front of him made very little sense. Hawkeye was laying in the dirt, Trapper stood stock-still with a hand full of playing cards, and Radar held his hand out in front of a giant blue box that wasn’t there a few minutes ago, eyes wide and nearly hyperventilating.

“Radar, hey,” Klinger said, stepping around the whining surgeon on the ground. “Hey, kid. What’s happening?”

Radar gave him his best deer-in-the-headlights look.

“He’s here,” Radar said. His voice was shaking. Klinger wrapped an arm around his shoulder. “The Doctor’s here!”

“Hey!” Hawkeye protested. He hauled himself up, cursing under his breath, and brushed the dirt off his fatigues. “I’m a doctor!”

“We’re doctors!” Trapper corrected. “That thing says ‘police.’”

Radar didn’t answer. He shifted closer, letting his hand touch the door.

It opened.

The space beyond was shadowed at the entrance, slowly transitioning from dark wood to stark white walls and roundel-covered double doors, lit from underneath and between by a pale yellow light. The hall was far too big to fit in the box no matter how many mirrors you put inside. A gentle hum pulsed from the hallway, like it wanted them to enter.

Klinger started cataloging. There had to be something here he could use for his next pass at his Section Eight.

“Holy crap,” Radar whispered.

The doors at the end of the hall creaked open.

“You first,” Hawkeye said from somewhere behind Klinger and Radar. Klinger felt a bump against the back of his heels and turned to glare at Hawkeye.

Then Radar stepped over the threshold, and all three of the others followed.

The inside of the box, or whatever it was, felt no different from the outside. Stepping through the doorway was just that: stepping through a doorway. Hawkeye swiped a hand along the wall and frowned.

“We’ve all lost it,” Trapper said with the authority of a man who had completely convinced himself of something. “Either that or a bomb fell on camp and this is the elevator to Heaven.”

“You really think that’s where we’d go?” Hawkeye replied. Klinger rolled his eyes and moved faster to catch up with Radar, heels echoing in the empty space. The Captains always talked like that, bouncing off each other until they could finally agree on something.

Radar gripped the edge of one of the white doors and eased it the rest of the way open. The room beyond was bare and circle-lined with only a hat stand and a wicker chair in one corner and a flat-sided, button-covered pedestal (control console?) in the center. Beyond that was another half-open door that spilled into a bright hallway.

“Wow,” Radar said.

“I think that’s underselling it,” Klinger added. He waved Radar through the doors and followed after, grateful to hear the Captains’ boots rushing to catch up.

The humming picked up, thrumming through the floor around them. Radar stepped forward and ran a hand over the console, which only brought the humming to a fever pitch.

He pressed a button, and the room fell silent.

“I don’t like this,” Hawkeye said. “I don’t understand it! It’s just a crate! A crate that appeared out of nowhere, sure, but bombs appear out of nowhere. Jeeps and casualties and– and Frank Burnses appear out of nowhere! Nothing good ever sneaks up behind you!”

“Police box,” Radar corrected, spreading his hands over one of the console’s panels. “It’s not a crate. They have them in England.”

“And how do you know that!?” Hawkeye surged forward, grabbing Radar by the shoulders and turning him around. “And who’s ‘the Doctor?’ Aren’t you scared? This is– Trapper’s right, it’s not real, because it can’t be real. This is insanity, or a mass hallucination, or something! Nothing can be bigger on the inside, that’s not how it works! Do the North Koreans have nerve gas now?”

“It is real!” Radar shouted back. “I know it’s real ‘cause I met the Doctor before, ‘cause when we went to the state fair there were these robots and they ate Petey Gustafson even though I tried to help, and the Doctor stopped them!”

“What the hell are you talking about!?”

“Leave him alone, Hawk,” Trapper said. He eased Hawkeye’s fingers away from Radar’s shoulders and pulled him toward the wicker chair. “You’ll be okay. Just sit down for a minute.”

Hawkeye collapsed into the chair in a pile of limbs and leaned his head against the wall. Trapper knelt on the floor beside him and took his hand.

It was cute, Klinger thought. They would make a nice couple if they could get away with it. It would have been domestic if they were back at home or even in the Swamp, but instead they were in some horrible box that seemed to like Radar and could very well keep going on forever past the single door on the far side of the room. Radar paced around the console until he was in front of a small television screen recessed into an alcove. A few button presses later and it lit up with color.

“Woah,” Radar said. “Klinger, come look at this!”

“I’m not so good with radios,” Klinger said. He drifted nearer to the single door and pushed it the rest of the way open, peeking out into the hallway beyond.

“She’s not a radio!” Radar insisted. “She’s an electronic computer, like the ENIAC they got in Mary-land.”

“Whatever you say, kid.”

Klinger glanced over his shoulder. Trapper and Hawkeye were talking in hurried whispers in their corner. Radar was completely engaged with whatever was happening on the screen. Klinger definitely had more questions about the kid-eating robots, but they could wait.

He stepped into the hall.

Suddenly he couldn’t hear the sounds from the room behind him, even though he could see everyone in it perfectly clearly. The pulsing, thrumming heartbeat of whatever this place was carried on in the background, encouraging him down the door-lined hall to the left.

He didn’t trust this place. It was all too… alien. He’d read enough of Radar’s science fiction comics to know a spaceship when he saw one, even if it was packaged up inside a big blue box.

The first door he opened was a bedroom. Well-made bed, gray wool blanket, a few choice knick-knacks on top of a bookcase. Another shelf held a scale model of an aircraft carrier, proudly proclaimed the HMS Ark Royal by the plaque underneath.

The next door was… also a bedroom. Cluttered, with pink-tinted walls and a makeup station in one corner. One entire wall had been converted into a cubby-shelf. More than half the cubbies were filled, labeled with strings of numbers and unfamiliar names. A hunting rifle with the sign “Mars, 1911” was one of the very few recognizable objects.

Klinger turned to leave and ran directly into a brunette in an extremely yellow raincoat.

“Oh!” she said, eyes wide. She was slight, bright-eyed, and very British. “What are you doing in my bedroom? No– no, scratch that. How did you get in here in the first place?”

Klinger fumbled for his words. Here was this absolutely stunning, beautiful, magnificent woman, and she was probably from outer space. “This is your bedroom?”

“Yes,” she said carefully. “So why are you in it?”

“I thought you said to ignore that question.”

“You seem to want to answer it.”

“Well, it’s all a mistake, really,” he said, edging around her to get closer to the door. “Radar said something about ‘the Doctor,’ and I didn’t feel like questioning him, so–”

“Radar?” she asked. Something unreadable flickered over her face, close to disappointment. “Not Walter?”

“Walter, Radar, sure! He answers to either, so long as you’ve got food or compliments.” Klinger felt the door frame behind him brush against his outstretched fingers. He braced himself against it. “Now look, how about we say you probed me, and I just answer whatever questions you have. I’ll help you abduct someone higher up the command chain, if you want! There’s this guy, Frank Burns? Very representative of humans as a species, you’ll get great use out of him.”

She narrowed her eyes. “What makes you think I’m going to probe you?”

“This is your spaceship, isn’t it?”

She hesitated for a moment. “Ah,” she said. “I think we’ve gotten off on the wrong foot. My name is Sarah Jane Smith. I’m an investigative journalist from the year nineteen-hundred-and-eighty.” Klinger frowned, but didn’t interrupt. She was carefully counting off points on her fingers like this was something she’d had to do time and time again. “This is the TARDIS. It’s a spaceship, it belongs to my friend, the Doctor, and yes it does always look like a police box, I think he’s fond of it.”

Sarah Jane stuck out her hand. Klinger gripped the door frame tighter.

“Aren’t you going to introduce yourself?” she asked.

“Uh. Corporal Max Klinger, MASH 4077th. You really mean it by ‘1980?’”

She grabbed his hand, shook it, and smiled. “It’s very nice to meet you, Max. I like your dress. Let’s go find the Doctor.”

She shoved him out into the hallway and pulled him down the corridor, never letting go of his hand.

Nothing on the little television screen made sense. Maybe some of that was because Radar didn’t have the training or the smarts to understand all of it, but he certainly knew how to tune a radio and that skill seemed to come in pretty good handy. He’d found a screen that could display the date and time, but the numbers were flickering so wildly between times in 1950 all the way to 1953 that he could barely read it. It didn’t help that his head was being real uncooperative, trying to poke at Captains Pierce and McIntyre without his permission in a way he really thought he’d finally gotten a hold of.

There was a man in a Navy dress uniform standing in the doorway behind him. Radar looked up to see him holding his peaked cap in his hands, staring wide-eyed at the Captains.

“Excuse me,” the man said. Captain McIntyre shot to his feet, edging in front of where Captain Pierce was sitting in the wicker chair. “Would one of you happen to be Walter?”

“Oh, that’s me, sir,” Radar said. The man’s grip on his hat tightened. He was real scared. “I didn’t mean to intrude, really, I just thought since the door was unlocked the Doctor wouldn’t mind if–”

“It’s quite alright, lad,” the Navy man said. He ran a hand through his hair and adjusted his tie. His nerves were so on edge when he met new people, ‘cause they always thought he was incompetent or stupid. “Gave me a good startle, that’s all. And who–”

“Captains Pierce and McIntyre, sir,” Radar provided, pointing to the right one as he did so. “And uh, I’m Corporal Radar O’Reilly, company clerk. Nobody really calls me Walter anymore on account of how they all call me Radar.”

“Ah. I see. Well, jolly good to meet you, Corporal. I’ve heard you lot are a field hospital?”

“Yessir. MASH 4077th, best care this side of the 38th parallel.”

“Good! Good,” he said. “I’m a surgeon with the Royal Navy, you see. Surgeon-Lieutenant Harry Sullivan, at your service.” He put his cap on for a moment, tipped it, and then went back to wringing it in his hands. “The Doctor thought I could help you chaps while he works on the nitty-gritty, so to speak. And I’d like to get a good look at your processes.” He smiled, nervously. “Historical surgery is a special interest of mine.”

Captain Pierce shot to his feet before Captain McIntyre could stop him. He was boiling under the surface, confused and scared and trying to cover it by being worried about Radar and real angry about the fact that he was scared and– “Historical!? We’re on the front lines of a war! We’re pioneering techniques that nobody would have even thought of two years ago! And you’re calling this historical surgery!?”

Lieutenant Sullivan had the good sense to look scorned. “Poor choice of words, I’m afraid, but it is historical, to me. I was barely into primary school when the war in Korea began.”

Captain Pierce blinked at him. He was panicking in that way that always went badly, where he didn’t shout or hit people but instead got real quiet and miserable and lonely for a few days. His mind didn’t always want to cooperate with him. Radar knew the feeling.

“Trap,” Captain Pierce said, very quietly. “Can you pinch me now so I can wake up?”

“Let’s go outside, huh?” Captain McIntyre said. He grabbed Captain Pierce by the shoulders and turned him toward the door, gently pushing to get him to move.

When they were gone, Lieutenant Sullivan sighed and grabbed his overcoat from the hat stand. “Excellent start, old boy,” he mumbled to himself.

“Captain Pierce’ll be okay,” Radar said. Lieutenant Sullivan startled and turned to him. Radar hated that, startling people. He always forgot that most folks didn’t know when someone quiet was in the room. “Oh, sorry, sir. But he will be, ‘cause he’s always okay. Just sometimes he needs not to be for a few days.”

Lieutenant Sullivan smiled at him. It was a sad smile. “Not to worry. The Doctor has days like that. All you can do is make sure he has someone good for him by his side.”

The Lieutenant was thinking about gingerbread. It wasn’t a good memory, it was– almost cloying, it made him sick just to think about, made him fight to keep a worse memory from clawing out of the depths that had something to do with a half-empty bottle of aspirin and a man in a blue pinstripe suit who wasn’t nearly the same kind of fun as his Doctor, and–

Radar snapped back to the moment. His whole skull hurt. He was out of practice, didn’t even reach for it anymore, because he didn’t want to see all the blood and fear and regret that was lurking around the 4077th. He had enough presents and futures to worry about all on his own, with the war going on. He sure didn’t need to go poking around in other people’s pasts. This had come to him without any effort, not like usual where he had to actually try to see inside people’s heads. Everything around him was humming in a way he thought he was supposed to find comforting.

Still, he tried pushing back, skimming for more information, but Lieutenant Sullivan had already moved on, thinking about something else with not enough tied to it to be easily reachable.

Klinger had come back, slightly worse for wear, with a girl who couldn’t have been all that much older than them.

“Hello,” she said, smiling at him. He was far younger than any of the soldiers at UNIT, but the Korean War, that was one of the times the United States used its draft system, wasn’t it? The boy must have been shipped over the moment he turned eighteen. Radar thought about arguing that he wasn’t a ‘boy’ and then thought better of it. “Your friend Max was telling me all about you on the way back here.”

Klinger folded his arms and took up a position next to Radar. “Hey, that’s not all we talked about! I also complimented you. A lot.”

Sarah Jane, because her name was pinging around almost alarmingly in some real uncomfortable areas of Klinger’s mind, smiled wider. “Yes, and it was very nice,” she said. Max reminded her of someone, a nice young lady with an unpronounceable name who she’d stayed with for a few days on Leyon Beta while the Doctor headed the revolution against the monarchy–

Radar blinked. He was on the ground. When had that happened? Lord, his head hurt. It was all he could do to mumble thanks and try to keep his shirt cuffs over his wrists when Lieutenant Sullivan and Klinger hauled him up from the floor. The Lieutenant squinted at him and shined a small flashlight in his eyes.

“What are you looking for?” Radar mumbled.

“I’m checking your pupil dilation, lad,” Lieutenant Sullivan said. “That was quite the fall, you know. Give us a sporting chance at catching you next time, if you can.”

Lieutenant Sullivan gently grabbed him by the cheek, trying to turn his head, and the bolt of fear and miserableness that passed over Radar nearly made him hurl. Harry– Lieutenant Sullivan– God, he hated himself. This close, with his hands touching Radar’s head, his thoughts were overwhelming. Why did the Doctor keep coming back for him, would this one like him like the others, did he like him, really, or was he just the only medical doctor he knew and trusted? and if he got this wrong, if the Doctor already knew the lad and now the boy had a concussion or something worse, something he didn’t catch, would he–

“I’m okay!” Radar insisted. Lieutenant Sullivan drew his hand away like he’d been burned. “S’not anything wrong. I fainted, that’s all.”

“Well, that’s not particularly reassuring,” Lieutenant Sullivan said. “You realize that could be a sign of something much worse, don’t you? An undiagnosed neural problem or an infectious disease, or– or a brain tumor! And in this day and age the treatments aren’t effective, I mean, you lot are still doing lobotomies, so–”

“Harry,” Sarah Jane said, sharply. “Stop scaring him.”

“I’m only worried that–”

“How about,” she continued, raising her voice to cut him off, “we all go outside and let the Doctor finish up? We could all use some fresh air, don’t you think?”

“Great idea,” Klinger said. He grabbed Radar by the wrist, thankfully over his sleeve, and pulled, hauling him back through the double doors and the hallway and out into the dirt and blood and eternity of Korea.

The box was still a box.

Lieutenant Sullivan shut the doors behind them.

“Now, I suppose we wait,” Lieutenant Sullivan said.

Something pulled at the edges of Radar’s mind, something sharper and more intense than he’d felt since he was a little kid and everything in his brain was too much. He looked up, expecting to see choppers rumbling overhead at any moment, but…

Nothing.

Captain Pierce was scared, real worried that something in him had finally snapped, that he was already in a padded cell in a hospital and just didn't know it. Captain McIntyre was scared in a different way, wanting to touch Hawkeye but not knowing if it would be welcome, out in public, I mean cripes, we’ve hardly done anything other than a little bit of necking in the supply tent–

Radar took a breath and tried to do what the Doctor had taught him way back in Des Moines. Shut a door, lock it, hang up the key where you can find it again if you need it. He’d made a lot of doors in Korea. Right then it felt a little like the whole building he kept them in had been hit with a mortar. Lieutenant Sullivan was scared too, but it was about the Doctor, a constant thrum of worry in the back of his mind, he still didn’t understand everything about the Doctor, the man was an alien, for God’s sake–

That tug again. Radar knew he should have been able to pin it down, find where it was coming from, because it was danger, but everything was getting louder, drowning it out–

The door of the TARDIS opened again. The Doctor– he was wearing a different coat, had a different face, but it was unmistakably him– stepped out, grinning at him.

The tug resolved into a yank, a blindingly clear picture of a very real future where very soon something went extremely wrong and the whole bunch of them had to have a long talk with Colonel Flagg, where Major Burns somehow became Lieutenant Colonel Burns way sooner than he was supposed to,

Another option, where the future turned and turned and never got very far past 1951 no matter how much time passed,

And another, one that meant he had to move right now and maybe he could make it back to Iowa.

The yank was just enough to pull Radar forward so he could grab Lieutenant Sullivan and shove, moving him out of the way so that when the gunshot echoed around the valley it didn’t hit him, travelled past from the direction of the Swamp to–

Radar realized he had made an extraordinarily bad decision when the Doctor brought his fingers up to his waistcoat and they came away soaked in something dark and tacky and orange-y enough to only register as blood after he’d stared at it for a few moments.

Major Burns stood outside the Swamp, looking at the pistol in his hands like he was surprised it was there.

The Doctor looked at the bullet wound in his abdomen that was rapidly darkening his waistcoat and pants.

“That man ruined my outfit!” the Doctor protested.

He was on the ground about two seconds later.

Chapter Text

Lieutenant Colonel Henry Blake was very decidedly not a man of action. He did what he needed to do because he needed to do it, sure, but delegating worked wonders.

So when a pistol fired in his camp, he did what he always did in this kind of situation.

“Radar!” he yelled from his new home under his desk. “What the hell was that!”

Nothing. The kid should have been there by now.

“Radar!”

Henry frowned and picked up his fishing cap from where it had fallen. There hadn’t been more shots. Just the one.

“Jeepers,” he muttered to himself. “Frank Burns.”

Frank was… well, Frank was a lot. Frank was the kind of man who bought a doctorate and got drafted for it. He was the kind of man who could live with Hawkeye Pierce for more than a year and not be changed by it. He was also the kind of man who didn’t care about anything except the accolades he got at the end of an accomplishment.

In other words, he was the only idiot around who would fire off a gun at a hospital in broad daylight.

Pierce was yelling for someone. Or at someone. Maybe both. Henry put his hat on and walked out into the compound to find… a situation.

The first thing he noticed was a giant, blue crate that had appeared between Major Houlihan’s tent and one of the nurses’. There was a splatter of blood across the front, about at the right height for aiming at a man’s stomach. McIntyre and an extremely pale Hawkeye were crouched in front of the box with a stranger in Navy dress. Corporal Klinger had herded a pretty young woman in fatigues and a rain jacket off to the side and was doing his best to comfort her.

And then there was Frank, standing on the other side of the road with his pistol in his hand, looking absolutely baffled while Radar O’Reilly of all people shouted at him. Henry ignored him and stomped over to the commotion.

Klinger’s scrap pile with a man inside was lying on the ground, bleeding a lot of the wrong color of blood absolutely everywhere through a gauzy silk scarf that had been stuffed against the bullet wound in the left side of his abdomen.

“What the hell is going on here?” Henry demanded.

The Navy man leaped up. “This is a hospital, yes? I need your OR and a good nurse, now, or you’re going to end up with quite a lot of trouble on your hands that I really don’t know how to deal with.”

“Hang on!” Henry said. Pierce looked up, seemingly only just noticing that he was there. He looked like he’d dipped his hands in iodine. “You can’t come into my hospital and start giving me orders!”

“This man is going to die because one of your personnel shot him, unless you let me get him on an operating table this instant!”

“Henry,” McIntyre said. Henry blinked at him. “They came out of the box.”

Pierce, somehow, went even paler. Henry poked him out of the way and forced his knees to let him down in the rapidly-becoming-mud. He lifted the orange-soaked scarf and tried to get a sense of the extent of the damage.

“Perforated the bowel, do you think?” Henry asked, glancing up at Pierce.

The Navy man responded instead. “Wrong side. Angle and point of entry, it’s probably clipped a liver, maybe the chronologic irrigator. You need to let me take him into the operating room.”

“The what!?” Pierce squawked. Henry stumbled up and was immediately replaced by McIntyre, who went back to holding pressure on the entry wound.

He took a deep breath. He couldn’t very well let the man bleed out.

“Klinger, get a litter,” Henry ordered. Klinger scrambled off with the girl in tow. “McIntyre, find Bayliss, tell her she’s assisting and that it’s an emergency.”

“Not Margaret?” McIntyre asked.

“I don’t want this getting to Frank until I’m ready for it,” Henry said, glancing back at the Swamp. Frank was still getting the chewing out of his life from Radar. At least that situation was stable, for the time being. McIntyre nodded and beelined to the Officers’ Club, letting Navy take over at the wound site. “Pierce, you and I are supervising.”

“Oh no,” Pierce said. “No no no. I’m not getting involved! This is wrong, Henry. W-R-O-N-G wrong. They came out of a box that appeared out of nowhere! His blood’s made out of iodine! Not to mention that they’re doing something to Radar! The kid should barely be able to stand up to Frank, much less yell at him! I absolutely, positively, undeniably will not have any part in this!”

There was a long pause. Something almost-imperceptible changed in Pierce’s face.

The door of the crate was rattling shut behind him faster than anyone could stop him.

McIntyre returned, Nurse Bayliss in tow. She took one glance at the situation and knelt down next to Navy, asking questions as fast as she could fire them off.

“Where’s Hawkeye?” McIntyre asked.

Henry pointed to the crate, and McIntyre disappeared into it.

Well. He could supervise Navy by himself.

Hawkeye stumbled through the doors of the control room and nearly ended up on the floor. Okay, maybe it hadn’t been a good idea to come in here, not if he was panicking like this, not when he already felt like he was going crazy. But something was weird with Radar, weirder than usual, and he couldn't sit on that. The kid spent an hour staring at an empty spot on the ground, and something showed up there. He kept the Navy man, Sullivan, from getting shot by the first-class idiot Hawkeye had the misfortune of calling his bunkmate. Had Radar summoned the box? Or– or, and this was a worrying thought, had the alien used Radar to land his ship?

Or, some part of his brain added, maybe you’re worrying for no reason. Maybe you're worrying because you really are crazy. Do you honestly think someone dressed like that is the leader of an invasion force?

Could be, he argued. The British wore red.

I don’t think you’re helping the ‘going crazy’ allegations by talking back to me, you know.

Point taken.

He didn't think he was going crazy. Then again, Frank and Flagg were both perfectly convinced of their own sanity.

There was a television screen blooming with color on one side of the console. Information spilled across it far faster than he could parse, but there was one rapidly changing piece of data that never moved from the corner.

The date was changing. The little screen said it was September 15, 1952, and was rapidly ticking backwards. It had been 1951 yesterday, as far as he was aware.

The sound of the wooden doors down the hallway clicking open startled him away from the screen. One of that Doctor's friends, maybe– he wasn't supposed to be in here, and Frank had shot him, his friends were probably more than a little peeved about that and had every reason to be.

Hawkeye bolted through the other door and shut it tightly behind him. The hallway where he found himself was white-walled, just like the console room, and curved away in a massive arc in either direction. There was a door every twenty-five feet, plain and white like everything else.

He went right. He'd open some doors, maybe find something that would give him a clue how the aliens were doing whatever it was they were doing to Radar, and call… someone. Someone would be able to do something about this. Not Flagg, someone else. Sidney? A Brit? All three of the aliens were British, which felt weird. And human-looking, except for the iodine all over his hands and the quadruple-thump of two hearts under his fingers and the fact that his chest didn't rise and fall, not at all, even as that crime against human nature of a heartbeat ratcheted higher in its effort to keep his blood pressure up.

He was aware he was having what Trapper generally referred to as “a rough time” and what Frank always called “why you're unfit to be a soldier,” which was rich coming from a man who definitely wasn't soldier or surgeon material. Margaret called it a “Hawkeye Pierce special.” He liked that way to think about it best, especially over Sid Freedman, psychiatrist extraordinaire’s, interpretation that the something fundamentally wrong with his brain was getting exacerbated by sixteen hour shifts and more probably too much gin. Sure, he was freaking out and probably wouldn't be able to find the motivation to do anything other than lurk around the gin still for a few days after all this was done, but that was his well-earned lurking.

Hawkeye skimmed his fingers along the wall as he walked down the hall. It wasn’t doing as much to keep him grounded as he thought it would. The walls were completely smooth, some sort of metal that almost pulsed under his touch.

He opened a door. It was a kitchen like any other: baby blue walls, an oven and a fridge, and, for some reason, a smaller oven in a special cubby. Hawkeye went for the fridge and found that it was really an aquarium filled with thumb-sized penguins.

Another tick in the “actually, really going crazy” column, he supposed, along with the bigger on the inside box and the iodine that he couldn’t quite get off his hands, even with a lot of generous scrubbing in the kitchen sink.

Were they taking the alien into surgery? Hawkeye didn’t begrudge Henry that. Normally he was the one who was the champion of the oppressed, the no man left behind type of surgeon. Didn’t matter if you were American, Korean, a deserter or a communist, if there’s something the matter with you, Hawkeye Pierce is your guy. We’ve all got the same blood, eh fellas?

Hawkeye sat on the floor and stared at the penguins. He felt like they were mocking him, having fun while he was reconsidering the entire structure of his life.

His dad had told him that a lot, when he was little. We’re all human. Everyone’s got the same blood. Underneath it all everyone’s a little scared, and being kind will mean the world no matter what.

He picked at the orange stains under his nails. Same blood, hell.

Trapper knocked on the door.

“It’s all wrong, Trap,” Hawkeye blurted. He lay back on the tile in the kitchen. “Everything’s gone sideways and I’m worried it’s all in my head.”

“Misery loves company,” Trap said. “At least I’m nuts, too.” He flicked the aquarium glass with a fingernail, scattering the penguins before they returned in a huddle to investigate. He chuckled and dragged his finger around to watch them follow. “They’ve got an island back there,” he added. “Fridge is bigger on the inside.”

“Har har,” Hawkeye said. Trapper opened the drawers in the door of the fridge and found a container of fish food that had been tiny worms at one point or another. He sprinkled a dusting of worm in the top of the water and the penguins started producing an awful racket as they devoured the food.

“Good way to go crazy,” Trapper said. He reached in and pulled his finger through the water. A few of the full penguins trailed after it.

Hawkeye thought he was supposed to be experiencing wonder. Trapper sure seemed to be, picking up one of the penguins and grinning his lopsided, unfairly charming little grin at it. Hawkeye just felt sort of empty, all the anger and fear at the situation and even the potential for wonder gone.

Exactly the right time to start the lurking, he thought. He’d have an excuse for not feeling anything if he drank himself numb.

“We should steal it,” Hawkeye said, suddenly even to himself. Trapper held up the penguin. “No, no, the spaceship. We could fly away, into whatever’s out there. Go exploring. No more war, no more Frank, no more meatball surgery, no more stupid generals who send kids who don’t deserve it to get shot.”

Trapper sat down next to him, cradling the penguin in his hands. It pulled itself up onto his thumb with its beak and wingtips, tilting its head at Hawkeye. “Who’s to say there’s not war out there?” Trapper said, softly. He stroked the penguin’s head with his other hand and it leaned into his touch. Maybe they could steal one. For Radar. “We don’t get along, and we’re all the same species.”

“Says you,” Hawkeye quipped back. It wasn’t as clever as he would have liked. Trapper held out the penguin for him and he took it, letting it slide into the valley of his cupped-together hands. It was soft, kind of oily, and ruffled its feathers in an extremely undignified way. “Think he’s got a name?”

“Or she,” Trapper said. “I’m guessing Belinda.”

“Francine.”

“Esmerelda.”

“Judith.”

“Judith is good,” Trapper said. Hawkeye passed the penguin back and Trapper held it up to his face. “Hi, Judith.”

Judith squawked, angrily, and bit him on the nose. Trapper carefully returned her to the aquarium where she was lost in the ebb and flow of penguin feathers.

“That’s my third relationship that’s ended like that,” Trapper said, rejoining Hawkeye on the floor. “I oughta stop putting my face near girls.”

“I’ll make sure to bite your nose before we go home,” Hawkeye said. “You’ll have teeth marks to remember me by.”

Trapper shrugged and held out his arm. Hawkeye took the cue and leaned against him, settling his head in the crook of his shoulder.

“We can stay for a while,” Trapper said into his hair. “Henry and Ginger have it covered.”

Hawkeye didn’t realize he was crying until Trapper wiped the tears away from his eyes.

“Hey,” he said. “Talk to me.”

“I just–” Hawkeye tried. He grabbed the sleeve of Trapper’s free arm and pulled it closer, into the hug with the other one. “It’s never going to end, Trap. We’re going to be here forever.”

“Not forever,” Trapper said.

“Forever,” Hawkeye stressed. “C’mon, c’mon, tell me the date.”

“Whadda you want to know the date for?”

Hawkeye sniffled and wiped his eyes on his shirt cuffs. “Confirming a suspicion.”

“Jun– Au–” Trapper frowned. “Well it’s– it’s summer. It’s hot out.”

“Not even the year,” Hawkeye sighed. “I don’t know what year it is. How messed up is that, that neither of us knows what year it is? And how long have we been here? Since 1950? How long ago was that?”

“Three years,” Trap said, quietly. “1950 was three years ago, and I know for a fact it’s not 1953. ‘52, maybe. Maybe.”

“And yesterday it was 1951.”

“Fuck.”

Harry Sullivan, as Navy introduced himself, scrubbed in with the same efficiency as Henry had come to expect from his own surgeons. He didn’t complain once about the working conditions. Maybe that was because they only had the one patient.

Klinger stood by in his nurses’ getup, ready to fetch anything they needed. The girl, Sarah Jane, had made herself busy talking to the soldiers in post-op with Father Mulcahy. She seemed to be the kind of person who needed to be doing something all the time. Henry took a place across the table from Ginger, who was clenching and unclenching her hands as opposed to wringing them together.

“He doesn’t breathe,” Ginger observed, quietly. “How are we gonna put him under?”

Sullivan fiddled with his scalpel for one moment, two, then started the laparotomy. “Ether might only wake him up, I’m afraid,” he said. It was a clean cut, as good as anyone’s except Frank’s. Dark orange fluid, blood, good god, pooled in the incision.

“Entry wound’s still bleeding,” Henry observed. It had already soaked more gauze than he would have thought possible while the man was still alive and not-breathing.

“I know,” Sullivan said. “I know, I know. The clotting factor isn’t in his blood, it’s generated– well, I don’t understand it, really, but it’s what I said before, the chronologic irrigator. It’s something about chronons, I think. If that bullet hit him there…”

“Like pumping him full of blood thinners,” Henry agreed, judging by the amount of blood around. “Or hemophilia. Any clue how human blood would sit?”

Sullivan shook his head and completed the incision. Ginger handed him a retractor before he could even ask for it.

“Is that always where his liver is?” Henry asked. “Bullet passed right through it.”

“There’s another one in the right place,” Sullivan said. “He’s got space for doubles of things thanks to the short digestive tract.” Ginger passed him another retractor and he pulled the misplaced liver out of the way, exposing a dark, tapered organ that was clearly doing most of the bleeding. “Klinger, was it?” Sullivan called.

“Yessir,” Klinger said, stepping forward. Henry glanced up just in time to see him look down, notice what the hell was going on, and look away.

“I need as much iodine as you can get your hands on, and a unit of plasma. O negative if you can spare it. And– and something important to someone, cloth, preferably, something that can be ruined.”

“A bedsheet work?”

“Clean?”

“No better than anything else around here.”

“Fine.”

Klinger scurried off, leaving the OR in silence while Sullivan worked. The bullet had fragmented, leaving him to track down pieces like 52 pickup.

Ginger took a long, shaky breath.

“It’s okay, hon,” Henry said. He didn’t believe it.

“I was the same, the first time,” Sullivan said. He dropped a bullet fragment into the tray. “I knew he was an alien, of course, but seeing inside for yourself… What’s his pressure?”

Henry took over on Ginger’s retractor as she checked. “160 over 80. High?”

“Low, if anything.”

Klinger returned with a box of iodine, a unit of O neg, and one of his bedsheets, the bright floral ones.

“Made ‘em myself,” he said by way of explanation. “I hate olive.”

“Good,” Sullivan said. “It doesn’t matter if it’s not sterile, his immune system is outlandish. Pass the iodine through the sheet.”

Klinger scoffed, but did as he was asked, grabbing a beaker and setting the sheet over it like a coffee filter. “You’re not puttin’ this stuff in him, are you?”

“I’ve done it before, in less sterile conditions. Do you have a unit there?”

“About.”

“Mix in the plasma.” Another bullet fragment in the tray. “Four to one, best you can manage. A quarter of the unit. We might be able to get some clotting out of it.”

“Safe?” Henry asked.

“No,” Sullivan replied. “No, absolutely not. He’ll bleed out if we don’t do something, and I'd rather not explain that one.”

“Meatball surgery. Mystery meatball surgery. Why the sheet?”

Sullivan plunked the last of the bullet fragments in the tray. “Suture, if you’d please. It’s like– it’s sort of like magnetization. The more treasured an item, the more effort that’s been put into upkeep, the more temporal energy it has. Temporal magnetization. You couldn’t put molten iron in someone, even if their veins could stand it.”

Henry nodded like he understood. “And the rest of the extra bits?”

Sullivan made a broad gesture with his forceps. “Do you care, or are you trying to make conversation?”

“I’m curious,” Ginger said.

Sullivan nodded and took the needle Ginger handed him. He really was good. Henry would put him in the operating room with Pierce and McIntyre any day. “Right, well.” He passed the suture to Henry. He took the cue and started trying to put the… chrono… whatsit… back together. “Breathing’s passive, so he doesn’t have lungs or a diaphragm, but these,” he pointed to two large, lung-like organs, one that was situated behind the stomach and another behind the, oh, Henry, keep it together, right heart, “store and condense oxygen for use in emergencies. He can make it seven minutes in a completely oxygen-free environment before he starts to experience any symptoms of deprivation.”

He pressed down, gently, on the sac behind the stomach. The Doctor took a gasping breath before returning to unresponsiveness.

“He’s got a few extra pieces in his immune system, too,” Sullivan continued. “This one next to the stomach is a sort of souped-up thymus. Back behind the kidneys,”

Henry glanced up. “What’s he need four for?”

Sullivan shrugged and continued the medical lecture. “This one produces fast-acting anti-toxins. If it takes more than ten minutes to kill a human, he’s almost certainly immune to it. Klinger, is that solution prepped?”

Klinger held up the unit of almost-blood, neatly transferred back into the vacuum bottle he’d taken the plasma out of. “I did the same thing with the other three-quarters of the blood, in case you need it. Radar needs to order more iodine.”

“Good man,” Sullivan said. “Man?” Klinger nodded. Sullivan took over the retractors from Ginger, allowing her to hang the bottle and start a line on the… alien. “Now, the chap who shot him.”

Ginger laughed. “Major Burns can kiss my ass.”

“Seconded,” Klinger said. “We should make it mine, so he doesn’t enjoy it.”

“Yes, well,” Sullivan said. Henry finished his stitches, best he could do under the circumstances, and moved on to the bullet hole in the liver. “I’m grateful to your clerk for pushing me out of the way, of course, but what’s someone like that doing in a hospital?”

“Surgery, theoretically,” Henry said.

“High-velocity surgery, I see.”

“Usually. Always this sloppy. All he does is make more work for the rest of us.”

“And you keep him around?”

“Can’t get him transferred.”

Ginger shook her head. “He’d cause more problems if he was anywhere else. Imagine if he had a colonel who took him seriously.”

“Well, Flagg,” Henry said.

“Who?” Sullivan asked. Ginger moved to close and he gently took the suture away from her to do it himself. “Bit tough to get through, old thing. I can do it.”

“CIA nut who shows up every once in a while,” Henry explained. Sullivan’s stitches were fast, efficient, clean. “Tried to steal our penicillin last time. He wanted to sell it to the North Koreans for information. Are you that good on humans, or just him?”

Sullivan shrugged, his stitches faltering. “I’m no great talent.”

Ginger rolled her eyes and threaded another needle, going to work on the entry wound, where the bleeding had finally slowed enough to be manageable. “He’s as good as Dr. Pierce, don’t you think?” she said to Henry.

“Just as fast,” Klinger added. “Hawkeye’s already going to hell in a handbasket, imagine what he’ll be like if he knows he’s got competition!”

“Well, you aren’t getting out of here any time soon,” Henry said. “I wouldn’t want to move him inside of a week with blood that thin. Or with how much he’s lost, not to mention the potential of pulling internal stitches. Up to joining the army?”

Sullivan smiled under his mask, the corners of his eyes crinkling up. “I’ll send in for a transfer.”

Sarah wasn’t exactly a war correspondent, but given how badly the Doctor had been injured, she was beginning to think she might as well get some practice.

Post-op, where Max had left her while he went into surgery, was crowded. Unreasonably crowded, if she had anything to say about it. There were young boys, none of them much older than her, in nearly every bed. Chest injury here, missing eye there, one boy who she thought might not yet have been eighteen who had lost his thumb and the two fingers closest to it.

She had seen all this before. Skaro and the Daleks, Cybermen converting any living flesh they could get their mitts on, even the devastation wrought on London by those bastards who had hurt Captain Yates back in her own time.

So why was this different?

Maybe it was all more real, here. This wasn’t aliens or dinosaurs, it was living, human people, fighting each other for the sake of cruelty and against people who were inherently exactly the same as them. This wasn’t the Daleks’ and the Cybermen’s senseless slaughter of those with different, “weaker” views.

She scrubbed her eyes with her palms. Or maybe it was. Everyone in charge of this war was fighting for exactly those reasons, weren’t they? Deep down, the desperation to exterminate communism was exactly the same as the quest the Daleks had been leading in the black for longer than she had the capacity to imagine.

She resolved to stop thinking about it. It wouldn’t help to go comparing the poor men wounded in a not-clean-enough, middle-of-nowhere field hospital to Daleks.

Sarah pulled out her notepad. Best to focus on something else. There were a few others in post-op, besides the wounded. Two nurses were at the other end of the room, laughing between themselves after finishing their checks on the patients. A young, blonde man in a panama hat and high-collared shirt was sitting with the boy who had lost his fingers.

She pulled up a folding chair. The man, a priest, she could tell, now that she was on this side of him, offered a nod and a small smile.

She supposed she had expected him to be providing counsel. Instead he was playing cribbage with the soldier, no board but a score sheet on the small bedside table.

The soldier looked up from his cards. “Boy, they’re keeping all the pretty girls here,” he said. Sarah wasn’t sure if she could describe his look as a smile or a leer. “First that smokeshow blonde who’s teachin’ me how to write again, not you Father, sorry, and now you. Somethin’ in the water here?”

The Father rolled his eyes over the boy’s head. “Very much so. Lead, most likely. Did you arrive with that poor man Major Burns shot?”

“And the surgeon with him,” Sarah said. She twirled her pen, a nervous habit she’d picked up on the debate team. She didn’t hold much stock in religion, but the Father had the sort of face and voice it would be reassuring to hear kind words from. “Do you think he’ll be alright?”

“Our surgeons are the best in the business,” he said, sincerely. Sarah thanked God for the blessing that he hadn’t chosen to use his faith on her. “If I were to be charitable, I would say that even Major Burns has his moments. He’s quite the skilled hand at amputations, funnily enough.”

Sarah turned to the soldier. “He’s the one who operated on you?”

The boy nodded. “No good bedside manner, though. He’s tryin’ to convince me I can still pull a trigger with my pinky. I ain’t volunteered for that.”

“You volunteered?” Her hand found its way to her notepad. She didn’t know what she would do with any of the stories she found here. She couldn’t very well submit them back home. Perhaps they’d be relegated to the drawer where she kept the rest of the stories she found on the Doctor’s time. Or maybe she could send them off somewhere before they left.

“Day I turned eighteen,” the boy nodded. His face clouded. “That was a long time ago.”

“How old are you now, then?”

He looked away. “Eighteen, I think.”

The Father took his good hand. “Time makes fools of us all.”

“Yeah, I s’pose. Feels like it’s been years, y’know?”

“I know exactly the feeling,” the Father said. He turned his attention back to Sarah and offered his hand to her. “Lieutenant Father Francis John Patrick Mulcahy, at your service.”

“Sarah Jane Smith,” she said in kind, shaking his hand. “Suppose you could fit any more names in there?”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” Mulcahy said, smiling a genuine, brilliant smile. “Irish Catholics have about six names to go around, and I’ve been given the blessing of keeping track of three of them.”

When Hawkeye finally found the strength to return to the camp, no penguins smuggled away in his pockets, Frank was standing outside the door of the box, spaceship, whatever, face set in that way that meant he was preparing to be as irritating as possible. Hawkeye was unclear what had happened to Radar.

“What were you two doing in there?” Frank demanded.

“Nun’ ya business,” Hawkeye said. Trapper had hooked two fingers through the belt of his robe and was holding on, as if that would stop him from doing something stupid. “What are you doing out here?”

“Well,” Frank said. “Well– it’s a magic box! Those– communists, probably, brought it here, which makes it our property. We should be reporting it to Colonel Flagg.”

Hawkeye could almost hear the eye roll from Trapper. “They’re British, Frank.”

Frank ignored him. “And what’s all this stuff everywhere? It’s like that time Klinger dropped a crate of iodine all over the store room!”

Good god, the man was an idiot. “I don’t know if you know this,” Hawkeye said, “but when you shoot someone, blood tends to come out.”

Frank’s eyebrows scrunched together. He looked back down at the mud, very, very slowly, then back up at Hawkeye. “Blood? I know what blood looks like, and that’s not it. Don’t make things up.”

“I’m not making things up!” Hawkeye thought about kicking him, then remembered the fingers hooked in his belt and decided better of it. “I’m still covered in the stuff!”

He had an idea. Figuring Trapper was expecting something like a punch, he grabbed Frank by the lapels and nearly stumbled over trying to drag him into the box. The little twerp was digging in his heels, trying to resist. Trapper seemed to understand the plan and let go of Hawkeye’s belt to add another hand to pushing Frank around.

Frank looked around the hallway inside the box. He looked back at Hawkeye and Trapper.

He opened his mouth, then closed it. Then again. Finally, “I’m confused.”

Trapper laughed, no humor in it. “Yeah, me too, bud.”

Chapter Text

Something bad was going to happen.

Radar was absolutely certain of it. He’d been certain since the afternoon when the Doctor got out of surgery. He didn’t know why he was certain. It was different from his usual level of vague dread, different from how he got a little bit of warning about choppers and buses, and way different from how he knew that Major Burns was going to try to shoot Lieutenant Sullivan. It was making him sick to his stomach.

Something very, very bad was going to happen, and he didn’t know what it was.

The Doctor was still extra-unconscious in that way everyone was when they were knocked out with the surgical drugs that meant Radar couldn’t feel their presence, but Ginger (she made him call her Ginger, which felt real weird to him, but he wasn’t gonna argue with her when she kept half-threatening to break his kneecaps if the word “Lieutenant” came out of his mouth again) said they hadn’t even given him any drugs. He wasn’t the bad thing.

Major Burns had come back out of the TARDIS with Captains Pierce and McIntyre, shaking and staring into nothing, but he wasn’t the bad thing, neither, though maybe he was a bit closer. It had been good to yell at him earlier, give him a real earful about all the stupid problems he caused. Radar squinted at the little blue police box and tried to shut all those doors again so he could think.

It still felt like the doors had all been blown open. Everyone he’d ever tried to shut out was talking in his head, or at least everyone in the camp. Hawkeye and Frank and Trapper, because he thought about himself with that name even in his own head, and Henry and the Father, why did he think about himself like that? didn’t he know his own name? and Klinger, someone else who really needed to get out of the army before he forgot he had a first name, and Margaret–

“O’Reilly!”

Radar whipped around, wide-eyed. “Major Houlihan! Yes sir, I mean ma’am, I mean–”

Major Houlihan jerked her chin at the TARDIS. “Why is… that next to my tent?”

“Oh, uh,” Radar started. He couldn’t come up with a convincing lie and was absolutely certain Major Houlihan wouldn’t believe the truth. She was already tapping her foot, irritation building in her like smoke rising in the air, inevitable as hot-headed as she was. He remembered that awful nickname the Captains sometimes called her and how much she hated it and turned away from the thought. “Maybe you should ask Colonel Blake?”

“I’m asking you,” she said. Her arms were crossed, now. She was getting real angry, but he was too useful for KP and anyway Colonel Blake, the soft-bellied fool, would never allow it.

“He ain’t soft!” Radar protested. Major Houlihan went stock-still and he realized a moment too late that she hadn’t said anything out loud.

“What?” Major Houlihan hissed. “What did you just say? You– you–” Frank was right. Frank was right? Oh my god, the little nerd can read my mind.

Radar was feeling even sicker. It was like being caught in a tornado, or a boat in a storm, if Lieutenant Sullivan had anything to say about it, and he– he couldn’t–

“Something bad’s going to happen,” Radar said. “Something really, really bad is going to happen.”

She didn’t want to ask. She didn’t want to know. My god, he can really read minds, he doesn’t just have good ears, he knows. “Radar,” she said. He felt like he was going to be in trouble, which was funny, because normally people didn’t use his first name, or what they called him, whatever, when he was getting in trouble. “What the hell does that mean?”

“I don’t know!” It was somewhere between a shout and a whine, undignified, really, which was a word Major Houlihan had thought and he never would have been able to find for himself. “I don’t know, I don’t– we’ve been here so long and every day so many people are dying and I want to go home, all I want to do is go home, but Major Burns might’ve chased off the only chance we’re getting!”

The doors wouldn’t shut. There weren’t any doors, not anymore, and outside every single one was fear and dread and they all wanted to go home, even Margaret and Frank, especially Henry, but–

Radar wrapped his arms around himself, sinking to his knees in the dirt.

“He ain’t gonna get to go home,” he said. “Oh my god, Colonel Blake’s going to die. He’s going to die.”

His hands dropped to the dirt. Maybe they weren’t his hands. The boat that was him was capsizing, the doors were all gone, all that was left was the swirling vortex of the future and the present and the past and everyone’s thoughts around him and–

Something broke. He could almost feel it. Whatever was holding all that inside him just couldn’t take it anymore, and it spilled out in a wave that nobody could see but was enough to ruffle Major Houlihan’s hair like a light breeze, and she couldn’t have possibly known that it was everything in his brain stopping working.

In post-op, the Doctor jerked up, completely awake, nearly tearing the line out of his arm with the motion. Something very, very bad was happening. Something with an incredible amount of psychic power, enough to scramble the TARDIS if it could wake him up out of a healing coma, Walter–?

Deep in his ears, in his brain, all around the camp, the grinding sound of an engine fading from existence sounded out.

The black sank in, and the voices stopped.

Captain McIntyre was the first to notice Margaret yelling for someone.

Radar was– he wasn’t bleeding or nothin’, but–

but he–

there was something wrong. something that made it hard to get close to him, like

there was a storm but it existed only in his mind.

could anyone else feel it?

Margaret, maybe. She brought up a hand

to shield her eyes

from the dust that didn’t exist,

the tornado in their brains.

Trapper yelled for Hawkeye, for someone, anyone, what the hell was happening?

Margaret grabbed him by the shoulders and shouted something at him, but he couldn’t hear it, couldn’t even make out the shapes of her lips, it was like–

like–

there was nothing it was like.

Hawkeye was there,

shouted something else,

something equally unclear,

but his eyes were wide and scared and hadn’t they just fixed that?

The elevator to Heaven, Trapper thought.

The Doctor stumbled out of the flimsy hospital bed they’d put him in, only just remembering to stop and carefully remove the IV tube from his arm. It wouldn’t do to waste the hard work Harry had done. Something was wrong. Something was very wrong. He nearly fell, reaching out blindly just in time to find the railing of the hospital bed to stabilize himself. Someone had left his coat on the chair next to him and he grabbed it, shoving it on over the hospital gown even though his sleeves bunched up beneath it. There wasn’t time to stop.

A young nurse rushed over, clearly intent on getting him back in bed.

“Walter,” the Doctor gasped. He switched to the nurse’s shoulders for support, barely managing. A line running from the bottom of his chest all the way down his stomach was burning with pain, and so was where that idiot had shot him, but that had never stopped him before.

The nurse tried to push him back into bed, gently, kindly. He dug in his fingers.

“No, I need to see Walter, something’s wrong–”

The psychic wind that had woken him returned, redoubled, grew into a storm in a matter of seconds. The nurse shivered and brought her hand to her forehead. If it was strong enough for the humans to feel, there was something very wrong indeed.

Harry burst in through the doors to the rest of the camp, thoroughly– well, harried. “Radar,” he said, letting the Doctor throw an arm over his shoulders to prop himself up.

“Walter?” the Doctor asked.

“Same lad,” Harry answered. “Odd duck. Doctor, the TARDIS–”

“Not now. Outside, quickly.”

They stumbled out into the square between the operating building and several of the squat, olive tents. The roar was louder out here, undulled by distance and other minds on which to catch. A few of the camp staff were there, standing several meters away from the crumpled form of Walter on the ground.

“Good lord,” Harry said, bringing his free hand to his head. “What’s that sound?”

“A psychic storm,” the Doctor answered. “Oh, Walter. Did he go in the TARDIS?”

“Yes, but Doctor–”

“She would have latched on,” the Doctor said, half to himself. “He’s a truly gifted clairvoyant, you know. The TARDIS might not have been able to tell the difference between him and a Time Lord, greeted him in the same way. It’s too much for him to handle, a mind as small as a human’s.”

“Doctor, the TARDIS is gone.”

The Doctor collapsed to his knees next to Walter, hand already reaching for his temple to make contact. Thanks be for small miracles, at least, that Harry had some of the most impressive psychic shielding he’d ever encountered thanks to sheer refusal to accept things, and could carry him most of the way to the boy.

“I can’t worry about that right now,” the Doctor managed through gritted teeth. He hurt, it should have already been healing by now, but it felt like a hot iron was being pressed against his insides with every movement, and the effort to keep out the psychic pressure was beginning to become too much to handle. This body had never had the best in the way of psychic defense in the first place. It wasn’t like he ever had, but this one was particularly weak.

He braced himself as best he could against the dirt, and made contact.

Walter.

Doctor?

The grass around his feet was red and extended as far as the eye could see in any direction over the sweeping hills that surrounded the city of Arcadia. Walter was sitting beneath a silvertail tree, still dressed in fatigues and a jeep cap, huddled with his legs pulled to his chest against the gypsum-soft bark. His glasses were tear-stained and laying in the grass at his feet.

The Doctor straightened his waistcoat and took a seat next to him.

“Walter,” he said, as softly as he could manage. He’d met the boy a long time ago, when he was much different. He knew he’d grown harder, cynical, stranger, in a way, and tried to find some of the unmitigated friendliness he’d had back in the days with Jamie.

“M’name’s not Walter,” the boy responded. “Nobody ever calls me that, not since I got drafted.”

The Doctor clasped his hands between his knees. He understood perfectly. He’d had another name, a very long time ago, before they dragged him to the Academy against his will to make him a Time Lord. “Do you want me to call you Radar?”

“I don’t know,” he said, pulling his legs in tighter. “I like it, it means they like me, they’re thinking about me enough to give me a nickname, but I never would’a got it if I didn’t come here.”

They were silent for a while, except for Radar sniffling as he tried to keep in the tears.

The Doctor pulled him in, one-armed, and cradled the boy’s head against his shoulder.

“There’s nothing wrong with crying,” he said.

“I know,” Radar said. He wiped his eyes with his shirt cuff. “I just don’t think I’ll be able to stop.”

Another stretch of silence played out. The Doctor watched the lights of Arcadia in the distance, sparkling against the burnt orange sunset.

“Your spaceship left,” Radar said, sniffling. “I’m sorry. It’s my fault. I chased it away.”

The Doctor gripped his shoulder tighter. “You have nothing to apologize for. There was no way of knowing, on any of our parts. You were curious, and that’s nothing you should ever stop being. I couldn’t have known. The TARDIS was only doing her job. We’ll figure it out.”

A soft breeze blew over the fields, turning the dark red grass into a swaying ocean, the hills to waves in the water. The draped leaves of the silvertail tree above them rustled, tinkling against each other in an almost wind chime sound.

Radar choked on a sob. “Colonel Blake’s gonna die. He’s already dead. The only reason he’s still here is because the hours are all twisted up.”

“Your CO?” the Doctor asked.

Radar nodded against his shoulder, scraping the jeep cap along the fabric of his coat. “I ain’t never known someone as nice as him. He cares about me. He wishes he could ask me to come back to Bloomington with him, when we go home, ‘cause I–” he sniffled again, then broke into full-on tears, grabbing the Doctor around the waist. The Doctor held him tighter, as tight as he could without hurting him. “‘Cause he thinks of me like his own son, and I hear him think it, all the time, and he’s gonna die. He never gets to go home.”

The Doctor couldn’t say anything. He didn’t have anything to say. Radar cried into his shoulder, occasionally wiping his nose or his eyes on one of his own shirt cuffs, and the Doctor just held him.

He missed Susan very badly. It wasn’t often one abandoned one’s own granddaughter on a planet infested with Daleks.

“Why do I gotta know this?” Radar said, when he had collected himself enough to speak. “I already know when the choppers are showing up, and that’s bad enough, but–” he broke away to sniffle, to hold one hand to his eyes like he could keep the tears inside. “I wish so badly I didn’t know.”

The Doctor gave him a last pat on the back. “I have to reach further into your mind to close the pathways the TARDIS opened,” he said. “She greeted you in the same way she would have one of my people, and it allowed you to see outside of the time fracture.” He pulled out of the hug, wiped off Radar’s glasses for him with a cloth from one of his coat pockets, and gently replaced them on the boy’s face. He needed Radar to look at him for this. “I have an offer for you. Do you want to forget? Really, truly, want to forget?”

There was no hesitation when he nodded.

“Please,” Radar said. “Please, I can’t go on knowing.”

The Doctor held out his hands for Radar to take.

“When you wake up, you’re going to feel much better. I promise.”

The storm fell silent.

On occasions like this, the Doctor dearly wished his anatomy would grant him the privilege of vomiting in times of emotional distress rather than only gastrointestinal. It certainly seemed to make his friends feel better, having that bad on the inside transferred to the outside so physically. That was before considering the burning, incredible pain running down his front and somewhere deep inside him.

At least it was quiet. Too quiet, without the TARDIS. He wasn't angry with Radar, and he would never say so to the boy's face, but he was certainly frustrated with him. The fact was that a good opportunity for Harry and an easy job that would make the Time Lords happy had just turned into staring down the barrel of another several years of being stranded on 20th century Earth, this time in an active war zone, and in this version of exile he had brought two Humans out of their timestream to very potentially wreak havoc on the fabric of his life.

He'd never been one to show those sorts of worries. Certainly not this face. If he fell apart, what would happen to Sarah Jane and Harry? If he showed a moment of uncertainty, of nerves, they would understand that he had no plan and no inklings of a plan to get them back to their own time.

There were more people gathering in the compound. The three who had been standing around, Harry, Sarah Jane and a man who looked unsettlingly like the Doctor’s previous regeneration, a gaggle of nurses… in fact, he was fairly certain it was everyone who wasn’t one of the patients.

“Yes, hello,” the Doctor said. He couldn’t quite get the volume he normally gave to his grand speeches, and didn’t have the energy for one, anyway. The arm propping him up buckled and Harry was there just in time to catch him and help him to sit instead of leaning over. “Nothing to worry about, the problem’s quite solved.”

Radar stirred next to him, coughing and groaning. One of the men rushed forward, an older gentleman in a fishing cap, and knelt down with them.

“Radar,” the man said. “Everything alright, son?”

“M’fine, Colonel,” Radar mumbled. “The Doctor helped. S’not his fault.”

Colonel Blake turned to him, hands still protectively perched on Radar’s shoulders. “Thank you,” he said. “Whatever that was, thank you.”

The Doctor waved him off and lay down, hoping a change in position would ease the pain. It didn’t. “Only doing my job.”

The idiot who shot him shoved his way forward through the group. The two men who had been standing in the compound, one dark-haired, one light, rolled their eyes at each other.

“I demand somebody explain whatever’s going on!” the idiot shouted. A chunk of the nurses and enlisted men booed and started to wander off.

Colonel Blake helped Radar up, then offered a hand to the Doctor. He took it, inordinately grateful for the gentle hand Harry put on the small of his back to assist, then for how he immediately took the Doctor’s arm over his shoulder to keep him upright.

“Officers meeting,” Blake decided. “Plus our guests. Mess tent, if the Doctor can make it?” The Doctor nodded tightly. There wasn't much to be done about the pain, not now that he'd been woken from the healing coma in which his body had put him. “Klinger, Bayliss, you too.”

The blonde woman who had been with the two men snorted. “Lieutenant Bayliss isn’t–”

“All due respect, Major,” one of the few remaining nurses said, “I’m a lot more up to date on the situation than you.” She whispered something to one of the other nurses with her and they snickered before she followed the supposed officers to the biggest tent.

As the officers made their way, Sarah Jane joined the Doctor and Harry, along with a young enlisted man in a bright green polka dot dress who rolled over a wheelchair. The Doctor glared at it for a moment, mostly for show, but didn’t resist when Harry dumped him into it.

“Busy day,” Sarah Jane said, smiling weakly. “I take it you have a plan?”

“The beginnings of one,” the Doctor lied. “All of my tools were in the TARDIS. I need those things to fix the time fracture, but she can’t land in the middle of such a turbulent timestream without a pilot. It’s a rather tricky situation.”

Harry took the handles of the wheelchair, leaving Sarah Jane and the enlisted man, Klinger, he took it, to trail after. “So we’re stuck,” Sarah Jane said.

The Doctor sighed. “Until I can track down 51st century time suturing equipment, I’m afraid that might be the case.”

Harry stopped, suddenly. The Doctor winced against the sharp bolt of pain that came with the jostle. “Torchwood,” Harry said.

“Oh, no!” the Doctor insisted. “Absolutely not! I am not calling Jack Harkness and telling him that I got myself stuck in the Korean War!”

Sarah Jane loomed in front of him. It was startlingly effective. “So, what? You want us to stay here? When you were the one complaining that I was going to get myself injured!?”

“Steady on, old girl,” Harry said. Sarah Jane looked as if she was about to hit him. “If he doesn’t call Torchwood, I’ll do it myself.”

The mess tent was as decrepit as the rest of the place, all benches and tables that looked like they were going to give way at any moment and a packed dirt floor. They’d been left seats at one end, between the young nurse and the priest who looked too much like the Doctor’s most recent outdated model. Klinger and Sarah Jane sat on the side with the nurse, and Harry sat next to the priest, leaving the Doctor absently rocking the wheelchair back and forth at one head of the table while Blake stood at the other.

“Okey dokey,” Blake said. “Radar, let’s call roll for our guests.”

The idiot, sitting on one side of Blake and with his other occupied by the blonde woman, shot to his feet. “Sir!”

“Just one minute, Frank!” Blake shouted. Everyone flinched. “Sit down,” he said, softer. “We’ll get there. Down the list, Radar.”

Radar nodded and glanced down at his clipboard. “Lieutenant Colonel Henry Blake.”

“Yo,” Blake responded. Radar dutifully checked off a mark on the sheet.

“Major Frank Burns.”

The idiot snorted. “Present.”

“Major Margaret Houlihan.” Radar glanced up at the Doctor and added, “Head nurse.”

The blonde woman glared daggers at Blake. “Do we really need to do this? We’re all here, even two– five of us who shouldn’t be.”

Klinger and Bayliss both rolled their eyes. Radar went on. “Captain Hawkeye Pierce, chief surgeon.”

The dark-haired man raised his hand. The blonde one already had his hand up before Radar could finish getting out “Captain “Trapper” John McIntyre.”

Radar paused, clearly trying to calculate something in his head. “Surgeon-Leff-tenant Harry Sullivan.”

“Charmed,” Harry said, smiling at the group at large. Radar, Klinger, and Henry smiled back, but none of the others. “Glad to be here,” he concluded, lamely.

Radar shook his head and pulled in tighter to his roll sheet. “Lieutenant Father Francis Mulcahy.”

The priest tipped his panama hat. “Present.”

“Lieutenant Ginger Bayliss.”

“Also present, thank you,” Bayliss said.

“Corporal Maxwell Klinger.”

Klinger smiled. “Alive and kicking.”

Radar stilled for a moment, then continued. “Miss Sarah Jane Smith.”

“Nice to meet you,” Sarah Jane said. She met the Doctor’s eyes, and he looked away. “Although I will say that I hope not to be here long enough to get to know any of you.”

“And, uh,” Radar said. He scrunched his eyes shut. He’d gone pale. Residual illness from the psychic storm, perhaps? “Doctor John Smith, United Nations scientific advisor.”

Everyone turned to look at him. The Doctor nodded. “Now then. Quite a few of you are in possession of some of the facts, but allow me to spell everything out quite clearly. At some point since the war in Korea began, the entire peninsula fell into a fracture in time. In essence, no matter how much time passes, you and everyone else involved in the fighting are stuck between June 15, 1950, and approximately July 27, 1953.”

He gave the first revelation a moment to sink in, waiting for the murmur of surprise to calm. The Father made the sign of the cross and began to mumble a prayer. Hawkeye cradled his head in his hands with his elbows against the table. “What’d I tell you, Trap? I saw that TV in his spaceship.”

“This isn’t the time for pranks,” Margaret snapped at him. “Frank, tell them!”

Frank shook his head, staring into the middle distance. “It’s real,” he squeaked. “All of it, I really think it’s the truth. I saw the spaceship!”

Margaret turned to Henry, wide-eyed. “Colonel, stop this!”

“It gets worse, hon,” he said.

“Indeed,” the Doctor added. “Next order of business, Miss Smith and Lieutenant Sullivan are not from your own time. Both live in the year nineteen-hundred-and-eighty.” He didn’t let the outrage start this time, talking over the top of whatever Margaret was about to argue. “I, myself, am not of this world. I am a Time Lord, born on a planet called Gallifrey approximately two-hundred-and-fifty million light years from here. We arrived in my ship, the TARDIS, which is in fact not a police box but rather a vehicle capable of travelling anywhere in space and time, in order to repair the fracture that is keeping all of you trapped here.”

Margaret stood and planted her hands on the table. “I have had it!” she announced. “Pierce and McIntyre, I understand, but the rest of you!? Even you, Frank! And you, Bayliss! You bring three– civilians, probably, into our camp, you put one of Klinger’s ridiculous get-ups on one of them–”

“Not my sense of fashion,” Klinger protested under his breath.

“–and claim that makes him an alien! Well, you’re not tricking me! I’m not the idiot you all think I am, and I want a straight answer! You,” she said, pointing at the Doctor, “are going to explain exactly what happened to Corporal O’Reilly, right now, or I’ll kick your ass to the curb this minute!”

“He just had surgery!” Radar protested. “You can’t do that!”

“I can do whatever the hell I feel like!” Margaret barked back.

The Doctor held up his hands, placatingly. “It’s quite alright. Radar is gifted enough to have suffered a severe psychic shock from entering my ship without the proper precautions in place. This led to the storm in the compound. The situation has been resolved and is unlikely to occur again.”

“‘Psychic shock,’” Margaret scoffed. “He’s not psychic, he’s just–”

“You’re lying,” Radar said, quietly. Hawkeye, sitting to one side of him, grabbed his hand when it started shaking. “You don’t believe that at all.”

“Don’t tell me what I believe,” she spat. “You don’t know anything about what I believe.”

The priest, Mulcahy, stood. “If we could stop arguing for one moment, I have something I would like to say.” Margaret stilled, hands balled into fists so tightly that her fingers were two-tone, then slowly sat back down. “Thank you,” Mulcahy continued. “Whether or not Doctor Smith–”

“Just the Doctor,” the Doctor corrected.

“‘Doctor,’ thank you. Whether or not the Doctor is telling the truth, we have the responsibility as caretakers to provide him and his friends shelter until such a time as they are ready to leave. Their presence has come with the blessing of another pair of hands in the operating room and a correspondent who can deliver stories of the work being done here to our communities. If, as the Doctor says, he has the ability to send us home, who are we to turn down his help?”

Nobody spoke for a few, long moments.

“I think that says it all, doesn’t it?” Henry finally said. “Thank you, Father. For clarity’s sake, as the Doctor said, I’d like Lieutenant Sullivan to give an overview of our OR session.”

Harry stuck his hand under the table and waggled his fingers. The Doctor rocked the wheelchair closer until he could grab it and give a reassuring squeeze.

“The… accident, when we arrived,” Harry began, glancing at Frank, “happened to be in very nearly the only place that could have caused severe, long-lasting damage. The Doctor’s anatomy is very different from ours, internally; the bullet fragmented inside an organ called the chronologic irrigator, which is responsible for the clotting factor in his blood and for accelerating the healing process. Myself, Colonel Blake, and Nurse Bayliss repaired the damage to the best of our abilities.”

The Doctor squeezed Harry’s hand again, this time for his own reassurance. The pain from being upright this long immediately after major surgery was beginning to wear on him, and the idiot Frank very well could have killed him. If he hadn’t brought Harry with…

Well, he had regenerated under worse circumstances. The execution came to mind, as did the fugue state he’d suffered after his most recent death.

“Frank almost killed him?” Trapper asked. “Henry, he almost killed a civilian!”

“I wasn’t aiming for him!” Frank protested. “I was aiming for the surgeon!”

Hawkeye scoffed. “Oh, like that’s better.”

“Just because you’re too nancy to protect–”

“That’s enough, thank you!” Henry announced. “I swear, if Thanksgiving comes around again, I’m going to make every single one of you say what you’re thankful for, out loud, and it had better be nice. Now considering the whole caboodle of the situation, we’re gonna get on the same page by there being no discipline for Frank’s little accident and no kicking-out for Lieutenant Sullivan and his pals. But this information doesn’t leave camp, does everyone understand?”

The group nodded. Frank’s was far less convincing than any of the others.

Henry glanced at him. “And that includes Colonel Flagg. Radar won’t be making any phone calls without my permission for a good long while. Doctor, you said you could fix whatever the heck is going on around here.”

The Doctor nodded. “I can, but my ship has taken off to Rassilon knows where, and my equipment was inside. The quick return that would normally activate is inoperable within the time fracture. I’ll require an outgoing call to acquire replacements from an… associate. Should they prove easy to obtain, the war might well be done within the month.”

The tone in the room brightened considerably, even Radar. The Doctor mentally patted himself on the back for a job well done.

“Hey, no kidding!” Hawkeye said. “Three lousy, stinking years, and then an alien shows up and we get to go home within the month!”

“That would be the low estimate, I’m afraid,” the Doctor continued. Hawkeye fell back into an exaggerated frown. “It’s very possible, probable, even, that he won’t have the equipment on hand. In that case, I’ll need to build it from scratch. That would take considerably longer, at the best of health.” He shot a glance at Harry, hoping he could pick up on the fact that the meeting quite seriously needed to end. Harry squeezed his hand tighter. “Realistically, I would say that we’re looking at anywhere between three and eighteen months, depending on available materials.”

“Call it a year,” Sarah Jane snapped. “A year, stuck in the Korean War?”

“Oh, decided it was a bad idea to come with, did you?” the Doctor sniped back. He was tired, and this body– well, he’d certainly been more considerate in past lives. “I didn’t invite you, you know.”

She was up and storming off before he had the chance to apologize, not that he would have, quickly followed by Corporal Klinger.

Trapper snorted. “Nice going, Doc.”

“Real soft touch with the ladies,” Hawkeye added.

Frank shook his head. “I don’t know what a woman’s doing as a reporter, anyway.”

Margaret whacked him.

“Back to business,” Henry said. “I don’t know if you remember, Frank, but the Doctor’s got a rather nasty bullet wound that he should be busy healing, not talking to us. Sullivan, there’s an extra bunk in the surgeons’ tent. I’ll have Radar put in an order for new uniforms for you.” Radar nodded and scribbled down a note. “Miss Smith–”

“Miss Smith will take any orders you give her with an entire shaker of salt,” Harry interrupted. “I’d let her make her own decisions, old boy.”

“Noted,” Henry said. “And Doctor, take a damn nap. I’ll have that call ready for you in the morning.”

Chapter Text

Sarah threw herself down on Klinger’s bunk like she already owned the place.

“He’s so stupid!” she groaned. Klinger pulled over his sewing chair. “The self-centered, ridiculous, miserable git!”

Then she pulled her jeep cap down over her eyes, flopping out her arms to either side, hitting the canvas wall and making the whole side of the tent billow out for a moment before settling.

“A year,” she sighed. “A year, probably, of being stuck in an active war zone without a damn thing I can do to help. Harry’s a surgeon, the Doctor’s– well, he’s the Doctor, and what am I?”

“A sight for sore eyes,” Klinger joked. She pulled the cap back up and smiled at him. Good god, she was beautiful. And not an alien, apparently, only the Doctor.

“Oh, I wish that was enough, Max,” she sighed. “But it’s not, is it? I can’t spend a year in Korea looking pretty and nothing else.”

“Disparaging my profession,” he said, shaking his head. “The hell am I doing if not exactly that?”

She flipped over, tucking her chin in her hand. “You’re certainly improving my morale.”

His heart skipped a beat. “Look, hon– you don’t have to flirt back. I’m not exactly a catch, I know that. Hell, my ex-wife left me for a sausage guy. I just wanna make you laugh.”

“It’s not obligation,” she scoffed. “If I put my eye on who I was obliged to, I’d be a housewife married to a virology student my Aunt Lavinia tried to set me up with. Not me, thank you.”

“Yeah?” Klinger asked. He leaned in, settling his elbow on his knee and propping his chin in his hand, just like her. “You keep your eye on crazies in dresses, then?”

“You’re not mad,” she said, smiling. “But yes, essentially. Or trousers, as it would happen.” She tucked her tongue in her teeth, meeting his eyes with her own sparkling, fantastic gaze. “Don’t you just think there’s something lovely about women? Or even–” her breath caught, for a moment. Klinger could feel his cheeks going red. “Oh, Max, I’ll chase a skirt any day, if there’s someone cute and funny inside of it.”

“Awful nice of you to say,” he stammered out. “I mean– I appreciate it, really, but–” he looked down at his hands so he didn’t have to meet that sharp, beautiful gaze, tried to stop picking at the rough skin at the corners of his nails. “You’ve got a surgeon and a genius for friends, and you’re picking me to spend your time with?”

The bunk creaked, and Sarah’s shoes and knees swam into his field of view.

“I’m very angry with the Doctor, right now,” she said. It wasn’t much more than a whisper. “I love him to bits, but then he turns around and says that sort of thing, and– well, I know I wasn’t invited. He planned a special trip for Harry and then I barged in because I can’t stand not being his best friend.” She sniffled and smoothed her hair back out of her eyes with a sigh. “I’ve been travelling with him for a long time, Max. Too long. I’m losing track of what normal people are like. If I can spend my time with someone who isn’t going to judge me for being a little bit odd, why wouldn’t I?”

Klinger didn’t know what to say to that, so he didn’t say anything. Just nodded and switched from picking at his cuticles to a thread that had popped free from its stitching on his skirt.

Sarah stood and walked over to his sewing machine, running careful fingers over the table.

“Do you make all your own dresses, then?” she asked. She sniffled one more time and wiped her eyes before pressing on a smile.

Klinger recognized a need for distraction when he saw one. He half turned in his chair and cocked an elbow over the back. “Most of them,” he said. He waved a hand at the pile of fabric on the unoccupied bunks. “Cheaper that way, and it’s a good time waster.”

Sarah took down one of the floral, red numbers, and held it up in front of her fatigues for him to smile at. “I wouldn’t call this a waste of time at all,” she said. “I’d buy anything here any day.”

“Yeah?” Sarah hung the dress back up and stepped back, looking at the racks of clothes more carefully.

“Do you think–” she started. She bit her lip and tucked her hands in the pockets of her rain jacket. “Do you think you could make the Doctor a new waistcoat?”

The look in her eyes when she turned to him was so hopeful, so pleading, that he knew he wasn’t going to say no.

“The one he was wearing’s awful,” he said, anyway, and she seemed to understand that as a yes.

Sarah cracked a smile. “Isn’t it?” She perched on his cot again and searched through her bag until she found a small photo wallet. She flipped through it fast enough that Klinger only caught glimpses of most of the pictures - one of just Sullivan, one of him and three men in army clothes posing in front of an obnoxiously yellow car, a few of a woman in bright buttondown shirts.

She found what she was looking for near the back and held out the photos for Klinger to see. One was an older man in a green velvet jacket, riding boots, and an honest to god cape. The other was younger, with what Klinger would hesitantly call “too many teeth” wrapped up in more layers of clothing than he could count and with a ridiculous scarf to top it all off.

“He’s always dressed like that,” Sarah said, smiling brightly and without any hint that she was playing a joke on him.

“Uh huh,” Klinger said. “Is there some sort of point I’m missing?”

She looked carefully down at the photos, then snapped the little wallet shut. “No, no,” she said. “No, I– I’m being silly.”

“‘Course you’re not,” Klinger said. He rifled through all the brand new information that had been dropped into his lap in the past few hours. “Sullivan, when we had the Doc in OR, he said that he ‘didn’t want to explain’ what would happen if he bled out. And you say ‘he’s always dressed like that.’ Those two things have gotta be connected, just because they’re about him.”

Sarah hesitated, then nodded and flipped the wallet back open.

“They’re both him,” she said, softly. “When he dies, he– he doesn’t die, he just changes. I met him when he was this one,” she added, pointing to the older man. “He was number Three. Then some spiders killed him, and he turned into number Four.”

“Spiders?”

“Big spiders,” she said, gesturing out the measure of a hat box. She paused, then pointed to the ceiling of the tent. “And one really big spider.”

Harry brought the Doctor back to post-op, did his absolute best to convince the stubborn fool to actually sleep, and was led to the so-called Swamp by Pierce and McIntyre. Burns had been placed on a post-op shift, which would have left Harry uneasy if Nurse Bayliss hadn't given a personal promise to supervise him.

Pierce dumped a pile of assorted nonsense off the spare bunk in one smooth motion and collapsed face down into his own.

“You got a nickname, Sullivan?” He mumbled. “Everyone else has a nickname.”

“We call Frank ‘Ferret Face,’” McIntyre supplied, grinning. “He's not a fan.”

Harry started picking through the pile. There were a shocking number of dirty magazines. He didn’t particularly want to touch them. “I can see where that one came from,” he said. “But ‘Trapper?’”

Pierce giggled and snapped upright, almost gangling off his bunk. “Oh, you'll love this one,” he said.

McIntyre rolled his eyes. “First week here, before Hawk showed up, Frank and I were doing supply. I left, the door got jammed, and he went whining to Henry that I trapped him. Henry thought it was funny, so it stuck.”

“No no no, that's not the funny part.”

“You weren't even there!”

“The funny part,” Pierce went on, “is that you had the same nickname in college, ‘cause a girl got caught making whoopee with you in a train bathroom and lied to save face!”

“Yeah, like that made it any better for either of us,” Trapper shot back.

Harry dumped the pile of dirty magazines on Trapper's unoccupied cot and sat on his newly christened own. He had an inkling, but it never hurt to ask. “Where does ‘Hawkeye’ come from, then?”

“Oh, Last of the Mohicans,” Pierce said. “It's my dad's favorite book. Better than the alternative.”

Harry couldn't help but crack a smile. “I would find a spot of bother putting my faith in a surgeon named Natty Bumppo.”

“Imagine that,” Hawkeye responded with his own wild grin. “Doctor Natty Bumppo Pierce.”

“Like Patch Adams,” Harry added, before he could remember that the reference made no sense in his own time, thank you Doctor for all the films from the ‘90s and 2000’s, and it made much less sense in early 1950-something. “A clown doctor.”

Trapper snickered. “We've got one clown Doctor already. Two, counting Frank. You oughta stop letting him dress himself in the dark.”

“Or at all,” Hawkeye said. “Are aliens colorblind?”

“I daresay he prefers ‘iconoclastic,’” Harry said, lying down. There was still a vague pile of stuff next to his bunk including a smattering of chess pieces wrapped in the wads of dirty sheets. He would need to change the ones that were already on the cot, but the day so far had worn him out more than he expected. “No, no nicknames for me,” he said, getting back to the original point. “Don’t suppose I’ve ever earned one.”

Hawkeye stumbled up and over to a collection of flasks on the only clean table in the entire tent. A martini glass was pressed into Harry’s hands a moment later. It reeked of paint thinner.

Hawkeye raised his own glass, and Trapper followed the motion a moment later.

“To the man getting us out of here, and the genius who saved his life,” he said. Harry could feel his ears going red. “L’chaim.”

“L’chaim,” Trapper echoed.

Harry sniffed the concoction dubiously, sighed, and joined the toast. “L’chaim.”

The blonde nurse, Margaret, was on shift when Harry left the Doctor in post-op, as were Frank Burns, Ginger, and a short, Pacific American woman who had kindly put on a name tag identifying her as Lt. Kellye Yamato.

Kellye crept over to his bedside and sat in the chair his coat had been draped over, fiddling with one of the primitive blood pressure monitors.

“Major Houlihan's not very happy about you,” she said. “But she spends so much time with Major Burns, she probably thinks he's in the right.”

The Doctor waved off the worry and sat up, unable to help the hiss of breath at the pain that radiated through him when he moved, and obligingly held out his arm when Kellye reached for it.

“You'll be looking for three numbers,” he instructed as she set up the sphygmomanometer. “A diastolic, a systolic, and a multisystolic. 200, 160, 115 is the ideal. I’d expect something twenty below that.”

She frowned and stopped with the stethoscope halfway to her ears.

“Ah,” the Doctor said. “Rumor mill hasn’t made it to you, I take it. Here.” He held out his hand, smiling. “Come on, come on, I don’t bite.”

Kellye offered her hand but flinched back the moment he touched her, alarmed and, to the Doctor’s disappointment, very faintly afraid. At least his awareness was starting to bleed back in after Radar’s psychic storm. “You’re cold,” she said. “Real cold.”

Ah. Not afraid of, afraid for. A better alternative. “Yes,” he said. “It’s quite alright. I promise, I’m perfectly healthy except for the bullet hole your Major put in me.”

Kellye still looked skeptical. The Doctor gently took her hand and pressed it to the expected side of his chest, letting her get her bearings.

Then he slid it to the other and watched her frown break away into fascination. That was always the best response, he found. Confusion and frustration led to difficult arguments.

There was something else underneath. Something… the Doctor tried and failed to get a grip on it. It was always hard with someone new.

“Good grief,” Kellye said after a moment. When she was silent for longer than the Doctor could stand, he gave her a better look and saw that her eyes had gone watery.

He let go of her hand. He should have been able to say something, ask if she was alright, apologize for pushing–

Kellye took a sharp breath and wiped her eyes. “Sorry, sorry,” she said, forcing a laugh. “You must be so far away from home.”

Homesickness. Now there was an emotion on which he could get a handle. Everyone got homesick, travelling with him. It was a chronic condition.

“I like to think I've made home elsewhere,” he said. Kellye broke a real, small smile and adjusted the cuff on his arm with a certain unnerving level of enthusiasm. “Are you quite alright?”

She looked up, bottom lip between her teeth. “Hmm? Oh– it’s not every day you get to learn something brand new. You’ll have to tell me what I’m looking for.”

The Doctor nodded and waited for her to find the multisystolic pressure. “The middle is hard to catch,” he instructed as she eased the pressure down. “There’s a sort of change of tone.”

He could feel the jolt of emotion through her hand on his arm, pride, maybe, when she found the systolic pressure. “One eighty, one forty-three,” she mumbled to herself, then dropped the pressure again to find the diastolic. “Ninety-seven. Lieutenant Bayliss said you lost a lot of blood, so I’d call that fine for now.”

She paused for a moment, glancing up at where Margaret and Frank were talking across the desk in the corner, then scooted her chair closer so she could whisper.

“So,” she said, “Why’d you come here? Did your spaceship crash?”

The Doctor snorted. “I wish she would have. It might have been easier to repair her than to repair the time fracture by hand.”

Kellye frowned. “What’s that mean?”

“Ah, yes. What’s the date today?”

“July 28th, 1951.”

“And what was the date yesterday?”

“Aug–” Kellye stopped. She took a moment to think. Then she stood, grabbed Ginger from where she was doing her rounds, and pulled her into the conversation.

“You don’t need to drag me around!” Ginger complained. She shot a glance at Frank and Margaret. “Something wrong with him?”

“Well, you coulda told me he was an alien,” Kellye muttered. “What’s going on, what was in that officers meeting?” She turned back to the Doctor, wringing her hand in the hem of her jacket. “What’s a time fracture?”

The Doctor considered. He had a good metaphor to explain it to Radar in mind, but doubted either of the nurses knew the intricacies of telephone and radio function.

“Do either of you knit?” he asked. Both nodded. “A skein of yarn is wrapped up, made into a ball, but it’s still quite linear. As you tug on the end it turns into one straight line. That’s how time is supposed to flow. It’s bunched, from an outside perspective, but when you unravel and take a look from close up, it’s continuous, with no jumps.”

“So it’s gotten tangled,” Kellye supplied. “Like trying to find the end and only coming up with knots.”

“Very good,” the Doctor said. “Yes, that’s exactly right. It’s a common occurrence in high casualty situations. Normally, time fractures resolve themselves and lead to very few problems. Sarah Jane and Harry’s time is also fractured, but it’s caused no long-term issues other than meaning that the years between 1970 and 1974 in London are roughly concurrent with 1979 to 1981. That is like a knot. This is like snipping up the entire skein and trying to glue it back together!”

“How are you supposed to fix something like that?” Ginger asked.

The Doctor sighed. It would have been far easier with his own equipment: Gallifreyan-made temporal spools and picks and the TARDIS’s central plugboard, automatically synched to the environment as it was whenever she landed. Whatever Jack could smuggle out of Torchwood for him wasn’t going to be nearly as useful.

“Very, very carefully,” he said.

By the time Henry had finished checking in to make sure the guard rotation for the night was ready, Radar was waiting in his office with a stack of forms to sign. The kid always looked tired, everyone looked tired, with the hours they pulled, but this was different. Whatever happened out in the compound not an hour ago had to be catching up with him.

Radar straightened out the edges of the pile of forms and glanced up, looking anywhere but at Henry. “I’m okay, sir,” he said. “I’ve got to make some orders.”

Henry caught him by the wrist as he tried to scurry out the door. Radar flinched so hard he let go, worried he’d hurt him, but luckily the kid didn’t try to run off again.

“What’s going on, son?” Henry asked. “Are you really–” Good grief, he didn’t want to say the word psychic. An alien from another planet he could deal with. Time travel, okay, fine. If Radar was actually– well, if he was, that was a whole different can of soup.

Radar shrugged and stared at the floor. “Runs in my family, sir.”

“Mind reading runs in your family?”

He glared even harder at the floor and scuffed his boot. “The Doctor says the O’Reillys’ve lived on a ‘psychic well’ since we came to Iowa, an’ I’m just real good at using it. I’m not special, sir, I’m just lucky.”

Not special, what a ridiculous thing to say. “You’re better at the radio than any other clerk in Korea,” Henry said. If Radar could really hear his thoughts anyway, he might as well say them out loud, make himself more comfortable. “You take good care of animals that nobody else would give a chance. And I bet you called the Doctor to come help us, didn’t you?”

Radar nodded and tightened the grip he had on the cuffs of his sleeves. “Yessir. Sorry, sir, I know I’m not supposed to make long distance calls without permission.”

“Well, look at that!” Henry said. “You managed to get the telephone to make a call to a spaceship! What the hell makes you think you’re not special?”

Radar shrugged. “I’m not like you and Captains Pierce and McIntyre. I can’t help people. I knew– I knew when my dad was gonna die, and I couldn’t do anything about it, even though I knew. Maybe–” he paused, looking away to sniffle and wipe his eyes. “I’m real scared that maybe one day, I’m gonna know that you, or Captain Pierce, or even Major Burns are gonna die here, and I won’t be able to change it at all.”

“That’s too much pressure to put on your shoulders, Radar,” Henry said. Radar just sniffled again and shook his head. Henry guided him over to the extra chair and sat him down. “Kid, you’re not responsible for every bad thing that happens to anyone.”

“I am!” he forced out. “I am, Colonel. I can’t save people, I-I– I couldn’t handle all the stuff in my brain and I chased the Doctor’s spaceship away, and if– if one of you dies, it’s gonna be all my fault, because I could’ve tried harder to stop it!”

Henry thought about kneeling, decided his knees wouldn’t be able to take it after the abuse he’d already leveled at them, and sat down on the floor in front of Radar instead. “Do you think it’s my fault when one of my patients dies?”

Radar’s eyes went almost comically large behind his glasses. “No, sir! Of course I don’t! Some of those soldiers come in in such bad shape– they just don’t make it that long, no matter what you try to do to help them.”

“Right,” Henry said. “It makes me sad, too, but you can’t change your cards once they’re dealt. All you can do is make your best with the hand you have. Me and Trapper and Hawkeye make those boys as comfortable as we can, and we try to save them, but we’re getting dealt real bad hole cards all the time. Now you and me, we’re gonna make the best of the time we’ve got to be together. And when we go home–”

“If,” Radar mumbled.

“When we go home,” Henry corrected. “When we go home, you’re gonna come to Bloomington, Illinois, and Lorraine’s gonna cook the best damned apple pie you’ve ever had, and you can tell my kids all about how you did their Daddy’s job better than he ever could have every single day.”

Radar wiped off his glasses on the bottom of his shirt and nodded. “I’d like that, sir.”

“Yeah,” Henry said. “Me too. Now get some sleep, huh? It’s getting late.”

“I’ve got orders to make!”

Henry grabbed the edge of his desk to haul himself back up off the floor, thought for a moment, and ruffled Radar’s hair through his hat. “That’s an order, son. You’ve been busy. Lieutenant Sullivan can borrow some fatigues, and there sure isn’t any way anything you call for would get through any faster if you did it now.”

“I suppose so, sir,” Radar said. He gathered up the papers in Henry’s out tray and stood to leave before pausing in the doorway.

“Sir?” he said.

Henry looked up from the forms he was starting on. “Yes, Radar?”

“I think– I think something else bad might be happening. Tomorrow.”

“Normal bad, or Korea bad?”

Radar bit his lip and looked down at the papers in his hands. “Both, I think.”

Chapter Text

Frank sat in a metal folding chair just beyond the end of the alien’s bed in post-op, jiggling his leg only because he wasn’t able to stop himself. It was some time just past three in the morning. Margaret and Yamato had finished their shifts an hour ago, leaving him in only the presence of Bayliss and one of the new nurses whose name he still couldn’t remember.

He carefully clasped his hands and slid them down between his knees, trying to stop the shaking. He was a surgeon, for God’s sake. He didn’t shake.

The– alien, not man, alien, real, live, space alien, was up to something. He knew it. The Communists were up to something, Hawkeye stinking Pierce was always up to something, and that little girl the alien had brought with him, the one with the bright eyes and soft brown hair and cute little nose, not that he’d say so to Margaret– she was definitely up to something, too. She was too smart and too un-American not to be up to something.

So what if he hadn’t meant to shoot anyone? He could keep on pretending he had been trying to deal with that surgeon, who was definitely a spy, what else would he be? An alien spy. If this one had orange blood, who’s to say the other ones didn’t have green? Or blue? Any color but proper, red, American blood. Even if those two weren’t aliens, they were still British.

Frank Burns did not trust the British. You can’t fight a war and then go back to being friends, no siree, no matter how long ago that war was. What next, were people going to start being friendly with the Germans? With the Russians? Canada? He’d read his histories on the War of 1812, thank you very much, and wouldn’t be trusting those beaver-lickers any time soon. Not to mention the ones who were French.

Bayliss was watching him. He hadn’t gotten to properly talk to Margaret all shift, not with her eyes on them. She kept glancing over every time she walked past. What did she think he was going to do? He didn’t have any plans. If the alien died, it wasn’t his fault. At least they wouldn’t have to worry about him getting pneumonia; he didn’t seem to be breathing at all.

Frank leaned forward and grabbed the chart from the railing of the bed, flipping to the page with all the records on it. Everything was wrong. He scribbled out the extraneous number Yamato had written down for blood pressure and put the chart back.

O’Reilly slammed open the door from outside and stumbled in, half-awake but eyes wide. Frank stood and planted himself between the alien’s bed and the door.

The little freak nearly ran into him. He was chewing on his nails. Draftees, good God.

“Can I see him, Major Burns?” O’Reilly asked. He pointed to the alien and went back to working his thumbnail between his teeth.

“What do you want to see my patient for, Corporal?” Frank asked.

“Your patient! Colonel Blake and Leff-tenant Sullivan are the ones who did surgery on him!”

“And he’s in my care!” Frank snapped back. Bayliss glared at him. He made an effort to lower his voice. It wasn’t that he was scared of her, but– well, maybe he was a little scared of her. “If you want to see him, you can wait until he’s awake and one of those sympathizers is on duty!”

“Sir–” O’Reilly argued.

“You are dismissed, Corporal.”

O’Reilly shuffled his boots, took a deep breath, and gathered himself. “Sir, I need to see him. It’s important!”

“What’s so important that it can’t wait until the morning?”

“I don’t know!”

O’Reilly sniffed and adjusted his glasses.

“I don’t know, sir,” he continued. “But I’d like to find out, and I need to talk to him for that.”

Frank opened his mouth to say something else, then stopped. He could listen, if they talked. Aliens, alien conspirators, magic boxes - no wonder Pierce was working on a breakdown. The man was weak-willed, jelly-spined. He wouldn’t pick up a gun if it meant saving his own life.

Frank stepped out of the way and O’Reilly dragged the folding chair to the alien’s side, glancing up at him. At least something there had finally been taken care of. Nobody thought Frank Burns was crazy for saying the twerp could read his mind now, did they? It was all working out. All he needed to do was get on the phone to Colonel Flagg–

O’Reilly flinched, looked away, and shuffled a few inches closer to the alien. Frank made himself busy reviewing charts nearby.

“Doctor?” O’Reilly asked. When the alien didn’t respond, he reached out and gently jostled him by the shoulder. “Doctor, it’s Radar.”

The alien blinked, wiped his eyes, and sat up. “Mmm, hello. Early, isn’t it?”

“Can’t sleep,” O’Reilly responded. “That thing–” he glanced back at Frank. “That thing you did, with the grass and the tree? You gotta undo it.”

“Radar, your mind can’t handle that much information, not without proper training.”

“I’ve gotta see!” he protested. “I’ve got this– this feeling, like someone’s grabbing my insides. I think something’s going to happen in the morning.”

The alien made a motion at his coat. O’Reilly fumbled through the pockets until he came up with a fob watch and a paper packet. The alien opened the watch and glared at it. “It is the morning.”

“You know what I mean!” O’Reilly hissed back. He opened the packet, pulled out a couple of candies, and handed it over.

“No, I don’t,” the alien said. “I’ve never met a human with precognitive abilities as expansive as yours. You could very well mean almost anything.”

“Morning morning. Between sunrise and… noon, probably.”

“There, that’s better. You don’t need my help, just a bit of guidance. What sort of thing?”

“That’s what I’m asking you for!”

The alien snorted. “I certainly don’t know. Details aren’t exactly my forte.”

Frank stopped listening. They weren’t even talking about anything interesting, nothing he didn’t already know. O’Reilly was a freak, the alien was an alien, and O’Reilly thought casualties were bad. Casualties were necessary. They’d never win the war if they didn’t send boys to fight, and that meant they came back hurt or dead.

It was just something that had to happen. He could convince himself of that.

O’Reilly gasped. “Colonel Flagg,” he said. “Colonel Flagg!”

Frank smirked down at the chart he wasn’t reading. Good. Colonel Flagg was probably the only sensible man in all of Korea. He took charge. He was willing to use methods nobody else would ever dream of! He’d deal with the alien, even if that wasn’t what he was coming for, take him to– Roswell, maybe, and then everything could get back to normal.

O’Reilly was staring at him.

“What?” Frank snapped.

“If Colonel Flagg takes the Doctor, we never get to leave,” O’Reilly said. “Never, do you get it? The war will never, ever end unless he helps us!”

Frank put the chart down. O’Reilly had stood, hands balled into fists at his sides. The alien was busy poking around in the bag of candies.

“Keep it up, Corporal,” Frank snapped. “I have had enough of your insubordination! When Colonel Flagg gets here, I’ll have you rotting in Leavenworth!”

O’Reilly went pale. Good. Maybe he’d learn how to behave like a soldier.

“Radar,” the alien said. O’Reilly turned back to him. “I'm afraid we need to make that phone call sooner rather than later.”

“I never heard of Torchwood,” Sparky said. Radar hunched closer to his desk and tried not to think beyond the next few minutes. There were so many bad things creeping up, and he couldn’t find any way to pick out specific ones. He hadn’t fallen asleep no matter how hard he tried, he still felt sort of nauseous and sad for no real reason, and the new doors the Doctor had helped him put up were still all wiggly and see-through and seemed to be getting more see-through with every moment. It was a lot quieter, but Major Burns and Captain Pierce thought real loud, and he couldn’t close the door to the Doctor all the way no matter how hard he tried.

“They’re British,” Radar said, hoping that would clarify, which was another word that definitely wasn't his. He looked up at the Doctor, who was still clearly in all sorts of pain (and didn’t that send another shock of guilt through Radar, ‘cause he’d been the one to cause it) but was picking through the office filing cabinets anyway. “Sparky, just put me through to someone on the phone at the BCFK, okay?”

Sparky sighed. It came through like thunder, rattling down the staticky line. “You got a British patient there, or something like that?”

The Doctor picked up the bugle, glared at it, and set it on top of the filing cabinet. God, Radar hoped he wasn’t gonna try and play it. It didn’t seem like he was thinking about it, at least. “Yeah, something like that,” Radar said. “I think it’s probably classified, really.”

Definitely classified. It was definitely classified. Or at least he wasn’t planning on telling Sparky he’d got an alien around.

“Oh, a spook,” Sparky said. “Hey, Radar, I shouldn’t be telling you this, but–”

“Colonel Flagg, yeah,” Radar said. Should he have waited? Maybe Sparky knew more than him. The Doctor had given up on the bugle and was making a paperclip chain with a pile he’d pulled out of his coat pocket. He was going a mile a minute inside, so fast that there wasn’t anything for Radar to latch on to. Radar tried to blink the buffeting wave of the Doctor’s thoughts out of his head and scooted closer to the desk. “He’s gonna cause a real problem for everyone if you can’t get me talking to Torchwood.”

A puff of static that was Sparky laughing just a little came through. “I’ll trust you on that. I’ve got a line to the British artillery, that alright?”

“Yeah, I’ll make do,” Radar sighed. He waited the long moment while Sparky found the connection. The Doctor had pulled Radar’s teddy bear, Tiger, out of the bundle of blanket and sheet and tucked him in, which would have been nice if it wasn’t also real embarrassing.

The line clicked. “14th royal artillery, Sergeant Kutch speaking,” a man with an extremely posh accent said. The Doctor hastily shoveled everything back into the filing cabinet and rolled the wheelchair over to listen. “What in blazes do you need this early in the morning?”

“Hi, this is Corporal Radar O’Reilly, MASH 4077th! I’ve gotta–”

“A MASH unit?” the sergeant asked. “Good heavens, has something happened?”

“No, no sir!” Radar said. The line was gravelly, hard to hear. He had to shout just a little bit. “Only you were the only British unit I could get a line to, and I’ve got someone who needs to talk to Torchwood.”

The line was silent. Radar was about to ring Sparky again when the sergeant finally spoke. “Son, where did you hear that name?”

Radar glanced at the Doctor. The tangle of the future was creeping up on them. Just thinking about not getting the call through felt like someone clawing at something inside him. There were so many ways everything could go wrong, and even the ones where it went right were making him sick to poke at. It had been a long time since he’d gotten this much warning about something, this much time before something. All he could usually manage was a few seconds before the choppers came over the hill when he was trying to keep all the pain in everyone else’s heads out.

There weren’t a lot of ways out, when it came down to it. The next big bad thing really, really wanted to kill someone. That seemed about right for Colonel Flagg.

The Doctor held out a hand, sending a little spark of pain through his side from where Major Burns had shot him. Radar passed over the receiver.

“Hel-lo,” the Doctor said, brightly. “Sergeant Kutch, was it? Yes, fine, thank you, they’ve treated me quite well, with a notable exception. It’s vitally important that you patch us through to Torchwood.”

Radar couldn’t hear the response. He thought the Doctor probably had better hearing than him, if he was able to hear what Kutch was saying without holding the staticky line right to his head. Anyway, the British forces were too far away to hear anything without hearing it.

“Yes, well,” the Doctor scoffed. “I would assume that if I know about Torchwood, I have the clearance to know about it, wouldn’t you? Of course I’m not a spy, what would I be spying on! Yes, I know Torchwood is intelligence, but–” the Doctor waited, rolling his eyes so hard Radar worried they might fall out. “Sergeant Kutch, if you would listen to me! I need you to call Jack Harkness, and tell him exactly that the Doctor is on the line, and that I’m going to be very unhappy with him if he doesn’t answer!” He paused again, waiting for an answer. “Yes, ‘the Doctor.’ No, it’s not a codename, just– Sergeant, would you do as I ask!?”

The Doctor stood there for a long moment, listening, then handed the receiver back to Radar. “On our way,” he said with a grin. “Might take a moment, he’s said.”

“Yeah, they have to get a good line,” Radar said, nodding. The Doctor dug around in his pockets and came back up with a yo-yo, a twisty cube that matched his coat, and a silver and red doohickey shaped like those things some doctors looked in your ears with. It looked like it had been through a fire or two.

“Ah hah,” the Doctor said. “I knew I still had one around somewhere!” He held the thing - sonic screwdriver, Radar pulled from him - up to the plugboard where it made a sharp buzzing sound and immediately sparked so badly he had to drop it. Radar scooted back as far as the phone cord would let him.

“What was that for!?” Radar protested.

“So we can both hear,” the Doctor said. He grabbed a few forms from the desk and poked the doohickey with it. Another shower of sparks went everywhere. “Oh, well. I probably should have replaced it some time ago.”

The line crackled. The sharp tug of danger, or at least an earache, came just in time for Radar to hold the receiver out at arm’s length.

“Doctor!” a man said. Radar had expected him to be British, but he wasn’t, and his voice came through the line loud enough to hear clearly. “Hey, what the hell are you doing in Korea? Nasty time fracture down there. Get lost looking for me?”

“I’m fixing it,” the Doctor said. He was starting to mess with the plugboard. Radar really hoped he didn’t break it. He thought he knew what he was doing, at least. “And I know you; watch your language, there’s a boy in the room.”

“I’m not a kid!” Radar protested.

“Compared to him and me, you most certainly are,” the Doctor snapped back. “Now Jack, our timestreams are quite out of sync at the moment. I haven’t met you yet except for your ridiculous attempts to seduce me, and I have no inclination or desire to know what nonsense you and the future Me get up to. All things considered, this is quite the strain on the web of time, but I still need some–” the Doctor paused, making a face like he’d swallowed a lemon. “... help, if you’d be so inclined.”

Jack was silent for a long moment. Radar picked up the cube from the desk and fiddled with it with his free hand while the Doctor started rearranging the ends of wires he’d pulled loose.

“Last time I saw you,” Jack said, “you abandoned me on a game show set crawling with Daleks and ran off with your girlfriend.”

“That doesn’t sound like me,” the Doctor said. “Goodness, am I some sort of idiot in the future?”

Jack laughed, strained. “Yeah, something like that. Hang on, let me get some files out.”

More static rattled down the line. The Doctor pulled something else out of his pocket, a toggle light switch, and started carefully wiring it in. For turning on and off whatever he’d done to make the phone louder, apparently. Radar carefully set the phone receiver down on the desk. His arm was getting tired holding it between them.

“Okay,” Jack said. “Look, whatever it is you need, you’ve clearly stumbled into some kind of shitshow if you’re willing to ask for help. I’ll do my best. But,” the Doctor sighed and rolled his eyes, “you have to let me have a little bit of fun, right? What number?”

The Doctor scoffed. “Do you ask everyone you flirt with for their age?”

“Hey, don’t blame a man for wanting some imagery!”

Radar sank in his chair. Oh, he was uncomfortable. He could barely stand it when Captains Pierce and McIntyre made innuendos at each other, much less whatever this was.

“Six,” the Doctor grumbled. More static, flipping papers.

Jack whistled. “I like the hair. Coat, not so much.”

“Have you got files on me!?” The Doctor flipped the switch a few times, testing it. Nothing blew up or caught on fire.

“Torchwood has files, I just appreciate them. Now, Doctor, how can I be of service?”

Radar was actually pretty impressed with himself for not gagging there and then. He looked down at the cube and found that all the fiddling had messed it all up. None of the colors were in the right places anymore. It was probably a metaphor, or something. He just didn’t know for what.

“Papers, for a start,” the Doctor said. “Myself and Sarah Jane are civilians, and Harry’s are thirty years out of date in the wrong direction.”

“Hang on,” Jack said. “You didn’t travel with Sullivan and Smith in your Sixth incarnation.”

“I may have dropped Frobisher off for a vacation in Ibiza. Can you get me clearance, or not?”

“I can, but don’t you have that kind of stuff in the TARDIS?”

The Doctor glanced at Radar, and he sank even further into his chair.

“There was an incident,” the Doctor said, extremely carefully. “You, ah– you’ve heard of Walter O’Reilly.”

Jack laughed. “Heard of him? Doctor, he’s on my recruitment list the second he gets out of–”

“Yes, I’m quite clear on the situation, thank you,” the Doctor snapped. “Radar, say hello, would you?”

Radar scooted his chair closer. “Hi, sir,” he said. The Doctor was waiting for him to say something else. “Sorry for calling so late, only there’s a spook showing up in the morning who doesn’t like us all that much.”

“Hell of an early warning system, Doctor,” Jack said. “Nice to meet you, Radar O’Reilly. You and me are getting dinner sometime.”

“Stop it,” the Doctor warned.

“For recruitment purposes!”

“I may not have officially met you yet, Harkness, but I’m extremely clear on your modus operandi! I have quite the list of equipment I need shipped, if you’re finished making a nuisance of yourself.”

“Absolutely not, but go ahead.”

Radar stood and wandered out into the compound, tucking the cube into his jacket pocket. He had the sense there wasn’t anything left to do that he could help with. Despite the time, Captain Pierce was sitting on the chair outside of the Swamp, staring up at the sky.

Very, very carefully, Radar took down the key and opened the patio door to Hawkeye’s mind.

The world was so big, and so filled with uniqueness, Hawkeye thought. That was something to look forward to every single day: uniqueness. He’d never put much stock in blending into a crowd, not when the great thing about humans was that everyone was different from everyone else, whether it was half the world away, across the country, or just down the block.

So what the hell was it like across the universe? If the Emersons back home in Crabapple Cove could have eight kids and pray like their lives depended on it while he and his little two person family spent every Sunday baiting the crab pots when there wasn’t a medical emergency, what did Sundays look like on– Gallifrey, wasn’t it?

“They don’t have crabs,” Radar said. Captain Pierce startled so badly he nearly fell out of his chair, legs and arms going everywhere.

“Christ, Radar!” he said. He clutched both hands to his chest, falling into the overexaggerated performance that he knew everyone liked about him.

Radar shut the door in his head. He probably shouldn’t have been snooping in the first place.

“Hey,” Captain Pierce said. He patted the other chair and held out the bottle of whiskey he’d gotten from somewhere. “Hey, it’s alright. You startled me, that's all. What are you doing up?”

Radar sat and had the bottle of whiskey pressed into his hands. Captain Pierce leaned back, looking up at the stars.

“Colonel Flagg’s gonna be here in the morning,” Radar said.

Captain Pierce snapped back to a seat. “Frank?”

“No, he didn’t know.” Radar took a careful sip of the whiskey and handed it back. He always felt a little silly trying to drink. He liked it fine, when it wasn’t the Swamp gin, but anything other than Nehi always felt a little too grown-up for him. “I don’t know why he’s coming, but the Doctor’s phone call needed to happen, or everything woulda gone wronger than it’s going to go.”

Captain Pierce was looking at him funny. Radar turned to the sky. He knew they all had names, the stars, but he’d never really thought about what they were called. That was stuff you had to get educated to know, not stuff you knew when you dropped out because you couldn’t wrap your head around math for anything more than crop yields.

“I’m sorry we gave you that stupid nickname,” Captain Pierce said. Radar frowned and looked back at him. He was holding the bottle of whiskey like Radar sometimes held Tiger in the times late at night when everything got to be too much. “It feels kind of mean to call you ‘Radar’ now. I mean– now that we know– well, you’re–”

“I like it,” Radar said. “You wouldn’t’a given me a nickname if you didn’t like me.”

Captain Pierce smirked. “‘Hot Lips?’”

“You just wanna sleep with her.”

“I’m game if she’s game,” Captain Pierce said. “If she drops the baggage.”

“I don’t think he’d like being called baggage, sir.”

That got a laugh. One of those good, long, honking laughs that Captain Pierce saved for the people he really liked, one of the ones where he was out of breath and wiping his eyes by the end of it. Radar let himself smile and watched the stars swimming their way through the night sky.

Captain Pierce punched him on the shoulder. One of those light punches that sometimes guys did with their friends.

“So,” he said, propping his chin in his hand. “You knew all this was real, and you still read those comics?”

Radar shrugged. “Sometimes I thought it wasn’t,” he said. The stars were so bright overhead. There were planets by some of them, he knew. Planets where other people came from. Planets he really, really wanted to see. “After Petey died - he was the one who got eaten by those robots at the state fair - I had to go see a head shrink. The police said he got killed by a thresher, so the shrink believed that, and every time I tried to tell him the truth he told me I was making up silly stories because it was too much for my head to’ve watched him die. The comics– I guess it’s nice to think that maybe some of the people who write them saw that stuff too, isn’t it? That I’m not really nuts like the shrink thought, and that I didn’t imagine the Doctor.”

Captain Pierce was quiet for a really long time. He was thinking about the Doctor, about the time he’d already spent getting to know Lieutenant Sullivan. About how they seemed like good people. About how he’d really like to go home sooner rather than later. Radar watched the stars. Even if he had learned their names, he wouldn’t know these ones, he thought. They were different because the world was pointing a different way.

“We’ve gotta talk to Trap and Navy,” Captain Pierce finally said. Something was clicking over towards working out. He took one last long drink of the whiskey and stood up. “Flagg’s in for one hell of a time.”

Chapter Text

Kellye had been having a perfectly nice dream when Ginger woke her up.

“I’m not on shift until the afternoon!” she complained. Ginger flicked her in the shoulder again and waited until she turned over. The look on her face… Kellye sat up and tried to comb her hair into something reasonable with her fingers.

“Radar says Flagg’s showing his face,” Ginger said.

Kellye froze, nails hooked in a tangle. “Major Burns didn’t make a call, did he?”

“‘Course not!” Ginger glanced over at the lump of Shari under her covers and sat down next to Kellye on her cot. “Kell, you and I know what’s going on! We’ve gotta do something!”

“Like what! Hawkeye and Trapper only get away with that stuff they pull because they’re surgeons. He’d have either one of us court martialed and you know it.”

“Can’t you at least keep an eye on him?” Ginger asked. “You know, hang out with the Doctor, keep him from saying anything that gets Flagg in a tizzy.”

“Get bent,” Kellye said, lightly. “Fine. But you owe me a favor.”

“I ain’t complaining,” Ginger said. She yawned and flopped the rest of the way onto the bunk when Kellye stood to track down a clean set of fatigues. “I’ve been babysitting all night, Kell. Major Burns is taking the excuse to shove that stick even further up his butt.”

“I’ll order some x-rays,” Kellye joked back. Ginger rolled her eyes and made the job of crossing the five feet to her own cot look like the most arduous process in the world.

“Wake me up when Flagg gets here,” Ginger mumbled.

Kellye could already hear snoring by the time she was out the door.

It was a beautiful day, which they didn’t get often enough. Sometimes it was hot for weeks on end; eighty degree day after eighty degree day that wouldn’t have been so bad back in Hawaii where a swim in the ocean was only ever an evening away and the hospital was air conditioned. The cold days were worse, Kellye thought. There wasn’t any way to get out of the wind except in post-op, and even then huge drifts of snow were constantly blasting in beneath the swinging doors.

The morning was chilly, not cold, with a beautiful sunrise starting to creep its way over the horizon. It seemed like the wrong kind of day to have to deal with Colonel Flagg and the destruction he left in his wake.

Hawkeye, the Doctor’s friend Dr. Sullivan, and Margie were on duty when Kellye walked into post-op. Klinger and the Doctor’s other friend had brought breakfast and were eating with the Doctor, despite the fact that breakfast for the patients usually waited until nine. The lady was in one of Klinger’s skirts, carefully pinned to give it pleats so it would fit her.

“Kellye!” the Doctor called. He waved her over to sit on the recently freed bunk next to his. “Goodness, they work you hard, don’t they?”

“It’s not my shift,” Kellye said. She sat down and suddenly felt horribly self-conscious about being the only one in fatigues in the group. The Doctor was in one of those hospital gowns, at least, but the shock of color of his coat was laying across his lap.

She imagined Klinger had a lot to say about that particular fashion choice.

“You heard the news?” Klinger asked around a mouthful of what passed for eggs from the mess tent. “Colonel Flagg’s gonna show up by noon, according to Radar.”

Kellye nodded. “I promised Ginger I’d keep an eye out.”

“Oh, not to worry,” the Doctor said. He sat up a bit straighter and hissed through his teeth. It was nice to know that reactions to pain were universal, Kellye thought, then immediately felt bad about thinking it. “Hawkeye has a plan, supposedly. Papers for the three of us are on their way, as are some of the materials to construct suturing equipment.”

“For the time fracture,” the lady clarified. “We haven’t met yet; I’m Sarah Jane Smith. Your name is Kellye?”

Kellye smiled. “Kellye Yamato. It’s okay if you don’t remember. You’re meeting an awful lot of people.”

“Oh, I try my best,” Sarah Jane said, grinning. Klinger shot her an odd glance that Kellye had no hope of figuring out. “This Colonel Flagg, he’s a regular problem?”

“Yeah, real pain in everyone’s ass,” Klinger said. “Hates crazies, Communists, and queers. I claim I’m all three and he thinks Captain Pierce is crazier than a bucket full of monkeys on psychotics and I’m perfectly sane!”

The Doctor shook his head, clearly holding back a smile. “I’m afraid you’re rather too good a tailor to make an authentic bid for sectioning. I find madmen to be abysmally haphazard with their color coordination.”

Klinger snorted and made a grand gesture at the coat. “You’re one to talk.”

“I’ve made no claims to my own sanity.” Sarah Jane rolled her eyes and whacked him on the shoulder. He made to nudge her back before stopping with his elbow halfway out, clearly at the limit of his range of motion when he tried to push it further and winced.

Hawkeye wandered over, Dr. Sullivan trailing after him like a lost duckling. His gaze made its usual vague pass over Kellye before lingering on Sarah Jane and finally making its way to the Doctor.

“Slop to your liking?” Hawkeye asked. Sullivan reached around him to grab the Doctor’s chart and look it over. “I’m sure I could dig up a few sides of last night’s botulism surprise.”

“Don’t remind us,” Kellye complained. “It’s bad enough to eat it once, it’s worse to hear about it again.”

“What, you’re not a fan of leavened meatloaf? I’m just glad it’s not Passover.”

The Doctor snorted a laugh and poked at the breakfast tray, a look of distaste clear. “I can quite honestly say that I didn’t know half of this was edible for humans.”

“Oh, it’s not,” Hawkeye said. “I’d rather eat dirt.”

“‘Tis an ill cook that cannot lick his own fingers,’” the Doctor agreed.

“Particularly when he needs to bite his thumb, good sirrah.”

Klinger poked Kellye in the arm. “Is this a bit? Are they doing a bit?”

“It’s Romeo and Juliet!” Kellye said. “Oh, I love that play. I know it’s been done to death, but star-crossed lovers are so romantic.”

The Doctor’s gaze flicked up from the awful mess tent food just in time to meet Sullivan’s. Sarah Jane started laughing hysterically.

“Goodness, you two couldn’t be more obvious if you tried,” she accused, wiping her eyes. “Oh, a sailor and a walking pride parade, honestly. That’s what’s going to get you in trouble with Colonel Flagg.”

Hawkeye sucked in a breath and gripped the bed frame so hard his knuckles went white. Kellye thought he might swoon. Well, there was no surprise there. Everyone in camp, Major Burns excluded, made to protect one another. Especially once it was obvious how Hawkeye and Trapper felt about each other. “Is that what it’s like in the ‘80s?” he asked, desperately. His eyes were sad. Kellye felt a flash of… not pity, exactly, but something that made her heart hurt anyway. “The nineteen-eighties, not the twenty-eighties or the twenty-nine-eighties? You can just–” he gestured wildly between them, nearly making contact with Sullivan's face. “You can just do that? Not even– he’s an alien!”

“Rather more complicated than that,” Sullivan grumbled. The Doctor was bright red and pretending to be extremely focused on eating one of the barely-sausages. Klinger had also gone red, strangely enough.

Sarah Jane sat up straighter. “You don’t have a problem, do you?”

“Me?” Hawkeye asked. “Hawkeye Pierce, a problem with–” Sullivan whacked him on the arm and pointed around the room. Hawkeye leaned in closer and lowered his voice. “Hon, I’ve got an Oscar Wilde collection back in Maine. Trapper John, the rotten fink, purposefully defaced the one magazine I could get my hands on with pictures of John Wayne in it just to fuck with me. I’m Dorothy’s best friend! I’m– I lived in New York! I am the problem! Science-fiction’s never been my genre, but given a chance I’d–”

The Doctor nearly choked. “Point taken, thank you.” Sullivan honestly looked like he was about to explode out of embarrassment.

Sarah Jane patted Klinger on the leg and stood up. “Well, Max and I have some work to do on getting me better clothes. You two,” she paused to gently touch the Doctor’s shoulder, then pinch Sullivan’s cheek, “behave yourselves, would you?”

“I always behave myself,” the Doctor said. Sarah Jane rolled her eyes and dragged Klinger away. Hawkeye very purposefully took the chart out of Sullivan’s hands, hung it back up, and led him to their next patient.

Kellye felt even more awkward without anybody else there. What was she supposed to do? Keep an eye out for Colonel Flagg, sure, but he always made enough of a ruckus to get everyone’s attention. She could have brought a book, maybe, or her knitting. Probably the knitting; the book she was in the middle of was really only appropriate for late nights when she couldn’t sleep and needed to giggle at what men thought was attractive with Ginger.

There was a tap on her knee. The Doctor was glowering at the tray from the mess tent. “Are you quite sure this is edible?”

“Nobody’s gotten really sick,” Kellye said. She worked the dry skin at the corner of her lip between her teeth. “Hawkeye likes to pretend so, but it’s not that bad. Sometimes we get spam.”

The Doctor frowned. “I wouldn’t have thought junk mail was popularized yet.”

“Huh?”

“Hmm? Oh– the tinned meat. That does make more sense, doesn’t it?” He picked at the almost-eggs, firmly avoiding making eye contact. “And this is the standard fare?”

Kellye shrugged. “At least the eggs don’t need a spoon today.”

The Doctor wrinkled his nose. “Hmm. No other options?”

He was beginning to look a little bit pathetic, dragging his fork across the powdered egg mix. Kellye shifted to the chair Sarah Jane had been sitting in so she could whisper.

“I know it’s bad, but you’ll get used to it,” she said. She paused, combing her mind for something kind to offer. It was the least she could do, if he was really getting them all out of there. “I’ve got some sugar cookies from home in my tent. I’ll get you one if you promise not to tell the other patients.”

The Doctor shook his head. “That’s very kind of you, but unhelpful. The quandary lies not on the plate, my dear.”

The general concept sank in. She’d only seen him eat the sausages. And Ginger had said his internal anatomy was all squiggly; Radar had told her about the cows back in Ottumwa sometimes, how they had to have extra stomachs to get everything they needed out of grass. If he had to sacrifice some digestive tract for the rest of the stuff he had in there, the double pulse that she’d felt ticking away against her fingers when she took his pressure, he was probably limited to things that were easy to digest. Animal products, not plants.

“Oh!” Kellye said when understanding had fully hit her. She felt a little bit stupid, but she wasn’t a stranger to that. “Oh, I’m so sorry. I should have realized– you’re not even the same species as us! I’ll go talk to Igor, he’s our chef.”

“He’s certainly made a monster, hasn’t he,” the Doctor scoffed. He worked his fork under the eggs and lifted the corner of the congealed yellowish brick.

He grabbed her hand when she stood to leave. “Kellye. Zipped lips about this, hmm?”

“All quiet on the western front,” she said back. It earned a brief, tight smile before he moved on to investigating what passed for toast.

Kellye swung open the post-op doors and stepped outside. The soft glow of sunrise had grown into the gentle light of the Korean dawn stretching through the mist over the minefield. It danced in sparkling motion through the smoke from the kitchen building, along the camouflage netting draped across the squat line of tents next to the mess, over the spray from the creek slowly but surely wearing away at the stepping stones that had been there long before anybody American cared that Korea existed.

It was pretty, really. It was only horrible that she had to be there to see it at all.

She got three steps away from the door before the rumble of a jeep pulling up stopped her in her tracks.

Harry was beginning to get frustrated with exactly how often people slammed the doors of the post-op ward. There were patients, for heaven’s sake! One can’t heal oneself particularly well if one’s constantly being woken up by the level of drama one usually only sees on Soaps.

This, he took it, was Colonel Flagg. The man looked like he could have been Frank Burns’ brother. He was already stomping towards Hawkeye by the time Lieutenant Yamato scurried back into the room after him.

“You,” Flagg said. Hawkeye prepared some big, exaggerated gesture, but didn’t have time to start it before Flagg had put a finger to his chest and corralled him against the wall. “Do you know how much time I’ve spent cleaning up after your mess, Captain Pierce? How are you doing it, huh? You’ve got Communist contacts, don’t you? You and all your little Commie friends, you’ve got your fingers in high places. Well, you’ll see. I’ve got friends in high places too, Pierce. And I am going to take,” the finger moved to Hawkeye’s forehead. Whacked him. “You,” again, “down.”

Hawkeye threw a desperate glance at Harry. “You wanna tell me what I did this time? So we’re on the same page, you know. Joseph Stalin and I get up to so many tricks we’re on a first name basis.”

“You think you’re funny, don’t you,” Flagg snapped.

“Only on my good days.”

“You’ll see.” Flagg stepped back. He was laughing. Harry thought about every leader of every alien menace the Doctor had ever taken down and was reminded uncomfortably of every single one of them. “You’ll all see.”

He slammed the door again on his way out.

Hawkeye still had his back against the wall on one side of the ward. Flagg had woken up all of their patients, and, completely unsurprisingly, everyone was staring at the target of the shouting.

“You know,” Hawkeye said. He let his legs buckle under him and slid down the wall. “He didn’t even tell me what I did.”

That, apparently, was enough to satisfy the curiosity of most of the room. Yamato left just as Radar appeared, easing the door closed after him.

“Hi, sirs,” Radar mumbled. He pulled the chair that had taken permanent residence by the Doctor’s bedside as flush as possible with the bed and sat in it, twitching. He’d found a Rubik’s Cube at some point, which was easily blameable on the Doctor. Harry quickly decided that that particular problem was probably best left to the experts.

Hawkeye hauled himself off the floor with a groan. Harry had a certain sense of dread for the state of his own back after anywhere from three to eighteen months of field surgery.

“I say,” Harry said, steadying Hawkeye when he nearly overbalanced. “You really think this plan of yours and Radar’s is going to work?”

Hawkeye shrugged, winced, and shrugged again. “He thinks I’m nuts.”

“And you can work with that?”

“Oh, of course I can. All we’ve gotta do is tell him the complete, honest, full-of-facts truth, and he’ll be too busy looking his gift horse in the mouth to believe a word!”

Hawkeye had a smile like the Cheshire Cat, and it was a mite terrifying.

A quick talk with the nurse on duty, Cutler, later, and Hawkeye was dragging Harry into the office to sit on Radar’s desk and listen to the argument in Colonel Blake’s office.

“You know he did it,” Flagg said. Hawkeye rolled his eyes and made a grabby gesture at Harry until he sat on the desk next to him. “You probably helped! The lot of you are degenerates and traitors, and God only knows why they put you all in one place.”

“Hey, I’m not a traitor!” Blake complained. Hawkeye snorted and had to cover his mouth with his hand. “Look, Hawkeye Pierce has as much influence as a sack full of dirty laundry. He might stink up the place a little, but he’s not really offensive, really. He can’t possibly have that much influence! He hasn’t even been out of this camp since the last time you invad– visited.”

“He has contacts,” Flagg spat.

“Why? He doesn’t need glasses.”

Hawkeye laughed once, loud and honking, and then snapped his hand to his mouth again.

“Oh, well done,” Harry hissed.

“What?” Hawkeye mumbled around his hand. “You swallow one goose in elementary school and it stays in there forever.”

Flagg threw open the door from the office. Good grief, the slamming. Harry was suddenly very aware that the desk provided little room to scoot away from Hawkeye, who had been summarily labeled a degenerate by a man who had the very real power to put either one or both of them in a 1950s military prison.

Hawkeye grinned that Cheshire Cat grin behind his hand. “Hullo, Colonel. My darling friend and I were just getting in our doctor-prescribed daily dose of eavesdropping.”

The beady little eyes turned to Harry. He shuffled another inch away from Hawkeye and tried to tip the cap he didn’t have on.

“And who is your friend?” Flagg asked. Blake stumbled out of the office and didn’t look angry, only exhausted. “A Communist?”

Harry had found that, on rare occasions when he was very, very annoyed, and didn’t have the Doctor or Sarah around to whack him, he completely lost control of his mouth. “It’s not as if I would tell you if I was,” he sniped.

Hawkeye giggled next to him. “He’s not a Communist, Flagg. He’s from the future.”

Blake looked like he was sincerely considering killing somebody. Flagg scoffed. “Sure he is, Pierce. And who are you, Ronald Reagan?”

Sarah had a habit of picking time travel films on her nights in the TARDIS theater, specifically because it annoyed the Doctor. She was a rather enthusiastic fan of Back to the Future. Harry had the date it would come out circled on a calendar in his office.

“He’s running for president, you know,” Harry said with as much sincerity as he could muster. “Gets elected, supposedly, though that is still a few months out for me.”

Flagg narrowed his eyes and crossed his arms. “I suppose Bonzo the chimp is his running mate.”

“I’d consider that an improvement,” Harry muttered. Hawkeye shot him an odd glance and hopped down from the desk.

“Sam, baby,” Hawkeye said. Flagg took a step back for every one he took forward. “I’m telling you the truth! We can make a deal, make up for whatever it is that I did. I’ve got a real, live, space alien in post-op for ya if you agree to drop all this.”

“Sure you do,” Flagg said. He was up against the wall, now, with Hawkeye standing a good few feet away from him. “You expect me to believe a word you say?”

Hawkeye honest-to-god fluttered his eyelashes. “And why would I ever lie to you?”

“Because you’re a perverted, two-timing, unpatriotic,”

“Oh do go on, I love the compliments.”

“conceited, un-American,”

“Isn’t that the same thing as ‘unpatriotic?’”

“buffoon of an incompetent, and if I had my way you’d be–”

The phone rang. Flagg’s hand shot to his pistol, and a moment later it was trained on Harry.

Everything in the room went very still. Hawkeye looked to be holding his breath.

“Answer it,” Flagg barked. “It’s one of those Red maniacs you talked to, isn’t it, Pierce? Calling you back. And he’s one of them!”

Harry cleared his throat. “I say, you do know the British are on your side, old chap?”

Flagg cocked the gun.

Very, very carefully, Harry answered the phone.

Chapter Text

Calls took a long time to go through overseas. It was almost one AM in Cardiff. Approaching ten in the morning in Korea. But Jack couldn’t risk his bosses knowing he was helping the Doctor, not when they were so often working against everything that he tried to fix.

He very much had a plan for the future. Some day he was going to be in charge of Torchwood, and they’d stop being such cowards.

Jack’s desk was covered in a mess of files. He tucked the phone receiver to his shoulder and fished out the most important ones. The Doctor’s: a three-ring binder stuffed to the point of fraying at the seams. Flight manifests to Korea. The old inventory sheet and his new, carefully doctored one to hide what he was shipping over. And the one he’d gotten his hands on a few days ago that he’d been meaning to save for the Doctor, anyway.

The line connected. Jack scrambled to hold the receiver to his head.

“Hello?” Someone British said. There was another click down the line. The operator bowing out? Jack could tell the difference in the tone of static on a bugged subspace network, but he still had no idea how to tell if a wiretap was active, much less how physical phone lines worked.

“Hey!” Jack said. He dug out another three-ring binder, thinner than the Doctor’s but filled with details on every single one of his friends. “You must be Sullivan?”

Surgeon-Lieutenant Harold Sullivan, Royal Navy, friend of Sarah Jane Smith, a little checkmark in the “romantic involvement” column, “UNIT?” circled in bright red pen. Jack had heard plenty about Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart from his Doctor to know exactly what UNIT was, but he’d be damned if he told the idiots running Torchwood about it before its establishment in ‘69 or ‘75, depending on what branch of the London timestream you were running in.

“Er,” the voice on the other side of the line said. “Yes, yes I am. That makes you Jack Harkness.”

Jack smiled and leaned back in his chair. “Exactly right, babe.” Sullivan spluttered. “Not a lot of time, so, important things first. You think he’s cuter than yours, or does the dress sense ruin it?”

Sullivan coughed a little. Nervous habit? “I can’t say I would consider myself as having homosexual inclinations.”

Good god, was the man always this awkward? Jack could condone lying, considering the general ‘50sness of everything, but he’d have thought the Navy could thoroughly beat gay panic out of anybody.

“Uh huh,” Jack said. “Well, if we’re playing it like that, I’ve found about a third of the stuff the Doctor asked for, and about half of the supplemental materials. Anything more than that and my boss’ll cotton on. There’s no shot of smuggling anything Gallifreyan in origin out of here, even if we had any. I’ve packed in some other garbage in hopes it’ll make up for some of that, and I’ve got the palladium wire on backorder.”

There was a long beat of silence. Long enough that Jack started to worry about the quality of the connection. “Yes, alright,” Sullivan finally said. “And that’s all from Torchwood, yes?”

“Sure it is!” Jack said. “Where else would I get all this crap?”

A loud click popped down the line. Someone hanging up.

“Sullivan?” Jack asked.

“Yes, still here,” Sullivan said. He sounded exhausted, suddenly. “Sorry about that, someone from the CIA had their ear on the receiver and a gun to my head. I’m hoping I haven’t just made a truly awful decision, mentioning Torchwood. I believe the Doctor jury-rigged a speaker switch…”

Another sharp, banging noise later, and the static on the line broadened from buzzing to a low, white noise hum.

“Ah, there we are,” Sullivan said. “Captain Harkness, I have Captain Hawkeye Pierce, here. He’s a friend of ours.”

Jack pulled out the stack of files on the personnel at the 4077th. He resignedly watched his blessedly mostly empty cup of coffee tumble over the side of the desk and skitter down the nearby stairs.

“Is Ronald Reagan really president in the future?” another voice asked. Jack found the Pierce tab in his folder and put a lanky, nicely structured face to the voice.

“Ugh, Reaganomics,” Jack complained. He patted around until he could find a pen, crossed off “Benjamin Franklin” and wrote in “Hawkeye.” There was a list of anti-American behaviors and sexual deviancies a mile long, signed off by Colonel Samuel Flagg, CIA. “You won’t be a fan, by the file I’ve got on you.”

“I’m not a fan of his acting,” Pierce said.

“Yeah, you won’t be a fan of all the homosexuals dying from a disease he did nothing to address, either.”

Sullivan cleared his throat. “Rather off topic, chaps. Did you really call just to give an update on your supply lines?”

“Well, kind of,” Jack said. He shuffled the odd file out to the top. “Look, I’ve taken an eye to the personnel situation, and the only staff member you’ve got there who has a chance at speeding up the Doctor’s work is the O’Reilly kid. By everything I’ve seen on him, he’ll work himself three-quarters of the way to death before he so much as stops to take a breath.”

“He’s already doing that,” Pierce said. “Something happened to him yesterday and he’s still up and doing his job even if he’s twitching all the time.”

“Kid like that, he’s never gonna be able to sit still in a war zone,” Jack said. He’d known his share of psychics back home, but none of them came close to what O’Reilly was capable of. “He can probably feel when corn’s in a bad mood, not to mention a ward full of injured soldiers.”

“I believe the Doctor is helping the lad,” Sullivan said. There was a clattering noise in the background and a mess of shouting voices. “When he’s done dealing with the mess Colonel Flagg is bringing on his head.”

“Real nutjob, huh?” Jack asked. He rifled through the rest of the tabs on the 4077th. Every single one of them had a lengthy list of accusations from Flagg. “Point is, I’ve got someone suited for the job. Sun-mi Chu, a neurosurgeon with the University of Washington. She’s got a list of high-ranking military personnel she’s designed prosthetics for a mile long and a list of what the governments of the world are unfortunately still calling sexual deviancies three times longer than that.” Pierce made a delighted little noise. Jack mentally shuffled him closer to the top of the list of people he wanted to meet in person someday. “Oh, yeah, hell of a gal. Apparently she’s getting shipped to Korea anyway because she called MacArthur a ‘backwards, flesh-peddling egomaniac’ to his face. I’ve got just enough favors to call in to redirect her to the 4077th instead of the 8063rd.”

Pierce giggled. “I think I’m in love already.”

“Shucks, Captain Pierce, and we’ve only known each other for a few minutes.”

That earned another giggle. Always nice to be appreciated.

“Right, my time’s up,” Jack said. He had crates to pack and hide before the morning. “Chu’s most of the way through her officers’ training, so it’ll be a week or so, and then everything the Doc ordered’ll come over there with her.”

“A week for you,” Sullivan muttered. Time fracture, right.

“Not more than a month?” Jack guessed. “Sorry, hon. Nothing to be done about it.”

“Quite alright. No more your fault than it is mine, I suppose.”

“I blame all my problems on the Doctor, even the personal ones.”

The click of a phone being hung up, and everything was quiet.

He damn well hoped they could get some quiet in Korea.

By morning, the news of Colonel Flagg’s impending arrival had made its way all the way through the rumor mill to Father Mulcahy.

He wasn’t going to let that stop him from conducting a Sunday service. If it was Sunday. It felt like a Sunday, he supposed, which made it enough of a Sunday for him.

Mulcahy had very few regular attendees for his sermons. Igor Straminsky, the camp cook, who was often the unfortunate target of Hawkeye’s anger at the quality of the army rations. Walter O’Reilly, who seemed only to be able to quiet his mind in the presence of someone practiced in the art of assisting. Maxwell Klinger, who came just to show off his Sunday best, even if he was an atheist. Frank Burns, who seemed far more interested in the performative aspect of prayer rather than deriving any value from its practice.

And Margaret Houlihan, the only member of his flock who had bothered to make an appearance on that particular probably-Sunday.

Mulcahy did not perform the sermon he had prepared. It felt a touch out-of-date, with the events of the last day; besides, Klinger, who was really required as an example for the theme of finding joy in the smallest of things, wasn’t in attendance. Instead, he sat on the appropriated mess tent bench across the aisle from Major Houlihan and waited for her to stop looking quite so uncomfortable.

“I thought Mass was a touch optimistic, today,” Mulcahy said. “I suppose I could conduct Individual, if you’d like.”

Margaret smiled, just a little bit, at what he thought had been a very good joke. “I think I’d call that a confessional, Father,” she said.

He gave the polite little smile back. “It doesn’t have to be. If you have anything you’re looking for advice on–”

A jeep was rumbling up the drive to the roundabout outside of post-op. Margaret turned to look and immediately adopted a look of complete and total distaste.

“That man!” Margaret complained. Colonel Flagg, in the flesh, stepped out of the jeep and took the opportunity to begin shouting at the unfortunately-present Nurse Kellye. Margaret growled a bit. “I want to see the Communists taken down as much as anybody, Father, but stealing penicillin to do it? That lunatic is underhanded, and cruel, and completely ridiculous to boot!”

Mulcahy found he rather agreed with the sentiment. The penicillin debacle had been topped off with the Colonel poorly disguising himself as a Jewish chaplain, and if that wasn’t a choice made just to pickle his herring, he didn’t know what was.

“I suppose not everyone can be as considerate as the staff here,” Mulcahy said, when the shouting had stopped and the Colonel and Nurse Kellye had disappeared into the hospital building. “There’s only so much kindness to be apportioned.”

“Don’t I know it,” Margaret sighed. Her eyes were dull with lack of sleep, and she hadn’t bothered to put on makeup. It wasn’t something that Mulcahy noticed, particularly, but she always went out of her way, even on bad days. She looked sallow and strange without it.

Mulcahy leaned in, settling his elbows on his thighs. “Is there something you’d like to talk about, Major?”

Her lips went thin, the way they always did when she was trying not to cry. Not that she cried often. Mulcahy sometimes thought he took that burden for all of them.

“My entire world’s been turned on its head,” she said, eventually. “I’d believe it easier if I’d seen any of it, but it seems like I’m the only one out of the loop! O’Reilly’s got some sort of ridiculous relationship with the man, Pierce and McIntyre went in the spaceship, Colonel Blake and Lieutenant Bayliss got a crash course on exobiology, and Klinger’s making friends with the girl, when I should be the one showing her the ropes! Even Frank went in the spaceship, did you know that?” She had to pause to wipe the very beginnings of tears from her eyes. Mulcahy politely ignored the gesture. “I do so much work here, Father. I’m the one that keeps this place running when Colonel Blake’s too busy appeasing the goons we call surgeons, and what does that get me? Nothing! It’s never gotten me anything except a lousy, second-hand report on the impossible from Frank Burns!”

There were teardrops on her shirt. Mulcahy continued to politely ignore them.

“Sorry, Father,” Margaret said. She laughed, completely without humor, and sniffled. “You’re in the dark just as much as I am.”

Somebody came back out of the hospital. Nurse Kellye. She was on a mission of some kind, disappearing into the nurses’ tent.

“The dark is easier to navigate when you have somebody beside you,” Mulcahy said. Margaret tilted her head. “We could ask, couldn’t we? I’m certain Radar would be able to explain some of what we’ve missed.”

Margaret pursed her lips again. “We could.”

Mulcahy frowned and scooted a few inches closer, to the very edge of the bench. “Do you not want to?”

She tried to laugh, sniffled, and wiped her eyes. “I guess you’re further into the dark than I am, Father. The storm, yesterday, the– the storm that was only in our heads. That was him. It was all him. He’s not observant, he actually reads minds! And you want me to get close to him and ask him questions?”

There was a knee jerk reaction floating in Mulcahy’s head. Of course Radar wasn’t– well, he wasn’t that, he was just more clever than any of the medical staff ever gave him credit for. Hawkeye was certainly kind, but he had a staggering number of preconceived notions about level of education being the marker for a person’s intelligence. Margaret and Frank were even worse, with their ideas about social status and rank.

Then again, plenty of strange things had been happening, and he believed all of them. He believed the Doctor was really an alien, he believed Miss Smith and Dr. Sullivan were really from the future, and he believed that something was deeply wrong with time in Korea and that the Doctor could save them from the purgatorial state they seemed to be living in.

“Is he really?” Mulcahy asked. “How do you know?”

Margaret bristled. “He took the words right out of my head! I– I thought something, and he responded to it like I’d said it out loud! And he said–”

She cut herself off so suddenly it looked like it hurt. Mulcahy scooted even closer. Gossip wasn’t exactly in the purview of a priest, but, well… he’d spent plenty of time in seminary huddled in corners where nobody could find them, trading secrets because they were the only currency they had.

“Said what, Major?” he prompted.

Margaret swallowed thickly, put her hands on her face. She was shaking. Mulcahy reached out and touched her elbow, took her hand when she placed it in his.

“He thinks Colonel Blake’s going to die,” she said, very quietly. “That was what… what broke him. What caused all that. He really thinks Henry’s going to die.”

How on Earth was one supposed to respond to that?

Kellye rapped on the mess tent door. Margaret pulled her hand away so fast it was like she’d been burned, schooling her face into a perfectly happy, perfectly majorial mask.

“Hi, Father,” Kellye said. She opened the door slowly, like she was afraid something was going to happen if she disturbed the situation any more than she already had. “I think we could use your talents in post-op.”

“Oh?” Mulcahy stood, made to grab his Bible from the temporary pulpit at the front of the tent, and Kellye shook her head.

“Um, sorry. Not that. It’s just that you’re probably the only one who could knock Colonel Flagg down.”

“Oh,” Mulcahy said. Margaret was standing in the middle of the tent, staring past Kellye to the hospital, her hands clutched so tightly into fists that she looked like she was going to strain a muscle. “I really don’t think I should–”

“Who’d say anything against you?” Margaret asked. Mulcahy gently set the Bible back down. “Frank, sure, but I’ll throttle him before he gets the chance.”

“That’s very… kind, of you, I think.”

Briefly, very briefly, Mulcahy had a moment of crystalizing clarity that he thought Radar likely experienced constantly. They were at a turning point. If everything happening was the truth, as he believed it was, if the Doctor wasn’t lying about the situation, if he could really help them - if they allowed Colonel Flagg to do as he pleased, there might never be an after Korea.

“I’ll meet you there in a moment,” Mulcahy said. He gestured down at his cossack. “Just let me change into something more appropriate.”

Radar could feel everything the Doctor had tried to do to help him being scraped away. Something bad was trying to happen, with Colonel Flagg. Something that he didn't always keep going on the other side of. He’d been able to feel it since just after the officers’ meeting, all through the night, through to when they were on the phone with Captain Harkness and now. With everything going on, he didn’t have enough focus left over to keep the doors closed. He hated it. It was like his brain had arms and legs and fingers all of its own and couldn’t stop reaching out to touch people.

Colonel Flagg was in Colonel Blake’s office. He was angry, real angry, because he thought Captain Pierce had done something, and his anger only got brighter and hotter further down the strings that made up all the futures that could happen. Radar spun the top of the little twisty cube he’d taken from the Doctor and tried to focus harder. He knew he could reach it, if he tried hard enough, and he needed to try. He was the last line of defense between them and the bad things that might happen, if Colonel Flagg got his way, and he knew it. He’d been able to tell when Ma got to the post office five miles away back in Ottumwa, but that was before there were so many people dying in a five mile stretch all around him that it hurt to even think too hard.

The Doctor was tired. He hurt, and with the capacity to pull healing ability from the future knocked out he didn’t think he’d ever been this seriously injured without regenerating - Radar paused, felt around for the word. Something to do with why he looked so different now than when they’d met before. But he didn’t want to show that he was hurting, thought it would make him seem weak, or like not as good as the other versions of himself, or–

“Radar,” the Doctor said, sharply. Radar tried to stop his legs from shaking and glanced up. “Stop poking, I can feel it.”

“Oh,” Radar said. “Sorry. I don’t mean to.”

The Doctor didn’t respond, but he was thinking. He was always thinking. His thoughts were too big to understand, most of the time, when they weren’t tied down to one of the feelings he was having. Being around him was like hearing a tornado churning its way through the corn fields above the storm shelter, rattling the boards in Radar’s head.

It felt like home, somehow.

“Radar,” the Doctor said again. It was coming from a very long way away, until the Doctor shifted closer and put a hand on his cheek.

“Walter,” the Doctor said. “You’re going to get very sick if you keep this up.”

“So?” Radar argued. “Colonel Flagg– he wants to take you away! If he sees through the trick Captain Pierce is pulling on him–”

“Nothing you do can ensure that won’t happen!” the Doctor insisted. The hand on his cheek was warming up very slightly, like holding ice in your hands until it melted. Radar could think a bit more clearly, with the help. “Oh, Walter. I’m sorry. I haven’t done a good enough job repairing the damage the TARDIS did to your blockades. My psychic skills have always left something to be desired.”

The Doctor was poking at something in his mind, something that Radar couldn’t help but shy away from, a big angry tangle of threads that sprawled out from Colonel Blake’s door and disappeared into so many of the others.

He didn’t think the threads had been there before, now that he thought about it. It was usually just the doors, a sort-of hitching feeling between his ribs right before the choppers came, sometimes an idea that he should duck behind the Officers’ Club right before Major Burns walked by.

“Good grief,” the Doctor said. He patted Radar on the cheek, twice, and took his hand away, and the shelter of his thoughts went with it. “Remind me, when the opportunity avails itself, that the first thing we need to work on is your stability. It’s like Finnegan’s Wake in there.”

Captain Pierce knew what that was. A book. So did Father Mulcahy. Radar scraped a nail through a seam of the cube in his hands. “It’s getting worse, Doctor. It’s been getting worse all the time. I can’t keep up. Something bad’s coming.”

“Then stop trying to ‘keep up’,” the Doctor said. He made it sound like it was the most obvious thing in the world, but there was fear curling in his chest and straining against his hearts. He didn’t believe in what he was saying, not really; he was just bluffing and hoping it would work. “You couldn’t possibly turn on every channel on a radio at once and not get overwhelmed, hmm?”

“How’m I supposed to tune what’s in my head?”

There was a little crowd gathering just inside the door to the compound. It was what Nurse Kellye had gone off to do: gather people. Ginger and Captain McIntyre were talking about what the plan was for Colonel Flagg, and Sarah Jane nudged past them, leaving Klinger in the group.

“It’s like a convention in here,” she said, wringing her hands around the bed rail. “How is everything?”

“No better than before,” the Doctor said. “I’m getting awful bored of all this, you know.”

“Oh, hush. You get bored if you’re standing still for more than thirty seconds.”

“Hmmph.” The Doctor glared at the door that led to the office area for a few moments. “I don’t make for my usual grand impression invalided in a field hospital.”

“The point’s rather not to make a grand impression, isn’t it?” Sarah Jane asked.

The Doctor shrugged and winced against the shooting pain it caused. Radar’d never felt so guilty in all his life. He should have been able to do something different. He could have, if he hadn’t spent so much time blocking things out. He would have known that Major Burns was going to do something earlier; he would have known a better way to get out of it.

And then he had to go and ruin everything, didn’t he? The spaceship was gone, fixing what the Doctor had come to fix was going to take way longer than it needed to, and he wasn’t even useful anymore, because there was no way he’d be able to see the choppers through the tangling mess of threads.

It was like the little cube. All the colors were mixed up, and there was no way to ever put them back in the right place.

The little group by the door had gotten bigger. Father Mulcahy in his Loyola hoodie, Major Houlihan, Major Burns, who didn’t seem to know what he was doing there.

The strings all pulled tight. Someone had made a decision. A bad decision. Lieutenant Sullivan, he’d said something about Torchwood–

And then Colonel Flagg came through the office door, Colonel Blake trailing after him, and there was a gun in his hand.

Radar made himself stand up. He was scared. Terrified. Everyone was scared, except maybe Major Burns, who wasn't any more scared than his usual, and they were getting even more scared in just a few seconds. There were threads that made it out, if he could get it right, but there was no way to see which ones they were, not when everything was so loud.

Colonel Flagg took a few steps forward. Father Mulcahy stood at the front of the group of very nearly everyone in the world that Radar cared about, Captain McIntyre right behind him. If anything happened to him - if Colonel Flagg did something he couldn’t take back, something that made all the fear pull higher into Radar’s throat - they would do something about it. Nothing was going to happen to him in vain.

Colonel Flagg raised his pistol. Radar’d never seen that end of a gun before. It was a wide, black eye, and if he said a single thing wrong it would eat him alive.

Everyone was so scared, and angry, and Radar pressed his hand to the burning bullet wound echoed but not there in his side.

He had to do this. He wasn’t useless, and he didn’t mean to cause so many problems, and he was going to make up for it.

“You’ve been talking to Torchwood,” Colonel Flagg said. He took another step forward and the eye got bigger. Another. It was pointed right at his forehead. Even Captain Pierce couldn’t fix that. Colonel Flagg flicked his wrist and Radar felt his eyes be pulled along with it, never leaving the horrible, black barrel of the gun. “Answer me, Corporal.”

“Yes, sir,” Radar said. He tried to swallow down the bile and pain inside him. “They’re on our side, sir.”

“Are they?” Colonel Flagg hissed. “Are they? We can’t trust our own men, O’Reilly. We certainly can’t trust their men. Do you know they tried to stop us from using the bomb?” The gun was only a few inches away, now. “You’re conspiring with Nazi sympathizers, O’Reilly.”

The barrel of the gun was against his forehead. The only thing he could make himself notice about it was that it was cold.

Major Burns cleared his throat. “Sir, maybe you shouldn't,” he said, and even he was worried, which was a little bit nice, all things considered. He might even feel bad when he could see Radar's brains blown all over post-op and knew that there wasn't really that much different between them on the inside.

Colonel Flagg smiled, and it was impressive the way he looked crazier than anybody else Radar had ever seen.

“You’re going to tell me everything you know about Torchwood,” Colonel Flagg said. The gun pressed in harder. He was going to leave a bruise, a little circle just above Radar’s eyebrow. “You’re going to write it down. And you’ll give me details on Pierce and his new love affair, won’t you?”

Somewhere behind him, the Doctor scoffed. Colonel Flagg glanced over for one moment–

There was a tug. A tug that resolved into a yank.

Radar ducked, grabbed Colonel Flagg by the middle, and shoved as hard as he could.

There was just enough time. He’d done just enough. The gunshot burst the lightbulb just over Radar’s shoulder, and he could feel all the strings going slack. Whatever had been keeping him stocked in bravery disappeared as quickly as it had shown up. He felt… empty. Hollow. Really, would it have mattered if Colonel Flagg killed him? There wasn't much of Walter O'Reilly left that wasn't Radar.

Colonel Flagg caught his feet just in time for Major Houlihan to push forward, pick up the metal folding chair from next to the desk, and smash him across the head with it.

He went down like a sack of bricks.

Somebody was shouting. A lot of somebodies were shouting. Radar stumbled into the free bed next to the Doctor’s and curled up as tight as he could, tucking his head between his arms. It didn't help block out the shouting.

Colonel Blake touched him on the arm, and he should have done something, I could have done something, Flagg was going to kill him all because he got passed over for some lousy promotion and–

Radar lifted his head. “That’s really why Colonel Flagg was so angry? Because– because he didn’t get promoted to– to chief crazy, or something?”

The shouting - all the noise, even the thinking noise - dribbled into silence.

Everyone was staring at him.

Captain McIntyre was the one to speak up. “Say that again, Radar.”

“Colonel Flagg, he– he thought that Hawkeye went over his head, told his boss he shouldn’t get a promotion.”

Flagg was starting to wake up. Captain McIntyre took one look at him, wound back his foot, and kicked him hard in the stomach.

It would have been cathartic (one of the Doctor’s words) if Radar hadn’t felt the twinge of pain echo through him. He curled in tighter and felt Colonel Blake sit down next to him.

Captain McIntyre knelt down, one hand on Flagg’s shoulder. “That was for Radar, you son of a bitch,” and even Major Burns thought he deserved it.

There was more talking, but Radar wasn’t listening. The Doctor had slid out of the hospital bed and was sitting on the floor next to him.

“Radar,” the Doctor said. He waited until Radar looked at him. “I know you feel very poorly about scrambling the TARDIS circuits.”

“Don’t remind me,” Radar mumbled.

“But,” the Doctor went on. Colonel Blake had a hand resting on Radar’s shoulder. It was making everything… quieter. Or maybe it was just that there wasn’t any more danger of dying if he didn’t get something right. Maybe he was taking a dive from the adrenaline, like soldiers did when they came in wounded. Maybe his brain was leaking out his ears. “Torchwood are my associates, do you understand? All of this,” he looked over, watched as Captain McIntyre and Klinger hauled Flagg up and dragged him outside, “this was my fault, but it was something that had to happen, given the circumstances, just the same as what happened with you and the TARDIS.”

The Doctor watched him for a moment. Radar knew there was some kind of point he was trying to make, but he couldn’t figure out what it was. He was so tired.

“I believe this makes us even,” the Doctor said. “Or don’t you agree?”

The quiet was sinking in.

There was a sort-of hitching feeling between his ribs.

“We’re even,” Radar said. He poked Colonel Blake with his foot. “Colonel?”

Colonel Blake looked like he was very far away. “Yes, Radar?”

A little laugh forced its way out of his mouth. “Choppers,” Radar said.

And then, finally, he fell asleep.

Chapter Text

The Doctor took a moment to stretch, long and slow, catlike if he could be so generous, when he was finally allowed to leave post-op. Nearly every minute of the ten days since the incident with Colonel Flagg had been abysmally boring. “Every book in camp” to read, as offered by Hawkeye, turned out to be a battered copy of Brave New World, a slightly more well-cared for Nineteen Eighty-Four, and a collection of seedy romance novels with pages torn out, and the entire collection took him only an afternoon and an evening to peruse.

He was not too proud to admit to reading the romance novels.

Flagg had been confined to the VIP tent for three days, well-guarded, until Radar was finally well enough to patch a call through to the CIA general in Tokyo to make some poor schmuck retrieve him. He had been dragged kicking and screaming away from the camp, and Blake had been absolutely certain that he would be back before long.

Radar, on the other hand, was a problem proving difficult to solve. He had constant nightmares, worked himself too hard to stave off the thoughts and pains of wounded soldiers and exhausted combat surgeons, and believed he was the only thing keeping himself and everyone around him from dying horribly. He was allowing the Doctor to assist him, at least. The damage the TARDIS had done was far more extensive than he had first believed, and for such a small gesture as the old girl saying hello. The psychic stresses of living day-to-day in a time fracture had been destroying Radar’s mind piece by piece. Repair was slow-going. His own fault, really. He’d skipped half his classes on good practices for telepathy at the Academy.

He could create a complete block, if Radar’s tenuous mental fortitude became catastrophic, but it would be a last, drastic measure. It would be like slicing a knife through every one of the boy’s psychic neurons. The effort to repair it would be immense, and in the meantime it would cut him off from senses he had lived with all his life. It would be like suddenly going blind and deaf.

It was becoming increasingly likely that he would have to do so. The unfortunate truth of his eminently helpful abilities was that Radar was going to hurt himself, and it would be sooner rather than later. He couldn’t help but use the senses available to him.

During the downtime, when Radar needed a break, the Doctor had spent every opportunity he had getting to know the rest of the staff at the hospital. Particularly Kellye, who was desperate to hear every story he could tell. Sarah Jane and Harry were likely still learning more than him thanks to just being Human. Harry had taken to the OR like a fish to water, or a boat to water, to be more apt, and was positively reveling in the fact that the other surgeons had taken to calling him Navy. Sarah Jane had gone entirely through her notepad taking down soldiers’ stories when she wasn’t being trained as an orderly, and was so close to Max Klinger that it was ever so slightly unnerving.

The affinity for Klinger, and Klinger’s apparent affinity for her, had gotten the Doctor something, at least. His new waistcoat had been presented as a housewarming present that very morning. It was very nice, all pink and orange flowers, but Klinger had firmly refused to give sewing advice “to a man who wears that sort of coat.”

It had decided to be summer that day. Not unbearably hot by any means, for Humans, and perfectly pleasant as someone who had evolved for a planet with two suns, but the lack of air conditioning or even a breeze seemed to be doing a number on many of them. Trapper, Ginger, Father Mulcahy, and a few corpsmen were attempting to teach Harry to play American football despite the heat. Hawkeye was seated outside the Swamp with a cowboy hat and a floral-print hand fan to observe the proceedings.

The Doctor, still slightly unsteady but certainly much improved, joined him on the spare chair.

Hawkeye raised his glass. “What’s up, Doc?”

“I am duly charmed, Dr. Bumppo,” the Doctor replied, as had become tradition after the seventeenth Looney Tunes reference.

Hawkeye put back a sip of the fire hazard that he called gin. “I bet my boyfriend can beat up your boyfriend.”

The Doctor scoffed. “Ignoring that he is certainly not my boyfriend, I would like to make you aware that he played college rugby.”

“Yeah, mine couldn’t take a punch if it was from Frank Burns.”

They lapsed into a comfortable silence. The Doctor wasn’t particularly clear on the rules of American football, (or any sport that wasn’t cricket, really) but he was fairly certain that Harry was putting up an extremely poor performance. Unless, of course, winning involved quite a lot of falling down and dejectedly watching the ball tumble away.

“Hey, Doctor,” Hawkeye said. He took a long moment to collect himself, then drank the rest of the martini in one painful-looking go. “When you leave, do you think you could find it somewhere in those big ol’ alien hearts of yours to take me with?”

The Doctor reached over, found that he wasn’t certain what one did to be reassuring, and settled for an awkward pat on Hawkeye’s shoulder.

“If the option is within my power, certainly,” he said.

“Good,” Hawkeye said. He smiled a ridiculous, Cheshire Cat smile. “I’d really like to know what the women are like in outer space.”