I'll go with you

Untitled Part 1

Sadao Hoki had long since decided that he had gotten used to darkness. As an army doctor, he had seen too much pain for his liking, and too many deaths that he could not prevent. But his eyes had adjusted to that darkness, he often told himself, as eyes always do in the absence of any source of light whatsoever for a prolonged period. 

"Be passionate to the cause, but dispassionate about the effort," his father had once told him. "And don't hesitate to make small sacrifices for the greater good." 

The 'greater good' was something his father brought up quite often. In his days of youth, thinking of the patriot that his dad had always been, Sadao had thought it thinking of the country's greater good. Perhaps his father had indeed meant it that way at that time, he would never know. But more often, a small sacrifice for the greater good just meant taking calculated risks that he knew were worth taking. As a surgeon as well as a scientist, he had to risk the possibility of his occasionally unorthodox methods not providing the expected outcome in order to help advance the field of medicine. He had to risk the patient suffering through the surgery to avoid an overdose of anaesthesia which could render the entire surgery redundant. 

Sadao had always taken everything his father said to heart and continued to follow his ideals even after his passing. But the one thing Sadao had never managed to do was be dispassionate about his efforts no matter how passionate he was to the cause. If there was one thing in the world that he absolutely hated with a burning passion, it was not being able to save a life. Sadao grieved each of his patients that he could not save as if they were family, as if they had not just been complete strangers before the surgery. Sadao was never partial to any of his patients, but there was just one life that he regretted being unable to save that left him more broken than any other patient ever could. 

His late wife, Hana, was a beautiful, kind hearted, timid woman who showed incredible courage when she needed to. She had studied in America for nearly as long as he himself had done, but to his father's incredible delight, had always stayed true to her Japanese roots. She had always been the epitome of everything Sadao thought a woman should be. They had married immediately after completing their education and returning to Japan, for they had waited long enough to finish their work at school and earn Sadao's father's approval for the wedding- they could not wait any longer. They had been happily married for about five years, until she died a victim of collateral damage during the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in 1937. She had bravely insisted on accompanying Sadao to Beijing with the Japanese troops because it pained her to be away from Sadao when he was sent abroad, and in an attempt to save a life, she lost her own. Sadao had done everything he could to save her, but even five years after the fateful day, the memory of her last breath taken in his arms was still every bit as vivid as it had been then. As Sadao felt the life ebbing away from her body while her pulse slackened, it kept hitting him harder by the second that he had lost his wife just as quickly and accidentally as he had fallen in love with her. 

Author's note: 

If this chapter was bad, blame it on Math tuition. I wrote this during Math tuition and a Math teacher's voice isn't exactly the best background music to have while writing, so yeah. The other chapters will be longer than this, I swear. 

And for those of you who don't read the description before reading the story, this is fan fiction for the story "The Enemy" by Pearl S Buck set in 1942 Japan in an AU where Hana is dead and Tom is much older and much gayer so he gets to have an enemies to lovers arc with Sadao :))

Okay, saying this was probably useless because the people who don't read the description are the same people who don't read the Author's notes, so good luck! Stay confused for over half the story until you finally make sense of something :))