Timeless

Chapter 22

A/N: And this is where paying attention to the tags gets important. While there's not explicit scenes here, there are allusions and implications of sexual assault and more. Please be aware that the next few chapters deal very heavily with these themes. If you're uncomfortable at any point, skip ahead or stop reading! Thank you! I also took a few liberties, so this is where things differ from both the show and historical accuracy.

September, 1944

Doctor Kathryn Egan was in the middle of a triage when everything really went to hell . Maybe it was the fact that the Allied Forces were falling back and the nurses couldn't just leave their patients. There were 12 men who were in critical condition and she was doing her best to float between the different stations.

But there was too much to be done. Too much to be done for her—and she was just one woman, attempting to do surgery as quickly and efficiently as she could. She had limited supplies and she knew that by staying with their patients, she was putting the rest of them at risk, but that was just a risk she was going to have to take.

They had lives to save, they had men that they could not abandon, could not give up on. And in the very same way that her brother wouldn't abandon his men, in the very same way that Buck Cleven would sit there and take heavy fire and keep going, Kathryn Egan was bound and determined to do the same.

And it was this very mentality that would be her undoing.

Pinching skin together, Kathryn coated her hands in blood and began to sew up the wound as quickly as she could. "We need to get the bleeding under control! Maggie, can you—"

But Maggie was already on it.

The thing about working with these nurses for as long as she had been working with them was the fact that they knew how to work with one another. They picked up on signals and cues that others just wouldn't. And the other thing was that they listened to Kathryn's orders, however unorthodox and however challenging they might be. Because they knew that Kathryn had their best interests at heart.

If the nurses knew what was coming though, they would have abandoned that field hospital. They would have turned tail and run, never to be seen again. They would have even left their patients. But they didn't know.

Didn't know that Allied bombings had taken down several main roads that Lieutenant Hausmann was taking to get to his next interrogation. Didn't know that he had ordered a back road to be taken. Didn't know that he was now in a car and approaching their location—although he wouldn't know that either.

They just didn't know.

The nurses were unaware that Allied Forces had nearly gotten in a firefight trying to get the car off the road and they had succeeded. Didn't know that Hausmann and four German soldiers were now trekking through to try and find some sort of vehicle that could take them where they were meant to go.

Didn't know that Hausmann saw the field hospital and knew that he had leverage . Because no Allied forces were going to attack a hostaged field hospital with a bunch of nurses and wounded men. It wasn't the honorable option, but he was running out of those.

So when Kathryn Egan was in the middle of a surgery—attempting to extract a bullet from a soldier's gut—the last thing she expected was the sound of a gunshot. And for a moment, she thought she was hit. But then her patient went limp and when Kathryn glanced up, she found four German soldiers and a Nazi Lieutenant standing there, smoking gun in hand.

"If I were you, I'd step away from the patient."

Kathryn just felt like she was going to throw up as she stood there, slowly raising her blood-coated hands in the air. She couldn't help her gaze from slipping down to the patient on the table, eyes glazed over and staring at nothing.