Timeless

Chapter 38

A/N: The war is over....and we've still got SEVERAL chapters to go haha! Domestic stuff, here we go!

May 1945

Getting Bucky back to base was the best thing that could have happened. For Kathryn, time had seemed like a fickle thing and always too fast for her to comprehend. It seemed like just yesterday it had been 1943 and they were coming over to Europe together, all with seemingly unstoppable attitudes and thought processes.

It seemed like yesterday that she had turned 23 and fallen in love—23 and having lost the love of her life and her brother all within the same day. She had turned 24 without them and then she had found them again in the place she least expected to, in a way that had horrified them all. She was 24 when she escaped from that Prisoner of War Camp.

And now, as the summer was approaching, Kathryn just felt like she was a totally different person than when she had first stepped onto the European Continent. That Kathryn felt like a whole lifetime ago and so completely out of reach from who she was now.

They flew fewer and fewer battle missions, ran more relief aid and mercy missions—and Kathryn slowly felt herself fading out of the hospital wing. She didn't have to sew up boys who had limbs hanging limply, she didn't have to extract bullets anymore, she didn't have to be Doctor Kathryn Egan anymore. That in and of itself was a strange thing, considering all that she had done during the war.

All of the boys were back on base too—DeMarco, Brady, Crank, Hambone. It almost felt like it was a full house again. Tina and Annie had gone their separate ways, as Kathryn would later learn from her brother. After receiving a bullet through the leg during the takeover of the last Stalag, Annie wanted nothing more than to retire from her medical service.

Subsequently, Annie returned to Scotland with the intention of never practicing medicine again. Similarly, Tina had requested to be shipped back to the States as soon as they were able to get her off of the continent—

And the knowledge that both of them had survived, it was enough for Kathryn. She had started out with all of those nurses on the front lines and they three were the last ones standing. She bitterly regretted the ones she had left behind and the ones that had died, but they had made it.

Beatrice, she later learned, had escaped from a camp and made her way back to the Allied Forces—where she immediately demanded that the Allies make an attempt to save Kathryn, Annie, and Tina. Kathryn had no idea that Beatrice's ulterior motive had been an escape attempt and it had left her shocked at the sound of it. Beatrice had then returned to London, where she didn't ever intend on leaving.

She also learned that Annika had married a Frenchman and Becky had given birth to a second child.

Everyone seemed to be moving on from the war. She just wasn't sure how she was going to do that. She had full intention of marrying Gale Cleven, of course. But she didn't know how to reconcile who she wanted to be with the person that she was now. She was a woman who wanted nothing more than to teach children—and she had killed eight people. Eight people, two of whom were barely old enough to be called teenagers.

Long ago, Kathryn had wondered if the nurses of this war would leave it with more blood covering their hands than anyone else's. She nearly laughed at the sentiment now— Doctor Death , indeed. She was known all over the free world by this title. This omen that she had caused in order to protect people.

The title made her sick, but she had no way to change that. No way to fix the public perception that was almost superhuman or supernatural about her. She wasn't anything grand or great, and the things that she had done were not commendable or honorable. It was just what she had to do to survive. And she would do them all again without hesitation if it meant protecting herself or the people she loved.