Timeless

Chapter 32

"I'm not telling her shit." Bucky raised a brow, rubbing her shoulder gently. "So you get better or I'm gonna find a way to haunt you for the rest of your life."

"Ha," Kathryn mumbled. "That's not...that's not how that works."

He had a perfectly good response waiting for her, but she had drifted off again back to sleep. He just sat there, staring at his thin and gaunt little sister— she was not Beth . And he would not let her be. And whether it was Jo March's spirit that possessed him in that moment, he determined that he was going to will her to live. Her will had always been strong enough for him and Buck—now she just needed some help with it. And he could do that.

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That week was hell for everyone in that cabin. Tina and Annie didn't want to watch another nurse die. In their eyes, Kathryn Egan, Doctor Egan—she was a force of nature that was untouchable and immovable. A force as immutable as gravity. For them, she had always been the constant.

But as far as Annie could tell, this fever and sickness was brought on by the physical examinations that they had received. She didn't think that equipment they used had been cleaned in any ways and she was almost certain that the combined force of torture and the unhygienic tools that had been used had caused this. It was jarring, watching Kathryn go from being untouchable to being helpless in that bunk and unable to even sit up on her own.

Hadn't they lost enough? Hadn't they been through enough?

It was still a miracle that Buck Cleven and Bucky Egan had managed to keep the entire thing under wraps. They weren't sure about the lengths that they had gone to in order to ensure Kathryn's survival. They weren't sure how the Nazi's left them alone every single day. But whatever they had done, it was working.

Tina and Annie just went about their daily chores and tried to keep a close eye on Kathryn's illness. When it progressed to the point where she could barely move without being in agonizing pain, they knew that unless she broke that fever, it was over for her.

But for both of them, they had rarely seen such tenderness and gentleness from any sort of men in their lives. And it wasn't just Buck Cleven and Bucky Egan that were going the extra mile to ensure that Kathryn Egan lived. No, it was the other men in the 100th and in that cabin. It was the extra food they managed to scrape together to ensure that she could keep something down. It was the way that the men huddled together for warmth so that Kathryn could have more blankets—

And she wasn't even coherent for the situation at hand. She would have hated the doting and the hovering. She would have hated being waited on like this—but she had cared for them time and time again and now it was her turn. And they could bear that burden for a while if it meant Kathryn Egan surviving this illness.

The next time that Kathryn Egan was semi-coherent was after a nightmare of sorts. It had been visceral and she was absolutely certain that it was really happening. In her nightmare, she found herself on the front-lines again—but this time was different. There was no gun, no scalpel, no way for her to fight back. And so when Hausmann shot her in this dream, the bullet ripped through her like she was just a piece of paper—like he was striking a ball and this was just another game of baseball.

Her cheeks were wet when she woke up, still trembling from the dream and the fever. It was in this state that she found herself mostly awake—and in the arms of none other than Gale Cleven. She didn't even remember him coming to see her in this haze, but here he was, nonetheless.

"Gale?" She mumbled out his name like it was some sort of prayer.

"You were cryin' in your sleep. I couldn't leave my best girl crying," Gale's voice sounded close to her ear and she realized, in her haze of mind, that their position was somewhat precarious. He was behind her and holding her up, with her head resting on his chest. At the moment, she couldn't even bring herself to care. She was still shivering madly, teeth nearly chattering.