Chasing Liberty // Countryhumans North Korea fanfiction

Transfusion

1939

    “Comrade Kangwon, there’s someone who wants to see you.”

   Kangwon looked up from the blood transfusion he was doing, nodding to the revolutionary at the doorway of the hospital.

   “I’ll be right out.”

    Blood transfusions were some of the most difficult procedures for him to perform on the KPRA soldiers, even if not the most dangerous. Sharp implements were reusable, and materials for rough stitches were easy to come by, but the blood bags, tubes, and needles needed to transfer blood were more difficult to get their freedom-fighting fingers on, and to sanitize properly. Usually necessity dictated that they cobble makeshift devices together, which wasn’t really ideal for people who had little access to proper medicines.

    Luckily they had recently received a generous donation of medical supplies from one of the anti-Japanese merchants, just in time to deal with the aftermath of another attempted raid from the Imperial Army.

     “Thanks, comrade,” the woman breathed a sigh of relief when he was done. “I feel like I could go take on another hundred Japs.”

     Kangwon knew she was already feeling the effects of his blood entering her veins, and would be riding a sort of high until it had circulated entirely though her system.

    “Give it some time,” he advised her. “Let your stitches heal first.”

    He finished up with her, then departed the small hospital lodge, just a touch woozy. He knew Korea would scold him for giving too much blood again, but they couldn’t afford to take any of the other Provincehumans’ right now. They needed every able person in fighting condition.

    The last attack had been far too close to the valley, torching one of the villages that had been aiding them. The KPRA had managed to prevent the wholesale slaughter of every ‘Communist’ villager, but no one would be living in that nest of smoldering embers any longer.

    It was how the Imperial Army operated- razing everything to try and make cooperating with the guerrillas as unappealing as possible. Fortunately, even the threat of death wasn't enough to stop people who wanted to be free.

    Kangwon wiped his hands on the cloth he kept in his pocket, sighing as he dried them, thinking of the rash of burns, bullet wounds, and sword slashes he had been treating over the past couple days. 

    ‘Hard to believe I used to have trouble stitching up a child’s back.’

    He had seen far worse brutality than lashings or illness ever since he had joined Korea’s revolution. Starvation, mutilation, brutal rapes, full-body burns. The victims of their Occupiers, many of which could never be healed. There were even more atrocities being committed against the Koreans now that they had started to fight back in earnest, organized and armed.

    And he had certainly suffered more, personally. Back in his hermit days, Kangwon had never even dreamed of being shot in the back or of struggling through the snow of the Manchurian mountains, starving and pursued relentlessly by the Japanese.

   Not that he was complaining. It was better than sitting idly and waiting for things to change.

    His country was wounded, and in dire need of healing. And he was a healer.

    Kangwon had expected one of those who usually wanted to see him- a prospective patient. Someone with a cough, or minor injury, or pregnancy. Instead, standing under the trees a few metres away was a man he had never seen before.