Dear My Rude Darling With Multiple Personalities

Episode 31

Eighteen-year-old Monica knew little about war.

It’s only natural, having lived my entire life in an orphanage in the capital.

It was not long after the war broke out. Stories of young men receiving conscription orders and leaving, and of families or lovers sending them off in tears, were common, but injury and death still felt distant to Monica.

However, I guessed that it wouldn’t be an easy place since most orphans are pessimistic.

Monica had a habit of always expecting the worst, so she wasn’t particularly surprised when she was first assigned to a dirty and smelly hospital in the rear.

“Your clothes. Your shoes. You don’t have time to unpack on that bed, so change now!”

As soon as she arrived at the hospital, a girl handed Monica a nurse’s apron and slippers.

She wasn’t Monica’s superior, and she wasn’t much older, but she immediately started ordering her around and yelling. She even kicked Monica in the shin when she hesitated.

When Monica, clumsy as she was, started trembling while practicing injections on a doll, the girl smacked the back of her hand.

“Why are you so cold to me?”

When Monica couldn’t stand it anymore and asked, the woman looked down at her and snorted.

“You will soon be like me.”

Then she walked away, tapping Monica’s shoulder as if it were a joke.

—

Monica’s first patient was a soldier with a bullet lodged in his lung.

The man, now at an age where his hair was beginning to turn gray, had successfully undergone surgery to remove the bullet but still coughed up buckets of phlegm every night.

“I have to die. This suffering won’t end unless I die,” he would mutter between labored breaths.

“You say that, yet you’re breathing so hard,” Monica joked.

By then, Monica had become accustomed to lighthearted banter with the wounded soldiers. The man with the lung injury would lie on his back and laugh weakly.

“A skinny, uselessly cheerful girl like you should go home quickly.”

“No, I can’t. I’ll hold out for two years and go to college.”

“What kind of college takes kids like you?”

Most of the soldiers brought to the hospital in the rear had injuries or disabilities that would prevent them from returning to the battlefield.

Since these men required long-term care, Monica naturally got to know their personal stories.

The soldiers she cared for knew she was an orphan serving as a nurse to earn a chance at higher education. The man, despite his groaning, often laughed at Monica’s ambition.

“The best thing for a girl is to just meet a good man and get married.”

Monica had mixed feelings about him.

She hated when he laughed at her dreams of college, dismissing them as a fool’s hope, but she also wished he’d stop nagging her. The man often spoke of his fifteen-year-old daughter.

“I’m scared my daughter will end up like you.”

Even so, he would sometimes sneak pieces of black bread into Monica’s apron.

“I’m scared to death my daughter will starve like you!”

When the man who had said these things finally died, Monica cried so hard that she felt her eyes might melt away.

—

The situation worsened. Less than a year later, Monica was transferred to Arvid.

Arvid, located near the front lines, was a completely different world from the hospitals in the rear. More than ten soldiers died each day as they were brought in. Monica was tasked with caring for thirty soldiers at a time.

All of Arvid’s nurses wore wide-legged trousers—uniforms made from the clothing of dead soldiers. Monica recoiled at first, but a month later, she was trudging through the hospital in those same trousers, her boots soaked, her knees covered with waterproof patches.

Until she was eighteen, Monica had thought herself to be the most pessimistic person in the world. By nineteen, she had changed.

Arvid’s hospital was full of pessimists whose hopelessness dwarfed Monica’s own.

“Still, this place is better than the front lines,” one soldier said.

“You’re saying this isn’t the worst?”

“Exactly.”

A soldier who had one leg amputated below the knee grinned.

“Do you know where the medic cut off my leg? On a tarp laid out on the dirt floor!”

Despite the crude amputation, he tried his best to walk at Arvid’s hospital. Monica felt inspired watching him struggle to move, drenched in sweat but refusing to give up.

Then, on the day he managed to take fifteen steps and climb into bed on his own, he hung himself from the ceiling and died.

There was no time to grieve. His body was taken down, the sheets were changed, and another soldier was brought in to fill his place.

—

The new patient was a soldier with severe injuries to his eye. His military ID tag was half-destroyed; only the letters “Sol” were legible.

Even if Monica hadn’t been told to ask the soldier what unit he was from, she would have stayed by his side.

She couldn’t imagine how someone so severely wounded could cling to life. The soldier remained unconscious, groaning in pain. Monica changed his bandages and administered an anesthetic.

Monica’s resourcefulness was her only weapon in this relentless environment.

She remembered the makeshift remedies the orphanage director had concocted for sleepless nights. Using cheap alcohol and herbs, Monica crafted a basic sleeping aid that allowed the soldier five hours of uninterrupted rest.

That night, Monica stayed awake, watching over sixteen other patients to ensure his rest.

—

“Therefore…”

Monica woke to a new reality.

It was a beautiful mansion with white walls and intricate moldings. She lay in a clean bed that smelled fresh, listening to birds chirp outside the window.

Yawning, she sat up halfway, rubbed her face, and muttered groggily:

“A person with four personalities is nothing…”

—