Tintin sat, hunched in pain, his skin pale and breathing shallow. Every pothole in the road made him flinch as they barrelled along the dirt road towards the highway. The bullet had gotten him through the chest, an inch to the left, and it would have killed him, an inch to the right and it would have missed completely. It had slammed through something like two ribs and come out his back, leaving him with broken bones and a badly bleeding wound, and to judge from his thin, gasping breath, a collapsed lung.

Haddock had found him on the ground, in a growing puddle of his own blood, and panic had gripped the captain's heart as he saw a chest wound, imagining the Tintin was dying under his hands. He had ripped Tintin's signature sweater and the layers underneath and used the cloth to apply pressure to the wound. Years of working at sea had taught him how to handle accidents, and his hands bypassed his panic-stricken brain entirely and began working to stop the bleeding and bind the wound with whatever was handy.

With the kind of injury Tintin had, anyone else would have screamed. Even the biggest and toughest of men scream like children when they are shot, but Tintin had gone down with almost no sound. He would have died had not haddock gone looking for him when the gunfire ceased.

Now on the road, The captain glanced over at his patient, keeping half an eye on the boy and his other eye on the road as he drove as fast as he could towards the nearby village, and an emergency doctor. Multitasking like this required the kind of focus only imparted by a few fortifying draughts of fine whisky. Luckily they hadn't lost the supplies in the gunfight. "How're you holding up?" He asked, reaching out to gently pull aside his sea jacket and see the bandages. Tintin had the captain's greatcoat clutched around him tightly.

"I'm fine." Tintin replied quickly, dragging in a painful breath and hunching away from him. "Watch… the road." He was holding on to that coat as if it was a life preserver at sea, betraying fear that had nothing to do with his injuries or Haddock's driving.

When the captain had ripped and cut through Tintin's shirts, he had found what the boy had been hiding with his intense attention to proper dress. He had never seen the boy take off his outer shirt, even when the heat was so intense that the captain had stripped down to just trousers. What haddock had taken for a sort of stuck-up propriety, had been fear. Against his skin Tintin had been wearing a heavy bandage that bound his chest tightly, that with the injury had threatened to smother him. The captain had cut it off immediately to allow Tintin to breath, and in doing so had discovered what Tintin's layers had always hidden.

Tintin had breasts. Small ones, but still a pair of perfectly formed, probably attractive when they weren't covered in blood, breasts. Perhaps the right term was 'she' had breasts, but the captain couldn't get comfortable with the female pronoun even in his head. Tintin may be beautiful, but he certainly wasn't a woman.

"Don't worry Lad. It's all the same to me. I want to see if you're still gushing blood out of that gunshot of yours, and the rest can go to hell." Haddock said, glancing over at the boy. Tintin didn't seem to respond. Haddock tried again. "Fact is, I didn't see nothing, and I ain't going to see nothing."

Hearing that, Tintin reluctantly opened the jacket, holding it so the captain could see the bandage on his left side, also showing what he had probably been hiding for years, at least as long as his education and journalism career had lasted. The captain was far more interested in his wounds however. The blood was soaking through even the second layer of bandages. It was hard to tell how fast it was coming, but that couldn't be a good sign for the nicked lung that was slowly strangling the boy. He stepped on the gas.

It was three days before he heard from Tintin. With their assurances that Tintin would be fine, and that Haddock had certainly saved his life, he was told to leave it to the monks at the small mission hospital. Their calmness when faced with a gunshot wound made the captain wonder how many they saw in a year. Apparently this jungle paradise was no such thing.

He had spent the intervening days in the nearest drinking place with Snowy, vacillating between riotously cheerful sing-alongs with the friendly locals, and brooding hours where he worried about his friend. It was not unheard of for women to hide their sex and go into the world as men. The news was peppered with such scandals. Why not? European women were so rare that they had become a commodity. Most men would never marry, unless they found a foreign wife, and even those were expensive and rare. Certain types of men had discovered that it was easier to become women than to compete with other men, and those with performing talents or naturally feminine looks to them could make a great career for themselves on the stage. Girls were kidnapped off the street if they went out alone, so they went nowhere without a male relative, or existed completely behind closed doors and chain locks. It was for their own protection, he supposed, but it was an oppressive life. Haddock could remember his mother sitting at her favourite window, watching the world go by and never being able to take part in it. It had killed her eventually. She had wasted away, poisoned by unfulfilled dreams and boredom.

It was easy to see why Tintin might be so afraid of being discovered. His job, his freedom, his life would be forfeit. This same accident, had it happened in Europe where his face was known, could have exposed him.

This was more than just a bid for freedom though. Tintin could not be a woman, any more than Haddock could be a fish. Somewhere deep down, the captain thought, a man was more than what was in his trousers. He wasn't sure what exactly did make a man, but he was certain it was something a little more abstract than the ability to write one's name in the snow without using your hands.

After the monks judged that Tintin was fit to see visitors, The Captain was allowed in. Looking suspiciously at the ship's captain, the man at the desk pointed to the women's ward, which was guarded by another surly-looking Peruvian monk. Having convinced them that he was a friend of the patient, he was finally allowed in. The security surrounding the third floor hospital ward was unnerving. Was this prison? Apparently women in Peru were kept behind walls just as thick as those in Europe.

Tintin looked so much better than he had three days ago. His color was back, and though breathing was clearly still an effort, it didn't seem like this breath might be his last. The hospital had given him a thin shirt to replace his ruined clothes, and when the captain came into the room Tintin covered himself with the blanket, blushing in embarrassment, though he smiled an awkward welcome. He held the blanket up around his chest, hiding the curves that haddock was glad enough not to see. Before they spoke, Haddock proffered the clothes he had brought from the car. He turned around to let him change, his discomfort exacerbated by Tintin's own. He examined the grubby tiles beneath his feet, listening to the rustle of cloth, and the occasional grunt of pain as Tintin made a wrong move and strained his injured chest. He looked back up when Tintin came up beside him, dressed in a baggy white dress shirt and jacket that had transformed him seamlessly back to the young man Haddock had fought beside and fought for. "How are you feeling?" The captain asked.

"I'm all right." Tintin nodded. "Lets get out of here." He smiled, and tilted his head towards the door. "I am not spending another moment in this place."

"Lets go to the beach. That's the best place for a man to heal up." Haddock nodded, the two of them already moving towards the door. Tintin still had a long way to go, but this wasn't the place for a man of action. Snowy was waiting anxiously just outside the front door, and leaped around his master's feet when they exited.