A/N: This could be seen as slash, but I ask you this – is it slash if there is no sex? Anyway, this is my first MASH attempt, so please, read it and tell me what y'all think. Muchly appreciated. smiles
It was never about the sex.
Each had a source for that kind of attention – one had a wife, whereas the other had whoever dropped into his lap. Their relationship was sexless, except for the one occasion after one hell of a night in the OR; they'd tried to see if passion could erase what the drink could not, but it hadn't, and they were both haunted still the next day. The tonic for that horrific night, eventually, was just sitting outside the Swamp, watching the sun go down, together. After that, they seemed to be normal.
So the sex, or lack of, was not part of their definition.
What really made it was the companionship – in the middle of a war, with only a bottle of foul alcohol (Hawkeye contested this name on the grounds of taste) and Winchester for company would be a damn sight more interesting if not for the fact that they were kept sane by each other. Jokes and pranks concocted, anecdotes shared, taunts endured – a surgeon's best friend could only ever be the scalpel that kept his wit sharp, said BJ once. Course, he added, a scalpel as a pet name for a friend really didn't cut it. Hawkeye almost stopped breathing with laughter that night.
BJ wouldn't have understood it if someone had spelt it out in front of them – you couldn't be in love with two people like that, could you?
Hawkeye would have just smiled softly. Because he knew that, at the end of the day, BJ may have been right, but it didn't matter, because BJ didn't love two people like that. He loved his family and he loved Hawkeye, and that was that.