AUTHOR'S NOTES: Wow, it's been ages since I've written anything for MASH. This is mostly a drabble-type thing (okay, maybe more of a vignettewhatever. ) which I wrote for my dear co-writer and partner-in-crime's birthday. My dear Epigone deserves only the best.
I hope you guys enjoy. Feedback will, as always, make my happy, shiny and giddy.
Take care,
Meredith
Between the Cracks 1/1
by Meredith Bronwen Mallory
mallorys-girlcinci.
BJ makes himself a breakfast of scrambled eggs, with a glass of orange juice and a shot of gin to make it all go down easier. It's a habit he's picked back up since Erin moved out. It wasn't so much her disapproval, but her understanding that made him tuck the bottle back into the drawer in his study, where it had come from. Such a kind and sympathetic sorrow in Erin's hazel eyes,
(peg's eyes were green and his are blue, so thank god she didn't inherit either)
he couldn't bare it. She never said anything, when he stopped, and that was an understanding he didn't mind at all.
It was Peg who disapproved, Peg who's eyes narrowed at the strange, not-man who'd been slipped into her bed, an exchange for the husband she knew.
(Erin, age five, having gotten into her mother's golden-age pulps.
"Papa, where's Korea? Is it in outer-space?")
"It might as well be," said Peg, miserably curled around BJ on the sofa. It was one of the last times, perhaps the last time, they came to each other for love. "I just don't understand." And she didn't, she was sure he would become an alcoholic, that he was drinking to excess. He tried onceonly onceto explain to her that, in Korea, there was no such thing. Or else, she said when she realized he only took a shot or two a day, he'd ruin his liver with that stuff. It wasn't even quality.
("Hell," says Hawkeye, "doesn't matter nowwe pickled ourselves in the stuff. The elixir of lifeyou cut yourself open and you've got your very own fountain of youth. Personally, I'm leaving my body to the nursesfor science!")
So BJ knows his liver will be fine, and doesn't really care if it isn't, either. He presses the glass to his lips and knocks back the bad gin that would still be too high-class for the Swamp.
("The only way to start the day," Hawkeye intones.)
BJ can't help but nod with a knowing smile, in the kitchen where he knows no one is there.
Really, most days, he lives the life belonging to the old man who's face he sees in the mirror. For a long time, after he came back, things seemed a lot like they had been in Korea; he was shoved into one existence while the other moved on restlessly without him. Duality, plurality, everything defined by here and there. It was only when he woke one night, nine months after he'd come home, thinking about Hawkeye in the dim red lantern light of Rosie's bar, that he realized he didn't have that luxury.
The 4077th had become just another empty field, three miles from the 38th parallel. He couldn't find it if he tried.
But there are still days, days like today, and a whole lot of days towards the end of winter, when he's sure all he has to do is roll over the wrong
(right?
Hawkeye grins, "Or is it left?")
way and this time he'll get out of bed back in Korea. Radar's voice will be on the loud speaker and only Hawkeye's hand on his elbow will keep him upright and sane in the white of the O.R., and the nightmare will start all over again.
Only this time, it will be worse, because he knows how it ends.
The story ends as it begun; with Hawkeye. Hawkeye at the airfield in Kimpo, colorful and bright and real against the army greenHawkeye with his lips tinged blue from asphyxiation, sitting propped up against the wall in his boyhood bedroom, mouth open as if to laugh even though he's only trying to breathe. It ends with the Colonel saying a few dignified words over the rocky Maine soil, with that same voiceless sobersaying he shoulda known that would cut Hawkeye just too deep. The last straw.
(Hawkeye with a whole lot of straws, with a whole lot of tongue depressors. "Out goes Trapper, in comes BJ. Out goes Henry" snap! "in comes Colonel Potter. Sorry Henry.")
They all came to the funeral, of course, everyone that mattereda tried troop, war-weary and a whole lot older than they ever remembered knowing how to be. Where had those years gone? Soaked up in Korea, along with all that blood. Father Mulcahy cried while he tried to officiate over the service, standing beside that awful black coffin
("Not my best color!")
only able to hear silence in one ear and the sounds of his own tears in the other.
Radar held his bright, strangely silent little baby girl on his lap, wiping at his glasses now and then, as if they might show him something else. Margaret held everyoneincluding Charlesup. There was red head with curly hair, who sat in the far back of the church and left halfway through the service.
Hawkeye's story ended with a sharp, un-fairy-tale punctuation, but BJ's had to go on, still goes on. There's an unfairness about that which makes BJ bitter, as petulant as Hawkeye once was, reclining on that cold bus amongst the corpses.
("They'll just keep coming...")
And they do. From somewhere, from whatever middle-land that twists around soldiers between the time they fall on the battlefield and that terrible, blinding white moment of waking in the hospital. BJ has seen the veterans of Vietnam, has turned his face awayif only for a momentfrom the mutilation that has only gotten chilling and precise. Their eyes are dull and emptyHawkeye eye's; they scream with nightmares that slither down underneath their bones, and they ask, 'Doc, am I crazy?', as if BJ somehow knows the answer.
How should he know? He feels crazy, sometimes. It comes over him suddenly, an impish child in the dark. Sitting with Erin during their weekly lunch, reviewing case files with the senior staff; it can be anywhere and anywhen. It's the unreality, or rather the place where reality frays. The place where his path angled sharply off from Hawkeye's, leaving the story half finished.
Or perhaps BJ just missed itthe big finalehaving been jostled out of his uncomfortable seat in the jeep during one of their relocations.
He's fallen out of the story, and down in between the cracks.