Characters: Hawkeye Pierce, Sherman Potter
Word Count: 1750
Rating: K+
AN: An episode tag to Hepatitis (5x20). The title to this collection comes from Ernest Hemingway's story of the same name. Mainly, this came about because the ending to Hepatitis is just so '70s pyscho-babble. (Also, you definitely should not use phenobarbital this way.) The phrase 'Mickey Finn' came into American parlance circa 1920.
.
.
"Colonel," Hawkeye slurred, cheek down on the desk, "your desk is more comfortable than my bed."
He ought to sound surprised, but mostly he just sounds drunk.
It was surprising comfortable for a metal desk, once he'd pushed the nameplate out of the way and deposited his whiskey glass near the photograph of Mrs. Potter. She'd appreciate that, he thought. Maybe the colonel wouldn't appreciate that, but he was sitting amiably enough on the other side of said comfortable desk, so he mustn't be very bothered. Potter was surprisingly calm, that way. He understood the necessity of sleeping anywhere you dropped.
"I thought—I'd slept everywhere in this camp since the war began—but your desk takes the cake." He patted it fondly. He did have rather a fondness for this desk, because it was Potter's.
"Henry had a desk," Hawkeye continued, poking the colonel's nameplate with his index finger, wishing the dish of fig newtons weren't so far away. He liked fig newtons, and he didn't like Vernon Parsons. Still, he didn't feel much like chewing anyway. "Century old, antique oak." He flapped his hands emphatically, like wings. "We—we flew it away—for pencill-up."
For some reason, this thought struck him as being very funny, and he laughed, hard. Why isn't the colonel laughing? Didn't he know how funny it was to see the helicopter carrying Henry's pride and joy, the antique American oak desk away into the sunset of Korea?
He heard a sigh above his head, the kind of long drawn out sigh which means the colonel is either amused, or angry. He flips awfully easily between the two. This also struck Hawkeye as being very funny, and he laughed and laughed, hard enough that he can't draw breath for a moment.
He's lolling his head on the desk like he's a fish, landed and trying to flop, clumsily and awkwardly, out of the boat back into the war. Like a hooked fish, and that thought feels sadder than it should.
But there's something to be sad about here. He ought to feel sad about the desk, and then he remembers that Henry isn't the colonel, that Potter is.
"Henry doesn't mind anymore." Hawkeye said, and that sobered him enough to raise his head to look at the colonel, who is very pointedly looking over his head.
"Just don't drool, Pierce." Potter said mildly, dunking and biting off his fig newton. Hawkeye wanted to protest, he only ever drooled at nurses, and ribs, in that order. "I had a looksee at your x-ray—nothing there."
"I knew that. I'm a doctor, you know." Just like BJ, nitpicking his work like he wasn't a doctor himself. "Diploma straight from Huxley College, or was it Wagstaff College?" His voice sounded positively sloppy, not sly like he meant.
Hawkeye didn't think he should say 'I told you so.' No one told his mouth that, and no one told his funny bone not to say it like a seven year old either. He heard the colonel snorting into his glass on the other side of the desk.
"Got me thinking about soft tissue problems, wouldn't show up on an x-ray: sprain, strain, spasm—"
"—Incredibly average Vernon Parsons." Hawkeye muttered to the desk panel beneath his cheek, putting up one finger. It was too much work to put up the whole arm. "How—how'd you figure out—"
"Oh, a Colonel has his sources." Radar is cheating, Hawkeye thought to himself, and Frank Burns' lips were loose enough to sink a whole fleet, much less a single ship.
"Yes, Radar hinted and Burns spilled." Potter agreed, in that particularly arch tone which said he was feeling both pleased and patriarchal. "But I meant what I said about tying yourself in knots, Pierce." He said directly, and then more quietly, half to himself, "Why am I reminding you when I doubt you'll remember this?"
"Why am I all floppy?" Hawkeye lifted an arm in exemplum and shook it around over his head, watching it sort-of wobble with a satisfying limpness. His hands looked like flesh-colored birds, gliding over his head.
"Feel silly." He said thickly, his mind spinning the carousel of picnics in Korea, and Mad Hatters playing with grenades, and little girls climbing through land mine holes. It all seemed like pictures at the end of a tunnel.
"Don't do that, Hawkeye." The colonel commanded, pulling down his arm with a firm hand. "Other than some rather good Scotch, I'd guess that the phenobarbital I snuck in has you a bit…" Potter seemed to be casting around for a word to describe the surgeon before him, who was leaning over on his desk and petting it fondly.
"Glued. Unglued. High. Low. Regressed. Progressed. Egressed. Depressed. Repressed. Suppressed—"
"Yes. Now shut up, Pierce, and let me examine you."
"Take me, I'm yours."
"For two glasses of Scotch? You're too easy, Hawkeye."
"—ngh" Hawkeye breathed, feeling the steady, painful thumbs pressing down his latissimus dorsi. His back tweaked in complaint. If it didn't feel like fiery tendrils running up and down his spine, it almost might have felt good.
"I envy Sophie," Hawkeye groaned, half moving away from the colonel's hands on his back, and half moving into it. Next time he'll take BJ's offer, even if he doesn't have a shirt on.
"Stay still, Pierce, your back feels like a piece of wood." Potter commanded, digging into a particularly knotty spot below the right shoulder blade. It felt good, the way the acute throbbing eased into a warm soreness under Potter's unyielding hold. "Hardwood, that is."
"Only—only kind in Maine—uh." Hawkeye felt the intense urge to shiver, or shake under the fingers pressing hard, too hard, not hard enough, into the tense spinal muscles. He's been sleeping on a cot that is basically a slat of wood not three feet wide for over a year, he's got knots on top of cramps on top of spasms.
The knuckles of Potter's fingers are kneading into the infraspinatus like the teeth on a saw digging into a tree limb, and the colonel kept on doing it, rubbing out the same medial to lateral motion over and over. It actually hurt, although the stab of throbbing pain dulled to a faint tenderness in a moment.
Hawkeye tried to sit up straight, as if to say, alright, alright, that's enough. While the alcohol combined with phenobarbital might have made him fairly drowsy and loopy as well as relaxing his muscles, the shift from prickling soreness to sharp pain to faint ache has mostly cleared his head and gotten his back up. Metaphorically, of course.
The colonel laid two fingers on the levator scapulae and applied pressure. Agony blossomed under the firm touch.
"F—fine." Hawkeye managed to save his dignity, but only just. The junction between his neck and shoulder blade twinged, jarred just by the movement of his jaw from talking. He tried to turn his head, but Potter just tapped the back of his nape with the palm of his hand and Hawkeye froze.
"Behave, Pierce." He's doing something, rolling the balls of his thumbs on Hawkeye's shoulders and circling the bony protuberances at the base of Hawkeye's skull with his finger-tips. The combination of both made red-hot twitches spike outward from the warm, firm pressure of Potter's hands over his cervical vertebra.
"Yes, Dad." Hawkeye muttered under his breath, holding onto the edge of the desk. If at any point this was pleasurable, it's now gone, replaced by the spiking waves of pain radiating outwards from his spine. The pain that went clear through to his lung was almost better than Potter rubbing down the overworked and tensed muscles in his back.
For the next few minutes, the only thing that happens is Potter's hmphs as he goes from cervical back down to middle thoracic, and Hawkeye's resultant fidgets and stifled groans.
"You've been hunching over your surgical table for the last week." The colonel observed, talking easily now that he's eased off deep pressure on Hawkeye's back. "Is that making your Vernon Parsons problem worse?"
"Korea is making my Vernon Parsons problem worse. Korea is my Vernon Parsons problem." Hawkeye shot back, gesticulating his hands wide to convey the whole of this camp.
"But the table isn't helping. We'll see if we can't get the table braced higher for you."
"Just cut me off at the knees."
"I'd rather cut you off at the pass."
"Next time, just shoot me." Hawkeye muttered darkly, standing up sloppily, putting a hand on the corner of the desk to catch his balance.
"Next time?" Potter echoed, putting his hand on Hawkeye's elbow. "Next time—not that there will be a next time—I'm giving Hunnicutt this job. I'm too old to be touting question marks around the compound."
"An exclamation point am I." Potter chuckled, and shaking his head like a horse shaking off flies, walked Hawkeye to the door with him.
"Just go pour yourself back in the Swamp. And thank me in the morning."
"Mhmm." Hawkeye replied, pushing the door open, feeling half-drunk and more than a little exhausted. His path to the Swamp is short, and well-traveled under his feet. He could travel this path in his sleep, and sometimes has.
He stopped short, hand on the Swamp's door, then pulled it open and shut it with a bang, not that it makes anybody jump. Frank's asleep, BJ's asleep, or drunk enough that he doesn't even stir at the door. He'll have a killer hangover tomorrow.
Hawkeye shuffled out of his clothes, and looked at his toothbrush for a minute, which is good enough for tonight. He laid down on his plank, shut his eyes, ready to sleep, then shot straight up in bed.
"He slipped me a Mickey Finn." Hawkeye said, sounding startled, even to his own drunk self. He's surprised at first, then almost appreciative, both because of the colonel's concern and his cleverness.
"Hey, Beej—" He looked over in the darkness. BJ didn't stir.
"Good night, you. I'll tell you in the morning." He cackled suddenly, rolling over into his blankets and his favorite worn-in spot on the cot with a long sigh of relief. "Old dogs can learn new tricks."