I don't own any of this except for what I own. No havey de money. No makey de money. No wanty de money.
Author's Note (aka gratuitous pleading for reviews time. Yipee): This started as a need I had for non-Margret (sorry kids, I like it, but I need more sometimes…) romance with Hawk. Hopefully it's not like the other randomly-added-chick-fics out there, but if it is let me know. Here's to the readers, and another for the reviewers.
***
His post-op shift was almost over, but Captain Pierce could already feel the familiar restlessness rising up in his chest. The clipboard rustled a little and swung lazily as he hooked onto the bed of the patient he'd just finished going over with the nurse on duty. Looking around at the standard issue tent filled with standard issue cots and standard issue blankets covering standard issue wounded soldiers. Walking over ot the duty log he flipped through it pointlessly and suddenly remembered he hadn't filled in the date and day when he'd signed in. He hadn't known.
He'd been feeling down for days, and had plenty of reason for it. The stream of wounded had been particularly endless, and more were predicted. His last good night sleep had been back in the states, and to top it all off the mess crew had contracted the worst cases of hepatitis this side of the war he'd ever seen. They couldn't risk an outbreak with the casualty level so high, and the sick staff had been sent to Tokyo where they, if they survived the disease, would be reassigned. The MASH had been living almost a week on C-rations, and the new Mess Sergeant colonel Potter had rush ordered didn't seem to be in any sort of rush to get there.
Hawk's psyche had decided it was time for a shut down, until things started to look up. Speaking up which, he was so caught up in hating himself he didn't bother looking up when the long white curtain that lead to the oppressive outdoors shuttered as the door opened and a figure immerged.
"Shifts up Hawk," the beaming face of Captain Hunnicut walked down the short aisle between the wounded, and patted Captain Pierce on the back. "Came to pick you up."
"No thanks, I'll walk." The scraping of Hawk's feet on the floor as he dragged himself to the door caught BJ's attention. The slump in Hawkeye's shoulders was acting acutely more morose than usual.
"Feeling Blue?" He held open the door for Hawk, but a fatigue fashioned private bustled through the door, nearly bowling Pierce over.
"No," He brushed himself uninterestedly where the private had bumped into him. "Seeing too much Green."
"Envy?" BJ made show of looking both directions before waving Hawkeye through the door. Running his fingers through his hair in a tired sweep, Hawk sighed.
"Army."
The fresh air didn't do much for him as he stepped out of the med tent and took a quick glance at the sky. He'd been in the tent so long the sudden brightness of the sun stabbed at his eyes and as his sight cleared he stared down the horizon of tangled mesh, corrugated steel and military dilapidation. There was something about that morning that was getting to him.
There was something about this morning that got to her. The crispness of it all! Being so many miles from home, but still getting that same homemade feeling whenever she took a lung full of air. The sky was blue enough, and the trees were agreeably faded brown and scraggly, like most brush had in the drier areas.
Back in the states she had covered every mile she could walk, hitch or motor over, and now it was only when she was moving did she feel like she was really in the right place. Home really can be where the heart is, she thought to herself.
The thought of her heart, and her home, made her stop her silent reverie for a moment, as a dull pain grew in her head. If she was being entirely honest with herself, it wasn't the feeling of being on the move again that elated her so, but more what she was moving from. Suppressing a shudder, the fresh sting of an ugly memory played out slowly in her mind. She was escaping from the strongest prison she'd ever known. That was a happy thought indeed, and she couldn't help but grin. It was the first sign of life she gave to the other passengers in the Jeep.
"Happy thoughts, Sergeant?" One of the nurses in the Jeep had caught her smiling to herself.
"Not particularly ma'am. Just happy to be on the move, really." She pulled her bag a little bit into herself and shrugged her shoulders, continuing the comatose stature she'd adopted.
"Happy to be going to the MASH unit?" The nurse looked surprised. "As a nurse I feel like I have a sense of purpose there, but why you, Sergeant?"
"Call me Bernie ma'am." She muttered as softly as she could, but just over the wailing motor. "Pretty much everyone does, and I didn't mean to smile. I'm sorry…" The was no standing the way the nurse looked at her, with a strange bewilderment that was almost empathetic like that. It was shameful. Bernie raised her top lip in a grimace and kept talking, hoping an answer would get this woman off her back. "I like to cook ma'am, and it'll be nice to be in charge of my own personal set of staff, I guess. Where it is doesn't really make a difference; whether it's in the on a general's crew or at a MASH unit. I think I'd like them both the same."
"Wait," another woman turned around, the second nurse of three that were in the jeep. The only other person besides them was a very young looking private who was nervously scanning the sky line for some hidden threat as the jeep he was directing barreled down the road. "You said you cooked for a general? No kidding?"
"Well, I didn't say that I had, but yeah, no kidding. It's actually where I'm coming from." She pulled the bill of her olive green issue hat low over her eyes with a habitual gesture. She didn't want to talk about the general. Luckily the first woman piped in.
"We picked you got on at the same med unit as us. Why didn't they just take you straight to the MASH?" Bernie wasn't very excited about how this conversation had suddenly taken a strong focus in her direction.
"Actually, it was dumb luck that I caught this ride. I'd walked most of the way." It was pretty easy in the military to get a ride anywhere she was headed, what was hard was convincing people that she didn't need one. She was a safe ways from the war, walking shouldn't have been a big deal.
"You walked!!" The third nurse finally joined the conversation and joined the other two with the surprised look on her face.
"Yeah... It was nice." She didn't remember most of it. The fog that she'd been living in, the constant fear, had finally lifted as she walked along. One day she'd woken up on the side of the road, wondering where she was. Bernie knew she wasn't in her right mind. "Really."
Bernie smiled as radiantly as she could and turned on her charm. These ladies thought she was crazy, and that wouldn't do if they were going to live in the same unit. "So are you three new nurses to the unit we're going to?" They didn't seem to notice her sudden mood swing.
"We sure are!" The second one chirped. She was a cheerful girl with rosy cheeks and a broad smile. Likable. "Though I think we're all pretty seasoned. They say these sort of things are tough, but I bet it's not all that bad."
At that moment a shell flew overhead with a wild scream and continued on it's deadly path. The four women followed it with varying looks of horror and intrigue on their faces. They couldn't feel the blast of the impact, but they heard it. The jeep sped up considerably.
"Well," Bernie's face was painted a wide grinning shade of awe. The other nurses had adopted greener hues that didn't quite match their brownish uniforms. "Now there's something you don't see everyday. Hey kid," the tapped the driver on the shoulder. "How far are we from the front?"
"A few miles Ma'am, give or take." She thought it was a little bit more on the side of the take, given how white the boy's knuckles were.
"Well, looks like we have front row seats to the war!" The cook tried her best to sound as if she had been given the greatest gift on earth, but the moment she said it she knew she should have saved it. Instead of cheering the nurses they switched hues to an arsenic white. Nurse One shot her a deadly glare. Most of the rest of the trip was silent with Bernie's hat pulled low as she focused on the gentle rhythm of jeep jerking down the rocky road. It would have reminded her of a sensation similar to high-impact rolfing, had she had been into that sort of thing.
They couldn't get there soon enough.
"Boredom strikes our fair duo yet again!" Colonel Klinger swung through the door with a peach organdy flourish. Hawkeye looked up from his knitting across the room from where BJ was watching the Still work its slow magic, where he had been for the last half hour. Paint drying and gin dripping seemed to be equally appealing in the state of boredom they were in.
"I've heard this program before, isn't there anything new on?" Hawk went back to his knitting, and BJ continued to stare never having looked up.
"How about a little bit of news to turn your dials?" Klinger sat down conspiratorially on the edge of Hawkeye's bed.
"I just had those turned. Every thousand miles or so, otherwise I start getting bald patches." The stronghold of boredom had even started affecting his wit. Things were bad.
"Cut it out Captain." Klinger wasn't in the mood.
"I wish I could, but chronic cynicism runs in the family." He made a slight gesture with one hand and then frowned over his work. "Ah, can you believe it? I've dropped a stitch."
"Listen, Captains, I've got a bit of news that will have you dropping all your stitches." Klinger paused for dramatic effect. It worked. BJ had pulled his eyes away from the slow drip of the still and Hawk laid his knitting in his lap. The corporal grinned widely and leaned in slightly, lowering his voice. "Three new nurses are coming in today!"
"That's it?!" Hawkeye threw up his small blue blob of stitches. "Klinger, we heard that days ago! Weeks ago!"
"Wars ago," BJ chimed in, with his usual amused smile. "Thanks for the gossip Klinger, but it's already been run through this mill. I think we're waiting for more news on that Mess Sergeant that disappeared."
"Yeah," Klinger sat back in a most un-lady like fashion. "Aren't we all? I've had it up to here with SPAM sandwiches."
"We've been living for four days off of C-rations and what we can dig up." Hawk murmured over his stitches. "I'm actually starting to fantasize about liver with bacon and onions."
"Now that's cruel and unusual." BJ poured himself some of the Gin he had faithfully watched.
"Which ones crueler," Klinger whined, around his cigar. "The fact that he's dreaming about it or that his mentioning it makes my mouth water?" Captain Pierce did his best to hide his stomach growling.
"So they still haven't found the cook?" He tried to imagine how the army could lose a Mess Sergeant so easily. He didn't have a hard time coming up with the first hundred ways.
"Nope." Klinger shook his head. "Rumor has it that she just walked out of her camp after she got her orders about a week ago and no one's seen her since. Tomorrow's the end of one week since she's disappeared though, so if she doesn't show up they're crying AWOL and sending us a new one."
"Wait a minute, did you just say 'she'? A female cook?" Hawk sounded excited but the news was enough to grab BJ's attention as well. However, the light in their eyes was anything but hormonal. "Can you see it? A gray haired, little old, pie and cookies, lemonade on the back porch, woman? Do you know what this means?" He didn't wait for an answer and shot out, grabbing Klinger shoulders firmly. "No more liver and Spam. Ma Baker herself will be on our end of the stove!"
"I know," the man in drag grinned to see Hawkeye get so caught up in the same idea that he had had. "That's what I was figuring too. And get this. Guess where they're sending her from?"
"A Betty Crocker Catalogue?" You could tell from his tone that BJ wasn't quite buying the idea of the cookie cutter cuisine that was quickly forming.
"Better," Klinger leaned in with a 'here it comes' raise to his brow. "A general's camp."
BJ gave a low whistle.
"No kidding? Well, that could be good or bad." The two other men in the tent looked at him with indignant questioning. "Hey! All I'm saying is she might be a great cook cause she was on a general's staff, or she might be a terrible one cause there's got to be a reason she not on his staff anymore. Doesn't it even slightly bother either of you that she just up and walked out of her camp?"
"He's got a point." Klinger conceded.
"Soufflé flattener." Muttered Hawkeye as he fell back into his bed. They sat in silence for a moment, letting the boredom blanket them again until the low roar of a Jeep could be heard in the distance.
"Medic!" A feminine voice cried out as the Jeep came clamoring to a halt. In an instant the jeep with received by two eager looking surgeons.
"The new nurses I gather." Bj said, nodding to them and then looking down at their cargo. Three wounded men had somehow been strapped to the oversized Jeep that also carried three nurses as well as the man driving.
"Yes, we are." The one nurse that wasn't attending the wounded swung down to help with the unloading.
"And look, they brought gifts!" Hawkeye said with a cheerful sarcasm. "They look like they've been roughed up a bit. What happened?" The nurse looked slightly frazzled, as did the other two in the jeep.
"On the way here a shell flew over head, these guys are the results of the end of the flight pattern." They quickly sorted out the wounded and headed into the OR, nurses in tow. By that time the sight of wounded had called out Colonel Potter as well, and Radar buzzed around trying to sort out who had just arrived as new personnel. Hawk was ready to scrub up, but the more sever looking of the nurses pulled him away from the sink.
"I'm afraid there's still two more men out there that we couldn't get into the Jeep," She looked more ashamed than worried as Hawk frowned at her. "And another woman who was on the road with us."
His hand was already on a medic bag, and with a quick shout to Sherman, he was out the door and calling for a Jeep. He motioned for the Nurse to follow. "Keeping talking."
"They're down the road about three or five miles. The two we left weren't badly injured but the Sergeant insisted on staying with them." The nurse looked down-right peeved, as she wrung her hands angrily. "We couldn't get her on the Jeep. I don't know if we would've had room for her even, but there was no way we could even drag her back to the vehicle." The Jeep had come and Hawkeye jumped in.
"Which one?" He asked more forcefully than the nurse would've liked.
"Which what?" She pulled on the hem of her jacket nervously, unconsciously preening.
"You said three or five miles. Which is it? How far?" The man was getting out of hand, almost angry.
"I…I'm not sure." She straightened her hat slightly. "Four. I'd say about four miles."
"Let's go!" Captain Pierce yelled to the driver as he settled completely into the jeep, medic helmet a tipped crazily, as an afterthought, on his head.