Title: The Very Model
Rating: K+
Wordcount: 500
Warnings/Spoilers: survivor's guilt, war is hell. Basic MASH spoilers and speculation.
A/N: The title of this comes from the Civil War poem "The Soldier's Grave." Crossposted on ao3.
for Memorial Day, and those that didn't make it.
.
.
He came home.
That was the first thing he had to learn, and it was always the last to sink in.
He marched, halftime, down that bending weather-beaten dirt road in his best regimentals, new and freshly starched, medals heavy and clinking on his chest. Above the waving fields of golden corn, the sky seemed impossibly blue. He saw the front porch, a long way off, Grandfather's rocking chair moving slowly in the heat of the noonday sun. Old Drake grazing under the elms, loose in the back pasture. Pa must have come in from the fields to have lunch.
His boots seemed impossibly heavy, like he couldn't make those final few hundred steps. The window dressings twitched, there was a sudden crash, a clatter of feet, and the porch door swung open, cracking with a hard snap against the front clapboard. He had never seen his Pa run before, but he ran down the driveway with the wild abandon of a man who had thought, for long years, that all his hope was gone.
Sherman stopped. His father stopped too.
There was barely a foot between them. His father was red in the face, silver creeping up his temples, his chest heaving in and out with the exertion beneath his shirt and vest. They were the same height now, Sherman realized as he looked at his father. And those shoulders, strong and solid, were shaking. His hands came up, between them. Sherman looked down.
Whose hands are these, he thought, what have they done?
He meant to say something, and he must have made a sound, a choked sound, buried somewhere deep in his chest beneath barbed wire and mud and dead men:
"Pa."
Long, long after, in the war after, and the war after that, Sherman would remember the way everything fell into pieces at once: horse-smell, corn waving, beat-beat-beat—the beat of his heart, the beat of his father's, as one together. The firmness of his father's embrace, how softly Pa kissed his hair, the way his hand tenderly clasped the back of his head. He sobbed into his father's chest as if he were still a little boy.
He wanted to give explanations, to point to his medals, to apologize, to find the words he lost somewhere between the Mississippi and the Rhine, about pride and saving face and loss and love. His father pulled him closer, as if he didn't mean to ever let go, tight across his shoulder blades. Above him, Pa's bass was croaky with the undercurrents of long-suppressed grief and worry.
"You came home to us, son."
He can learn all the rest again, but this is what he had fought for: the corn rolling on for miles, the sky as blue as the eye could see, his mother, clutching at the porch post as if it held her up, his grandfather limping down the steps, the tears coming fast, and his father, at long last his father's embrace, welcoming him home.