For Hawkeye back at the 4077, things were slightly livelier, but somewhat less pleasurable. He and Charles spent their afternoon stitching new injuries and re-wrapping old from a brawl that had broken out at Rosie's between two groups of mostly recuperated Marines. The worst injured occupied three beds in Post-Op, and Colonel Potter, backed by a half-dozen MPs, loaded the rest onto ambulances (over their protestations, they wanted to stay back with their buddies) heading for Seoul or back to the line.

Hawkeye was bored.

There was boredom and there was boredom, and this was the latter kind: They hadn't had casualties in so long he'd welcomed the re-injury of personnel he'd treated a week ago. BJ was gone, but even if he were back in the Swamp they'd just glug gin and bore each other with letters from home. Winchester did his best to be irritating, but lately his insults just didn't have the same sting. Hawkeye almost wished Frank Burns were around, just so an elaborate prank would be worth planning. Even the nurses had heard all his come-ons; instead of being amused or affronted, they just rolled their eyes and ignored him. It was almost enough to make him yearn for casualties.

Hawkeye had heard stories from World War Two, of men trapped in submarines so long that they started to go more than a little insane. Some comrade of his father's told stories of elaborate games of Iron Gullet among the enlisted men: They would raid the kitchen for canned whatever, and prepare hideous delicacies by mixing whatever they filched. The man able to keep the most horrible mess down was declared the winner.

Hawkeye'd never understood what could drive a person to that kind of disgusting behavior until he'd spent an entire afternoon staring at the tent ceiling and trying to calculate the total number of pairs of shoes in Korea. He even envied BJ his junket to the 8063rd, and that was a sorry state of affairs – envying a man because he could see real wounded, instead of macho jerks that made themselves sicker in a drunken bar brawl. Hell, Hawkeye even envied the participants of the bar brawl itself!

The nurses were bored with him, he'd already irritated Charles, Margaret, Colonel Potter, and even Father Mulcahy to dangerous levels; he supposed he could empty the still until he slept, but he would just wake up in a few hours and be more miserable for the hangover.

It wasn't like Hawkeye had infinite hobbies. After surgery and drinking came womanizing, and after that teasing and being teased by friends. Once all of those were eliminated, there was only scheming.

Come to think of it, scheming didn't sound so bad. Hawkeye sat up in his bunk, genuinely interested in something for the first time in days. He grinned at nothing in particular.

BJ had a birthday coming up, didn't he?

---

When BJ woke up, the sun had moved considerably towards the horizon and he could already feel a wicked sunburn spreading across his cheeks, nose and chin. He didn't mind that, or the half-dozen mosquito bites he could feel on his arms and neck; the dream he'd had of Peg had been one of the most vivid he'd had in weeks, and he could still hear the little trill she laughed when startled. He tucked his dog tags back into his shirt and walked back to the 8063rd's camp, hungrier than he'd been in recent memory.

Unfortunately, the war had caught up with his leisure time. The sleepy camp now resembled a nest of irritated termites. Enlisted men swarmed over every outdoor surface, and nurses ran in and out of tents in varying states of disassembly. "BJ, thank God!" called Madeline, loading a crate of ice-packed plasma into an ambulance. "I was getting ready to send out a search party!"

She slapped the dust off her hands and walked over to BJ. "I'm sorry," he said, surprised at himself. "I guess I dozed off."

"Oh, that's no problem, now that you're back here, but we've got orders to bug out, and we were worried that we'd have to leave you."

"Bug out, really?"

"It seems the lull is over, and the Chinese are on the way. Your driver's back; some corpsmen threw him in the showers to sober him up."

"Thanks, Madeline."

"Well, it was self-interested; I was hoping I could talk you into taking one of our fractures with you to the 4077. He's stable, no problem, but Dr. Rowen's worried his leg'll get misaligned and in the chaos we won't have time to fix it properly."

"Shouldn't be a problem, if you can spare somebody to help me get him loaded."

"Great. This is a nice, leisurely bug out; we've had plenty of advance warning for once."

Stretching the soldier, a friendly supply sergeant who'd run afoul of a Canadian tank while intoxicated, across the backseat of the jeep was quick work, though it required putting the case of Snickers bars Klinger had gotten for the hams in the well of the passenger seat. Private Jowett was in no condition to drive; if he couldn't construct a simple declarative statement BJ wasn't going to let him operate a massive piece of machinery. BJ hopped in the driver's seat and the damp, miserable private climbed in next to him, resting his feet on the dash, for the rattling drive home.

---

November 1952 (two weeks later)

4077th MASH

BJ strongly suspected he was dreaming. He knew he was standing on his front porch, but it didn't look anything like his actual front porch; his was whitewashed, and hosted several comfortable but battered pieces of patio furniture. This was natural wood, long splintered and grey with age, and the paint on the front door was flaking off in long strips. If he'd stopped to think about it, he could've come up with a more conclusive answer about whether it was really a dream or not, but a sense of urgency propelled him onward, into his house that wasn't his house.

BJ looked down at himself. He was wearing a dress uniform, but he wore major's leaves instead of his own captain's bars, and he wore his sidearm. He wanted to take them off, but dimly he knew there wasn't time.

Up a long flight of stairs (the real stairwell was much farther from the door, wasn't it?), Peg awaited him. He grinned up at her, and with infinite slowness and grace she descended. Her expression was beatific.

Peggy was dressed in one of the most absurd getups BJ had ever seen – it looked like something an inept dressmaker might create had they heard a description of Elizabethan finery, but never seen a picture. The dress was violent blue velvet, with a full skirt that came down to Peg's ankles, but was slit far up the side, displaying a length of ankle and impractical high heels. She wore a bodice with a false corset that began far lower than anything Peg normally would ever wear outside their bedroom. BJ grinned. The sight of her was sweeter than anything; her presence alone was enough to make him happier, like a warm bellyful of sweet tea. Every time she set her right foot down, BJ could see her ankle clear up to the mole on her outer thigh, the point he'd always considered the three-quarter mark of her leg. BJ's smile turned wolfish; he suspected he was going to like the way this dream ended.

At last, after an eternity of anticipation, she reached the landing. BJ could smell her hair and hand lotion; he wanted to kiss her and never stop. Her smile was luminous, and he searched for the right words to convey what about her he had missed, and how desperately.

"You wan' goo'time, Joe?" Peg asked.

"What?" It wasn't Peg's voice. It was the voice of someone who had a brief primer in English from bad movies and bad people, and it was a call he had heard dozens of times in Korea, mostly from desperate guttersnipes too young to be suggesting it. BJ had always ignored it before, but hearing it here made him want to weep. He was home, but his wife had the voice of a Korean prostitute.

"Good time, Joe?" she said again, taking care to form all the sounds in a way that suggested phonetic memorization rather than real understanding of the words she spoke.

She wasn't Peggy.

He kissed her anyway; his lips on her lips, one hand curling in her upswept hair and the fingers of the other curled at her collarbone, finding purchase in the small hollow before arching finely around her neck. He pulled away from her and turned before she could ask for money, as he knew she, this not-Peg, would inevitably do.

The same force that had compelled him to go inside the house now turned him right, into the living room (isn't that the kitchen?) full of ruined and reclaimed furniture and silvery moonlight, where a little girl, no older than ten years old, sat silently on a torn brown ottoman, staring at nothing. She was a beautiful little waif, with enormous moonlit eyes and the graceful cheekbones of a movie star.

Peg-not-Peg was standing beside him, though he hadn't seen her move from the foot of the stair. He recognized a murderous glint in her eye for just a second (it was a relief to see it, there was his Peg, the old Peg) but it was gone in another. "Too young, Joe," she said, tugging at his arm. She tried to sound flippant, but BJ could hear fear even through her broken English. BJ ignored her to look at the little girl, and when his attention was elsewhere she flickered out in that peculiar way of dreams.

"Erin?" he asked fearfully. He knew this was his daughter (but that was impossible, he hadn't been gone that long, Erin was still a baby in a crib!), but he had to be cautious; she might've undergone the same dreadful transformation Peggy had.

She stood up and turned full to face him. "Hello, Daddy," she said calmly. "You look well."

He took a step closer, wanting to embrace her, but something about the formal little creature made him nervous. He knelt instead, so that his eyes were almost on the same plane as hers. "Erin, sweetheart, what happened here?"

Erin stared at him; he wondered why it had taken him this long to recognize that the hollow cheeks and protrusive eyes that had seemed lovely a moment ago were the products of acute childhood malnutrition. She reached up and stroked the rank insignia on his collar, then looked him straight in the eye. "You're a ten-cent soldier for a dime store cause," she said, her voice thick and terrible with adult contempt. "What were you expecting?"

He had no answer. Six thousand miles away in Korea, BJ Hunnicutt wrenched himself out of the dream and woke, shivering and damp with sweat.