Title: With Love from Home
Rating: K+
Wordcount: 1200
Warnings/Spoilers: Basic MASH spoilers and speculation (teeny-tiny spoiler to Abyssinia Henry, s3e24). Campbell's Chicken Noodle Soup.
A/N: This was a gift for justalittlegreen. Thanks to PrairieDawn for the beta. Part Four of Tomorrow, If You Remember Anything. This is complete and will be posted within the next week; crossposted to ao3.
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"Enter the Mess"
Potter listened to them with the solemn gravity of a judge, fountain pen poised over the next stack of DD form 443s. No one mentioned Hawkeye and Radar's scuffle over the mail. The Colonel wasn't their principal, and they weren't a group of schoolchildren. It had been done, finished. Somehow, it paled in importance compared to the mail that couldn't be sorted.
"Well, Radar, I'm not sure I'll be much help." Potter said, mildly, putting down his fountain pen. "Can I see it, please?"
Radar handed the package to the Colonel. Potter took it and turned it over in his hands, looking it all over. He traced the stains with his fingers, smoothed the paper under the string where it had bunched up, and peered through his glasses at the address. Then he sat back and shook his head.
"I've been in this man's army longer than you three have been alive, but this is a first. Well, there was that package Mildred sent me on Guam, but we never did figure out how that monitor lizard got inside—" he glanced up from the package and caught the clear incredulity. Radar's mouth was hanging slightly opened, BJ had raised one eyebrow and Hawkeye had a clear this-is-such-bull expression on his face.
"Just once," Potter said, grumpily, raising one finger and stabbing it down on his blotter with emphasis, "once, I would like someone to actually believe my stories are true."
"I hardly believe—"
"Look, Colonel, if we bought that story—," BJ interjected, trying to keep Hawkeye and his comments behind him with his elbow, and failing. Hawkeye took a quick side-stop to the left of the chair in front of Potter's desk, threw himself forward and planted his hands on the edge of the desk. BJ just shrugged, as if to say I tried.
"I hardly believe what I'm saying, but if you told true stories, then maybe we'd believe them. But until I get to see a portable latrine with my own two eyes, I call bull." Hawkeye retorted, looking down his nose at the older man, with a look of superiority on his face. Radar's mouth dropped open a little wider and he looked positively shocked, then he shut his mouth with a click and looked mulish.
"I believe your stories, sir." Radar announced quietly to the room at large.
"Thank you, Radar. Now, why don't you make announcement to the whole camp and see if anyone was expecting a parcel from home." He clearly caught the slightly panicked expression that slipped over Radar's face. "Leave it with me, Radar." Potter advised, sagely. "That'll keep certain folks from pressing their luck."
"The Commanding Officer: good for barking at mailmen, guarding the house, playing with the children, walking the wife and a long cozy snooze in front of the fire." Hawkeye narrated the action, pretending to walk up to BJ with a microphone in hand. He bowed, BJ bowed back and then they commenced to hand-shaking.
"Have you any in the French cut?" BJ asked, putting on as affected an accent as he dared, in the presence of Radar.
"Have you considered, sir—"
"Blow you two." Potter said, but without any real heat. The laughter was all in the twinkle in his eyes.
"Radar, you done with the mail, son?"
"Sure, except for you and the patients in Post-OP, sir."
"After that, and after the announcement, see if you can't get the Army Postmaster on the horn. Somebody must have a record of this package."
He looked again at the plethora of different Army stamps in different colors stuck all over the package like a strange pattern of multi-colored spots. He turned the package towards them, pointing at the address label.
"Whoever sent it doesn't know how to spell Uijeongbu." It was crossed out and scrawled in at least four different scripts, going further and further down the package. Every spelling was different, and at least one attempt had been crossed out with a heavy line several times over and restarted with a Ui instead of a We.
"Oh no, sir." Radar demurred, shaking his head. "That's just the Army—they don't how to spell it. Err, well, nobody can spell it. They all spell it different ways, but it gets here, honest!"
"Radar," the Colonel said, threateningly.
"Going, sir."
It turned out that nobody and everybody had a record of the package. The 4077th moved, the Army supply lines moved, and the package had been crisscrossing the Korean peninsula for the better part of three months at least until it had finally caught up with them. In the process it had been in-processed and out-processed by the Army Postmaster the better part of a half-dozen times, and they had no interest in ever seeing the package again.
They told Radar so but used a lot more four-letter words than his Ma allowed him to use. He told the Colonel that, with blatant bluster, but he had just laughed. He had needed a good laugh. Frank had come in and out of his office all afternoon trying to claim "his" package.
Hawkeye sipped a long martini throughout the afternoon, watching Frank scurry in-an-out like an old terrier with a bladder problem.
It was just like the old days of the MASH 4077th, except Trapper was gone and BJ was here, and Potter was here and Henry was dead. The only thing the same was the gin, strained through 1942's best olive drab Army wool socks, and Frank, winding up into spirals of further and further idiocy, and Hawkeye. Hawkeye was still here, and not home. Even the momentary excitement of one mystery package couldn't distract him from that for long.
BJ sighed his way through a minute reading of Peg's latest letter.
"Erin's talking to her bunny again." He related, not lifting his nose from the paper. He had read and smelled the letter a dozen times already, but that was not going to stop him. If he pressed close enough, real close, he would be teleported home, if only in his mind.
"Yeah." Hawkeye responded, lazily, raising his martini to his lips, tilting it, and lowering it again without drinking. He was practicing for the next time they played drinking games with Sidney. Pick-Your-Neuroses (as it was colloquially called), was devilishly fun for diagnosing each other with Freudian terms, but the misdiagnoses were killer.
The last time they had played, he had wound up tied to his cot with his own bathrobe tie, and BJ had refused to say what he had done or why. Margaret had laughed so uproariously in his face that she had started coughing, and Potter had blushed (Potter! Blushed!) and left his breakfast unfinished. When he had gone to Sidney to demand an answer, Sidney had offered to let him play anytime, just so long as there were no Generals handy.
"Look, Beej, if you're done digesting that letter, do you want to go to dinner?" Hawkeye called, flipping over on his bunk. He'd finished short-sheeting Frank's bed an hour ago and was getting to the state of antsy that meant he needed to get up and do something. Either that, or he needed the latrine.
"What for?"
"I thought today would be a good day to die."
"It is meatloaf day." BJ deadpanned, but set down his letter, carefully sliding it back into its envelope and placing it flat on top of the novel he was reading.
The box greeted them at the table. Everyone else was busy. Potter was explaining to Margaret how the box had gotten there, and Frank was looking at it with greedy eyes, and Father Mulcahy was doing his thrice-daily blessing of the food, ignoring the box entirely.
"Has it worked yet, Father?" Hawkeye asked, setting down his tray with a clang and stepping over bench.
"Oh hello, Hawkeye." Mulcahy replied, absentmindedly, eying the slop on Hawkeye's tray with the enthusiasm of a man facing a firing squad. "Well, no one's died yet."
"There's always a first time." BJ voiced his medical opinion, taking the bench next to Hawkeye.
"They said that about the Resurrection too." Fr Mulcahy might have spoken softly, but he carried a big stick.
"Colonel," Hawkeye called down to the end of the bench, "Stop kicking me, Frank. Has anyone claimed the box yet?"
Frank opened his mouth, and there was the resounding sound of three thuds under the table. He moaned, and sort of slipped under the table like a wet noodle. Potter glared at them.
"He kicked twice." BJ explained, looking at his fork and knife as if he didn't know what to do with them and pointing at Hawkeye with his right thumb.
"Snitch."
"Boys." Potter remonstrated, setting down his own silverware with a clang. Margaret looked intent at his elbow. "No one has presented a legitimate claim to the box." He raised his voice a little, ducked to the table's level and called under it, "That includes you, Major Burns. And no—pretending to fake your mother's handwriting is inexcusable."
"Fink." It was an almost inaudible word drifting from the end of the table.
Potter glared again. BJ and Hawkeye pointed their fork and knife respectively at Fr Mulcahy. He blushed and looked apologetic. Potter sighed.
"This box isn't becoming a problem, it is a problem. Now, anybody have any bright ideas?" Potter asked, looking around the table. There was another thud. He shut his eyes and rubbed at his temple with his hand.
"We could always give it to Frank." Hawkeye suggested suggestively.
"We could give it to the North Koreans too." BJ suggested, not to be outdone in the suggestive suggestions department.
There was another thud. This time Margaret looked determinedly innocent.
"What about a raffle?" Margaret said brightly, setting down her own knife and fork. "We could raffle off tickets for a worthy cause."
"For the Orphanage?" Fr Mulcahy said, certainly last but not to be outdone.
"Fine idea. You arrange it." Potter agreed, picking up his fork. He swished it around in the mashed potatoes, and looked vaguely sickened, if resigned. "Not one word, Pierce," He pointed his fork in a vaguely threatening semi-circle, and Hawkeye slowly pulled his nose away from his meatloaf-laden fork.
"Now just be good little boys and girls and eat your dinner, children."