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He was home. He didn't know how it happened, but suddenly he found himself at the airport, waiting for his family. The brisk Northern California air seemed much colder than usual, but it didn't matter: he was home.
A tug on his pant leg turned his attention downward. "Daddy?" a hesitant voice asked. He saw a petite, inquisitive face staring up at him expectantly, as though it was quite normal to walk up to grownups and ask such a question.
He smiled and knelt down next to her. "Yeah, kiddo, I'm here," he told her, hugging her gently. To his surprise her skin was frozen to the touch; he shivered, but gripped her tighter.
"Where's your mother? You didn't run off on your own, did you?" he asked, glancing up to look for his wife. He found her standing off to the side, watching them silently. She didn't seem happy to see him, and as he stood up he could see she had been crying. "Peg?" He took a step closer, but she only backed away.
"Why weren't you here?" she asked him, her voice trembling. "You could have done something."
"What?" He took another step towards her; she stepped back again.
"You should have been here," she insisted. "She wouldn't have died."
He stopped, confused. "Erin? But she's right over there." He gestured in the child's direction, only to find she had disappeared. Panicked, he ran to where he had first seen her. "Erin?" he called out, searching the area to no avail. "Erin!"
In the background he heard Peg say, "Didn't Hawkeye give you the letter?" He glanced up at her again, but instead of his wife he saw Hawkeye standing over an operating table, working on a patient. The airport dissolved like mist and he found himself standing once again in the O.R., standing over a wounded soldier, surrounded by the sights and sounds of war. A biting wind blew through the tent, chilling the marrow in his bones.
Suddenly something sharp and flat cut into his hands, making them bleed. He discovered he was holding a letter addressed to him from a hospital in San Francisco. His blood flowed down the edges of the letter as he scanned the first sentence: "Dr. Hunnicut, it is with deep regret we inform you of your daughter's passing..."
That's impossible. He read it again, the strength rapidly draining from his body. "That's impossible," he repeated aloud, hearing the desperation in his voice. Everyone stopped working and watched him silently. His stunned gaze came to rest on Hawkeye, whose eyes met his with a guilty light. "She can't be dead," he informed the figure of his friend, ignoring the blood pulsing down his hands and dripping onto the floor. "I just saw her—she can't be dead!"
Am I losing my mind?
He closed his eyes and pressed his fingers to his temples; his head was spinning. The letter's words echoed in his head, and he dropped to his knees in a pool of his own blood on the OR floor. "Oh, God...Erin," he said softly, scalding tears raw against the bitter chill. "I'm so sorry. I tried so hard—they wouldn't let me come home. I wanted to see you...wanted to help. I'm a doctor, God damn it, I should have...I couldn't even call your mother..."
He leaned his back against the leg of the operating table, trying to bring his tears under control. The only sound in the room was the constant drip of his blood hitting the floor. From somewhere above the table he heard the same sweet voice that spoke to him earlier. "Thank you, Daddy...goodbye."
He opened his eyes and saw a trail of tiny scarlet shoeprints leading from the pool of blood around him to the doors of the O.R. Glancing up, he saw Erin standing next to Peg in the doorway. The child smiled and waved cheerfully at him, then the pair turned and walked out.
He tried to stand, but slipped on the bloody floor. "Erin, wait!" he pleaded. "Hold on!" A cold wind whipped through the area, raising goosebumps on his arms. He struggled to get up, but his body wouldn't move. A single thought kept pounding in his head, matching the rhythm of his heartbeat: it can't end like this.
"Wait!"
The sun, it seemed, had given up on Korea. As night quietly slipped away to the other side of the world, a pale sky slowly stretched its way across the horizon. But thick clouds made it impossible to see the normally colorful sunrise, and the camp was greeted instead by dismal gray hues to match their collective mood.
Hawkeye observed this gradual change through the dim plastic window his tent's winter covering provided. He let out a small grunt of irritation; even the weather was against their presence. Someone walked by outside, murmuring "damn" over and over, echoing his thoughts. He sat in silence, watching B.J. shift restlessly in his sleep. In fact he had done so for most of the night, since anything resembling a peaceful rest had clearly abandoned him—and the tension etched on his friend's face told him he wasn't the only one.
The events from last night weighed heavily on him. Whatever his reasons had been for hiding the letter from B.J., it was a moot point now. He wasn't sure what scared him more: the thought that his best friend's daughter was in danger, or the thought that B.J. might not be his best friend any longer. Either way, he knew he was going to find out today—and the realization didn't bring any comfort.
B.J. rolled onto his side and murmured something Hawkeye couldn't make out. After a second his hand spasmed around the blanket, pulling it taut. "Wait..."
Pierce started to respond, but noticed the man was still asleep. He leaned back in bed and rubbed his arms to warm them up, making a mental note to beg, borrow or steal something flammable in the near future. Maybe Charles had another stash of stationary somewhere...
He heard a low rumble in the distance, but ignored it. As it grew steadily louder, so did his irritation. "Now I'm hearing things," he muttered. "I have to be, because there's absolutely no way that sound can possibly be what I'm hearing out there."
The sound was unmistakable now: grinding gears, steel and rubber crunching through the frozen dirt...
"There's no way," he repeated stubbornly.
"Attention, all medical personnel. Two jeeps entering the compound. No rest for the frozen."
Hawkeye swore and leapt to his feet. "How?! How did they manage to find, let alone shoot at each other?" He turned to rant more in B.J.'s direction, but found the man hadn't moved. One hand still clutched the blanket in a death grip; his eyebrows were knit together as though he were solving an unseen puzzle.
After a moment's hesitation, Hawkeye gently shook him. "Beej, we gotta go. Santa sent us our Christmas presents early." B.J. turned away from the voice, muttering to himself.
Gathering his courage, Pierce shook him again. "Come on, sunshine. If we're late we'll have to take whatever's left on the clearance rack." He tried to tug the blanket out of the man's hands, but B.J.'s grip was firm. Hawkeye grunted and stood back. "You're harder to wake up than a lot of women I've met, you know that?"
Just as he reached down a third time, B.J.'s eyes flew open and he practically jumped into a sitting position. "Wait!"
Hawkeye yelped in surprise, stepping back.
Blinking rapidly, B.J. turned in the direction of the jeep's roar outside; the redness of his eyes had only lightened a little, revealing to all who saw him what kind of night he'd had. He glanced down at the blanket entwined in his stiff fingers and slowly released it. His heart was racing, but he couldn't figure out why. Something about Erin, and bloodied shoeprints...he gazed at his hands, trying to remember, but the dream was already fading. Maybe it was better that way.
Hawkeye instantly recognized the hazy confusion that lingered on his friend's face. I guess I look like that too when I've just had one hell of a nightmare. "Come on, Beej," he said softly. "They're waiting for us onstage." He stretched out a hand towards B.J. just as the other man glanced up.
B.J.'s expression suddenly struck Pierce with an overwhelming sense of de ja vu. There was something in those eyes he hadn't seen from his friend for a very long time, something both heartwrenching and oddly touching in its own way. It caught Hawkeye off-guard as they stared at each other in silence. I remember now...I remember the last time he looked like that.
B.J. gazed blankly at the man standing before him. All at once the previous day's events came rushing back to him, along with the despair. In a flash, the strange look that had halted Hawkeye in his tracks was gone. He threw off his blanket and staggered to his feet, not seeing the hand Pierce offered. Without a second glance in the man's direction he roughly snatched his jacket off the floor and struggled into it, clearly fighting the start of a painful hangover every step of the way. Within seconds he was outside, a brisk blast of air whipping through the area as the door closed.
Hawkeye clenched his outstretched hand and lowered it. The cold outside was nothing compared to the bitter, icy strands that wrapped themselves around his heart. He couldn't recall the last time B.J. was ever so angry. Not even when they were so fed up with each other he'd moved out of the tent did his friend ever give him the silent treatment.
He rubbed his arm absently and shivered. Sure, he understood why B.J. was angry at him. And if the tables were turned, he might have even done the same. But language was the only way he survived in a place that made no sense. Communication was his single release valve—the one way he could let others know he was there, he was alive, and he wasn't going to sit idly as the world slipped into madness. Not many people understood that about him, but B.J. did. From the day they first met he'd always understood. For him to deny that now was...
He closed his eyes and shivered again, shaken by far more than the freezing temperature. Slipping on his jacket, he prepared to meet the icy reception...both out in the compound and inside the O.R.
There had to be a way to make it up to B.J.—he just wasn't sure how.