Author's Note: Goly gosh, it has been FOREVER! I had a couple of pieces I wanted to write in between these two, hence the delay, but I couldn't get my brain round to it somehow, so I've decided to fit them in later somewhere. I should warn you all that this particular chapter is the tiniest bit slashy, but it's nothing explicit, and you may read it howsoever you choose. :-)
It is winter, 1950, the first annual 4077th Thanksgiving dress up party, and the surgeons have banded together to contribute a pantheon of Greek gods to the proceedings. Hawkeye's duties as chief surgeon being minimal at present, it is he who is left in charge of the minor details. Henry is easily settled as Neptune, a trident and fishing net being slightly more obtainable than an eagle and a thunderbolt. Hawkeye has, in a stroke of his usual brilliance, cast himself as the wine-god Dionysus, thus ensuring that the continuous flow of his favourite elixir is entirely justified. For a mischievous moment, he toys with the idea of Margaret as Aphrodite, emerging pink and seductive from the sea, but is forced to regretfully abandon this concept when her combination of outraged screeches and hurling of slippers threaten to bring down upon his head the greater power of General Clayton. He takes a certain delight in pronouncing to Frank that he is the perfect Haephestos, hurled form Olympus as a baby for his ugliness, but he does not trust Frank with a suture, let alone a heavy smith's mallet, and he tires of Frank's blustering protests, so dismisses the idea.
Trapper, Hawkeye finds, is not so easy to place. He could be Apollo, with the slender surgeon's hands and golden curls, though he admittedly has no lyre, only a beaten-up guitar. He could be the fleet-footed thief Mercury, mischief incarnate, quicksilver and laughter, but somehow that is not right either. He considers for a moment casting Trapper as one of the warriors, but he is neither a Hercules nor an Achilles. He could be Hector or Patroclus perhaps, but something in him baulks at the idea of Trapper wielding a sword. Finally, he has it. Eros. Not the chubby, fluttering cupid of Rome, but the ancient spirit of love, slender and lithe, wildly, frighteningly beautiful. Raw physicality and violent passion, gaunt waist and narrow jutting hips, all hard muscle, bone and sharp angles... Dangerous... yes... But this is Hawkeye, and there is a strange allure in the danger, a potency which he has always been powerless to resist.
Trapper grumbles and moans about having to wear a loincloth in the middle of a Korean winter, but Hawkeye is insistent. He himself is resplendent in purple toga and sandals, garlanded with the closest Korea can come to vine leaves, bottle in hand, and lecherous grin firmly in place. Henry's borrowed garden fork is a sad excuse for a trident, but the precarious rhinestone in his belly-button more than makes up for it. Spearchucker declines the chance to, as he puts it, "freeze his buns off," instead opting for a rather unexciting, but undoubtedly warmer striped poncho. Ginger is stunning in flowing black and gold as a courtesan, Zale a somewhat unimaginative football player, Jukebox Spalding a dashing mobster with felt hat and cigar. Klinger is a true confection of white gauze and silk as Marilyn Monroe, Hotlips a revelation as General McArthur, Igor a scrawny, long-legged Superman. Radar, for some reason best known to himself, attempts an imitation of what appears to be a Christmas tree, while Margie, Nancy, and Barbara are Bo Peep, Goldilocks, and Red Riding Hood respectively. Frank, with some slight coercion, is forced to attend dressed in a cardboard box which Captains Pierce and McIntyre take the sensible precaution of lashing to the central pole in the mess tent.
At a quarter past drunken five, there are few survivors. The gods of sex and alcohol weave their staggering way swampwards, bereft now of both bow and bottle, leaning a little too heavily upon each other's shoulders. Blood rises, hot and enticing, alcohol fueling the fire. Through a shifting haze, Hawkeye sees Trapper's eyes, glassy and unfocused, feels the stale, gin-sweet breath, staggers beneath the weight as Trapper collapses earthwards, sprawls upon the dirt floors where he watches, mesmerised, the bare lightbulb swinging on its roped orbit above his head, hears the scratching of the gramophone needle as the table turns, around, and around... He wakes in a tangle of limbs and discarded beer cans, to find his head resting on the muddy floor, dusty golden curls sharing the same pillow.