NOTE: Not mine.
NOTE #2: I am a review whore. It's awful. Do you think my story is rubbish? If that's the case, send me rotten reviews! Do you think it is pure brilliance? Say so! Or lie! Anything! I don't care! I would just like to know if the story is being read, is all. Sigh. Please review... please ... pretty please with all the toppings.
PAIRINGS: Hawk/BJ (ish), Hawk/Trapper (in mention, or rather, in wishes as nothing happenned), Frank/Margaret
Closure, pt 5
Dear Beej,
I had a revelation the other day. Two revelations, actually. Bet you didn't know I was pregnant, much less with twins! Must be the record holder for the longest labor pains in history, five years and counting...
************
The screen door swung back into the frame, the racket of wood on wood reverberating through the sickly heat, but B.J. shivered, the sweat cooling on his body, his resolution solidifying in his mind, it was just Hawkeye sleeping one cot over, no monster, nothing different or strange or dangerous.
Without a thought as to how Hawkeye had been able to maneuver his way through the mound of filth to his bed without falling flat on his face (although he more likely than not DID fall flat on his face multiple times), B.J. silently padded across to his friend's bunk. His breath caught.
Stale lamplight splashed shadows through the tent netting, staining Hawkeye's face a sickly yellow. A mass of dark hair spread limply across his forehead, faintly brushing his twitching eyelids as he lost himself in a dream. B.J. stared, took in every detail, the subtle yet frantic scurry of Hawkeye's covered eyes, Hawkeye's gaping mouth, the lips just barely moist, the darkened hollows of skin stretched tight over fine cheekbones, the roundness of the face, the delicate flutter of eyelashes, and B.J. realized for what shouldn't have been the first time that the man asleep there, right in front of him, was nothing but muscle and body fat and bones and blood and a heart pumping away and there was nothing magical about him. He was just flesh, a bag of bones, no pixie with a magic touch who entranced every woman he met.
In fact, asleep, he was scruffy, dulled, so HUMAN, and B.J.'s stomach contracted. The magic was gone. In the sallow light, Hawkeye hadn't 'slept with' women, he 'had sex with' women, maybe he even 'screwed' women (although he didn't seem the type to just take). In that light, he seemed almost ill, frail, and so quiet. In that light, he was a human who didn't just pass through the latrines to humor the rest of the mortals around him, but who went there to clear his body of refuse... didn't heal people because it was just what he did, simple as that, but because he had studied and tested and pushed, and possibly even failed once or twice and spent the night weeping alone in a stark cold apartment with a bottle for company. He was human, and one day he would stop having sex and would wither away and no longer eat or shit or smile or fail or drink or laugh or make a face, and he, Hawkeye, that human being, would die. The thought brought a strange calming sense of comfort to B.J., which he immediately felt guilty for.
B.J. could smell gin and vomit in the warmth of Hawkeye's breath, and he noticed vaguely just how close their faces were, and was pleased with how disgusted he felt with the stench, Hawkeye's stench. Disgusted. Disgusting.
Hawkeye let out a snore, and B.J. started, tripping backwards, away from the sound and to his own cot.
************
I was furious with Trapper when he left. FURIOUS! The love of my life, leaving me just like that... a sick sort of poetic justice in it, though, the surgeon leaving the biggest hole unfixed. Trapper, the love of my life, he left me just like Carlye did, the other love of my life, and I hated him for it. How could one person do that to another? He MUST have known how I felt, I mean, he never asked any questions, right, so he must have known answers. And that's what I thought love was. I never told him how I felt. I never even kissed the man (and here you were all along thinking we were lovers. Pshaw). But he should have known anyway, after all, that's what friends do. They know each other.
And then you came. Wife, kid, brains, and I knew I could never feel for you what I felt for Trapper. Whereas Trapper made me feel comfortable enough to let me forget he was even there, you made me think... about all that I was missing... like the love you felt for your wife. Often I felt something like resentment towards you, you being Trapper's replacement, though in all the wrong places, you having a Life, and in all the right places, you being YOU, not Trapper, replacing his hands in the O.R. and his smelly socks in the Swamp, but never... in me... something.
************
Each low and breathy moan that pushed through the heated silence strained B.J.'s ears as he attempted to catch its source, its meaning, through listening, eavesdropping inside someone's head, trying to decipher the dreams that aren't meant to be deciphered, that are meant to be kept secret, forgotten, to be held in the back of one's mind and away from the black and beady judging eyes of public scrutiny. B.J. was breaking and entering, and his gut wrenched at the breach of trust, but he had to know, had to have proof, had to hear Hawkeye call out the name of an actress from last night's movie or a nurse who he propositioned only that very day... but he only caught the sound of base desire, a human being dealing with the stress and the loneliness and fear in sleep as he would never do awake... or at least a human being caught doing in sleep as he would never be CAUGHT doing awake.
Lying in his cot, B.J. wondered at this, for isn't something more truthful if it is said or done in a moment when control is foreign and the subconscious holds the reins?
Skin sliding over skin, quick surgeon's fingers pressing and rubbing just so, then a rough palm pulling, and a creak as hips twisted off the cot, towards and away from the sensation.
Whose hand was it that was controlling Hawkeye's own? Nurse Baker's? Maybe even Carlye's?
B.J. had never been religious as a child. It was just the way he grew up. But when he married Peg, devout, beautiful, kind, loving Peg who went to midnight mass on Christmas and to church every Sunday, he found no reason not to follow, if only to please his wife and partake in the atmosphere, the presence of those who had something to believe in. And often, he felt jealous.
But now, although he was never a believer, he found himself praying. And of all the things in the cosmos that he might pray for, he didn't pray for his family or for world peace or to get the hell out of this godforsaken place, but for himself; God, don't let This be, don't make things change, please God, and I promise I'll-
He felt deeply ashamed, and felt his face grow hot.
The creaking grew frenzied, feverish, the breathing shallow, the guttural moaning higher and faster and B.J.'s stomach gave a sick lurch as the air suddenly froze.
A strangled cry, a name, and B.J. closed his eyes. He would not sleep that night.
************
His entire body spasms as he comes, his white-knuckled grip of the railing being all that keeps him standing.
Cold water courses over the length of his body, splashing off of his shoulders, swirling around his feet, and he slumps over, touching his forehead to the white tiling of the shower wall, his chest heaving in an effort to catch his breath. He whispers the name that he has cried merely seconds before as the rush of cascading water roars in his ears.
And this is when you know you are lost and done for... when a past you would rather erase completely from memory comes back to haunt you, and you wish the haunting would never end, this is when you think 'I have a problem, Peg, god I'm so sorry, I wish none of it had ever happened', even though nothing DID happen. 'It's all in my head. I'm sure of it.'
Except now... now it's in B.J.'s head in another way, no changing it. It's no longer Hawkeye's problem that he fears, it's B.J.'s own. Yet another cliché in the lives of the 4077th's troubled offspring.
B.J. loves him.
And although everybody loves Hawkeye, it's not the funnyman or the healer than B.J.'s fallen for. If someone were to ask him what it is that he sees in the idiot (and God knows he's asked himself that very thing), he wouldn't be able to say; isn't able to say, yet doesn't know that he'd want to be able to say... knows that he'd be able to rationalize it away, that dirty little secret of his, make it lose all of it's mystery, like the moment when the light fell a certain way and the shadows highlighted not a bright and cynical suffering man, but a skeleton covered with flabby muscle and ripe with glistening organs and tissues, back when mortar shells dictated shifts and clocks merely covered holes in the walls.
B.J. loves Benjamin Franklin Pierce, but if asked how and when and why, he wouldn't be able to say. But doesn't that say it all?
And in thinking all of this, he feels... ...
...
B.J. turns off the water and steps out of the shower.
************
And here is the major revelation number one, the big cheese, the mother load, the grand kahuna, the two scoops of raisins, the twinkle in the eye, the bounce in the step, the moment you've been waiting for... I've been waiting for:
It's almost as though it's the other way around. Trapper, Carlye, though never the nurses, THEY were the replacements, your replacement. Carlye was mentally fulfilling, Trapper was... there... but who else but a lug like you can fill a size-thirteen gap in my life? Mind you, it hurt like hell when they left, but then, temporary fillings do ache when you lose them...
************
When a patient was unable to walk or speak or move his arms or his legs or- and yet nothing physical was wrong with him, treating the soldier like an invalid only helped to cement the 'problem', possibly make it permanent. Assuring the patient that there was something wrong with him only helped to solidify the 'injury' in his mind.
B.J. stands in front of the long bathroom mirror. Although the light of the ceiling lamp is soft, the cold silver of his reflection in the mirror prickles the fine hairs on the nape of his neck. Shivering, he stiffens his back and stares.
Hair slightly grayer slightly thinner slightly cleaner, big forehead big nose and so many teeth, nick where his calculating hands slipped and brought up a drop of his blood and much humiliation (even though there was no grinning oaf to call him on it)...
Mildly sagging chest where time took away youthful muscle and replaced it with a shaggy carpet of fur, long arms long legs, cock leaning off to the left, hair hair and hair, huge feel huge toes...
Just as he left it. He was 'B.J., Plain and Tall'. His textbook could find nothing wrong. But in seeing all this, he feels... ...
...
He loves Hawkeye. He thinks it again, and every time he repeats it in his mind, it becomes more solid, a mental medical condition that ought to be squelched out of him, exorcised like the demon it was, cured... if only he knew where the doctor who could cure it was.
************
And my second revelation, and I'll write it out quickly and send this and run away, so that I can pretend it never happened, is this:
There is a mystery about love, something even I can't try to doll up into a wholesome pretty picture, mostly because love is the ugliest thing I know of. It is incomprehensible, illogical, selfish, senseless, a royal pain in the caboose, and unspeakably hideous. Or terrifying. No one can explain it, why two people who are so different, as people are, can reach a level of psychological FULLNESS and completion so as to want to spend the rest of their lives together. No, no wait, love is beautiful, but people who say they are in love are wicked. Not bible wicked, but selfish, senseless idiots. Two people in love with each other shouldn't have to speak or have sex or touch, but just BE. Sure, sex is intoxicating and gives you a high that makes you feel on top of the world, even if that world is a stinking wet hole in South Korea, but you and I both know, as doctors, that it's just chemicals, a physical reaction to a physical action... what am I getting at?
I will never love anyone who has had sex with me.
No, no, that's not it; true, but not it. This is it (in more than one way, huh?):
Just as you can't verbalize a goodbye, I'll never be able to say I love you, B.J.
And now I'm running. Read that.
************
A frantic rapping at the bathroom door.
B.J., are you all right in there? B.J.? Alright then... Hurry up, darling, breakfast is getting cold, oh, and there's another letter from Hawkeye for you on the table. Don't take too long in there, honey.
************
Anger
Denial
Bargaining
Depression
Acceptance
To hell with it all, eh Beej?
Love, Hawkeye
TO BE CONTINUED...