It was dark, and they'd been drinking. Not in celebration of anything…no, tonight was just a drown-your-sorrows sort of night. Besides, did one need reason to drink in the middle of Korea—smelly, cold, scary Korea? Gin, beer, shots of whatever they could get their hands on. Chinese wine that tasted bad (but got the trick done)…Hawkeye and BJ, together forever at the bar in the Officer's Club. First to come, last to leave.

Hawkeye was the less sober of the two, so it was BJ who was weighted down with 150-some pounds of drunken man, which is not, you know, any picnic. They were nearly to the swamp when Hawkeye said, "Wait, wait, stop."

And he leaned over, and BJ turned away as he heard the gagging noises. The lunch was even worse coming back up.

The wind howled, and BJ knew it was about to rain again.

June. Back home they would be swimming and having barbeques and drinking lemonade. But Korea's weather will not even give them a sense of normalcy—it'd been raining for three days straight. Triage was hard in knee-deep mud…not to mention the power-flickers in OR and leaks everywhere.

"Are you okay, Hawk?" it had been more than a minute and he was still hunched over. BJ grabbed the back of his jacket, afraid he was going to fall into the mud.

"Thanks," Hawkeye muttered.

"Are you okay?" BJ asked again.

He slurred a couple of words that BJ did not understand. Not taking them to be of any importance, he patted Hawkeye on the back.

"Come on, let's go in. It's gonna rain again. We'll catch cold."

Hawkeye straightened up, leant against the tent and put his hands on his knees. "You know, maybe playing in the rain is worth catching cold."

"Words to live by," BJ said, for he was never condescending to Hawkeye, no matter how drunk he was. "You're at your smartest when you're drunk, we should keep you like this all the time."

"I'm so hot."

BJ put his hands on Hawkeye's cheeks, Hawkeye's neck, Hawkeye's forearms. "No you're not. You're cold. Let's go in. Come on."

"I used to have these patients. This couple, that had a baby," Hawkeye mumbled, wrapping his arm around BJ's shoulder to steady himself.

"Yeah?" When random memories of home made appearances at three AM after gin in the Officer's Club, BJ always listened.

"And the baby…was like 18 months old, you know," Hawkeye's head was lolling about, and there was a horrifying moment in which BJ became afraid he was about to get covered in the last of Hawkeye's lunch. Instead, Hawkeye pressed his forehead into BJ's shoulder to keep from falling forward. "But she just bit everything. It wasn't a teething thing. She was past that. She was just a little pain in the ass. Her mother's hair and hands…I couldn't imagine what it was like to breast feed her. She almost bit my finger off. Just…chomp."

BJ felt Hawkeye's teeth sinking into his neck and he pushed him back.

"Hold on, Count," he admonished, jokingly adding, "Save that stuff for behind closed doors."

"I don't ever know what happened to them. The baby's probably a…a…I can't think of the word."

"Cannibal?" BJ supplied.

"Yeah. Is it bad?"

"Well, I don't know about you, but I've never met a cannibal I didn't like."

"I mean, they were my patients," Hawkeye went on, ignoring the crack. BJ had just gotten him through the door. "I should know these things."

"You can't help it. It's the army's fault. You'll find out when you go home," BJ pushed Hawkeye down onto the bed and began removing his boots. Truth be told, he would have passed out on top of the covers, boots on, and woken up with a big enough hangover that boots in bed seemed trivial. But it was monsoon season. They were caked with mud, and BJ knew that if the roles were reversed, Hawkeye would do it for him. Had done it for him, many times. They took care of each other—some paternal instinct, or something. BJ didn't wax poetic on it.

"This is home, Beej."

"This is not home. This is just a hellhole that we call home because 'home' is shorter than 'hellhole'," BJ was getting to his feet, ready to fall into his own bed for the night. But Hawkeye was not done talking, held onto his friend's wrist tightly.

"Come here, Beej," it was a command, and BJ leaned in close, ready for one last whispered confession before he passed out. But Hawkeye said nothing, just quickly grabbed BJ's face, giving the other man no time to stop him.

In his condition, Hawkeye fumbled. Twice he kissed BJ's nose, then his chin…had even grossly misaimed and got a mouthful of dog tags. And BJ had no idea what was going on until Hawkeye actually found his lips.

Strange to kiss another man. Hawkeye tasted like liquor and vomit and the strange flavor of human breath. No soft curves against BJ's chest, no shapely, pink, feminine mouth. Just jagged Hawkeye, and the mud on his pants was now the mud on BJ's pants. Hawkeye, whose stubble was painful, whose body was hard…but whose hands still felt somehow tender on the back of his neck.

It was over quickly, just as soon as BJ realized what was happening. And then he slunk under his own covers, and Hawkeye fell into a deep sleep. Tomorrow he would not remember, but BJ would not soon forget. Outside, the sky broke.

---

Fin