The jeep bearing BJ and Hawkeye comes to a screeching halt in front of pre-op about three minutes later and BJ has never been so happy to see a place in his life. On any other day, the sight of the tent gives him heartburn. Today, he would kiss the damn thing if someone would let him. But there's no time for irrational displays of affection like that. Not now. Not with Hawkeye all but bleeding out on the litter beside him.

BJ jumps from the back of the jeep, cradling his injured side as things shift, and bellows for help.

The space outside the tent is crawling with people in various states of distress. Triage has been set up, but it looks like most of the injuries are superficial. Despite what his concussed brain thought at the time, there probably weren't that many people up on that hill with him. He spies mostly head wounds and embedded shrapnel, and the line for the OR is blissfully nonexistent. Good , maybe Hawkeye won't have to wait after all.

BJ starts unstrapping the litter from the back of the gurney just as a corpsman with half his face covered in bloody bandages runs up to help.

"Take that other end. I've got his head."

They're halfway to the pre-op door when it suddenly bursts open. BJ has to do a double take when a rather elegant Rita Hayworth look alike, resplendent in pearl earrings and pink evening gown, appears dramatically in the doorway.

"BJ Hunnicutt? Is that you?" Klinger singsings as he sashays out into the warm Korean evening. "I thought I recognized your dulcet tones."

He's smiling as he approaches but that smile quickly falters when the cross dressing Corporal finally gets his first good look at BJ and the litter he carries. Like flipping a switch, Klinger goes from section 8 to well-trained soldier in the blink of an eye.

"Holy Toledo! Is that…"

"I found him," BJ says desperately. Klinger will know. Klinger will understand. He will get him what he needs. "Help me get him inside."

The evening gown clad Corporal is all business after that, and works quickly to clear a path for BJ and the gurney.

BJ's earlier call for help did not go unnoticed and people have begun to gather. They whisper and point. Hawkeye's name hisses out in the night, but BJ hasn't the time to care. He's so close to his final destination. Somehow it feels like, if only he can get Hawkeye into pre-op, then the tides will change and all this will end in something other than heartbreak.

Pre-op is what he needs. Lights, and space, and people who know what they're doing.

BJ cleans his hands in a sink at the opposite end of the room as Klinger and the on duty nurses prep Hawkeye. He is transfixed as grey water tinged with pink swirls in the basin and then disappears down the drain. He watches it go, breath hitching in his throat when it dawns on him that that's Hawkeye's blood he's washing off his hands. Hawkeye's . It's enough to close his windpipe as he grips the sides of the basin with white knuckles and bowed head.

It's too much. All of this is too damn much. His injuries…. Hawkeye's condition. Everything is battering at his hatches, threatening to tear him apart. But he can't. He can't let it. BJ has weathered storms like this before and he can weather them again. He's Hawkeye's only hope at this point, and he can't afford to break apart now. He needs to board up and batten down. Pull himself together and act like the world class surgeon he knows he is. That Hawkeye told him he was. He's gotta reach down into that bag of tricks he brought with him to the war, the one he keeps hidden and to himself, and pull off one hell of a miracle.

By the time BJ has collected himself enough to turn around, the nurses have Hawkeye stripped bare and laid out on the table. But they're just standing there in silence. BJ is about to yell at them, ask them what in the hell they're thinking when it dawns on him what this moment really is. He snaps his mouth shut and takes a selfish moment to join them.

They're in shock. And they should be. This is Hawkeye lying here before them. The 4077th's own comedic relief. The camp funny man, perpetual and undeniable, striped down to his barest form. Naked, vulnerable, and near death. BJ is overcome by an irrational need to shake his bunk mate, demand he wake up and quit the joke. Because it's not funny. Nothing about this is funny. But BJ won't shake him, because it won't do any good. There are no jokes left in South Korea.

Every part of Hawkeye's body that wasn't covered by his uniform is layered in black soot. Heavy soot so dark you can't even see the skin beneath. What flesh isn't covered in that inky residue is marred by burns; angry, glistening, pus filled patches that glisten under the overhead lights. Something has torn a grotesque hole in his side as well and blood is welling up and then pooling beneath. Rounding out the entire unsettling scene is the compound fracture to his left tibia and the pristine white bone that can be seen poking out of the skin. It's gut-wrenching, soul-shattering, and seemingly insurmountable. It reminds him of the General's son who never should have made it past triage at the front. Hawkeye never should have made it past triage, and that thought has BJ's previous nausea and dizziness resurfacing. For the first time in a long time, he's doubting his own abilities as a doctor.

I can't do this.

But he has to.

The room is not frozen in place for long, though it sure feels that way. A nurse steps forward and throws a respectful sheet over Hawkeye's lower half. Placing a hand on Hawkeye's chest, she sighs and then squares her shoulders. That is what stirs the medical professionals in them once again. That is what jump starts the world and starts it moving again. Starts BJ moving again. He dons a pair of gloves and presses the bell of a borrowed stethoscope to Hawkeye's chest with shaking hands.

"Hawk? Hawkeye? Can you hear me?" No response. He orders blood and tests and drugs and then backs away from the gurney to let his team work.

They're like a well-oiled machine at this point. Another unexpected byproduct of this war; one born of necessity and blood. Because mistakes in a MASH can spell death, so often do spell death, and they all seem to realize that they can't afford to make any mistakes tonight.

The enormity of what BJ is about to undertake hits him hard and he stumbles backwards a bit and into an empty gurney sitting behind him. He runs into it and the crash it makes when it hits the wall makes everyone turn and look at him. BJ can feel his face flush under their scrutiny. It's like everyone in the room is seeing him for the first time. Really seeing him. They're noticing the bandages on the side of his face and neck, the fact that he's filthy and barely able to stand on his own two feet. Even Klinger abandons what he's doing to come over to BJ and ask him if he's ok. He pushes away from the gurney, determined to prove to everyone that he's fine, that he can handle this, but his body apparently has other plans. His knees give out beneath him as the room dips and tries to tip him over. Klinger saves him from a date with the floor at the last second.

"Why don't we find you some place to sit down for a second, eh Hunnicutt?" Klinger suggests with a wry smile and a wink to the room. The display seems to convince the nurses that the situation is under control and they resume their work without comment. Klinger seems serious about making him sit and tugs BJ forward and towards the scrub room. Seeing as how the Corporal just saved his butt, and after one last glance over at Hawkeye, he reluctantly follows. His team will take care of things. They can handle this and he trusts them to get his friend from pre-op and into the OR. Besides, the scrub room was his next stop anyway.

Klinger is uncharacteristically quiet as he eases BJ down onto one of the long benches they keep in the scrub room. He hovers there, just watching as BJ wraps his arms around his middle and squeezes his eyes shut. The sudden change in altitude and position has aggravated his injuries and tightened his chest. He can practically hear Klinger wringing his hands in worry, but BJ doesn't have the strength left to open his eyes and assure the poor Corporal that he's fine. Besides, it would probably be a lie.

"I'm gonna…" Klinger eventually says, "go get you some clean scrubs." He's gone before BJ can even open his eyes and remind the man that he has all the clean scrubs he needs right here.

Alone for the first time in hours, BJ takes a moment to let out a breath and run shaky hands through his gritty hair. He feels terrible and risks a glance at himself in one of the mirrors above the sinks across the room. What he sees there shocks him so badly he has to do a double take just to make sure his eyes weren't playing tricks on him. He hardly recognizes the man staring back at him from the glass. The one whose face is swollen in places and covered in bandages everywhere else. Bandages, he notes, that are saturated with blood, and so completely that some of it has trickled down his cheek and soaked into his collar. Desperate eyes, devoid of humor, stare back at him as he reaches up to touch the side of his face in shock. He had no idea it was this bad. No wonder people have been looking at him so strangely all day. He's barely recognizable. He looks like one of those injured people he saw on the fog. Shell shocked and haunted. He looks like a ghost. He looks like a goddamn patient.

BJ is still staring at himself in the mirror when the swinging door separating the scrub room from the OR bangs open. He snaps his head around, ignoring the dizziness and pain it causes, just in time to see Colonel Potter standing there. His scrub cap is slightly askew and bits of white hair poke out in places. His face is red with what BJ can only imagine is indignant anger - anger aimed at him, anger he deserves.

Their gazes meet in the center of the room and BJ half expects to see sparks erupt, it's so intense. He steels himself for the tirade he knows his coming. The horrible truths and heated words that are headed his way. The ones he won't try to deny because anything cruel Potter has to say to him right now will be true, deserved.

But the words never come.

Potter takes one look at BJ's bruised and battered face and then all the bluster seems to go right out of him. But while his ire might dissolve, it's replaced by something else. Something BJ can't handle at the moment as he drops his gaze to the floor in defeat or exhaustion, he's not sure which. Potter mutters some ancient expletive under his breath and then disappears back into the OR. The door snaps shut behind him and for a moment, BJ can't help but wonder if he didn't just hallucinate that entire exchange. Has to seriously question whether or not it was real, or just a figment of his imagination, because that was not at all how he expected his first meeting with Potter to go. The state he's in, maybe it was just a hallucination.

Sitting here in the quiet of the scrub room, things seem to be compounding fast, and he's not entirely sure how to stop it, short of a shot of adrenaline directly to the heart. In addition to his injuries, the heaviness of what's happened, of what he's about to do, is hovering over him. It's testing his defenses, looking for any weak spots it can exploit to gain entry. But like before, he can't let it in. He still has hours of surgery ahead of him. He needs to be able to scrub up and save his friend. Save Hawkeye, who's lying there, bleeding out on a gurney at his empty station in the OR, waiting for BJ to come and save him, to be the hero of this story... The only thing is…. he's not entirely sure he can stand up anymore.

BJ slumps forward and cradles his aching head in his hands as moisture burns at the corners of his eyes. He can't give up. He can't let his body quit on him. Not yet.

Potter finds him in much this same position however many minutes later but BJ can't bring himself to lift his head and look at his commanding officer again. Potter doesn't seem to expect it and sits down next to him on the bench. It bows slightly beneath his weight.

"I need to ask you a question, Hunnicutt," he says quietly, though there's an edge to his voice BJ's never heard before. "I need to know if you're alright. Be honest with me now, Son."

BJ contemplates Potter's question. Physically he feels like absolute crap. The adrenaline that has been fueling him ever since he found Hawkeye near the plane crash is starting to wear off and he can feel the places where he's injured throbbing in time with his heart. Emotionally, he can sense the panic trying to claw its way out of his throat but so far, he's been able to keep it at bay. Other than that, he can still function. He can still think straight. He might even have a marathon surgery session left in him somewhere. In fact, he has to. Hawkeye's life depends on it.

BJ lifts his head, swipes at the wetness near his eyes - the tracks he'll never admit are tears - and answers the question. "I'm fine."

That 'something' from earlier flits across the Colonel's face again. Disappointment? Betrayal, maybe? Whatever it is, it makes BJ sick to his stomach.

"I thought as much," Potter sighs, his mouth turning into that thin line it always becomes when he's faced with something (or someone) he doesn't particularly care for. But before BJ can worry about it, someone else comes into the scrub room via the OR door. BJ glances over to see that it's Margaret. The tired looking nurse pulls the surgical mask away from her face but BJ can't tell what she's thinking. And he's too exhausted and in too much pain to try.

"Margaret here is going to take you over to post-op and give you a proper exam," Potter begins and BJ nearly loses it. He tries to get up from the bench, to plead his case on his own two feet with fists clenched, but he's too far gone at this point to get very far. All he can manage is an angry scoot forward.

"You can't just..."

But Potter puts up a hand. "I can and I will, so shut your piehole, Hunnicutt!"

BJ's eyes go wide for a second. There's no real malice behind the Colonel's words, but they still sting like a slap in the face. He's not sure Potter has ever spoken to him like this before.

"Do you have any idea how many rules you broke today? How many people you let down with that little stunt of yours? We thought you were dead until Margaret showed up!"

BJ looks down at his hands, dizzy with the implications of those words. The tunnel vision he's been operating with since the landing pad is beginning to expand and it's making his head hurt. He hadn't thought. He hadn't thought of anything but Hawkeye since this whole nightmare began. Not himself, and certainly not others. BJ can feel the moment his battered defenses start to crumble.

"Winchester and I were up to our eyeballs in wounded! But you wouldn't know anything about that, would you Hunnicutt, because you were too busy galavanting all over hell's half acre looking for Pierce when there was an entire camp out there doing the exact same thing! You left us in the lurch! I had to call reinforcements in from the 8063rd, and for what?"

"I had to…"

"I'M NOT FINISHED!" Potter all but yells, and BJ snaps his mouth shut. He's never seen his CO this angry before, not even when he's drowning in red tape and self-important Army bureaucrats. It rearranges something inside of BJ rather suddenly. He does his best to do right by his commanding officer. He owes the man that much at least. The Colonel has done so much for him over the years, and gotten him out of so many scrapes. He can't stand the idea that he's let him down, that it really was betrayal he saw in his CO's eyes a moment ago. BJ goes back to staring at his hands.

With military discipline that would have made Frank Burns jealous, Potter reins his anger back in and speaks levely again. Though BJ can tell in his periphery that the Colonel's face remains slightly flushed and his words are short and clipped.

"Now, the BJ Hunnicutt I know is a smart, level-headed young surgeon who wouldn't dream of doing what you did today. So the only logical explanation I can come up with for why you abandoned all reason is because you are so concussed you didn't know any better. And if you are so concussed that you didn't know any better, then you belong in a cot in the hospital tent and not bumbling around my OR mucking things up. I won't have it, Hunnicutt!"

BJ can feel the exact moment when Potter's words raze to the ground all the fortifications he's managed to build up around himself with sutures and stubbornness. His CO is right - about everything. BJ's place was here. He should have let Radar bring him back to the OR to be looked at. If not that, then he should have obeyed Margaret and gone back with her in the Jeep with the helicopter pilot. There were people up on that hill looking for survivors. They would have found Hawkeye eventually. He was so blinded by his need to make sure his bunk mate was ok that he forgot, just for a moment, to be a doctor. He broke his oath and that realization is enough to rob him of all his remaining strength. What Potter says next is nearly his undoing.

"We needed you in the OR today," his CO says quietly as Margaret busies herself with something across the room and pretends not to be listening. "I needed your hands.

"You let me down, Son. I expected so much more from you." BJ's not sure which version of Potter he hates more: the one who was yelling at him earlier, or this soft spoken one with betrayal in his voice.

BJ hangs his head in defeat, pulling in a shuddering breath that shakes his entire frame. Every nerve raw and sparking within him. "I shouldn't even be here."

Potter surprises him by placing a hand lightly on his shoulder. "I understand, BJ. I really do. I'd give my eyeteeth most days to be back home with my Mildred, but that's not going to happen. At least not any time soon. I've made my peace with that, and you should too. Put whatever this is away. Stow it under your bunk and do the job. Then maybe, if we're lucky, we can come out the other side of this thing alive and whole." Potter squeezes his shoulder gently. "But that's not going to happen if you keel over on us at any moment. You look like death warmed over, Hunnicutt. Let Margaret take your over to post op to get checked out. I'm not fond of my surgeons running around camp looking like they've just been trampled by a herd of wild horses."

"And Hawkeye?" BJ asks pitifully, hating how hoarse and tired his voice sounds.

"Winchester and I will take care of Pierce."

BJ nearly rolls his eyes at the thought of how insufferable Charles will be if he pulls off the miracle BJ was supposed to perform and saves Hawk. Yet for all his faults, Charles is a capable surgeon and he and Potter are the only ones BJ would trust to work on Hawkeye if he can't. At least it's not one of the unknown reinforcements brought in from the 8063rd.

"This is not up for debate, Hunnicutt," Potter says, mistaking his silence for defiance. "Go with Margaret, and I'll let you know the minute anything changes with our boy."

BJ nods and the Colonel slaps his thighs with his hands. That's it , the move implies, case closed . Nothing BJ says now will alter the course they've set.

Potter rises from the bench and heads for the OR door but pauses before pushing through. "Let me make one thing perfectly clear, Hunnicutt. If I so much as catch a whiff of you giving Major Houlihan a hard time about getting checked out, I'll have you on latrine duty for the rest of your career. Do I make myself clear?"

"Crystal." BJ mumbles and Potter storms out of the room. The threat is not an idle one and Margaret is eyeing him from near the sinks like she's just loving the idea of seeing him up to his keister in refuse for the rest of the war. A fitting punishment for his numerous crimes. She has to be angry at him. He's taking her away from her job, from the OR. From helping Hawkeye and the rest of the wounded. And yet, she's doing her best not to show it. She can probably sense how close he is to the edge. How one harsh word from her right now might reduce him down to a quivering pile of ash. And it would. It really would.

"Can you help me?" He asks quietly after it becomes obvious he's not going to be able to get up from the bench without assistance. Margaret's face goes blank again. She slides into that state of clinical detachment they all seemed to have mastered here at the 4077th and reaches out to start helping him up without comment. She's a warm and strong presence beside him but he doesn't lean on her. He won't lean on her. He doesn't deserve it. v