- In Love And War -
Chapter Fifteen: Ultimatum
Post-op was nearly empty, and we weren't expecting any more casualties for a few days, so—naturally—everyone who was anyone hitched up their skirts and skipped on over to the Officer's Club for a night of light-hearted revelry and—naturally—a small amount of debauchery. Naturally, Trapper, BJ, and I were among the last to remain, after lesser souls had drunk themselves silly and stumbled off to bed. I dragged myself up to the bar for another beer and paused to talk about God only knows what with Klinger; the conversation ended abruptly with a crash, and I swung around unsteadily to see the table I'd just come from knocked over, along with the cluster of chairs around it. And there, rolling on the floor, were Trap and BJ, both aiming punches at the other. I swore and leapt up heroically, and dashed over to grab Trapper's shoulders, trying to pull him off. He tried to twist out of my grip, pulled me off-balance, and incidentally placed my face in the area where his hand been seconds before—and, thusly, right in the line of BJ's punch. His fist caught me squarely in the eye, and I reeled back, clutching at my face, stumbling against the jukebox. Wetness seeping through my fingers—blood, oh God, he ruptured my eye, I'm blind, I'm blind, my eye's gone, I'll never see again—but I realized after a moment of panicky exploration that the blood was coming from my cheek, the skin split across my cheekbone. Apparently, my skin wasn't as thick as everyone seemed to think.
Hands were grabbing at me, Trapper asking if I was okay, BJ apologizing again and again, Trapper telling him to shut up and leave me alone and BJ issuing another threat, Klinger telling them both to back off and grabbing my shoulders, leading me outside. "I'm gonna take you to get your face looked at, Captain, you're bleeding a little. But don't worry, it doesn't look too bad, you know? You're gonna be just fine. Right in here…"
Margaret was the nurse on duty (I'd heard from Baker, who was supposed to be watching over post-op tonight, that Margaret had taken her place so that Baker could join the party at the O-Club), and she pulled me into the room where we saw to all the minor wounds like broken bones and hangnails and the wounded bystanders of bar fights. Potter, already angry at being woken from his dreams, took BJ and Trapper into his office for their second stern talking-to of the week.
Margaret gently wiped the blood away from my wound, and murmured, "It's not deep enough to need stitches. How's your eye?"
"Hurts," I mumbled, and winced as talking moved the tender muscles of my face, and whimpered as the wince had the same effect as talking.
"What were those two…children fighting about this time?"
My eye had stopped trying to flood itself, and I could actually see now, so I glanced at Margaret out of the corners of both eyes as she rummaged around for something to hold against my wound to staunch the bleeding. We hadn't spoken much since our night of intense drunkenness, and I had very little memory of just how much I'd said to her about the convoluted messiness between myself and BJ and Trapper, and she hadn't brought up any charges yet. So she either didn't remember or didn't care, or I hadn't said as much as I thought I did. Not knowing what was safe and what was taboo, I wasn't sure how to answer her.
She met my eyes, and must have seen the answer there for herself, since she sighed and patted my arm gently—which left me slightly more confused, since she didn't say anything for another few minutes. And when she did speak, I almost wished she hadn't said anything at all. "They won't stop until one of them wins, you know. They're both stubborn and determined, and they want the same thing. Neither of them will ever give up…unless you make it clear that one has won and one has lost."
My stomach dropped down to my toes and my heart decided it wanted to live in my throat from now on. Choose. She was saying I had to choose between Trapper and BJ, my best friend and my lover (Can I call him that if we haven't had sex yet?). They were like salt and pepper—I loved them both, and they were the only things that made life (or, in the case of the salt and the pepper, food) bearable here in this Hell-on-Earth. I couldn't choose—it was impossible, you couldn't have food with pepper and no salt, or vice versa. You needed both. They each had their own special something to add, and if you gave up one, you lost that something forever, and two somethings were, without a doubt, much better than one something. I wanted both somethings. "I can't choose," I whispered desperately, staring down at my feet. "It's—that's not the sort of thing you can just… It's not like picking out clothes or something like that, it's— I can't—"
"You have to do something. If they keep going like this, Colonel Potter will have one or both of them transferred. And then we could end up with two Franks." The disgust dripping from her voice almost made me smile.
"I take it you two haven't made up yet?"
"No, and we're not going to."
"Good. You deserve a lot better than him, Margaret."
"I know I do. I—"
The door was flung open, and BJ and Trapper scrambled into the room, both trying to shout questions louder than the other. I glanced over at Margaret; she smiled, patted my arm reassuringly, and slipped out of the room unnoticed. I glared from Trapper to BJ and back again until they both faded into silence, and then I pushed myself up from the chair and announced, "I'm done. You two are going to work this out from now on. I will not speak to, socialize with, or acknowledge in any way, either of you until you've come to some kind of agreement." That said, I turned and left the room.
They followed me, shouting questions, demanding answers, but I ignored them fairly easily. It was almost amusing, after a little while. I felt a little bit like the pied piper—Hawkeye, the Pied Piper of South Korea, playing my Magical Pipe of Indifference to make the Swamprats follow me. Even in the Swamp, after I'd curled up under my blankets and pulled my pillow over my head, I fell asleep to increasingly frantic questions and Frank's demands for silence.
TBC