- In Love And War -
Chapter Twenty-Eight: Normalcy

Sometimes—scratch that, most of the time—I had an enormous amount of trouble falling asleep. I was usually thinking a dozen different thoughts at any one time, and I always had to go through the difficult process of shutting down those thoughts before I could sleep. Unless I was completely and truly exhausted, I usually ended up staring up at the ceiling for about an hour before I finally convinced my brain to shut itself down. But sleep was proving particularly elusive on this night. I pushed myself up on my elbows and asked softly, "Is anyone else awake?"

"No," Trapper muttered, and BJ mumbled something into his pillow. Frank continued his whimpering snores.

Sidney chuckled. "And I thought I was the only one."

"Who wants to go for a midnight stroll?" I suggested hopefully, sitting up.

"Sure," BJ mumbled. "Wake me up at dawn."

"No," Trapper repeated.

Sidney's cot creaked, and he laughed again. "I'll go with you, Hawkeye."

Not exactly what I'd been planning, but Sidney was good company, and another soul-searching talk with him certainly wouldn't hurt anything. So we wandered up to the chopper pad—a very good place for privacy—and sat down Indian-style, facing each other. "So how do you feel?" he asked.

"Pretty good. A little sleepy, but there's too much going on in my head to sleep."

"What are you thinking about?"

"Today. And…about how much of an ass I was. A dumbass, a jackass, just a general ass—or a General's ass, if you prefer. Is there a 'stupidass'? No that's stupid-head. I've always liked that insult. I'll have to remember to use it then next time Frank says something stupid." I thought about that and then revised it to, "The next time Frank says something." I backed up the train of thought and redirected it more towards where I'd meant it to go originally. "I panicked, and I didn't think things through—I reacted all with emotion and no logic. Then again, isn't that the very essence of me—emotion without logic." I grinned at him. "This is some pretty deep stuff, Sid. You should be writing it down."

He returned the smile. "I'll remember it."

"My brain doesn't seem to have much control over what I do—I usually follow my heart or my gut." With a chuckle, I added, "I think my brain might hate me."

"Well, I might start to hate you, too, if I had to live inside your head my whole life. Just getting a glimpse inside there is almost overwhelming."

"I'll choose to take that as a compliment to my individuality and inner twistiness. Outer twistiness, too. That's why you like me so much, isn't it? You have to actually work to understand me, since I'm so twisted up. I like to think of myself as a contradiction in terms."

"You are that," he agreed, seemingly content to let me ramble on.

"I don't like to be understood. I like to keep people guessing, so they never know what I'll do next. Mysterious, you know? The allure of the unknown. Did I ever tell you about Carlye? She knew me too well. Even when I was completely unpredictable, she could predict it, somehow. I started to hate her for it, after a while—I didn't like that she knew me so well, that she knew me better than I did. It made me feel unoriginal, normal—and you know how much I hate that. I'm…worried BJ might end up knowing me too well. I want to let him in, but if I do, I might start to hate him."

He didn't answer right away, probably thinking through his reply. He, unlike me, didn't enjoy veering off on tangents. He liked to have a set path for the conversation. "In my humble experience with a marriage that's lasted five years now, I find that sort of connection to be exhilarating. A connection of two bodies, minds, and souls so deep one can anticipate what the other will do, say, or think before it happens. I live for those moments when my wife and I can just look at each other and know we're thinking the same thing, because it reminds me why I love her—she knows me more deeply than any other person, and still loves me in spite of all the things she knows about me. To know that another living person cares enough for you to want to know you completely…"

"That's not a bad way of looking at it," I said thoughtfully, leaning back on my elbows and stretching my legs out, looking up at the stars and the moon crawling slowly across the dark sky.

Sidney shrugged. "It comforts me."

"I suppose I've aged a bit since residency—if you can believe it, I was even weirder then than I am now. Carlye and I kinda had a love-hate relationship, and a lot of the time we were just looking to piss each other off as much as possible so we could have make-up sex. Subconsciously, I was always looking for reasons to hate her, I guess, and her knowing me so well was the biggest one. But I'm different now, personality-wise and all, and I don't want to hate BJ, subconsciously or otherwise. And maybe it's like you say, maybe it'll be good to have someone know all my faults and still love me in spite of them."

"Or still love you for them."

"Or that," I agreed. "Another thing—do you think it's possible that Trapper and BJ will ever really like each other? I mean, there's just something between them—jealousy, or something like that—and I'm not sure they can ever get over it."

"I think they can," he said, and his confidence surprised me. "They have to realize that you're able to care for them both equally, albeit in different ways. And once they realize that, it's just a matter of establishing common ground, which I don't think should be too difficult. I'll take care of them," he promised.

"You're a good friend, Sidney. I want to thank you for all your help."

"It's a pleasure, Hawkeye. What kind of a friend would I be if I didn't help you?"

"Yeah, well…you can't tell me you didn't have any doubts; I mean, I saw your eyes, Sid—you weren't sure about me for a little while there."

"Would you believe me if I said that I was uncertain about myself rather than you? I wasn't sure I'd be able to help you as much as you needed me to."

"I'll buy that halfway but…come on. I was pretty far gone. You must've been just a little uncertain, once." I held my three fingers up in the Boy Scout sign. "I won't tell, promise. Doctor-patient confidentiality."

He sighed, a grudging smile playing across his lips. "All right—yes, I was a little worried. You seemed to have no interest in helping yourself, and there was only so much I could do. The worst was not knowing what had caused your…situation. But we've both recovered."

"So we have." I stretched my arms towards the sky, yawning. "Thanks, Sid, you've managed to nearly shut my brain down. I think I hear my bed calling me—or maybe that's just the voices in my head. Is it normal to have four people talking inside my head?"

"With you, Hawkeye, I wouldn't presume to know what normal was."

I grinned. "That makes me feel a lot better."

Morning came too early, and brought with it wounded. Potter tried to tell me to go back to the Swamp and get some rest, but I argued that with BJ still off his feet, Potter and Trapper couldn't handle the wounded alone. "What about Burns?" Potter pointed out.

"I didn't think Frank counted," I said blandly, and Potter told me to scrub in.

The wounded were the result of a surprise meeting between an Allied scouting party and a group of North Koreans on a similar purpose. There were only about ten of them, but they'd done enough damage to each other that we all had to cancel our plans for the morning.

I happened to look up from a below-the-knee amputation to see BJ hobbling precariously into OR, Sidney at his elbow. "Hey!" I shouted. "What d'you think you're doing? You'll put too much stress on that leg!"

"I'm fine," BJ said dismissively.

Sidney, looking faintly confused and slightly scandalized above his mask, said, "He told me you'd said it was all right for him to be walking."

"Did I say that?" BJ asked innocently, and I glared at him.

"I said you could go from bed to the latrine, if even that! Back to the Swamp, now!"

"But I'm lonely," he whined, making big eyes at me.

I told my stupid heart to stop fluttering like that, and ordered Klinger to take BJ back to bed. Once I'd finished with the amputation, I took a well-deserved break and stomped off to the Swamp. BJ smiled brightly at me, and it was impossible not to return at least a fraction of that smile as I flipped down his blankets and started prodding his leg. "I should warn you," he said, "if my dad sees us like this, you'll have to marry me."

Luckily, my head was turned down towards his leg at an angle so that he shouldn't have been able to see my smile. I chose not to respond to that and went for a stern reprimand instead: "If you don't take it easy, you're going to do serious damage."

"But it's so boring."

"And the more you try to make it not-boring, the longer it will be boring."

"I can help in OR. My right hand's fine, and the left one's getting much better—"

"Just what do you think you would do?" I pointed out patiently. "You can't carry anything, because you can't walk. You can't operate because, one—you only have one fully-functional hand, and two—you cannot stand for long periods of time. If you want to be a cheerleader, I'll have a few corpsmen drag a chair in there for you, but you're much better off here. In bed. Resting."

He looked at me with a calculating expression, and then accused, "You look tired."

"Cutting into kids does that to me."

"I think you might also be better off here." A pointed look. "In bed." A pause, layered with suggestion. "Resting."

I tried very hard not to smile, but ultimately failed. "Much as I'd love to, we've got wounded. They need me in surgery." Inwardly, I winced, knowing what he was going to say.

"I'd say there's a fairly pressing need for you here."

"I wouldn't've guessed that dislocating a hip could so drastically increase a man's sex drive," I said mildly. Amazing, how things seemed almost back to normal between us—proof that anything could be fixed with a little cuddling, some open conversation, and sleep.

"Well, it does," he said tersely, and then flashed a brilliant smile, reaching out to wrap his hand around the back of my neck and pull me closer. Still smiling, I braced my arms against the side of his bunk, preventing him from pulling me in for whatever lewdness he had in mind. He frowned, then pouted.

"You know," I said idly, ignoring that pout, "with you in your present, fragile condition, there's only a limited scope of…things we could do, if you catch my innuendo. Namely, nothing that would put any stress on your hip."

"My hip's fine."

"It's not. You dislocated it! Add to that your apparent need to piss me off by walking on it before you're ready, and now you want to— You'll have to be patient. And be a patient. Doctor knows best."

"Doctor mean," he complained, sounding very much like a sulky two-year-old. "Doctor no like me."

"Doctor like you very much. Doctor no want to hurt you."

"I'm robust."

"Whose bust?"

He pulled a face, then reached down to rub my hip in a rather suggestive way.

Steady, Hawkeye, steady… "Beej," I said seriously, holding his gaze in what I hoped was a stern way.

"Ben," he retorted, and it was suddenly a lot harder to ignore that hand on my hip.

My mother had been the only person to call me Ben on a regular basis (excluding the teachers who'd done so just because I'd asked them not to), and I'd always gotten angry whenever someone else had tried it—it felt like it was soiling the memories of my mother, and the name only she'd used for me. But hearing that one syllable uttered in BJ's voice—said with a certain unavoidable sensuality, an inescapably raw sexual force—was completely different from the memories of my mother's gentle chiding, her whispered goodnights; and it sparked something inside me—I couldn't explain what, but it made my head spin a little, and started a faint, happy buzzing in my ears.

I was on the verge of deciding that maybe they could handle OR without me when there was a frantic pounding on the door. "Hawkeye!" Radar shouted. "We just got a chest wound come in, and Trapper's busy with a different patient, so you gotta take it—"

I squeezed BJ's arm briefly, leaned in for a fleeting kiss, and then dashed out the door.

Things were back to normal.