(to the tune of "the itsy, bitsy spider") Two little fic writers sent out an email,
They hoped and they hoped that it wouldn't fail.
They will adore,
Anyone who sends feedback.
'Cause their little muses are in need of a snack!

And now, without further ado....

The Uncanny Leigh and Mere Collaboration:

DATE BEGUN: February 2nd, 2003
DATE FINISHED: August 1st, 2003

Of course BJ knew. In a place like this, you became attuned to certain things, mostly because it was better to focus on the details than on the blinding enormity of the war. So he would remember, one night, Doris Day crooning on the jukebox in the washed-out dimness of Rosie's, or the way Hawkeye would look at him sometimes when they'd run out of flippant words, but later he never knew who else had been there or what had been said between the silences. Or he knew the way the muscles had moved, sinuous and fragile, on a kid under the wide glare of the OR lights, his chest laid bare -- the way BJ sometimes lay in the dark Swamp and thought he felt the wind move through the emptiness of his body -- but the kid never had a face. And so, in the same way, BJ knew.

It had been a mess: the Chinese had broken through the line to the west, and the jeeps came in a writhing column into the compound, thick and tortuous as sluggish blood. He'd had to tuck his arms into his sleeves, shivering, the haze of the OR still swaying crazily before his eyes, the steaming blood cooling against his bare flesh. In triage up ahead, Hawkeye stooped and stood endlessly, as if held up by wires, lifted a sheet here, probed a chest wound there. At one point, he paused halfway to the ground, his blurred gray outline cut out against the smoky sky: the young man below him, faceless in the darkness, had murmured something inaudible. Hawkeye touched him on the arm and yelled ahead to Margaret that he'd take this one first.

BJ hadn't seen anything more of the boy until after the operating session. Once they had peeled off their scrubs, baring the new sheen of sweat to the harsh lights, Hawkeye took him by the elbow and led him into post-op. Hawkeye leaned on the bed beside the door and stared earnestly at its occupant.

"This kid's already been here, Beej," he said softly.

BJ caught himself mid-yawn and bent over beside him, their elbows brushing over the coolness of the metal rail.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah."

BJ looked at him carefully.

"How long's he been out on the front?"

"I don't even know. At least four months; Trap and I treated him then for contusions."

"Uh huh."

Hawkeye ran a hand through his hair.

"I don't know why the hell the Army hasn't sent him home yet." He surveyed the patient without ever seeing him, with only that look in his eyes he got sometimes when he touched the still. "Well, no, I guess it's the same reason it hasn't sent us home. It doesn't give a damn."

"Look, Hawk," said BJ, slinging an arm companionably about his neck, "let's go home. Or," -- and he thought of sitting on a bunk still not quite shaped to the contours of his body, the tubes of the still warm from someone else's fingers, and Hawkeye watching not him but the gap between the beds -- "or I'll buy you a drink at Rosie's."

Hawkeye was suddenly stiff under the curve of his elbow.

"I can't. I've got post-op duty."

BJ drew back his arm reluctantly; then, with an effort, he said, "Don't worry about it. I'll cover for you. You wanna just go back to the Swamp?"

Hawkeye glanced at him, that flicker of -- what? Relief, affection, gratitude? -- showing in his eyes before he shrugged and turned away.

"All right. Thanks, Beej."

He gave the unconscious patient one more lingering glance over his shoulder before he slipped out. BJ could hear the rush of wind as he went through the outer door to the frosted compound outside.

He didn't know then. He didn't know, so he pulled up a chair to the bedside of this kid and looked at him, white against the white sheets, and tried to see Hawkeye and Trapper in the faint scar below his right eye. Which one had stitched that gash up? He saw the way the edges smoothed out into the arch of the cheekbone, and he knew it was Hawkeye. Hawk knew how to do that; Hawk knew how to downplay a scar, but not how to conceal it.

He might have dozed off for a time, the worn wood of the chair firm against his aching back, the dreary hospital illumination heavy on his eyelids. And it had been a while since he had been quite sure where the cutoff between sleep and wakefulness was, where the red and black of his dreams became the red and black of life. It had been a while since it had mattered.

But at some point it became important, because at some point he heard voices behind him. He never knew whose, but in these situations you never knew, you never tried to attribute your knowledge to an individual. In camp, there was a communal pool of knowledge, and sooner or later you skimmed the surface. Not wanting to hear made no difference, because the voices were always there, there was always someone who knew, and who were you to refuse that information?

So by the end of the night, without ever coming fully awake, BJ knew. He knew who George was, just from the details, just scattered words and winks in the air behind him. But when Hawkeye relieved him at two o'clock, pulled him to his feet and helped his stagger the long dusty way back home -- when had the compound gotten so wide, and Hawkeye so warm and slow-moving beneath his robe, and when had the Swamp become "home"? -- when he fell into bed and watched his bunkmate move off in redness through the mesh, he didn't know who George was to Hawkeye.

BJ had been in Korea long enough to know it was useless to try and trick himself, but he did it anyway-- it was a type of ritual, offering a supplication to the woman in his memory and it kept his other life
(Not home. Ha, home is here, isn't that crazy. What's that they say? Home is where the hea-- Oh, shut up. Don't think about that, just think about how absence makes the heart grown fonder, if you have to think of those stupid clichˇs at all. What do they know anyway?)
close to him like an open wound over his belly. With his eyes closed and his body laid out carelessly over his bunk, BJ tried, tried hard. In his mind, he made the rough cot dim and vaguely remembered another, wider bed, and those blue-stripped sheets Peg put under the overstuffed white comforter. Now, the sounds of the camp had to be banished, and just Peg's soft breathing close to where she'd curled herself against his back, head pillowed on her hands and those few sweet curls dangling over her face. That's right, BJ thought, as if he was a artist sketching things into detail, she's sleeping and.. And he couldn't remember the rhythm of her breathing; he knew she wore a rose perfume but the smell of roses had dimmed to nothingness in his mind along with the memory of her skin-- just where was that little mole on her neck? the scar on her leg?-- and it all came crashing down. Crashing, not like pieces, but like water with nothing to hold it up, like thunder so loud and so close in his ears he couldn't hear himself think. Slowly, BJ relaxed his jaw where his teeth had been pressed harshly together, as if to bite into that memory-- it was useless, and he simply laid there with his mind fully awake inside his exhausted body. Briefly the world diffused and he was treated to the flicker of an image he didn't really want to see; sleep and wakefulness were the same always because he was trapped. (Trapped. Trapper. Let's not think about that.)

Awareness.
"-- this is just disgusting!" A nasal, high voice with just that small edge of perpetual panic. "Frank," Hawkeye now, tone full of exaggerated patience, "what did we tell you about wetting the bed?"
"You're sick, Pierce," Frank sputtered, and behind the fleshy-darkness of his eyelids, BJ could just imagine Hawkeye's small, triumphant smile.
"Now, Frank, there's no shame--"
"You know what I'm talking about, you degenerate," a kick against the pitiful stove, sounding hollow, "I won't stand for this again. That... _thing_ doesn't deserve to be in the army! Henry Blake may have been sympathetic towards that sort of _disgusting_--"
"Do you want to borrow my Thesaurus?" Here, of course, Hawkeye would be leaning back on his own bunk and raising an eyebrow, "You're repeating yourself, Frank."
"If you were a true American," Frank spat, "you'd know why I'm so angry I can't think straight."
A snort as Hawkeye swallowed his laughter, "'Straight'? I'd like proof you've ever thought in the first place."
"Just you wait," now BJ opened his eyes slightly, watching the blur of Frank stand over Hawkeye, brandishing his admonishing finger like a sword, "Potter-- thank God-- is regular army. He'll see that things are properly taken care of this time, bucko. Just you wait, I'll get that deviant--"
"And his little dog, too?" Hawkeye offered, rolling his eyes, "Come on, Frank, don't make BJ and me--"

(Yes, 'BJ and me', easy, assuming, and in his own mind BJ could imagine that faceless, featureless form of Trapper John standing behind Hawkeye in some other time. Back you up, buddy, one hundred percent, always. And, in the cot still molded to someone else, still loose and tight in all the wrong places, BJ closed his eyes and swallowed that lingering, unnamed emotion clinging to the back of his throat.)

"Don't make BJ and me," Hawkeye was saying, "tell Margaret about your little momentous--"
"Ha, you think you can blackmail me?" the door slammed, but Frank was still yelling, outside the tent and probably walking backwards, too, "I mean business, this time, and you jim-dandy can't do thing one about it!"

Yes, exit Frank, stage whatever, as long as he's gone, BJ thought, and listened to the now-familiar sounds of Hawkeye mixing a drink. Then there came the touch BJ hadn't even been aware he'd been waiting for-- the other Captain's hand on his shoulder, resting there for a moment.
"Hey, you're on in ten," Hawkeye joked, handing BJ a drink even as the younger man sat up, "I hope you got enough beauty sleep."
"With a face like this," BJ said with his words mostly in the gin, "how can I go wrong?" Hawkeye flashed a brief tilt of his lips and proceeded to search the floor for semi-clean articles of clothing, pulling them on with unself-conscious grace.
"I suppose," the older doctor said as he pulled a shirt over his head, "it's too much to hope that if we throw water on Frank, he'll melt."
"If that was true," BJ turned his back a little to dress, "we'd have found a little puddle of Frank in the showers long ago."
"Yuck," Hawkeye made a face around his smirk, "Can you imagine stepping in that?" He reached for BJ, pulling the other man to his feet, "Come, my dear-- our adoring fans await!"
The dim smell of shell powder touched over BJ as they walked through the compound and he stumbled, just once, before he moved a little away from Hawkeye and began to feel his new separateness amidst the vague, gray morning tents.

(Why call attention to it, why drag it out into the light where it can be seen and damn it, first they took away my family and my daughter's childhood and now they're taking away the one good thing in Korea and why can't I be blithely unaware, why do I have to think about it at all?)

Peg, if he could only just focus on Peg and her soft glory waiting behind those golden gates-- of the lethe in her embrace and maybe one day, he'd wake up and Korea would just be a dream he'd had, all of it, and Hawkeye just a quick, crazy element of his sleeping mind. Subconscious, the 'id'-- no one can control that.

In post-op, BJ counted all the patients in 'line' ahead of George and watched the numbers dwindle down until he was standing just behind Hawkeye, watching the older doctor pull down the clipboard with flair. "Morning, George," Hawkeye said, moving to sit down on an empty bed, while BJ kept his hands on the metal rail and his body behind it. The younger doctor nodded towards the patient, his smile sincere but his eyes watching, seeing, taking everything in. George had his hands folded politely in his lap, his eyes moved between his two visitors and settled on the one he knew. "Are you enjoying the wonderful view of bedpans and IV dips?" Hawkeye winked, "We set it up just for you."
"It's lovely," George's smile was earnest and laughing.
"Good," said Hawkeye, tapping the clipboard for emphasis, "only the best for our faithful customers." Lifting a hand briefly in BJ's direction, the older doctor leaned in to examine the dressing on George's shoulder. "This is BJ Hunnicut-- Trapper John was sent back to the states, so they brought him in."
"My condolences," George said to BJ, though his eyes were looking at Hawkeye through the fall of his messy blond bangs.
BJ laughed shortly, "Ah, but you're the one who's had to come down our assembly line twice in, what, four months?" And -- dammit, there he went again -- he looked to Hawkeye; he was speaking to George, but somehow everything spiraled back into Hawkeye, and he didn't want to think about time in terms of months anymore. Here, there was no time in that sense, no continuity, and maybe, just maybe, if he thought it hard enough, no causal relationships. Just sharp, short bursts of awareness, no obligation to anything outside of the dust and the blood and the places his eyes went illicitly, unthinkingly.

Hawkeye smiled, the faintest angle of bitterness in the line of his mouth, and said, "Yeah, by now he knows the ins and outs of the great American meat-processing facility."

George's glance slid to BJ momentarily, as if he wanted to examine more closely this man who knew how to cut straight through to the quick of Hawkeye's blustering humor.

"You guys do a good job," he said, after a beat, letting his smile broaden again and his eyes return to Hawkeye. "I would've liked to tell Doctor McIntyre that, too; that I appreciate - " He paused, shifting in the bed ever so slightly, the arm nearer to BJ tucking under the blanket. "What you guys did."

"I'd hate to think that I completely wasted my time in med. school," said Hawkeye lightly, reaching over to check the bandages on George's chest. "I mean, aside from my pretty female colleagues and the out-of-the-way broom closets, I really did do some studying." He concluded the brief examination and placed his hands on his knees. "Good to see you've got some honest combat wounds this time," he kidded.

This time, George looked right at BJ, his face bare and vulnerable, and BJ thought, God, wasn't there a time we all knew how to be so honest? When he had arrived, maybe, he hadn't known how to close himself off, had even exposed that rawness that Peg left in his chest to the air -- but at some point he had brought it back into himself, because Hawkeye looked at him oddly about it, and soon it was as if he had smothered it under the weight of his secrecy. He tried to dredge it up sometimes; now, faced with George and Hawkeye and the bright pinpoints of the post-op lights, he honestly tried to dredge it up, chafe it back into being, recreate the shiver of her eyes down his spine. But Hawkeye, searing and blinding as any shot of gin they shared in the heavy, inviolate monochrome of the Swamp, drowned all that out when he glanced up, grinned, and leaned across to pat BJ on the arm through the bed rail.

"It's all right," he assured George, his shoulders moving with cat's grace as he bent over. "BJ's no Frank."

That brief ache that BJ had been cultivating was gone instantly, scorched out by the exquisite agony of Hawkeye's slim surgeon's fingers -- and BJ smiled dully and thought, The best laid plans of mice and men--

"I do try," he said.

Hawkeye smirked without really seeing him, taking the joke at face-value; and why shouldn't he, when he still thought BJ's face could tell no lies?

"I've got to see to some other patients," BJ said abruptly. "Business is brisk, you know, and" -- he gave a brittle smile to George -- "you're already in the best of hands." He freed himself from those hands, pulling away so that Hawkeye's arm pressed the metal bars for a moment, trapped. But then he liked to be trapped.

BJ turned and moved off down the rows of white cots, fast and furious, until all he felt was the fluidity of his strides and the unyielding slap of his feet against the scuffed floor, the iron bed rails rising up on him from all sides.