Fandom: M*A*S*H.
Author: Epigone.
Pairing: BJ/Hawkeye.
Rating: PG-13.
Warning: Sexuality and mild language.
Archivists: Ask first.
Summary: BJ and Hawkeye are careless and get themselves into Big Trouble.
Date Written: January 2003.
Author's Notes: Much gratitude to Invicta, iolanthe, Raven, Cathy, Meredith, Barrie, and T'Len for their encouragement on this monster.
Feedback: Can be sent to kmaru1701 [AT] hotmail [DOT] com, and is much appreciated.
Indiscretion
Afterward, they vaguely wished they hadn't had quite so much to drink. Afterward, as they stumbled, laughing, across the dark compound from the officers' club, the drab walls of tents swaying past their eyes at crazy angles, the ground swelling and bucking beneath their feet, their breath raggedly frosting the air, their arms twined in untraceable paths, they rethought their bingeing; as they reeled in through the door to the Swamp, Hawkeye's lips roughly grazing BJ's cheek, their robes murmuring against each other, and winced confusedly at the blare of Beethoven whirling in the closed space, Charles looking up from his cot, wide-eyed, and saying, "Evening, gentlemen" -- at that point, they regretted that they were not sober.
Hawkeye had no doubt that he could have talked his way out of this had he been in full possession of his wits, but his mouth wasn't even functioning. He moved his lips soundlessly for a few seconds, his cheek still just barely brushing the edge of BJ's soft mustache, too dumbfounded to do so much as extricate himself from the incriminating embrace. It was up to BJ.
BJ deposited Hawkeye on his bunk, smoothed the ruffled front of his own robe, and cleverly said, "Charles, pal, y-you were still s'posed to be at the party."
"Everyone's still at the, uh, the whaddayacallit, officers' club," chimed in Hawkeye helpfully.
"Right, 'sright, why aren't you there? That's where everyone is."
"That," said Charles, looking at Hawkeye's unfastened robe with detached interest, "is precisely why I am not there. I tend to avoid your little bacchanalians, and frankly, now I am infinitely glad of it."
"Oh, this--" began BJ, scrambling for an explanation, but Hawkeye cut him off.
"Wasn't a bacchanalian, Charles, you uncultured boor," he said in an exaggeratedly clipped tone. "We're all Americans here. It was a first-day-of-1953, um, feshtival."
"Shut up, Hawk," said BJ shortly. "Let me talk -- at least I haven't doubled my weight in liquid in the last hour."
"I resemble that remark."
"Funny thing, that," said Charles smoothly. "To me, you resemble a man in the early stages of dishabille and in great danger of, ahem, some unpleasant disciplinary action."
"Yes," said BJ, "yes, isn't that funny? How appearances can be deceiving..."
Charles fixed him with a level stare.
"Actually," said Hawkeye, "I'm only in the early stages of undress, Charles. Pay attention."
A long silence ensued.
"Oh, dammit, Charles, you aren't going to go with Potter with this, are you?" asked BJ, after a time.
"Perhaps you should explain to me exactly what it is that I would be going to Potter about."
"Charles, don't play dense," growled Hawkeye, heaving himself to his feet and coming over to lean casually on BJ. "It is what it is."
"Such profundity, even from you, Pierce." Charles glanced from one man to the other. "How long has this little... liaison been going on?"
"Since before you came," said BJ tightly.
"September the twentieth, '51," supplied Hawkeye, and BJ turned to look at him in mild surprise. Hawkeye leaned more heavily on him and said, "Well, you know, more or less."
"Enough hemming and hawing, Charles," said BJ, feeling his stomach clench around the cheap beer he really shouldn't have had. "What are you going to do?"
Charles yawned widely and propped himself up on an elbow. He surveyed them both again, taking in the flushed faces, the rumpled robes, the entirety of their awry-haired breathlessness, before he reached over and turned off the record player.
"What I am going to do," he said deliberately, "is I am going to get something I want."
They stared at him, Hawkeye not so subtly resting his chin against the curve of BJ's neck. The realization seeped through BJ's alcoholic haze first.
"That's blackmail."
Hawkeye chuckled, the export of breath curling gently against BJ's collarbone.
"That's Charles."
BJ shivered and ducked out from under his loose caress.
"Hawkeye, for God's sake - " He pressed his lips together and winced; the sudden motion had tilted the world on a more pronounced axis. "What do you want, Charles?"
Hawkeye staggered and caught himself, grinning painfully at Charles.
"Isn't it obvious? He wants in."
Charles looked miffed, but BJ reacted more dramatically: he swung around to face Hawkeye and hissed, "Shut up, Hawk, please, shut up. This doesn't mean anything to you, does it? Just - just shut up."
Hawkeye looked as though he wanted to retort, but he had gone several shades paler, so he closed his mouth and sat abruptly on the edge of his bed. Charles smiled thinly at him, unreadably, and addressed BJ.
"I want out of this execrable pit. I want a two-week pass to Tokyo."
"Talk to Klinger," said BJ dully.
"No, no; Max" -- he put an odd emphasis on the name, at once scornful and sincere -- "doesn't pay attention to me. You two, on the other hand, operate on his level. You know the bartering system."
"You own the caviar and silk," murmured Hawkeye, but Charles ignored him.
"Is it a deal?"
BJ looked at his hands, trying to think through the waves of dizziness, the tightening of his chest. This could be it; this could ruin everything; he had to be sure --
"Well, let me see if I understand you," said Hawkeye archly. "You keep your formidable mouth closed, and we... we arrange a trip for you. We send you out of the Swamp for two weeks, leaving, ahem, only two tentmates." His voice was light and airy, but he kept his eyes studiously averted from BJ. "Is that right?"
"More or less," Charles stiffly affirmed.
"Uh huh," said Hawkeye.
BJ sighed, raised his head, and locked gazes with Charles.
"It's a deal. You'll get the pass tomorrow."
Charles stood and stretched languorously, smiling.
"Very well." He made his way to BJ and offered a hand, which BJ took. They shook on it, and Hawkeye watched, his eyes roving smolderingly over BJ with that restless, nervous energy. BJ could feel those eyes, the way they sketched him in red against the black of the mesh and the night behind, but he couldn't bring himself to return the look.
Charles sighed contentedly and strode toward the door.
"Now that I think of it, I think I shall have a drink." He stood for a moment in the tent opening, the flaps swaying around him in the breeze, and half-bowed. "Good evening." And he was gone.
He couldn't have been gone for more than a minute when BJ got unsteadily to his feet, trembling, his hand still hanging out limply where Charles had gripped it. His gaze moved about the tent, moved to Hawkeye and past him.
"I'm, uh, going... out," he said thickly, and turned with unexpected swiftness. He was outside in seconds, but Hawkeye could hear him retching violently just beyond the door.
After a moment, Hawkeye rubbed his eyes and followed, listing slightly to the right every few steps. It was hard to remember where his feet were.
He found BJ, on his hand and knees, without much trouble. There wasn't really anything to be done, so he sank to the ground beside BJ, laid his head against the other man's side, and slid an arm under his belly, so that they both supported each other. BJ was still heaving spasmodically, his back arching, his breath coming in sharp sobs. Hawkeye rubbed his stomach and waited.
Some time passed before BJ was still, and then all at once he reared up desperately, as if to stand and flee the scene, and fell into Hawkeye. Hawkeye braced himself against BJ's weight and held him until he was still again.
"Can't hold your liquor, hmm?" said Hawkeye into the skin below his ear. "It seems like I'm always hanging onto you while you bring up your entrails, doesn't it?"
BJ, leaning bonelessly against him, still trying to regulate his breathing, thought back to that day. The hard metallic gleam of his plane, resting in the scoop of the runway as he shouldered his bags and set out into Korea. The brilliance of the hazy red dust kicked up everywhere, the crystalline sparks where it caught and refracted sunlight. The shrill cries of officers, swarming here and there, and above all --
Above all, the clarity. Peg, still creamy and soap-scented behind his eyelids, her thin pink dress crackling in the updraft of his plane, her smile fresh and winsome and real, her touch that still meant something. The sharp looks this strange man kept shooting him -- Hawkeye, that was his name -- this man with long bones showing haggardly in his face and sleepless eyes, blue and protean as ice, that marked him Outsider, Other, Not-Trapper. The jagged edges of the wounds on those soldiers that they came upon in the jeep, soldiers with faces pale and stark against the deep red soil, limbs at acute, impossible angles, and one soldier, Hawkeye said don't touch, Hawkeye said he's gone, but BJ touched and rolled and the face came up out of the dust to meet him, wrong, all wrong, but you could still pick out the traces of features, twisted, the blood bright everywhere, the bile stinging and searing.
He came back to Hawkeye in the dark, looked around at the colorless tents, the dry grass long since bled of all vibrancy, the vague blurs of stars, and knew that no. No, some things don't stay always, some things you think are always and you blink and then they are were. But he wouldn't say it to Hawkeye, because Hawkeye, who had left town, father, and rationality back in Maine, probably already knew.
"No," he said when he trusted his voice. "No, it wasn't that. I mean, the beer helped, but - " He turned to face Hawkeye, slowly, accommodating his rebellious stomach. "You really don't know, do you?"
Hawkeye blinked at him and spread his hands.
"I know the gastronomical wonder that is cheap alcohol, yes, but other than that..."
"I'm serious, Hawk."
"A momentous occasion," flippantly, but only as a cover: Hawkeye was looking at him searchingly. "What?"
"I just - I just - I kept thinking he would tell. And there'd be the dishonorable discharge, and--"
"Beej," said Hawkeye patiently, "I'm not exactly playing for low stakes myself."
"--And, and Peg." BJ's voice went breathy on that last word, shuddering to commit that pink and cream to the dingy olive-green of the world. "And Peg. There's always Peg, Hawkeye; we don't say anything, but Peg's waiting, and if I start feeling like, like..."
"Like you're really cheating?" Hawkeye watched him neutrally.
"Like there's an overlap, like I can't lie in that bed in there without being in her bed at the same time and knowing that I shouldn't be doing what I'm doing unless I'm in her bed, because it's the same. I can't live with that."
"Your bed," said Hawkeye.
"What?"
"You said 'her bed.' You meant your bed, both of yours, I'm sure, but you said..." BJ didn't answer. "See, that's why it's not the same, here and there. I mean, other than the obvious reason," -- he gave a short bark of laughter, making a sweeping gesture with his arm that encompassed the smell of blood and the tents and Korea -- "it's that it's 'her bed' there. And here, it's ours. Yours or mine, doesn't matter: ours. Here."
"Here," BJ repeated, following Hawkeye's arm dazedly with his eyes. "Oh, damn, I don't want to be here."
"You make of it what you can."
"Yeah," said BJ bitterly. "Yeah, you do that." He sighed heavily and let his head drop against the side of Hawkeye's. "I just wish you would think. Back home -- that's supposed to mean something, too. It's not just here."
"I used to think that," said Hawkeye, leaning into him. "I used to think there was more than here." His smile was mirthless against BJ's skin. "Not anymore."
They sat there for a time, propped against each other.
"We'd better not be here when it gets light," noted BJ finally. He was almost completely curled up beside Hawkeye now, warm, drowsy.
"Mmm," agreed Hawkeye halfheartedly.
"Really."
"All right, all right." Hawkeye opened his eyes and shifted BJ partially off of him. "You want me to get that damn pass from Klinger?"
"If you wake him up at this hour, he's not liable to give you anything."
Hawkeye sighed in mock-exasperation as he got to his feet.
"How I miss the good old days, when all it took to manipulate Klinger was a new garter belt dangled in front of that promontory he calls a nose."
BJ chuckled and extended a hand.
"Help me up."
Hawkeye obliged, letting BJ swing an arm around his neck to steady himself.
"Let's get to bed, huh?"
"Which bed?" asked BJ, stumbling a little, pressing against him.
Hawkeye spared him the barest smile as they picked their wavering way across the compound.
"Our bed," he said.
~Fin~
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