Fandom: M*A*S*H.
Author: Epigone.
Pairing: Winchester/Klinger.
Rating: PG-13, for the sake of caution.
Warnings: Innuendo.
Archivists: Ask first.
Summary: Klinger has finally come to terms with himself when Winchester throws him a curve ball.
Date Written: Jaunary 2003.
Author's Notes: Thanks have to go to Meredith here, both for encouraging me on this piece and for getting me thinking about the name issue. Meredith, I love you, but then you knew that. This is a sort of post-ep to "Period of Adjustment," but knowledge of that episode isn't really necessary. The quoted lyrics are part of the song "What's the Use of Wond'rin," which comes from the musical Carousel by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Therefore, they are obviously not mine, and I'm not sayin' otherwise.
Feedback: Can be sent kmaru1701 [AT] hotmail [DOT] com, and is much appreciated.
By Any Other Name
The moon was immense and white against the windowpanes when Klinger finally allowed his thoughts to drift. During the day, there was always some moron from I Corps on the phone, or Colonel Potter needing a new batch of tongue depressors, or a pile of requisition forms to be filled out, or Hawkeye wandering in to complain about the shortage of penicillin, banging his elbows down gracelessly on the edge of the desk and rolling his eyes at the mountains of paperwork. "Klinger," he would say, "Klinger, now, you've got to have some backbone. Tell those figureheads in Washington that you're tired of running their war for them." God only knew how Radar had held down this job for as long as he had. Klinger had been doing it for a few weeks, and already he complained to the doctors of triplicate vision.
But nighttime was always worse. Had always been worse, ever since Laverne introduced him to Morty via mail a few months back and left him. For some time after that, he stopped responding to "Klinger," the name that she was merrily sullying across the ocean. He was Max for a while, until he felt uncomfortable in the naked intimacy of that syllable and reclaimed his surname. By then, Laverne was just a cardboard cutout, someone he burned with her letters, and he was free to be Klinger again, young and free and -- don't forget -- virile. Without Laverne's name lying in the bed beside him each night, he could pursue nurses to his heart's content. Home lost its iridescent charm; he stopped wearing dresses, and when Colonel Potter called him in for a celebratory drink and said, "Son, I'm glad you've finally given that mess up," he could only smile and think, no, Klinger isn't "that mess" anymore, Klinger isn't Laverne's dumb husband and Klinger isn't the butt of your jokes. That Klinger came off with the heels.
Somehow, though, there was always something to think about, nights. For a while it was that small green seed of envy for Radar; but after last night, the bright blurriness of Potter's office, the blasting sweetness of shot after shot of gin, the high buzz in his ears, it had choked itself out. Now there was just a fragmented memory of those hours, BJ perched up on the sawhorse, hating Radar with a look in his eyes that said it wasn't Radar at all, it was only easier to think "Radar" than, than-- and BJ muttering something that Klinger couldn't remember, but it was growing in the back of his mind.
"Well." Klinger addressed himself to the neat stack of papers on the corner of his desk. "What's the use of wondering about it?"
If Hawkeye had been here -- Hawkeye seemed to be here a lot lately, although not at night, as though for him it was the during the day that he needed to be distracted, distracted from-- But regardless, if Hawkeye had been here, he would have broken out into that song: "What's the use of wond'rin' if he's good or if he's bad? He's your feller and you love him...." Klinger couldn't remember the rest of the line.
For a moment, he had managed to push the thought out of his head with Hawkeye's enthusiastic singing, but now it returned. He sighed, picked up the telephone, and resolutely put through a call to the States. They patched him through to Iowa, and at last a woman's husky voice crept hesitantly into his ear.
"Hello?"
"Mrs. O'Reilly?" he inquired. "I guess you're Mrs. O'Reilly, right? Could I speak to Radar?"
"Who?" she said, and a new note entered her voice, a little bit like, like, what was it he had heard in BJ's voice last night? Almost fear, but disguising itself, because if you let on that you're frightened, the world could come crashing down around you.
"Radar," he repeated, grasping for that other name, the one Radar had worn loosely like his dog tags sometimes, his but not really his, reserved for strangers and people who didn't know what it was to walk in blood every day. "Um, Walter."
"All right," she said abruptly, and he could hear her hand curve over the mouthpiece. He thought about her calling Radar by that clumsy handle: he, clean and fresh-faced, rattling down the stairs two at a time, browned and well-fed, just another Iowa farmboy.
"Hello?" said Walter, uncertainty cracking his voice, but behind it there was a deeper resonance, like the thud-thud-thud of chopper blades, and it was Radar. "Who's this?"
"Klinger. Listen, Radar, what did I say? Your mom--"
"She doesn't like that name. Radar, I mean. Says it sounds like somebody from a comic book or somethin'."
Except in the comic books, the good guys never bleed. And Mom hates that you came back smelling like blood, the blood of the good guys, even your blood on one scarred shoulder, and now you call yourself by a name that means you've seen the fallacy of comic books.
"Klinger, why're you calling?" asked Radar, a little strain in his tone.
Klinger grinned faintly.
"Did you want someone else to call? I bet there's a lotta nurses you miss. They don't grow people like Nurse Murphy in your cornfields, huh?"
"What do you mean?" asked Radar sharply, and Klinger paused, startled. "Why would I want anybody to call? I like being home."
"That's good," said Klinger neutrally.
"There's nothin' to miss in Korea." He sounded suspicious, not at all like Radar, but not like Walter, either. "What kinda somebody else would call a somebody like me?"
"I don't know. I was just, you know, talking." Klinger shifted the phone from his left hand to his right. "Well, I'm actually calling about somebody else. And me. Well, really two somebody elses, but it's important to me, too."
Radar was quiet on the other end of the line, tense, waiting.
"Look, Radar, maybe I'm going crazy here...."
"Klinger--" began Radar dismissively, but Klinger raised his voice.
"No, no, I mean stupid-crazy, not crazy-crazy. Why doesn't anybody ever take me seriously?"
"Well, mostly 'cause you don't take yourself seriously. Like every time you say something, somebody inside you is laughing."
"I didn't ask you."
"I thought it was a question."
"Well, it wasn't a question I was asking!"
Radar didn't respond, and Klinger stopped, furrowing his brow.
"What do you mean, laughing?"
"Like - like there's somebody else in your head when you're using your voice, and he's Max, but he's not exactly you." There was the sound of Radar licking his lips nervously, and then he plowed ahead. "Lotsa people have that. Not the laughing, but the other person. Like, um, Major Houlihan sometimes has Margaret, or Colonel Potter has Sherm, and Hawkeye has Ben, and BJ, well, his is kinda funny, 'cause it's like mostly he's Beej, even though it's just Hawkeye calling him that, but then he's also got BJandPeg. One word, sorta."
Klinger was torn between asking, What about Winchester, who's Winchester? and demanding an explanation. He settled for neither.
"I'm not gonna ask how you know that, because you're probably crazier than I ever wanted to be. I got a different question for you."
"What?"
"Um, about BJ, and - and Hawkeye, actually."
"If they hid your keys, you can find 'em in the latrine."
"No," said Klinger, "no, it's not that sort of thing. It's, uh... another sort of thing." His fingers riffled nervously through the papers on the desk, brushing them lightly, lightly as the image nudging at the edge of conscious thought. "It's that I wanna know if BJ and Hawkeye are, uh, y'know, more than bunkies."
There was a moment of absolute stillness on the line, like an audible blink.
"Why're you asking me?" asked Radar quietly.
"Because you knew everything there was to know in camp. If it was there, you knew it."
The odd mixture of relief and defeat in Radar's voice told him even before the words meant anything.
"How do you know?"
How indeed? It wasn't like how Radar knew, it wasn't like how Radar used to know to blush and quicken his pace when he passed the Swamp some evenings, even though there was no sound to be heard. It wasn't like how Radar explained it to him once, how certain thoughts drop hollowly like stones into the pool of a person's mind, and sometimes if the splash is great enough, you can catch the ripples dying out against the shore. It was just--
It's just BJ up on the sawhorse, rocking back and forth, rubbing one fist as if it pains him. He looks down the sheer wood at Klinger, his legs bunched awkwardly, a little space left on the saddle behind him, as though he expects someone to climb up behind him, and he says, "You think you're ever going home, Klinger?" Klinger laughs uproariously into the bottle and replies, "Nah, that's just Army propaganda," and BJ isn't really even looking at him, is just leaning back into the empty space at his back, and he says, almost like he's not drunk, "Funny, though, there are things here you can't find back home. You just don't know 'em yet." Then he's definitely looking at Klinger, the not-Laverne's Klinger, and he grins ingenuously and says, "You'll see, Max" and pats the saddle behind him absently. And Klinger vaguely thinks, Oh.
"I guess people aren't as careful around a guy who used to wear dresses."
"Klinger, they could get in a lotta trouble. If you said something."
"I'm not saying anything," responded Klinger indignantly. "I mean - I don't know what I think, but I like Hawkeye, and I like BJ, and I'd like 'em to stick around."
"Good." Radar hesitated ever so slightly. "Did they... do something?"
"Nah. Nothing I could see, really, and nothing anyone else saw. Just - just little stuff."
"Uh huh. Oh, hey, Klinger, my mom's lookin' at me like I oughta get off, so, uh...."
"She's been standing there the whole time?" Klinger asked with some reproach.
"You did all the talking."
Klinger smiled.
"Yeah, that's true. Have a nice time at home, okay, kid? I'll see ya when I get back; I'll come down from Toledo or something--"
"Okay, but Klinger? Why's it important? To you, I mean, like you said?"
"Did I say that?" But even as he asked, lightly, he could almost feel the minute ripples within his own skull, and he stiffened. Radar didn't forget these things.
"Yeah, you said it was important to you, too."
"It's - it's not, really. I just meant that since I live here, it has something to do with me."
"All right," said Radar, letting it go, letting the idea go as consciously as opening his fist, because it wasn't his to know. "Um, say hello to - to everybody for me, wouldja? Just say I miss 'em, and... and, yeah, say hello."
"Right, kid, I will. I'll see you." He replaced the receiver gently.
He was alone again, and though he had thought that nothing could be worse than not knowing, he had been wrong. Knowing that those looks he caught sometimes, while he stood half-asleep beside the tables in the operating room, really meant what he thought they meant, really meant that Hawkeye was looking across the blood-spattered sheets and seeing something more than the unified front BJ presented -- knowing that didn't make it any less real. If Hawkeye wasn't skirt-chasing anymore, then he was pursuing something yet more elusive, something he was never going to catch, and one of these days he would reach out and it wouldn't be there. So of course Klinger should pity him, stupid Hawkeye who still thought it was possible to get what you wanted and not lose yourself in the process, and yet, and yet--
Whose business was it? Not Klinger's; not the business of the company clerk who filed the names neatly away and never knew what they really meant. His mother had once told him that to know the name of a thing was to accept it as part of yourself, and so he closed himself to it, it was not his, he did not want to know it
Desperation thick and rancid in his throat, and he says, to Colonel Potter and the empty air, "There are a lot more women than there are guys in America. And the women got most of the money. Stocks, bonds, stuff like that. So there's gotta be a rich, beautiful dame out there for an attractive lunatic like me." And Potter nods, knowing only the name of his Mildred, having only ever brushed other names, not knowing that you can have something thrust upon you without your permission.
Klinger reached out, lifted the pile of personnel records from his desk, and made for the cabinet. When he was still several yards away, he hesitated, poised on the balls of his feet, hearing the ragged beat of someone running outside. In a moment, the door swung inward and revealed Major Winchester, flushed, breathing heavily, smelling of cheap alcohol.
"Klinger!" he exclaimed, and stopped short. The drink made his Bostonian accent that much broader, and the open, nasal quality of the name in Winchester's mouth was so unfamiliar that for a moment it didn't even register as Klinger's. They blinked at each other across the room, Winchester swaying slightly, Klinger stock-still.
"Major," he acknowledged finally, cordially. "You need something?"
Winchester stared at him blankly, a frown tugging at the corners of his mouth.
"Ah, I... don't recall. Am I in your office?"
"Ye-es," said Klinger nervously, moving behind his desk. The papers thumped back onto the wood. "Major, do you want me to get Captains Pierce and Hunnicutt to take you home?"
"Those two boors are planning to swill themselves into the floor tonight," said Winchester disdainfully. "Won't even look at me. Hunnicutt has Pierce by the dog tags, and he's not letting go."
Klinger wondered momentarily if they also were a little drunker than they ought to be, or if Winchester was just being incoherent. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other and said, "All right, you want me to help you home?"
"Hardly," countered Winchester. "I can find my own way back."
"All right." Klinger looked frantically at his stack of papers -- names upon names upon names, none of them telling him anything, but the one always in his ears, offering to impart to him whatever he wanted, if he would just say it -- and when he glanced up again, Winchester was still there. "I'm closing up. Going to sleep."
"I like your earrings," said Winchester abruptly, and Klinger raised a hand self-consciously before he realized there was nothing there.
"I don't wear earrings anymore."
"Ah." Winchester squinted at him, leaning heavily on the doorjamb. "So you don't."
"No." Klinger took a breath and stepped forward, came up beside Winchester and snatched for the doorknob. "I'll just let you out--"
Winchester had him by the elbow before Klinger even knew he had moved.
"Come now," he slurred, interposing his body between Klinger and the door. "I'm won't remember a thing in the morning."
"Yeah?" said Klinger noncommittally, his arm limp between them.
"Yeah," said Winchester, that slight, familiar, sarcastic stress falling on the word. "So where are you going, Max?"
Klinger twisted out of his grasp.
"Don't call me that. I'm not going anywhere; you are. Home."
"I'd prefer not to," said Winchester, taking an unsteady step forward. "Let me stay here."
And it wasn't an order, despite Winchester's tone, despite the way he set his lips together and glared, because he didn't have that kind of power. He had no say in this.
"Major, I'm a married man," said Klinger finally -- the old standby, the easy fallback, resurrecting someone with dark eyes and lying tongue just to stand between them. "I'm not--"
"A technicality," murmured Winchester. "What did Pierce say about you? 'To Max Klinger, Korea's most eligible bachelor.'"
And what did Winchester say? Winchester, who is overflowing with stocks and bonds, but who is not a beautiful dame, who is not American but grimed instead with months of Korea, gives him a smile over their heads that screams Here I am; but all he says is "Corporal, my hat is off to you--"
"And what you meant to say, I guess, was 'Corporal, my pants are off to you,'" retorted Klinger. "Right?"
"Don't be vulgar, Max," said Winchester distastefully. "I know it's inborn, but try to fight it."
"Good night, Major," said Klinger, risking another move for the door. Winchester stepped aside docilely, and in a moment the cold air rushed in to meet them. "We're gonna have wounded tomorrow, so you'd better be rested up."
Winchester looked at him unreadably.
"Very well," he said at length. "I shall be." He turned and descended the stairs. His words were only short bursts of white on the air: "Oh, and Max? Don't remind me of this tomorrow."
Klinger closed the door before Winchester was out of sight. He knew that somewhere across the compound, Hawkeye and BJ were drinking themselves into warm oblivion, touching each other's fragility with open palms, lit from above by the bar lights and from within by something eager and tender and unashamed. Potter dozed dreamlessly, the full weight of Mildred's name in his chest, dense and solid where the emptiness would normally open up just below his ribs. Margaret slept out of her skin, floating untethered, but men slid in and out of the cloud-shadows, offering themselves to her when freedom became too open-ended. Mulcahy -- who knew of whom Mulcahy dreamed, but the Father had something beneath his fingers when he reached out in the half-light, the rough rub of a worn book cover, the coolness of the crucifix on his chest. One day, even Radar would find himself apart from that wide-eyed need, would forget the blue-gray Korean nights in favor of golden Iowa cornsilk and the golden hair of a girl who could call him Walter.
Winchester would go home. They would all go home. But only some of them would go home with the feel of someone else's name on their tongues.
Klinger sighed and scooped up the stack of folders. As he crossed the room, he thought he remembered the rest of that line from Hawkeye's song,
That's all there is to that.
but it was a stupid song written by someone who didn't know what was what. Things weren't so simple. There was a great deal more to it than that; there was deception and vulnerability and the things you'd always assumed about the person that you were supposed to love. You were supposed to love someone with soft hair and a name that came easily to your lips, so easily you didn't even have to think about who lived behind it.
Under another name, he might have said yes. If they weren't who they were, what they were--
But they were.
He dumped the papers into the cabinet and slammed it conclusively shut.
~Fin~
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