Fandom: M*A*S*H.
Author: Epigone.
Pairing: Hawkeye/Carlye and Hawkeye/BJ.
Rating: PG.
Warnings: None, really.
Archivists: Ask first.
Summary: Hawkeye's friend Tippy shares some hard-learned lessons with BJ.
Date Written: Summer of 2003.
Author's Notes: Finally, the post-ep to "38 Across" that I've been working on for what seems like years. With thanks to Meredith, who read my first attempt at such a post-ep eight whole months ago and told me not to give up on it, and to Am-Chau, who beta-ed two versions of
this fic with incredible skill and insight.
Feedback: Can be sent to kmaru1701 [AT] hotmail [DOT] com, and is much appreciated.
Filling in the Blanks
I've known Hawkeye for a while. More years than you've been doing
surgery, by far. But for almost as long, there have been... gaps
about him, in my mind.
He's quite the charmer. That's not to say everyone likes him -- he
rubs certain people the wrong way, as you've probably seen -- but
he's never had to look far to find someone. I used to envy him that,
but now....
Now, I guess it's only fair, because Hawkeye needs someone too much.
Exempli gratia: back in med school, half our class was gunning for
Carlye Breslin, but it was Hawkeye -- Hawkeye, angular and awkward,
with too much intensity behind his eyes -- who got the girl. I would
go with them to bars, some nights, and think that it wasn't quite
right that he should get her so easily. But that was only until I
really saw: he had to have her. He was always touching her
unobtrusively, drinking from her glass, watching her. All of that
intensity just looking for a way out, and maybe he thought if he
stuck close enough, she could carry some of it for him.
She couldn't. Or wouldn't. Whatever it was, she didn't.
You probably know that, though, don't you? He's probably told you
that, that and a thousand other stories, so that you think you can
understand him by piecing together what he lets you see. Solve the
puzzle of Hawkeye: find the underlying connections among expressions,
movements, speeches, words, syllables.
You can't. I've done enough crossword puzzles in my time to know
that sometimes, there is no systematic approach. There's a flash of
pure intuition, sometimes, if you can open yourself to it; you only
have two letters, the beginning and the ending, but you'll get it
anyway. If you let yourself.
Maybe I don't have the right to say this, since I still haven't
filled in all the blanks myself. Over the years, I've seen something
in Hawkeye, something he doesn't so much hide as carefully
trivialize. I know he cared for Caryle and, in his way, for all the
girls after her, but that didn't stop him from looking. Sideways
glances, open to interpretation. Never at me -- I'm glad of that,
really, because of course I like Hawkeye, and even I can see the
charisma of that smile, but I don't know what I would have... how I
would have... taken it. So, never at me. But sometimes there would
be a look, and I would think, Well, maybe he--
You see? Mere speculation. Empty reasoning. I was waiting for
something clearer.
That was all I wanted tonight, you know, when I went out to talk to
you. In the mess tent, I saw when he touched your shoulder, shook
you gently awake: you, startled and tired enough to forget to shut it
out completely in your eyes, and Hawkeye, with a strange softness to
him when you shifted that Korean baby in your arms. You realized
almost quickly enough that your face was too honest. You even
realized that I had seen, because you wouldn't look at me when you
gave the baby back to the chaplain, said your abrupt goodnight, and
left the tent.
I followed you, because in that moment, I thought that maybe you had
realized something else, too.
If that was so, you had already pushed it aside by the time I found
you standing alone, staring out over the empty compound. I said you
should call me Tippy; you said I should call you BJ. I told you I
was sorry I had been jumpy earlier; you shrugged it off by telling me
that it was understandable. We said nothing, until I asked you why
he won't talk about you. You're his best friend, aren't you? After
just a few months, his best friend? And he can't talk about you.
It's only when he's caught off-guard that he'll smile and say your
name, and yet there's never a minute I don't sense that
you're there, somehow.
I told you tonight that I don't know the word for it. I don't know
how many syllables, how many letters; I don't even know what it
starts with. It wasn't until I looked you in the eye, standing in
the middle of the camp with the dust rising around us on the wind,
that I understood. You don't know it either.
All I do know, right now, is that Hawkeye needs someone, that being
his nature, and this being Korea, where everyone is much more
vulnerable. As far as I can tell, he's resisting. He held onto
Carlye as long as he could, somehow knowing all the time that she
would have to go; he held onto those other girls, in the back seat of
my car while my date and I sat blushing in the front, waiting for him
to finish; but now it seems he's found something bigger than that
need, something worth hurting himself for, martyring himself for.
Do you think of the word for it every now and then, on nights like
this one when you just don't have the energy to pretend it away? I
don't really have to ask, because I know the answer. Maybe you'll
even think of it tonight, in the darkness of your tent with the chill
coming in under the door, while the others stay up talking. Maybe
it'll find you there, a brief flare of intuition, and pool in that
hollow place in you like the floodlights in the compound.
In the morning, though, Hawkeye will give you that smile of his from
the opposite bed, and you won't remember.
I probably won't ever truly understand, but in the end, I'm not sure
that it matters. Not just because I like Hawkeye, but because I
don't think I'll see him again. I had another college buddy who died
defending Hill 284, and while I don't expect that to happen to
Hawkeye, I doubt that, if I visit Crabapple Cove after the war,
Hawkeye will be there. He'll be here, long after the last hidden
mine has exploded and the grass has covered the bare spots where the
shells thudded. He won't be in any of those unmarked graves, but--
No, I don't think I'll see Hawkeye again.
You'll be the last one to know him. And... I don't know if I can say
this, but I will, nevertheless:
Don't wait too long. Don't wait to have it spelled out for you. One
of these days, Captain Hunnicutt -- BJ -- leave yourself open and
find the word in that space between should be and is.
Because we both know that Hawkeye won't find it by himself.
~Fin~
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