First Do No Harm
Fandom: M*A*S*H.
Author: Epigone.
Pairing: Hawkeye/BJ, mention of Hawkeye/Trapper.
Rating: PG-13.
Warnings: Sexuality, mild language, and general situational unpleasantness.
Archivists: Ask first.
Summary: Why did BJ take the whole Colonel Lacy incident so personally?
Date Written: February 2003.
Author's Notes: This is a post-ep to the incredibly, incredibly slashy "Preventive Medicine." If anyone's not seen it, the basic gist is that there's a commander, one Colonel Lacy, who has been sending a steady stream of wounded to the 4077th because of his reckless leadership. To keep him from returning to the front and causing even more damage, Hawkeye leads him to believe that he needs his appendix out. Hawkeye actually operates on Lacy, despite the fact that there is nothing medically wrong - leading BJ to get Royally Pissed and throw a fit.
Feedback: Can be sent to kmaru1701 [AT] hotmail [DOT] com, and is much appreciated.
First Do No Harm
Hawkeye tipped his head back and finished off the last of his beer.
Through the curve of the glass, he could pick out tinted fragments of
life: the spread spectrum of refracted light, the ceiling arching
away to an apex, and the translucent images of his fellow drinkers,
glowing, transposed into the oblivion of reflection. When he set the
glass down, the world was all straight lines again, crudely harsh
lamps, and tired people slouched on their respective stools.
He considered ordering up another drink. Under the faint, bluish
blur of alcohol, everyone was faded and beautiful, soft-fleshed and
cool forever in the haze; the lights moved diffuse and diamond-like
over his bare arms, revealing nothing; and all the lines dissolved.
All of them, no boundaries, no delineation, no this-is-right-and-this-
is-wrong under the white bar-lamps, as there was in OR, as there was
even in the Swamp on mail days...
But BJ was coming, had wanted to talk to him -- or had Hawkeye wanted
to talk to BJ? Had it been Hawkeye's request, as they tramped home
through the dust last night from post-op, or had it been BJ's,
whispered with desperate tenderness in the clandestine moments before
they stepped into the Swamp and put on the lights? It didn't matter:
when BJ moved against Hawkeye, he moved through him, and the words
were incidental, BJ moving through Hawkeye or Hawkeye through BJ and
forgetting which was which.
If BJ was coming, somehow Hawkeye owed it to him to be halfway
sober. Not for himself, not because his liver hadn't already ejected
itself in despair, but because to try to drink BJ away made no
sense. The clarity of BJ was not brittle, not painful, but
necessary. Where else could he find something so bright: swift arms
across the operating table, earnest grin across the poker table,
sharply defined warmth across the sheets? A little scuffed at the
edges, maybe, that smoothness rubbed away to a mustache, a brief
spasm of anger in the lips against his lips, but the war found
everyone somewhere.
"Sir?" said someone, down near his elbow and a little to the right.
Without stirring, Hawkeye replied, into his glass, "Only at snap
inspections and court-martials."
Radar slid onto the stool beside him, frowning.
"Huh?"
"I don't respond to 'Sir.' You can call me names, call my bluff,
call my bet, call me a cab - " He broke off, turning the glass
listlessly in his hand. "Oh, hell, never mind."
Radar bit his lip, shooting him a nervous sideways look.
"Uh, yeah, okay. Look, Hawkeye, with all done respect--"
"It's 'due,' Radar."
"What's due? I checked all of today's mail already, an' even
tomorrow's, an' we've paid off every red cent on that new movie
projector!"
Hawkeye kicked him gently beneath their stools.
"No, I meant that, at least in my version of American English, the
phrase is generally 'with all due respect.'"
"Right, but I'm talkin' in past tense, like, uh, the thing's already
kinda happened." Hawkeye looked vaguely amused, but he didn't
interrupt. "I was just wondering why you've been sittin' here all
morning."
"I was stood up," said Hawkeye, and Radar looked at him without
comprehension. Hawkeye chuckled dryly. "Nah, I'm just waiting for
BJ, though I'm starting to think it boils down to the same thing."
"Yeah, well, see, he's in the OR."
Hawkeye put the glass down abruptly and swung around to face him.
"What for? Lacy?"
Radar drew back a little; the fear in Hawkeye's body was palpable. He put an
awkward hand out and touched Hawkeye's arm.
"No, he said the Colonel's fine. But one of his patients, that
lieutenant, all of a sudden keeled over in post-op. Well, I mean, he
kinda just leaned over, `cause he was in bed, but he was all limp."
It was a shared fear, then, as if Hawkeye had infected him: Radar's
sheer bright animal terror at the memory of brown eyes running into
white and the quick startled movements of seizing limbs, and
Hawkeye's aching, visceral defensiveness, the edge of panic subsiding
but the base feeling still there, his pulse thumping BJ's name, and
the memory of being clutched and slammed around, back to the wall,
fingers in his flesh, raw anger, bile; and, overlaying it all,
flowing and flickering, Radar's fear for Hawkeye, waiting here alone
at Rosie's, everywhere the smell of gin and guilt and BJ like crushed
cloves.
Funny, wasn't it, that Hawkeye always smelled of gin no matter what
he was drinking?
Hawkeye pressed his lips together and, wincing slightly as he moved
his sore arm, climbed off of his stool.
"How long's he been in there?"
"Three hours, maybe."
The wince deepened for a moment -- not the wrenched muscle anymore,
but something farther down, secret and unlighted.
"Oh, damn. I thought that kid was doing so well." Hawkeye rummaged
in his pockets until he came up with a fistful of coins. He tossed
them at Radar. "Here, pay Igor for me, would you? And get yourself
a grape nehigh or something."
Radar caught the money open-palmed, spilling some of it across the
dingy floor.
"You gonna go see BJ?"
"Yeah," said Hawkeye distractedly. "Yeah." He turned and moved
toward the door; a few long strides and he was there. "Thanks for
letting me know, Radar."
"No problem," murmured Radar as Hawkeye rippled out through the
entrance curtain, all fluid, skittish grace. He ducked his head with
a soft noise, almost a sigh, and set about collecting the fallen
coins, broken shards of Hawkeye cold against his fingers.
* * * * * * * * *
BJ was already sitting in the scrub room when Hawkeye arrived: his
front bloodied, his head against the wall, his mouth slightly agape,
like a dying fish. Hawkeye paused in the doorway, his eyes going
reflexively to the curtain dividing them from the OR.
"What happened?" he asked after a few minutes, the words falling into
a silence punctuated only by the stabs of BJ's sharp breaths.
BJ didn't move. He'd known who was there ever since the thick heat
of the outside air had rolled in through the opened door: someone who
moved with quick, restless steps, white-hot all by himself even
behind BJ's eyelids.
"Oh... aneurysm," he said quietly. "Sudden. The aortic wall just
couldn't hold up."
Hawkeye went to him, leaned on the bench before him, just inside the
circle of his slumped shoulders, and said, helplessly, "It happens."
"I'm a doctor, Hawk," retorted BJ. "It's not supposed to happen to
me."
Hawkeye flinched ever so slightly and, gently, took BJ's chin between
his palms, tilted it down, and kissed him, leaned into him, breath
mingling hot between them.
"God, BJ," he said, "whatever you do, you're forgiven." BJ shuddered
almost imperceptibly, but Hawkeye felt it beneath him, BJ's chest
jerking just under his own ribcage. "Whatever you do -- I
don't care."
BJ broke away sharply, opening his eyes and grasping Hawkeye by the
arms. Hawkeye started, but held his gaze.
"I didn't ask you to approve of it," said BJ. "I didn't ask for
absolution. He was my patient."
"All right," murmured Hawkeye placatingly, blinking at him. "All
right. Listen, let's go home, huh?"
"I thought you wanted to talk."
"Did I?" Hawkeye looked at BJ's eyes, gone hard and flat and black,
without depth -- a trick of the light, surely. "Oh, right, but not
now. It can wait."
"No, it can't. You wouldn't ask me to talk if it wasn't important.
God knows you never want to talk otherwise. Never talk, just" -- and
his lips tightened, like his fingers on Hawkeye's arms -- "goddamn
wisecracks all the time, cute remarks, everybody thinking you're just
kidding when you say you're glad Peg's not here to distract me."
"Fine," said Hawkeye, brittle, jagged. "I wanted to apologize for
that idiocy with Lacy. I don't know what the hell bothered you so much about it, but I was sorry. I was. I don't know why now, because I did the right thing."
"Why do you always have to oversimplify everything?"
"Oversimplify?!" exclaimed Hawkeye hotly. "You were the one
spouting off about moral absolutes back there, you and your
Hippocratic oath -- or should we say hypocritical oath? Where do you
get off, telling me what to do? It's my job to weigh these things,
and there is such a thing as common good--"
"Dammit, Hawkeye, this isn't about doctoring for you. This is about
having a clear-cut hierarchy, so that what you want automatically
becomes correct. You make it so easy: you're all-powerful, you get
to be God. And it's not just the Hippocratic oath I'm going by,
it's" -- he put out a hand abstractedly -- "it's what medicine is.
Galen: 'First do no harm.' There are always absolutes."
Hawkeye stared at him, white-lipped. Then he shook his head and
said, "No, I can't believe that."
"You have to. We're not just filling out scorecards here; we're
treating people."
Hawkeye seemed to rally again.
"Do you think I don't know that? I've been here twice as long as
you, and if anyone knows the people in this war, it's me."
A muscle twitched in BJ's jaw, and his expression shifted subtly.
"And if you had your way, you'd know all of them."
Hawkeye felt the conversation slip off its axis, and for a moment,
sideways-glancing, he saw something in BJ's eyes go like a flare and
die out.
"Listen, if we're talking Biblical sense, if this is about you and me
and the people who've been... in your place before, say so. Don't try
to lambaste my surgery."
BJ seemed to shrug off that thought as he flicked a glance toward the
post-op ward through the door.
"You put a man in one of those beds for no valid surgical reason at
all. I have a right to say something about it." He shifted on the
bench, and Hawkeye realized how close they were, their knees tangled
together, his suspended elbows almost brushing BJ's chest. BJ kept
his grip on his forearms. "The minute you cut into someone, you're
inside him. It's not just about you anymore."
"This conversation is not just about me anymore," ventured Hawkeye.
There was a flash of cold, ancient pain in BJ's face.
"You can't do that," he said finally, panting a little. "You can't
just reach into a person's body and wash your hands of it afterward."
There was a silence; then Hawkeye moved in slowly, with calculatedly
smooth movements, hands spread-fingered, like a man approaching a
panicked horse. They met in the still air, breath on each other's
faces, warm press of bodies.
"I don't do that, Beej," Hawkeye said softly. After a pause, he
amended, "Not here. Never here." And yet, and yet, even though BJ
did everything for him, told Margaret to lay off, told Charles to
stop criticizing, told Hawkeye to let Lacy alone or he'd hate himself
for the rest of his life -- even so, Hawkeye knew he would take BJ and
make him hate himself and Her for brief quicksilver moments in the
morning.
In the dim slant of light, BJ's eyes were slightly wild.
"You can't take somebody in there and just -- just -- it's not that
simple. You can't just cut that out of him, what he was doing, what
he felt. It's never that easy."
Then BJ was right against him suddenly, cheek rubbing his neck,
graceless, shaking. And Hawkeye held him and thought, This is where
we should be, the white noise of the war outside, beyond that curtain
enough static to drown in, but here the beat of BJ's heart, the hard
contours of his body, solid, familiar to his fingertips, and yet--
Beneath BJ's skin, transient as breeze, he felt the ripple of muscle:
beneath the surface, world without light. You can't hold that, you
can't cut that out, said BJ, hammering blood and dead, dense bone. He
could imagine BJ, young, gawky, smooth-faced, a girl on his arm, but
every now and then that plunge in his throat when he saw -- what would
the name be? Josh, maybe, ever-present intern, or Tim, two seats
away in Anatomy and Physiology, and that nameless mass in his chest
he couldn't just take a scalpel to. Maybe even later, in residency,
some nights before he went home to the soup and potatoes Peg kept
warm in crinkling tin foil, watching some stranger across the room,
overhead lights on warm skin, what the hell are you thinking? All of
those feelings fossilized; stiff and atrophied muscles, cold in
disuse, thawing out under Hawkeye's touch.
First do no harm, said Galen: medical directive, moral absolute,
imperative verb. Thou shalt not covet thy--
No. Leave it alone.
Hawkeye shakily found a seat on the bench. His hands were on BJ's
face: one finger running down the cheek, BJ arching against him and
shrinking away all at once.
"It's okay," said Hawkeye, as much to the shade of Peg on BJ's lips
as to BJ himself. It's all right, Peg, I won't leave a scar. I know
my surgical technique. First do no harm. He's not mine, I'm not
going to cut in and leave myself under his skin where you'll find the
traces some night, I'm not, I'm not kissing him--
He was kissing him. Hard, fierce, crushing, beer and blood in their
mouths, until Hawkeye heard BJ gasp a little, and he climbed out,
pulled away. Someone's blood was on their lips. BJ's, maybe.
"Am I hurting you?" asked Hawkeye, suppressing a shudder of longing.
"Of course," said BJ, his hand on Hawkeye's elbow, drawing him in.
His voice was hollow until Hawkeye leaned back in and filled it,
filled them both with the echoes of pain.
~Fin~
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