Fandom: M*A*S*H
Author: Epigone
Pairing: Winchester/Klinger
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Some sexuality, maybe. There's very little that's explicit here.
Archivists: Ask first.
Summary: Charles finds the only beauty that exists in Korea.
Date Written: December, 2003.
Author's Notes: Done for Lady Mondegreen as part of While We Tell of Yuletide Treasure.
Feedback: Can be sent to kmaru1701 [AT] hotmail [DOT] com, and is much appreciated.
In Truth No Beauty
Is there in truth no beauty?
--George Herbert, The Temple
Winter rolled like a tide into Korea, leaving in its wake frosted huts white and stark as barnacles leeching to the hillsides. Before leaving with his two-day pass to Tokyo, Hunnicutt had stood in the middle of the compound, an awkward figure bowed against the wind, and said, with a quick cut of the eyes toward the jeep where Hawkeye sat, "Every now and then, you'd think this place wasn't ten kinds of hell. It looks almost like a snowglobe from here."
With an exaggerated smirk, Charles had replied, "Hunnicutt, only someone like you would use the metaphor of a tacky souvenir to express that sentiment."
He felt the snideness to be justified. Somehow, Pierce and Hunnicutt had managed to finagle two simultaneous passes from Colonel Potter, leaving Charles and the older man to combat the inevitable frostbite and influenza that the season brought. He felt it to be even more justified when Pierce and Hunnicutt had their return trip delayed by inclement weather.
A particular sort of numbness descended after a long day of doctoring, where everything seemed to smell antiseptic. Charles exited post-op on the third day of his bunkmates' absence in such a numbness, in his own private world of sensation: the bloom of his breath on the air, the stiff centered pull of cold muscles, and the brittle sound of snow shifting beneath his boots.
It was strange (in a way that Charles would not acknowledge) to return to an empty Swamp, to a silence that curled like the chill through the gap beneath the door, replacing the obscurely precise whirring of the still to which he had become accustomed. It was as if the war had finally ended, choked in its own excretions, and yet he was not finished. Each night, he stood in a cold room in Korea and at the center of himself was completely unchanged.
He was spared that moment of self-consciousness, though, when he opened the door and saw Klinger sorting the mail, sitting cross-legged on a bunk. Charles's bunk.
"Klinger," said Charles, enunciating each syllable, "what are you doing?"
"Delivering your mail," replied Klinger, without looking up. He lifted an envelope from the bed and waved it abstractedly. "Here's a letter now."
"Klinger, get off my bunk."
"Is this your bunk?" asked Klinger disinterestedly.
Charles considered pursuing the matter, but it was quiet and darkening and, on the other side of the mesh, beginning to snow again. Without removing his boots, he crossed to Hunnicutt's bed -- the still, between them, reflecting close and distorted the small room and Klinger bent intently over his task -- and sat down.
Klinger continued sorting, his hands stirring a murmurous sound from the letters before him. Charles, watching, lost and found himself in that lithe movement, as though in the stillness Klinger was separating him into discrete piles, pre-Korea and in-Korea. Pre-Korea, there was the voluptuous scent of red wine and the need to avert his eyes when by chance they fell on something forbidden; in-Korea, there was only the bitter afterscent of gin and the sinking light that crept over Klinger from the lamp.
At last, Klinger finished and met Charles's eyes. A smile flickered on his lips like the light.
"You still want me off the bed?" he asked, in a faint but steady voice.
Charles paused, waiting for the rush of scorn that did not come and did not come and did not come. All that came was a flash of feeling, a sheer clean transfixing pierce. The light made of him a shadow on the wall that rose and closed the gap between them.
To his credit, Klinger showed great professionalism in dealing with the problem of the mail. It was swiftly transferred to the floor, still in its neatly ordered stacks. Halfway through the relocation, Charles turned off the light, but Klinger's efficiency was undiminished. Soon there was only darkness and gentle motion within the clandestine Swamp, moonlit snow and quiet without; and, abruptly, Klinger's low voice insisting, "C'mon, Major, at least take your boots off!"
Charles removed his boots, and they filled the emptiness of the Swamp; for passing moments, filled the emptiness of an abandoned country taking on snow.
* * * * * * * * *
Months in Korea passed without pattern or reprieve. Changing seasons altered only the countryside, not the malignance in men that kept them fighting, that organ that the doctors sometimes believed they might find beneath the knife, nestled blackly into the chest cavity. They all discovered ways to reject that ugliness in themselves: Potter had discovered it in the woman he left at home, Pierce and Hunnicutt had discovered it in booze or each other, and Charles, on reckless nights, discovered it with Klinger in the supply tent. Afterward, he often thought that he understood how it was that Hunnicutt could stand in the midst of this desolation and see only the dazzling spread of snow.
On July 27th, 1953, peace broke out, and somehow they were all more frightened of it than they had been of the war. The last night, after the warmth and camaraderie of the mess tent, seemed as though it would be intolerable; the compound filled with near-strangers going to tents together in the dark, safety in numbers. Charles and Klinger, newly grown strange to each other with the presence of Soon-Lee, made eye contact on the threshold of the tent, but Klinger broke it first and turned away. They went home in different directions.
Klinger had a wife now who meant enough to keep him in Korea. Klinger was married, the war was over, and the next day, as the clouds streamed away beneath his airplane, Charles found that at the center of himself he was changed.
Still, when he finally landed in Boston and wandered alone from the plane, disoriented, half-asleep, Charles did the only thing that seemed appropriate to the end of that private, claustrophobic, intimate world they had left behind. He bought a two-dollar snow globe from the airport souvenir shop.
~Fin~
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