Fandom: M*A*S*H.
Author: Epigone.
Pairing: A little implied BJ/Hawkeye.
Rating: PG.
Warnings: Mention of unpleasant things, second-person narration, present tense.
Archivists: Ask first.
Summary: Hawkeye guilt-trips himself.
Date Written: March 18, 2003.
Author's Notes: Done for Advanced Composition, when told to write about time and Salvador Dal�'s The Persistence of Memory. I still hadn't done that week's five-minute challenge, so I figured, hey, what the heck, kill two birds with one stone. It turned out being pretty shabby, and I never posted it. Still, there are a few things in it that I want to remember, so I'm posting it with this fair warning: it's not worth much.
Feedback: Can be sent to kmaru1701 [AT] hotmail [DOT] com, and is much appreciated.
Out of Joint
You're restless tonight. There's something quick and crazed in the air, something you haven't felt since -- since he left, since Trapper left, except much less guarded, much more open and helpless and frantic. It's not a joke anymore.
BJ cries in his sleep now. That's something Trapper never did; it's something you once did, and every now and then, after you've seen full-on the blankness in some dead kid's eyes, without depth, without color, eternal in a way that nothing else is, you'll still wake up wet-faced; but not like BJ. Not every night, piteously, so quietly you only know it's there if you're listening. As though he doesn't want to impose.
He got a book the other week in Tokyo, the only English one in decent condition he could find: Hamlet. He always was big on poetry.
You know the line he stopped on, because you used to love Shakespeare, Shakespeare and Hemingway before you realized Hemingway was a crock. When BJ put down the book the other day, you knew, somehow, because it's what you always think, inarticulately, when you look at him.
The time is out of joint. And he knows it, holds it close against him where it hurts the most, like the sharpness of the bright picture frame, Erin on Peg's knee caught in the beige grasp of the camera. He knows it.
And you know it. You know you've broken time for him, split it wide open along its seam. In your own private anguish and passion, you've killed all his history and all his future.
You would rather have killed yourself.
~Fin~
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