Fandom: M*A*S*H.
Author: Epigone.
Pairing: Hawkeye/BJ and BJ/Peg.
Rating: PG-13.
Warnings: Sexual situations.
Archivists: Ask first.
Summary: BJ comes home from the war and has trouble adjusting.
Date Written: January 2003.
Author's Notes: The song lyrics used herein are from a traditional Scottish ballad. I haven't been able to locate the names of the composer and lyricist -- it's a very old song -- but I'm certainly not laying claim to it.
Feedback: Can be sent to kmaru1701 [AT] hotmail [DOT] com, and is much appreciated.
Over the Ocean
It is better not to touch our idols: the gilt comes off on our hands.
--Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
BJ guided the car over the stretch of gravelly road, his hands tentative: one on the steering wheel, one on Peg's hand where it lay cool and inviting across the armrest. From somewhere in the beige depths of the back seat, Erin's slumbering breath came as a muted whisper to him. Her hair crimped in the humidity; he could just see her profile receding in the corner of his rearview mirror, the last traces of baby fat and sunlit baby down clinging to the curve.
A year ago in Korea, Peg's crackling voice over the phone made promises about the evening of his homecoming. He sat alone in the claustrophobic stillness of Potter's office, felt her explicit look in the vibration of air at his ear, and knew the heat of the summer within his skin. They shared laughs in the dimness until they heard Erin's raw wail rising in the background, and before she went Peg said "love" to him. He returned it easily, the word native to his tongue, and smiled for hours after she'd hung up.
Does something other than the time zone shift when you cross an ocean? Is it that you are no longer consigned to your private Tantalus-inspired torture? Reflex makes you reach for the boughs that swing lazily just out of reach, laden with pale fruit that is not forbidden but the very opposite, you are bidden to partake of it -- and yet there is always that meter of space between hand and tree, those miles between bodies. When those barriers fall away, do you simply lose your appetite?
Oh, she said, you'll see what we'll do the first night back. But the first night back, he forgot where the bedroom was, and after he woke Erin and cried soundlessly into her baby hair, he fell asleep in the chair beside her cradle. At some point he came into gray awareness, a dream colored in vivid reds and greens throbbing at the edge of memory, and nearly murmured some endearment to Hawkeye before he heard, through the door, Peg's slippered feet go resignedly down the hall to their room, alone.
She woke him up at noon, and though he still drove with white knuckles and a tense alertness to possible landmines, he was pressed into service as chauffeur. Our house is waiting, she insisted.
A house is not a home, Floyd (Dad?) said once, unless it has a stork nesting on the roof. Now they had their own heavy, awkward bird that settled itself just out of sight wherever they went, brooding in the air above them. Neither mentioned it, but it didn't feel like home.
They saw the lot up ahead, washed in shades of sunset. BJ remembered it as a fecund place of moist soil and silver birches, but now the headlights laid it stark and bare before them. The land dropped away a few hundred miles from the road, dropped into echoing space and the dark water of the bay. He let Peg's name go like a stone down those cliffs, into the emptiness of the car.
Peg looked at him as they slowed to a stop, a smile touching her lips.
"It's ours," she said, squeezing his hand.
"It is," he said. "I'm glad I have this to come home to."
That heaviness came into her eyes, the pupils going large and leaden. He had never seen it before last night, when they had sat in the living room after Erin was asleep, and he had choked on his wine and said he was sorry, it was good wine, but he didn't want to do any drinking, he'd gotten his fill in Korea. She had looked at him like that, with a wisdom and fear he had never asked to see in her.
"BJ," she said, touching his cheek, "you never wrote about what it was like."
He froze against her palm.
"No," he allowed.
"It was always 'How's Erin?' or 'Is that leak fixed yet?' or maybe, every now and then, 'Can't wait to come home.' But what did you come home from?"
"You don't want to know."
He could see her chewing on the inside of her mouth, a fierce, insectile motion.
"No. No, I don't think I do. I don't think you want me to. But I want you to leave it there. I can't always tread around it, you know, I need you to meet me halfway. I don't ask about it, but you - you don't think about it."
"Fine," coolly.
Her other hand was on his face now.
"I never thought about you as being in Korea. It was easier that way. You were never in Korea; you were just… over there. You know, like the song? It's much more open-ended that way." Her voice was brittle, flailing. "God, you know what I used to think? You were--"
He leaned over and kissed her hard, through her white hands in the dark. It was something he remembered from nights lit with the redness of overheard lamps, the reedy insistence of cicadas loud in his ears, someone telling him that you don't use words. Words mean too much. Sometimes a word cuts too deeply at what you feel, and then you have to stop it at its source.
She was motionless beneath him for a time, but then her hands tugged at his shirt collar, her spine arched, and her lips pulled away from his and said, "BJ, Erin's here...."
He heard the quaver of reluctance in her voice and shifted in his seat toward her. He could see the murky flash of her bare neck when she moved against the pane of her window, skittish, desperate, birdlike
The birds always come back to haunt you, somehow. The stork on your roof, the albatross around your neck, and Hawkeye every time you close your eyes
"Shh," he murmured, leaning into her again. "We'll be quiet. I promised you last night -- and I'm sorry, I couldn't, I needed to sleep, I still need to sleep more than I can ever sleep for the rest of my life, but we'll do it tonight. And we'll build the house tomorrow."
She obliged; she was quiet, she tilted her head and kissed him back. Reservedly at first, then with grasping, flushed, tender abandon, but quietly, so quietly, never asking him why, why do you need this now, even as she kissed his lips never asking, Why aren't these mine anymore?
It was so quiet, some nights. It had to be. If they said something, anything, they would shatter the fragile illusion of security, send it all tumbling down, people who live in houses of cards should never wager everything at once
She was gasping in his ear even before he reached clumsily under her white blouse, his fingers foreign implements
Hawkeye never wagered everything at once -- except where sanity was concerned
In the mugginess of the car, they rolled across her seat, and his cheek brushed the chill of the window. She whispered things into the hot space between them, things that he heard rather than felt. He knew she lay beneath him in the dip of plush and leather, but her movements came to him indirectly, in her silhouette slithering in the glass beside them, in the murmur of the seat. In some still, clear part of his mind, he thought wryly that this must be some sort of cosmic joke, that he had come home to his faithful wife only to undress her illicitly in a darkened car by the roadside, the old cliché perverted.
The smell of rain, then -- the sheer face of memory rising between them. Late June, the trees top-heavy and wavering against the sky, an image of skewed proportions that slid in and out of focus. The girl -- a prom date? -- with laughter shrill and frantic, nameless, the beer on her breath wafting thickly in the closed car, the empty street blurring in brown and gray. I don't really know where to start… oh, you neither?
And, inevitably, the creak of old seat cushions, the bloody scent of rust, and Hawkeye chuckling low and private in the semi-light. Over his shoulder, the squat forms of the other jeeps in the motor pool, and the tents, distant and colorless on the horizon. Hawkeye kissed him and said, Look at me, you cad, I'm over here. And he could, it was all right, look at the black hair and the tired face that had no equivalent outside of the long parade of Korean months pressed in dust. There was no frame of reference; there was only the vastness of solitude and the solidity of Hawkeye, the way Hawkeye touched him and said his name as no one else ever had or would again.
Then he plummeted back into Peg and the smell of their old car. All those barriers, two-year barriers, were swept away, his arms were finally long enough to hold Peg, a fruit open and white and yielding -- and so, so solid. Not the girl in a ruffled dress he'd left at the airport, translucent as china, the imagined idea of her airy touch indelible in his mind. She was Peg, but Peg with wiser eyes and callused hands and hunger, as solid and real and frightened as all the rest. He snagged her momentarily and fell back.
BJ sat up suddenly, Peg's arms trailing off of him. The stars wheeled in gray streaks through the window.
"What?" she asked, coming up after him. "What is it?"
He didn't look at her until he had started the car again.
"I-I can't. Not tonight. Not so soon. It's not that - I mean, of course I want - if we could just wait…" He turned away again and fiddled with the keys.
"All right," she said with forced cheeriness, sliding an arm back into her blouse. "We can do that. It's late anyway."
"I'm sorry," he said. He was always sorry. "I really am." He could feel the shape of her body beside him, curled in on itself, all too familiar. He lost himself in the revving of the engine. "And… and we'll build the house in a little while."
* * * * * * * * *
Peg watched BJ move in the circumscribed lens of the rearview mirror, with that grace rolling in his shoulder blades. It was just flashes of familiarity she saw in him now: a look that died out in his eyes almost as soon as it kindled, the way his forehead creased in consternation. Small mannerisms that belonged to her, superimposed on this stranger, this man with sun-bleached hair and new lines around his eyes and an outsized mustache. That mustache had slid over her skin when he kissed her, and she had realized, her stomach growing cold, that she didn't know from what place in BJ it had come, what irrational need it filled.
He wouldn't even glance at her, although of course he was driving, Peg, usually the driver keeps his eyes on the road. She followed his example, as if she could somehow catch him out there along the asphalt, streaking by with the median strip.
Through her window, though, there was only the black water of the 'Frisco Bay, shimmering flatly like sheet metal where the highway lights fell neon over it. The opposite shore was equally black, so that the bay met the sky seamlessly, immense, oceanic.
BJ had never been a soldier. Oh, she knew by the way he looked at his gray image in the mirror that he thought he was, thought they had made him one as soon as he stopped flinching at the scarred hands that reached out to him blindly in post-op, but to her he had never been a soldier. She would take Erin to the beach on nice days, later, when BJ's voice had gotten harder on the phone and his script had gotten more constricted on the page, and while the sun burned through the sea-grass and their salty hair, she would stare out over the unmarred Pacific. Over There, she thought, that's where he is, but that meant that there was a war on. So she remembered a thin melody out of childhood, simpler, quieter, and she could think, It's all right, he's just like a sailor, it's just this ocean between us. You wait like a good sailor's wife, and he comes home in time, smelling of breeze
My bonny lies over the ocean,
My bonny lies over the sea,
My bonny lies over the ocean,
Oh, bring back my bonny to me.
But when he came back, he smelled of blood and dust. They met him at the airport, everything white and metallic, B.J. staggering forlornly into the terminal like someone cut off of a lifeline. She ran to him and his bags thudded to the tiles, his arms rose jerkily and dropped over her, and she smelled the sharpness of war on him, a layer of difference coating his body like sweat.
He touched her as though she might cut him. When he hugged her, he was thinner than before, less sure of his body, and the once-hard muscles in his torso were lean and wasted. Even his idiotic mustache was dry against her cheek, lifeless. She'd started crying then, standing in the sterile brightness of the airport with her arms around a stranger, until he let her go and bent over to gather his bags again.
He'd deposited those bags in the entry hall, tucked into the wooden corner of the high staircase down which he used to escort her. He had done it casually, as if shedding a useless skin, but she had spared the pile a quick glance, wondering what had come home with him, what had been left in Korea.
What had gone home with someone else.
Bring back, oh, bring back,
Oh, bring back my bonny to me, to me
The cold lights of their neighborhood spilled over her lap, projected the autumn tree branches onto her window in stark relief. She jumped a little and looked to BJ.
He sat rigid-backed in his seat, his elbows arrayed at awkward right angles to the wheel. There had been a time when he would have anticipated the whisper of her glance, would have caught it across the car and smiled as sweetly as only BJ could. Now, he couldn't even feel the way her eyes screamed into the side of his face
Bring back, oh, bring back,
Oh, bring back my bonny to me
The car shuddered as it turned into the driveway. Peg could see the gaping hole of their bedroom window, the curtains dejected against the panes, the faint outline of one bedpost long and rounded in the darkness. Last night--
Last night as I lay on my pillow,
Last night as I lay on my bed
Last night she had lain under the cutout square of moonlight alone, BJ's breathing harsh through the thin walls. She could easily have gone to him, brought him to bed; that was what he wanted, he had just forgotten how to ask, that was all. But she hadn't gone.
Erin stirred sleepily in the back, and BJ, turning the key in the ignition, said, too eagerly, "I've got her."
They got out of their respective doors, going their opposite ways in the darkness. She could see BJ's tall frame bend and stretch into the confines of the back seat. There was his hushed voice, meaningless words of comfort as he eased Erin out of her car seat, like memories of someone who said things to her at night and then showed her what they meant.
Last night as I lay on my pillow
BJ stood upright in the glare of the car's interior light, Erin resting on one shoulder. He shoved the door closed with one hip, still murmuring into Erin's hair. His eyes moved in Peg's direction before he turned and started for the house.
I dreamed that my bonny was dead.
As she watched him walk away down the unlit path, she recognized the tremendous irony: of all the ways she thought she might lose him during the war, she had never imagined this one.
~Fin~
[HOME] [MORE M*A*S*H FIC]