Fandom: M*A*S*H.
Author: Epigone.
Pairing: Hawkeye/BJ.
Rating: PG-13, for the sake of caution.
Warnings: Sexuality and heavy angst (hey, it was my first real BJ/Hawkeye slash fic; I didn't know I was going overboard.)
Archivists: Ask first.
Summary: Hawkeye tries to make a phone call.
Date Written: November-December 2002.
Author's Notes: The idea for this story is attributed to Jim Croce; the basic plot came to me while I was listening to "Operator (That's Not the Way It Feels)." Many, many, many thanks go to iolanthe, Barrie, and Flick for their beta-ing.
Feedback: Can be sent to kmaru1701 [AT] hotmail [DOT] com, and is much appreciated.
Photographs and Memories
...Nights we couldn't say goodbye,
and of all of the things that we knew,
not a dream survived.
Photographs and memories,
all the love you gave to me;
somehow, it just can't be true:
that's all I've left of you.
--Jim Croce,
"Photographs and Memories"
It was gray, early morning when Hawkeye finally stirred. For hours
he'd been sitting on the bed, rigid, his shoulders hunched
defensively against the moonlight that slid through the window. Once
or twice his head sunk toward his chest, but always he shook himself
awake with half-realized terror.
It wasn't the dreams, although God knew that they were enough to keep
anyone up. The new therapist, Albert, said that those were normal;
he just had to ride them out and things would pick up in time.
Normal. Normal was monsters under the bed and falling into an
endless pit and turning up at school in a state of dishabille.
Normal was not the thing that seized him by the throat when he
drifted off, that roared in his ears, that left him soaked with sweat
and screaming incoherently into the pillow until his father came down
the hall and talked him out of it. He'd thought about looking Sidney
up, of course, because Sidney understood, if that was even possible.
But somehow he could never bring himself to do it. There was little
use.
Tonight it wasn't the dreams that kept Hawkeye perched, quivering, at
the foot of his bed. Tonight it was a number. 365. 365 days. The
last time he'd encountered this date, it was on the lips of an
exuberant radio announcer. 365 days since Korea. Since --
It was nearly dawn. He stood suddenly, trembling, resolute. Two
doors down, his father's breathing was smooth and serene.
It had to be now.
He slid out into the hall and made his way to the staircase, avoiding
the creaky boards with practiced ease. He scarcely felt his feet as
he moved down the flight of steps. At the bottom, he leaned against
the banister, his chest heaving. The walls drew in closer, immense
and brooding, and his head whirled. Maybe this was a mistake. He
clenched his teeth, reached out blindly, and lifted the telephone
from its hook beside the stairs.
The operator's voice was in his ear in a moment, and he held onto the
solidity of that until the darkness withdrew a little. He slid his
free hand into his pocket and touched something there: a talisman to
ward off the shadows that slithered in his peripheral vision, a thing
that was comfortingly circumscribed and quadrilateral against his
fingers. He closed his eyes, marking the skittering of fleeting
nightmares in the space between seeing and not-seeing, and exhaled
into the receiver.
"Hello?" prompted the operator. "How may I help you?"
Hawkeye paused a moment, then sat down on the bottom step, his knees
bunched childishly against his chest. The clock chimed in the living
room. 365.
"I� I need a number."
"Can you give me the city, sir?"
His eyes were still closed. He sucked in his cheeks, fingering the
stiff square in his pocket. Finally, he took it out, put it face-up
on the floor before him, and opened his eyes. Something leapt hard
and pulse-like in his throat.
"Mill Valley, California."
"And the name?"
"Hunnicutt."
"Please hold, sir."
The line was suddenly quiet, and Hawkeye felt a familiar twinge of
fear. He put his palm over the thing on the ground, cupping his
fingers defensively; then he scooped it up and lifted it toward the
light.
It was an old photograph, criss-crossed by indistinct white lines
where it had been creased and re-creased. It showed a gray panorama
of earth and sky, ash and smoke melting into smoke and ash across the
line of the horizon, boundless but for the four rigid sides of the
camera lens. In the background, jumbled together in oblique lines of
jutting roofs and sagging walls, rose a cluster of buildings, lit
from behind by the lusterless sun.
In the foreground, their grainy forms limned with a whitish glow that
made them look almost pasted-on, stood two men. The taller one wore
a pair of dark surgical scrubs and an exaggerated mustache that
drooped over the edges of his wide grin. There was a clean, earnest
cast to his face, an unabashed and unashamed humor about the mouth
and eyes. Still, his jaw was set, and in his eyes there was a rigid
and pained glint. His arm was extended, and --
Hawkeye paused there, his breath coming quick and arrhythmic. A few
fervent curses left his lips and petered out into nothingness, and he
leaned closer to the photo. There was undeniably a harshness in
BJ's eyes -- and he had thought he had forgotten. He had thought
he had forgotten the most heinous crime of the war, the insidious
brutality that had gotten to them all, sooner or later, but that
shouldn't have gotten to BJ. Shouldn't have forced him to turn to
the wonders of their homemade gin to blur the clarity of their lives;
shouldn't have whispered suspicions in his ear that he was alone and
unnecessary and helpless and worlds away from a woman who was now
learning to clean gutters by herself; shouldn't have made it
necessary for him to grow that goofy mustache in order to support the
illusion that he was still joking with the world; shouldn't have made
his words sharper, his humor more cutting; above all, shouldn't have
stripped him of his most basic human right, the right to cry, fully
and fluidly, without the cheap aid of booze. Hawkeye nearly choked
on his hate for the war, thinking of that and seeing those eyes,
because it had taken BJ, the only goddamn good thing that might
have come out of it.
In the photo, BJ's arm was draped over the shoulder of the other
man. Hawkeye didn't have to study that man; much as he tried to
avoid it, his own mirror showed the same person. He knew the haggard
face, the lips lifted in a bemused and weary smile that didn't look
quite sincere, the hair fading into gray above the ears, the chest
receding as if to disappear between the ribs, the stooped posture,
and the unavoidable eyes, glazed and hollow, the gaze inward, the
lids heavy and flinching, the pupils dilated with the accretion of
horror. He knew them, and yet he couldn't force himself to claim
them.
He remembered that day. They'd had a steady stream of wounded for a
while, and Hawkeye was still brooding over an internal bleeder who'd
been taken up on the last bus to Seoul. At the end of his shift,
BJ quietly went over to a patient from earlier in the week, a young
G.I. by the name of McGill, and haggled with him over the price of
borrowing his Polaroid camera for an hour. Kellye, who was on duty
that afternoon, later told Hawkeye that it was an epic battle; McGill
was eager to make BJ pay through the nose, but BJ wouldn't leave
him alone. McGill finally let it go for six dollars and one of
BJ's less outrageous shirts. Then, out in the compound, BJ got
hold of Klinger, set him up behind a jeep with the camera, and lured
Hawkeye out of post-op with the offer of a drink at Rosie's. Klinger
obligingly snapped the picture just as they stepped out; there was
still a squint in their eyes as they emerged into light from
darkness. Somehow, that had made the whole day worthwhile, that
unspoken assertion of BJ's that this moment was theirs alone.
"Sir?" said the operator, and Hawkeye started.
"Oh, yes?"
"I've got the number here."
"Ah," -- he fumbled with the photo -- "ah, just a minute." There was
a pen beside the phone. Hawkeye snatched it up and turned the
photograph over. "All right, shoot."
The operator read him the number, and Hawkeye copied it down in his
loose scrawl on the white matted back of the Polaroid. Finishing, he
sighed, letting his eyes drift over the neat, sterile inscription
above the information he had just jotted down. It read:
Hawk--
Here's to better times and better photo opportunities.
You're not very photogenic. The guy beside you, though, he should be
in pictures.
Have a nice war,
BJ.
He and BJ had gotten their first close look at the picture in the
Swamp before dinner. There, under the harsh glare of the lamps, with
the cloying scent of anesthesia still clinging to his scrubs, BJ
painstakingly wrote his message. The care he took struck Hawkeye as
being at odds with the flippancy of his words. Hawkeye had
reflected, with a clenching in his stomach, that BJ's frankness
about what was really on his mind would have to be listed as another
casualty of the war.
"You got that, sir?" asked the operator.
"Yes," said Hawkeye, blinking slowly at the number. He couldn't read
what he had written; his eyes ached profoundly.
His vision had been swimming that night, too. Later, at Rosie's,
BJ ordered them round after round of drinks. It didn't take long
before Hawkeye was half-collapsed against BJ, both of them laughing
breathlessly at some stupid pun.
The next set of drinks arrived, and BJ made as if to pass one
over. When Hawkeye tried to take it, he found BJ's fingers curving
tentatively over his own. They locked gazes.
"Hawk," BJ said unsteadily. His smile was blurry. "Hawk, you like
the picture?"
Hawkeye, still chuckling, nodded vigorously and slipped BJ's
fingers off of the stem of his glass.
"Of course."
BJ relinquished his grip, but held Hawkeye's eyes. He reached down
suddenly and caught Hawkeye's other hand.
"Good. I - I wanted a good pissure." He looked bemused. "Picture.
You know?"
"Mmm," said Hawkeye distractedly, trying to free his fingers. BJ
clenched them harder, his smile fading slowly and resolving into
strained tenderness. He leaned confidentially toward Hawkeye.
"I meant to kiss you," he said, his warm, alcohol-sweet breath
vibrating against Hawkeye's cheek. "Really, I mean, just do it right
there for the cam'ra."
Hawkeye looked at him, his skin shivering where it brushed BJ's
stubble, and tried to keep his balance on the stool. BJ paid him
no mind. He didn't even seem to notice what a compromising position
he was in, there in plain view of Rosie's clientele.
"It woulda been a better picture if I had," he said. "I just - 's
just that, well, there was Klinger, an' right inna middle of the
compound� I figured what we got had t'be good enough."
Hawkeye pulled his hand away without a word. The alcohol was cold
and bitter and inert in his stomach, and he blinked painfully in the
bleary incandescence of the lamps. He lifted his drink and found
BJ still staring at him, distorted and wavering through the glass.
"To better photo opportunities," said Hawkeye, raising his glass
higher and knowing in that moment that none of this time was theirs,
no matter how many cheap snapshots they took of it. BJ raised his
glass as well, gulped its contents, and murmured for a refill. They
sat in silence for the rest of the evening, dripping lust into their
bourbons until the jukebox wound down and they were so drunk that
they'd forgotten why they cared.
"All right," said the operator cheerily. "For a little extra charge,
I can connect you, Mr. Pierce. "
"You can�" Hawkeye struggled to understand. "Oh. Oh. Connect me
to - to - uh - " And he couldn't say it. He couldn't say BJ's
name. He could think it -- hell, he'd been thinking it every day for
the past year, a low, latent throb rising behind his ribs -- but
something closed down inside when he tried to dredge all that up and
commit it to the empty air. "Yes, I - " I love him. I need to know
he's across the phone line in the middle of the night, because
somehow the only thing I remember of the war outside of the blood is
him and me in the dark in the tent in a strange place in each other's
arms.
He gripped the photograph until the edges dug into his palm, but all
he could think of was another photograph that he'd seen a long time
ago at the bottom of a dingy footlocker. He still couldn't think of
Peg, couldn't hold her and BJ and himself in his mind at the same
time. But he had no trouble visualizing that yellowed picture of a
beaming, pudgy infant, her smile somehow familiar as she submitted to
a kiss on the forehead from another BJ, a BJ with clean hands and
clear eyes.
"That's my little girl," BJ had said when he showed it to Hawkeye
his first week in camp. It hadn't mattered so much then, but time
went on inexorably, and things happened in the quiet dark. Hawkeye
often found himself kneeling before the locker on the nights that
Charles took the late shift, after BJ had fallen against him, and
there he would study the photograph. It was a part of BJ that
would never be his. He could never have a picture like that, not
when every kiss was clandestine and every endearment muffled.
She was probably calling BJ "Daddy" now. Hawkeye had no right to
call him anything at all.
"Mr. Pierce? Would you like me to connect you?"
His jaw worked soundlessly for a moment. Then, his voice catching,
he said, "No. No, actually, I think I� I think I made a mistake."
"Sorry?"
"No, I'm sorry. For wasting your time. Just, uh� send me the bill."
The operator began to speak again, but Hawkeye, shaking, placed the
receiver back on the hook. His vision blurred, but he picked up the
pen and fiercely scratched out the number on the photograph until it
was illegible.
"Wrong number," he whispered raggedly, swaying against the banister.
"Wrong goddamn number altogether."
~Fin~
[HOME] [MORE M*A*S*H FIC]