Fandom: M*A*S*H.
Author: Epigone.
Pairing: Hawkeye/BJ, reference to Hawkeye/Trapper.
Rating: PG-13.
Warnings: Sexuality.
Archivists: Ask first.
Summary: Hawkeye's carrying a torch -- quite literally.
Date Written: March 2003.
Author's Notes: The quoted lyrics from "Just One of Those Things" were penned by the illustrious Cole Porter for his show Jubilee. This fic's title was inspired by, and its epigraph taken from, Harvey Fierstein's Torch Song Trilogy, but otherwise, there are no similarities between the two pieces. This one has to be dedicated to Meredith -- not only because she is wonderful, but also because she let me bounce the basic interview premise off of her. She is truly an asset to humanity.
Feedback: Can be sent to kmaru1701 [AT] hotmail [DOT] com, and is much appreciated.
Torch Song
You mean [he's] a friend-friend or a euphemism-friend?
--Harvey Fierstein, Torch Song Trilogy
More than anything, BJ wished Hawkeye would sit up one night in the sheets and invite him in. But it had been two weeks, two weeks of empty glances and full glasses, and Hawkeye still hadn't asked.
It seemed a funny reversal. After mail days, it was normally BJ's prerogative to go around as if he had dry rot growing up inside, dulling his eyes, splitting his throat wide open sometimes at night when he screamed her name into his pillow, thinking that the sound would make her real, his own horror and ecstasy unreal, and came up with only a mouth raw and dry and tasting of cotton. But now Hawkeye flitted through the camp, Swamp to OR to officers' club to Rosie's to mess tent in endless permutations, under tent-flaps and through the dust, aimlessly, as the nurses muttered indulgently under their breath.
Early in the week, Hawkeye had carried in a bedpan, cleaned vigorously in the scrub room, and set it up beside his cot, under the mesh that looked out on the barrenness beyond the Swamp. In it, he constructed a sort of large, crude candle, fashioned of greasy wax scrapings from Father Mulcahy's sacramental tapers and a wick soaked in alcohol. Each evening, he lit it faithfully and lay in his bed in the stretch of its uneven light. It stank of ethyl and antiseptic; BJ asked, the third night, if the ritual might be cancelled due to olfactory protest. Hawkeye tonelessly told him that no, it mightn't be, and they let it go.
And all this for a small white envelope.
Potter had brought the senior officers together fourteen days ago and waved it before them. It was a letter from the broadcasting company for which Clete Roberts worked, notifying the personnel of the 4077th MASH that their interviews had been aired the previous week. Later, the PA announced it to the camp at large, but by then BJ heard the hollowness of it, saw the hollowness in Hawkeye's eyes, without comprehension. The echoes somehow lingered for days, dead, shattered noises invading even the dim sanctuary of the Swamp, until one night Hawkeye sprang savagely from his bed and left, went walking through the bleached compound, the indistinct tents hunched like black animals, the gray lines of the camp rippling off into the predawn sky.
Now every night he went walking to nowhere, and BJ could never stay awake until he returned. Sometimes in the morning, when BJ rolled over on his mattress and watched him, he still looked like Hawkeye, careless in sleep, the pulse fluttering in his neck, dark and light passing openly over his face as he dreamed. When BJ slid out of his covers and approached, though, Hawkeye came awake instantly, and the tightness came back into his features. The still hummed in the cobwebs behind them, murmuring to itself, and BJ hurriedly busied himself with other things.
Another afternoon, gin ripe in their throats and the phantom feel of blood slick on their hands after a long OR session, and into the silence of the Swamp came a sharp knock. Hawkeye looked up from a messy game of solitaire and called out, "Come in, dear."
Radar stepped through the door, his eyes darting from Hawkeye to BJ and back again.
"Uh, Hawkeye?"
Hawkeye had bent over the cards again, cursing fervently to discover that sweet-talking didn't work on them, but at Radar's tone, he looked up again, more intently.
"Yeah?"
Radar fidgeted, switched the dingy sack he carried from one hand to the other. Hawkeye seemed to draw into himself; then he half-rose, the movement of his limbs clear and uninhibited, eagerness swinging in every muscle. BJ, lying gracelessly across his own bunk, glanced up as well, belatedly, as though there had been a momentary lapse in some wordless communication. Still, across the room from each other, they were both at once tense and yielding, neither one knowing, neither one bothering to conceal it.
Radar smiled nervously, apologetically.
"I'm sorry, Hawkeye." There was something soft in those syllables, fond and yet terrified. "There's just junk mail for you today."
There was no visible change. Hawkeye, still all clear, jagged angles, merely lowered himself back down onto the edge of his cot.
"Okay," he said.
"Maybe next week," said Radar. Hawkeye felt a brief ripple of amusement pass beneath the surface of his thoughts: Radar was trying to comfort him. "I mean, I'm sure there's a lotta reasons he might not've written."
"Yeah."
"Who?" queried BJ after a pause, pleasantly, in a tone that suggested offhand interest.
"My dad," said Hawkeye without inflection, at the exact same moment that Radar said, "Trapper." BJ gave them a small grin, half-hidden by the new mustache.
"You guys want to consult about this and get back to me?" he asked, without the slightest edge to his voice, but he knew Hawkeye, and so he already knew the answer.
"Trapper," confirmed Hawkeye.
"Ah," commented BJ amiably, picking up his book again.
Radar swallowed.
"Listen, Hawkeye, I'm sure he means to. There's a lotta reasons--"
"I know," interrupted Hawkeye, crisply but not unkindly. "But there are a lot of other people who are going to want mail today, so - " He inclined his head toward the compound.
"Yeah, all right," said Radar, and fled the scene.
Silence reigned again in the small space, lit in patches by the filtered sun, until BJ turned over to face Hawkeye. He set down his novel, spine up, on the page he'd been reading for the past five minutes, and rested his chin in his hands.
"And what are the reasons he would have written?" he asked.
Hawkeye was still sitting uncomfortably on the edge of his mattress.
"I don't know," he said quietly, and gave BJ a smile of strained reassurance. "It was stupid. I just thought he might have seen that broadcast and remembered. Wanted to talk. I know there's a lot to be done alone after all of this, but� I thought a year'd be enough time. He didn't have to; it was just - " He spread his hands, the fingers curving into empty space. "Stupid. He didn't have to." A moment, then, where BJ tried to formulate a response, but Hawkeye spoke again, thoughtfully: "But he was here about a year, too. And he was my bunkie. And" -- a rush of dark, rough, clumsy pride, Hawkeye looking up from under his straggling bangs, defiant, childish, raw -- "he kissed me."
BJ simply stopped. He hadn't been moving in the first place, but there was something in the way his body lay, lithe and hard and sharp amid the tangled blankets, and the ways his eyes slid, dark water just under the irises, that placed him outside of the conversation for a moment, outside Korea and the bed that smelled faintly of Hawkeye, metallic fear and hot skin. Then he dropped back in, came back behind his eyes; the cot rustled as he twitched, almost flinched, and sat up.
"He what?"
"Kissed me," said Hawkeye, a curve to his lips that BJ could neither place nor claim. "I mean, not just once� but once in particular."
"What do you mean?" asked BJ. "What do you mean, he kissed you?"
"I mean he kissed me."
"But you didn't kiss him?" BJ's gaze swept briefly over his pillow: there, under the glazed yellow of the lamps, their cheeks against the cloth, their breath in each other's throats--
Hawkeye smiled and awkwardly reached across the gap to pat BJ on the knee.
"No," he said smoothly. "No, it was mutual."
"Ah," said BJ indistinctly. "Okay."
"By proxy, the last time," added Hawkeye, with childish satisfaction. "He didn't even care; he let Radar know about it."
BJ looked up sharply.
"Radar knew?"
"Radar would have found out anyway." Hawkeye put his elbows on his knees and hunched over a bit. "You know that."
And there was that small, niggling feeling: not in BJ's head, not in any rational part of himself, but somewhere in the deep that echoed without end. You know that. You know what's what here. Why go on pretending, if in the end you'll only suffocate yourself, like drowning in your own lungs, the leaden water settling lower and lower. The truth will out....
"But he was married," said BJ. Hawkeye raised his eyebrows and looked at him more closely, preparing to tear that argument apart. But then he saw BJ's jaw tighten, and he recognized that it was no accusation. BJ knew his own conscience too well to resort to that. It was just -- why don't you go pale and pained and helpless when you talk about him, when you conjure him up in the stagnant air, bending over the still, lacing his boots, holding your face; why does this person in the past tense hurt less than I do?
Because there's no future tense here?
"Not really, Beej," replied Hawkeye carefully. "I mean, it was...." He gestured ineffectually. "It wasn't like that."
Marriage, to Trapper, was a sort of grand joke, with a punchline about which he never gave a damn. Marriage, to both of them, in their little private square framed by olive-green walls, sweat and gin and dust seeping into their very pores, was something gaudy and exotic, like the native priestesses rippling through the local towns, all color and sun on silk, jangle of beads, no substance.
When BJ stepped up on the dazzling, noisy corner of a Korean street, everything was inverted, not least of all Hawkeye's vocabulary. Gone were the days where "my wife" meant no more than a funny little priestess practicing her charms behind gingham kitchen curtains. "My wife" became a totem, and there were no more jokes about it.
"I see," said BJ, and even now it wasn't bitter, just tired. It would have disturbed Hawkeye if BJ had shown a flash of resentment; it disturbed him even more that there was only resignation.
"Yeah."
The P.A. interrupted them then, as if on cue.
"Captain Hunnicutt, please report to the post-op ward."
They both tensed before it registered that only BJ was needed. He heaved himself to his feet with a sigh. Hawkeye, cautious and eager, made as if to get up as well.
"You need a hand?"
"No," said BJ distractedly, hands momentarily clasped behind him in an anxious, boyish pose. Then his glance solidified, and he smiled at Hawkeye and repeated more firmly, "No, it's all right. It's probably just that corporal with the belly wound - I've been watching him for an abscess."
"All right," said Hawkeye, folding into himself. "I was planning on getting some sleep anyway."
They both knew it was there now, tangible as the still or the dirty socks, but they moved around it, feeling out its edges, hands raised defensively, purblind. BJ should rail, condemn, sulk, anything -- but instead there was this, eyes slightly averted, voice as warm as ever, but no lingering touch on Hawkeye's shoulder as he went out alone into the compound. Hawkeye deserved worse. He deserved nothing.
Rolling over on the mattress, he reached out shakily and found the lighter he stored beneath his bunk. In the dimness of his corner of the tent, a small flame flared into being. He touched it to the wick of his bedpan candle, and the light caught there, caught and held, dancing sinuously into acrid smoke. He shook out the lighter and put it back in its place.
He let himself slide down flat onto the bed. His face turned inward, toward the wall, and he traced the sagging green cloth with his eyes, familiar as his own skin, unchanging as an ache. When he finally found sleep, he burrowed into the dent in his pillow, and one arm fell out limply over the white dip of mattress that his hips alone couldn't fill.
* * * * * * * * *
He floated through stylized dreams, sepia dreams curled at the corners like aged paper, smelling of musky dark things moving beneath the earth. He came down into himself, finally, into the sunlight of Korean August and the underfoot crackle of dry grass and the long reedy sound of the Imjin River crawling just out of sight. He could even feel his pulse, wrists and throat thrumming, and he laughed at the clarity of it all.
He was scrambling over the turf just beyond the garbage dump, his right arm tingling from the throw he'd just snapped off to Trapper. It didn't make much sense, the game they were playing: since there were only two participants, as soon as one threw a pass, he became the defense and charged headlong at his former teammate. There was no depth to the field either, no room for maneuvering, so it was impossible to score. They were quite proud of how well it worked.
Trapper made the catch and took off. He'd never been much good as a running back, not even in college, and they were both out of shape now; still, there was an exhibitionistic grace to his movements, lazy and elaborate, that caught Hawkeye off guard every time.
They were bearing down on each other, Hawkeye with a sort of desperation that he didn't remember having then, his arms and legs everywhere, his breathing harsh. As he approached, Trapper shot him a wide grin, the ball tucked under an arm, one shoulder forward -- and Hawkeye felt a little thrill of anger at that sun-warmed confidence. He lowered his head and drove straight into Trapper.
A flurry of limbs, and then gravity caught them in a sharp hiccup. They went down together, Trapper still clutching the ball, Hawkeye grappling for it even as they fell, fiercely, intimately. Trapper hit first, on his back, and then Hawkeye, the hard press of the ball between them.
"I've still got it," said Trapper triumphantly, after a moment in which they both regained their bearings.
"You dummy," said Hawkeye. "Who cares? I tackled you."
Trapper moved a little, brought the ball out from its snug place against him.
"So?"
"So," countered Hawkeye, swatting him playfully, "you lose."
"I never lose." Trapper grinned up from between Hawkeye's elbows, the long grass whispering in his hair. "I've still got something."
Hawkeye rolled his eyes and made a grab for the ball. Trapper put up a protective arm, and somehow Hawkeye's hand, deflected, found the curve of the other man's side instead. They froze; Trapper shivered a little and, after a pause, arched into him, catlike. Hawkeye was on the verge of pushing up to his knees, away, when Trapper's warm fingers slipped up over the nape of his neck, the fine short hairs there, and stroked him. In the next moment, Trapper tugged him down into a kiss.
Hawkeye submitted dizzily, putting his own hands on Trapper's chest where they wouldn't get in the way. They found a comfortable position and stayed there for quite some time.
Trapper let him go at last, and he sat up abruptly, catching his breath.
"Hey." Hawkeye glanced down: Trapper had propped himself up on one elbow, pillowed against the bright rise of the ground. They smiled vaguely at each other, and then Trapper said, "Now I think the ball's in your court."
"Wrong sport," said Hawkeye, the joke coming reflexively as he tried to gather his wits.
"That rhymed." Trapper reached over and touched him on the leg. "So all this time I've been living with a poet, and I didn't even know it."
"You just did it too," noted Hawkeye. Trapper's hand slid farther, casually. Hawkeye trembled and leaned in. "I guess that means it was meant to be, huh?"
"Yeah," said Trapper flippantly, and sat up as well, facing Hawkeye. "Um-" They kissed again, hurriedly, bruisingly, with growing frenzy. All Hawkeye could taste was Korea, but who gave a damn? Trapper felt so good.
He imagined them from outside his body, a shot in some scratchy, overdone romance movie; any minute now, the wild white of the ocean would rush over them, or the scene would fade to black. It was all too swift and open, crouched out there on the browned grass, oblivious, hungry. Gradually, he realized that he was drifting outside his body, seeping out. The sun blinked brilliantly in the haze -- haze? -- and from the officers' club, for a split second, he heard the jaunty pipings of a faint tune:
It was just one of those things,
Just one of those crazy things,
One of those bells that now and then rings-
It was just one of those things.
He kicked once, helplessly, into the warm air, and fell away.
* * * * * * * * *
In the jaundiced light of the Swamp, Hawkeye came awake, gasping, his pulse hammering. His vision whirled; he felt the soft brush of a hand on his knee, and he reached out blindly. The name was thick in his throat, but something made him wait, wait until the hand took his arm and--
"Hawk," said BJ in a low voice, sitting down on the bed beside him. "It's okay."
Hawkeye saw him then, him and the sinking sun and the candle behind him sputtering in its own smoke. Of course it was BJ. Of course.
"I know," murmured Hawkeye, limp in BJ's grasp. "It's okay as Korea's ever going to be, anyway."
BJ smiled sympathetically and squeezed his arm before releasing it. The bed groaned as he shifted his weight, leaned back and looked searchingly at Hawkeye. For his part, Hawkeye seemed fascinated by the candlelight playing on BJ's outstretched hand on his knee, a dense, still pressure.
"You wanna know something funny?" asked BJ lightly, sitting Indian-style, peering at him with that lopsided, understated grin.
"Yeah," said Hawkeye, all at once feeling drained, despite his nap. He nestled into the bed, his unshaven cheek against the cool, musty sheets, just next to BJ's bent legs. He briefly indulged in an absurd picture of the past: he and a pretty girl -- had it been Carlye? Or one in the long pale parade after her? -- lying in a clearing in the woods up by Cape Code, summer break before his senior year in college, heat flaking like old paint, the muted wash of the ocean beyond the bluffs, and his head lolling in her lap. He closed his eyes, and here, April evening in Korea, was warmer still. "Yeah, please, tell me something funny, Beej."
BJ's hand rubbed him smoothly, calmingly, on the small of his back, but with an odd tension.
"Sometimes I think I'm almost fond of Trapper."
"Why's that?" asked Hawkeye drowsily.
"Well, I always did figure we had to have something in common." BJ's fingers stopped their meandering path along Hawkeye's spine, anticipating his sudden stiffness. "Oh, God, Hawkeye, I'm sorry. I don't know why I said that; it was uncalled-for."
Hawkeye flipped over toward him, leaning against the pillow.
"Why?" Hawkeye caught his dangling hand with an unsteady noise. "It's true."
"It's not my business."
"Why not?"
BJ spread his arms.
"Do you want it to be? Do you want me to say it?" Hawkeye looked at him impassively, as Peg in her gleaming frame winked vivid pink and cream at them through the tessellations of shadow. BJ lowered his eyes and put his hands between them on the mattress. "All right, I don't like that he was here first." He flicked a bare glance at Hawkeye, earnest, aching, half-laughing. "And I don't like that he left things here," as the still whirred away obscurely and Hawkeye pulled back a little, "and I - I want you to say he didn't mean anything."
"That's clich�," commented Hawkeye dryly, after an almost imperceptible pause. "But I guess clich�'s expected of you romantics."
"Just say it," urged BJ. "Just say it, and I'll never - I'll never - "
In that plea, Hawkeye heard the echoes, maybe, of things to come, blurry nights below the window that let in only darkness, and Peg asking to be lied to, asking for that one constant at the very least: "Say he didn't mean anything." And in his own voice, blandly disconnected from himself, he heard BJ's answer, too.
"I can't."
"You can't?" repeated BJ.
"No." Hawkeye put his hands over BJ's. Nowadays he couldn't even tell if his own skin had any temperature at all, if he wasn't really walking around dead and rotting and no one had bothered to let him know, but under his palms, he felt BJ living in heat. Living out a quick, brutal, numbing existence, full of vital dark blood and dying exhalations and guilt black as bile, but living nonetheless, against all odds. It was strangely comforting to know that people like BJ went on living long after Hawkeye had ceased.
"Okay," said BJ flatly, his hands inert under Hawkeye. "But - have you ever wondered - would he say the same thing if he were asked?"
Hawkeye's gaze tried to be level and failed.
"No, I haven't."
"Maybe it's time to start wondering about that, then."
Hawkeye felt a swift flare of anger, but it burned itself out in a moment, and he was left to say, in an old voice, "It meant something to him. But not the same thing."
They sat in silence until BJ tugged his hands away and motioned toward the bedpan.
"Is that what this is all about?"
Hawkeye glanced at him, a low, shamed, covert flash of the eyes.
"Am I that obvious?"
"It's the oldest routine there is," said BJ with forced breeziness. "Carrying a torch."
"Oh." Hawkeye patted the bed awkwardly, as though he thought he could still touch something there. "I'm sorry, Beej."
BJ shrugged carefully.
"Like I said, it's not my business." He smiled and touched Hawkeye again, on the shoulder, with all the tender, brooding hesitance of the first time. Hawkeye leaned into it briefly, the warm-edged solidity of BJ, and then BJ's hand went fondly through his hair, gently, the oblivious affection of a child. It was at once the most modest and the most intimate gesture possible, pure and profane in the hanging air.
"Oh, no, not your business at all," said Hawkeye ironically, a little breathlessly.
"I promised Abel I'd help her with sorting some things in the supply tent at seven," said BJ reluctantly. "And I think your shift starts soon."
"That figures." Hawkeye yawned and stretched against BJ. "Go ahead, I'll be up in a minute."
"I'll see you later." The hand stayed on the back of his head a moment longer before BJ broke the contact and rose.
Hawkeye had to fight the impulse to flail out wildly, pull him back and demand to know later when? Tonight? What about next week? And next year? But he kept the bitterness under his tongue and merely nodded. He turned fully onto his stomach, facing the crosshatch of the wall, and heard BJ go out. It was a full five minutes before he stirred again.
In the growing blackness of the compound, the lit tents showed up in floating phosphorescence to the young man on sentry duty. He lounged, half-asleep, against the wall of the officers' club, singing under his breath to the strains of the Cole Porter song coming through the wood. Through the gloom and his heavy eyelids, he noticed a slight change. At the far end of the camp, in one solitary shelter, he saw a fuzzy light flicker behind the mesh. Like the tail end of a dream, it dipped and was gone into the night.
~Fin~
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