Fandom: M*A*S*H.
Author: Epigone.
Pairing: BJ/Hawkeye, although it's not central to the piece.
Rating: PG-13.
Warnings: Character death, second-person, future tense. I.e., weird as all get-out.
Archivists: Ask first.
Summary: BJ's no Radar, but he knows things.
Date Written: January 30-31, 2003.
Author's Notes: Response to a prompt: "You'd better come soon." Very rough--one of the rules of the challenge was that minimal revising was allowed. All I can guarantee is proper grammar and spelling.
Feedback: Can be sent to kmaru1701 [AT] hotmail [DOT] com, and is much appreciated.
You'd Better Come Soon
"You'd better come soon," they say. When you dream, it's always "You'd better come soon," the clipped doctors' voices you knew so well, weighty pronouncements of dignified sorrow. And you will, somehow, you'll explain to Peg, you'll drive haphazardly across thoroughfares, the landmines bursting behind your eyelids, and reach the airport, the planes will be on time, the flights instantaneous like streaks of molten metal through the sky, and you will be at the bedside. Hawkeye will look like the boy you imagine he once was, pale and thin but wonderfully secure, his blue eyes half-shut. He'll say something at once childish and profound, bitingly incisive and yet infinitely generous, something you can quote guiltlessly to your future grandchildren, because it won't be about anything cheap or tawdry or sweaty, it will be some universal truth as only Hawkeye could phrase it. And then he'll fall quiet, not quiet in the mere absence of noise, but with closure, finality, acceptance. No more flailing against the inexorable tide that has been tugging at his ankles since you met him; no more weakness or helplessness in the dark when only you are there. It will be private, but everyone will know, how could they not, and you won't have to explain.
But, of course, that's not how the wheel spins. You can try to weight it all you like, think of him fondly before you go to bed, compose letters in your head, even nearly have the guts, after six whole months, to call him. It never makes a difference; you wonder sometimes if maybe he'll go quietly, dead of fear in some nightmare you're not there to shake him out of, but in the back of your mind you know he's being devoured from the inside out. The war is in him everywhere, glistening little polyps of malignancy choking his lungs, clotting his arteries, black and tumescent and ever-advancing. You can't love that away from a distance.
So it's no surprise when Daniel Pierce calls you up on a Sunday afternoon while Peg's playing bridge -- pairs, but she's got a substitute partner, don't we all. You can't play bridge anymore, because although you're still a rock over the operating table, everywhere else your fingers lose their efficiency. Nerves, maybe.
Daniel calls and says things you understand, things you already knew, really, though you try to act stunned for his sake, for his voice jumping like a scratchy record on the line. Your hands are numb, so maybe there is an element of shock on some level, above the blankness in your chest, the little place that went still a long time ago, the moment you saw, out of the corner of your eye, Hawkeye turn away from you and that little girl, flit away through the barbecue smoke. You went still inside then, because even Sidney failed. Today, they'll all see that, but you knew it back in the blurred green heat of July '53.
So when you hang up the phone, you don't know why you're crying.
~Fin~
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