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perpetual_motionTitle: “Twenty Years Gone”
Author: Perpetual Motion
Fandom: MASH
Pairing: Hawkeye/BJ
Rating: R [language and some imagery]
Summary: “Peg, honey, it’s not like that.” Or maybe it is. BJ, the truth, and the layering of lies over decades.
Disclaimer: I do not own these characters, and I’m certainly not the first to play with this idea. I’m merely having a bit of fun and blowing my mind at the sheer word count of the thing.
Author’s Notes: It started with mijmeraar’s fics for fanfic100. They were good, they inspired, and then I was off. My plans for a brief little ficlet full of angst and pain turned into 14,000+ words. I wouldn’t have gotten here without distaff_exile and amazonqueenkate; they were encouraging, helpful and 100% brilliant throughout my various e-mails [roughly 30 to distaff_exile] and IM conversations [amazonqueenkate found great amusement in my capslock]. They talked me through awkward dialogue, wall-to-wall angst, and even the occasional “holy shit, how’d it get this long” freak out. It was a constant cheering section, without which, I don’t think this fic would have seen the light of day. My great thanks, ladies, for being so damned determined to get me to the end.
Twenty Years Gone
By Perpetual Motion
Peg’s mouth is a grim line after she hears the news. She stands up and walks away, hands pushing her hair from her face, flat shoes clacking against the kitchen linoleum as she heads across it for the bookshelf in the living room. BJ stays where he is, though he knows where she’s going. Dr. Spock has plenty to say on teething and toys and the pulling of pigtails, but BJ knows without having to look that there is nothing in there about your oldest girl coming home and announcing that she loves other girls.
“Daddy?” Erin asks, teeth pressed against her lip after the question.
BJ looks at her. She has her mother’s eyes and his nose, and her hair is a mix between the two. She sits at the kitchen table in slightly scruffy jeans and a bright red halter top. She wears the same dirty shoes she wore at Christmas, when she came home from grad school, laundry bag over one shoulder, backpack over the other. She is, and always has been BJ’s favorite. Not that he’s ever said that out loud. The boys are wonderful, two strapping lads with brains and brawn and energy and life. But Erin is his little girl, his baby doll, the only one of the children whom he didn’t see born. She is so very special in so many ways.
“You’re happy, right?” He asks with tears in his throat that he swallows around.
“I am.”
“Well, there you go.” He hugs her just as tightly as she hugs him.
“What about Mom?” whispered into his ear.
“Give her a little time,” BJ says. He doesn’t try to explain Peg. Peg will be fine. Peg just needs a period of adjustment.
“Thanks, Daddy.”
God, but he loves her more than anything in the world.
*
Later, as they prepare for bed, Peg faces away to ask her questions. “Do you think-“ She stops talking and BJ can picture the way her jaw is clenching and her lips are pressed.
“She’s happy, honey.”
“I know, and that’s fine, but…” Peg turns around, the lace edge on her nightgown swirling. “Are you?”
BJ looks up from undoing his belt, crinkles his eyebrows at the question. “Why wouldn’t I be?” He has a home, a wife, three brilliant children, and a steady job at a solid family practice. He sees the way Peg rubs at her hands, fingers of her left hand curling around the fingers on her right, dragging straight down. In the silence of the bedroom the cracking of her knuckles is very loud. A weight falls into BJ’s stomach. He knows his wife much too well. Knows her tells. She knows something that’s she’s held close for a very long time. “Peg?” He lets his voice ask the rest of the question.
“I…back when you,” she pauses and stares at her hands, fiddles with her wedding band. “I received a letter one day, back when you’d just returned. It was from Benjamin, and he told me how wonderful you were, how much you helped him. He said something bad had happened, right before the war ended, and that you had helped him through it. He said he loved you. And I just…Erin.”
All the blood that had been rushing for BJ’s face ran away with a quickness. Goosebumps raised up on his arms, and all he could do for nearly a minute was stare at his wife. His beautiful, wonderful wife, who had never once asked any questions about the war and Korea unless she already knew the answers. His wife who had welcomed Hawk into the house more than once, made up the guest room and fixed him coffee. His beautiful, wonderful wife. “Peg, honey, it’s not like that.”
“No?” Her face is blank, almost slack, waiting for whatever he says next. It’s the way she stands with her shoulders slightly rolled forward that gives away her hope that he’ll say just the right thing.
“Hawk and I…” BJ trails off and stares at his bare feet, wondering what to say. He looks her in the eyes as he starts to craft the lie. “It’s love that men have for one another when they’ve spent time almost getting killed together. It’s gratefulness and relief and friendship, and you call it love because all you see where you are is hate and destruction and confusion and pain. It’s a desperate attempt by mere men to understand the universe of war.” And he sounds more like Hawkeye than himself, but he tries not to think about it, hopes that Peg doesn’t notice, feels grateful when her shoulders roll back and she breathes through her mouth. “It’s not like Erin, honey.”
“I didn’t think it was.”
But she does, and probably has for close to forever, and BJ thinks that he could call her on it, that they could peel back twenty-odd years of half-truths and skipped stories, and he could tell her everything she’s never asked about him and one small, drafty tent, and the almost oppressive way Hawkeye’s personality could fill the walls to bursting. But he doesn’t know where that would leave them in the end, if the total honesty that they’re staring at from the precipice is worth more than what it will destroy. Because it will destroy them; he is completely and totally sure of that.
Instead, they lie in bed together, Peg’s back to him, her nightgown slightly wrinkled against her skin. BJ listens to her breathe, listens to the way her body relaxes as she falls asleep, and once he’s sure she’s fully unaware, he slips out of bed and out of the bedroom and down to the phone in the kitchen. He dials slowly and carefully and stares at the plates in the sink that Peg hadn’t washed because Erin had had important news. He listens to the phone ring and imagines Crabapple Cove from the last time he saw it, with frost on the ground and the trees bare but majestic. He remembers Hawkeye, hair gone nearly white with the same crinkle around his eyes, the same calluses on his hands, the same irreverent but painfully aware sense of humor. They’d talked briefly of the new war, Vietnam, just enough to get mad enough to have an excuse to drink, and they’d sat up all night on Hawkeye’s front porch with the cheapest, dirtiest gin they could find and the martini glasses that Hawkeye had managed to get home in his luggage all those years ago.
BJ thinks of it while the phone rings. He’s relieved that Hawkeye doesn’t pick up on the first ring. First ring pick up means insomnia and bitterness and Hawkeye poking and jabbing at BJ until he snaps and they fight. BJ needs Hawk at neutral to start. He can wing it from there, knows how to work around Hawk’s defenses and through his bluster, but he needs the basic building blocks of Hawkeye to get there in the first place.
“Dr. Pierce, at your semi-unconscious service,” said after the sixth ring in a voice that’s mostly awake but rough with sleep.
“Hey, Hawk,” BJ says quietly. He knows his tone has done the talking when there’s rustling and sounds of movement on the other end of the line.
“Beej-“ a break for what sounds like a massive yawn, “what’s going on?”
“Erin’s home for a visit. She…” he trails off and stares out the kitchen window, watches the way the tree branches hit against the window.
“Beej?” Hawk sounds completely awake now and slightly worried. “Is Erin okay?”
BJ snaps back to himself. “She’s fine, Hawk. Sorry. I just…do you remember when Margaret made that blanket?” He’s not surprised at the long pause. That blanket, when she’d finally finished it after almost making the sweater and scarf, had ended up big enough for four people to sit under during the movies. One night he and Hawk had stolen it for themselves, sat in the back, and held hands underneath. It had been almost too sweet, and BJ still can’t think about it with Peg in the room. It feels more like cheating than anything else. He’s still not sure why.
“Beej,” Hawkeye’s voice is careful, and BJ remembers a dozen kids being told they’d lost an arm, and another dozen being told they’d lost a leg. “What happened with Erin?”
BJ pictures a bandage, imagines ripping it off in the smoothest motion possible, and keeps that picture in his head as he says, “She’s gay, Hawkeye. She told Peg and I tonight that she’s gay.”
The pause this time is longer and harder, punctuated by late-night static and Hawkeye’s breath in his ear. He remembers certain nights, promises made under the cover of gin and blankets. Promises kept the next day with a quick smile and Hawkeye’s leg warm against his in the mess tent. Finally, Hawkeye speaks. “I have to go. I have to think.”
“I…but…you can’t just-“
“I’ll call you back in twenty minutes. Wait by the phone.”
BJ bites his tongue to keep from saying he’s been waiting twenty years. Because he hasn’t, he reminds himself as he puts the receiver back on the cradle. He’s had a life and children and a brilliant, wonderful wife. He has a house and a yard and a fairly new car. He is beloved by his patients and children. And his wife, despite twenty-odd years of worrying, has been right beside him, smiling a real smile and holding his hand.
“Dad?” Erin’s in the doorway to the kitchen, barefoot in striped pajamas, her hair messy around her head. “What’s going on?”
He considers saying, “nothing”, the way he did when she was younger and would wander in during other late night phone conversations. He considers telling a lie, something about Hawkeye and his crazy late nights, turning it into stories about the war, about the times he and Hawk played practical jokes. Nothing too heavy this late at night; Erin’s always been prone to nightmares, and BJ still isn’t convinced it’s not somehow his fault. He decides to go with the truth, because she gave it to him tonight, and he didn’t give it to Peg. “I was talking to Hawkeye.”
Erin smiles and walks further into the kitchen, opening the fridge and giving them a little light. “Is he okay?”
BJ wonders how many times Erin heard him talking Hawkeye down from a ledge when she was a child. Wonders if that’s where her nightmares started, listening to her daddy talk urgently into the phone late into the night. “He’s fine. I called him.”
“Gave him the news, huh?” Erin’s voice, muffled by the fridge, carries a tension that makes BJ ache.
“Oh, honey,” he leans over her and kisses the top of her head. “You’re my favorite daughter.”
“As always, I feel it’s important to note I’m your only daughter.” Said with a smile BJ only saw in pictures for much too long.
“Which makes it much easier to let you be my favorite.” He takes the plate of cold cuts she hands him, puts it on the counter, and grabs the mustard from the door. She gets the bread from the bread box, and they make sandwiches together in silence; BJ remembering the years gone by, when she was tiny with feet on her pajamas, Hawkeye encouraging her to stay up late, putting her on the counter so that she could dictate how they should be making their snacks. Peg had never stayed up for those nights, never come down to send them to bed. BJ had never considered anything but Peg’s natural want of an early night. Now he wonders if it meant something more, if Peg were testing him, or testing herself or maybe even testing Hawkeye.
“Dad?” Erin brings him back with her voice barely above a whisper. “You looked lost.”
“Just thinking.” He hands her the sandwiches, puts away the makings, and grabs two beers from the fridge. There’s an itch under his skin for a dryer-than-dry martini, but he pushes it aside and silently blames Hawkeye for the urge. He’d barely drunk the things before Hawkeye and his sweat sock hooch.
“Come back, Dad,” Erin’s teasing as she opens the beers and settles into her chair at the table. “How is Hawkeye?”
“He’s all right.” BJ thinks of the last few times they’ve talked, the genuineness of Hawkeye’s laugh, the easiness with which he teased, the beginnings of a plan for BJ to visit. “I’ll probably fly out to see him soon.”
“With Mom?”
BJ shakes his head. “Just me.” He watches Erin play with the crust of her sandwich, wonders what she’s thinking, wonders if she’ll ask.
“Has Mom ever gone with you?”
His baby girl is smart. Always has been. She asks the question like it holds no importance, but she’s still mangling her bread crust. BJ shakes his head, but she doesn’t see it. “She stays here and enjoys the quiet. She didn’t get it a lot when you brats were running around.” He smiles when Erin smiles, watches the breadcrumbs fall onto the tabletop. “But we managed to mostly get rid of you, and she takes the peace.”
“And you go see Hawkeye.”
“I do.” He waits for the question he can feel in the air. Wonders is she remembers the trips he took when she was younger. Wonders what Peg said as he kissed them all goodbye and got into a taxi. Wonders, again, if what he and Hawkeye had in Korea is responsible for Erin in the here and now.
“Do you two love each other?”
It’s not quite the phrasing he’s expecting, but it’s close enough. “Of course. We’re friends.”
“You went through a war,” and the tone she uses is so much Peg that BJ feels a swift hit of guilt slam into his ribcage.
“Honey, Hawkeye and I…” He stops talking when she looks at him. He takes a long pull of his beer and watches her take a bite of her sandwich. “War is a crazy place, kid,” he finally says, after she’s chewed and swallowed and resumed watching him. “The things you see, the things you do, even as a doctor, the things you do are completely foreign, some of them are downright wrong, and you’re left in the middle of it trying to figure out what to do, how to handle it. I don’t regret one second I was over there, because I know I did a good job, and I got to meet Hawkeye and Margaret and Klinger and Radar. But war is still a terrible thing, and if I could stop everything in Vietnam from happening, I would, because you kids don’t need to go through that like I did.” He pauses for breath, and she steals it from him in one question.
“Are you in love with him?” There’s hope in her eyes, a little girl looking to her daddy for an explanation, for a reason why she is how she is, and BJ wants to lie and hide himself away, but it’s his baby girl, and she’s still scared from earlier, and all he can do is empty his secrets at her feet and let her inspect them.
“I am.”
“And Mom?”
“Her too.” BJ’s not surprised at the confusion that stamps itself on her face. It’s confused him for years. “I can’t explain it in any way that makes sense. I love your mom. I’m in love with her. Have been since the first date, but Hawkeye and I, it’s made of different stuff. It’s…” he can’t figure out how to finish. He shrugs. “It is what it is.”
“Does Mom know?”
BJ is nearly certain that Peg knows everything, even the parts he’s never told, the parts he’s never once acted on since coming back. “Your mother knows enough to wonder. Further than that, I’m afraid to ask.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
Erin breathes out through her mouth, rolls her eyes in the classic motion of teenage girls around the world. “Why wouldn’t you tell Mom? If you think she has a clue that means she probably has a clue. She’s not an idiot, Dad.”
BJ considers the question, considers the man he was and the man he is and the woman his daughter has become. “It’s not about honesty,” he finally says when she has a mouthful of sandwich, “it’s about how things are done. Your mom and I have been together a long time, and when we fell in love, there were rules, and while the times are changing, as you and the boys are so wonderfully happy to remind us, some things haven’t. You can’t relearn a lifetime.”
“Which makes Hawkeye, what, exactly?”
“I don’t understand,” but it’s a lie, and BJ sees that Erin knows. He’s convinced every ounce of her shrewdness was learned from Hawkeye in the early years of her life. She sees through everyone around her like they’re cellophane. It’s not a trait either he or Peg has ever had in abundance.
“Dad, I’m 24. I’m working on a big fancy degree. I lied to you and Mom for years. I know a liar when I see one, and you’re it.”
BJ watches her get up and get fresh beers for the both of them. He carries their plates to the sink and sets their empty bottles in the trash. They face off in the middle of the kitchen, where Erin blocks him in until he says something. “Homosexuality isn’t a new idea, Erin. It’s been around as long as people, probably, but it’s not something that was ever discussed or mentioned or hinted when your mom and I met. No matter what I tell her now, no matter the years I’ve spent with her since, all she’ll see in her mind for the rest of her life is the thousand signs she thinks she missed. Hawkeye and I, we’re friends now. That’s all we’ve been since we’ve come back. War makes you do things. Coming home makes you stop them, because that’s how it works. That’s how it’s always worked.”
“That is such crap.” Erin hands BJ one of the beers, twists the cap off her own, and takes a long swallow before she expands on her topic. “You’re just using the repressive nature of your upbringing as an excuse to believe that Mom wouldn’t hear you out. You don’t actually know if she would or wouldn’t. You’re just being scared.”
“I’m not scared,” and there’s venom in his voice that he’s never used with Erin. “I’ve been scared. Believe me, kiddo, when you spend your days taking bullets out of kids, you learn scared. I ducked bombs and snipers and clipped golf balls into a minefield. I watched my best friend lose his mind because a woman took him too literally. I’ve spent twenty-odd years loving your mother and loving my friend and worrying that one would end the other. I know from scared. I can handle scared. What we’re talking about is terrifying, and it’s got nothing to do with upbringing and everything to do with expectation.”
There’s a long pause. BJ’s never been one to go into a speech about his feelings, always willing to talk about it in short bursts as needed. Erin’s never seen him quite like this, he knows, but then Erin’s never been old enough to really understand and handle what it is to get into a discussion of feelings and motivations with him before. His baby girl’s grown up, and she’s staring at him, and for some reason it makes BJ’s palms sweat.
“Expectations are crap, Dad,” she finally says in a tone that matches her mother’s. “It’s your life.”
“It’s the life I have with your mother. It’s a life I like.”
“And I liked having a life with you and Mom, but I was also honest with both of you tonight, and I get the feeling that my life’s going to get a whole lot better now that I don’t have a boulder around my neck.”
The only thing that would make the moment more uncomfortable, BJ decides, is if Erin were holding a martini instead of a beer. He considers genetics through osmosis as the phone lets loose a ring. He only just manages to get to it before Erin. “Hello?”
“Beej,” and it’s Hawkeye, sounding more awake than twenty minutes previous. “You really know how to wake up a guy.”
“Learned from the best,” BJ manages, tracking Erin with his peripheral. She settles at the table and throws him a look, chin out and mouth in a hard line. She’s not planning to go anywhere. “How went the thinking?”
“The thinking almost went to gin.” Static sprinkles the line, but the seriousness in Hawkeye’s voice carries. “Beej, what the hell is going on?”
He considers where to start. Erin’s the logical point; her revelation made Peg open up in the first place, but this isn’t about Erin, and it isn’t about Peg, and it certainly isn’t about logic. It’s about Hawk and him and Korea, and there isn’t a damn bit of logic in any of it. “Peg told me about the letter,” and he leaves it at that.
“Beej…” and Hawkeye trails off. BJ imagines him sitting at his kitchen table, phone to his ear, head held in one hand and his eyes squeezed shut. “I’d give you a great excuse with lots of oral gymnastics, but I just don’t have it in me this late.”
“Why?” BJ asks, and he hears an echo of Erin’s earlier tone in his own. Maybe she didn’t get all those tones from Peg after all.
“I was mostly crazy and most certainly drunk and mostly scared and definitely lonely. And I was jealous, because you went home with a full bag of rocks in your head, and I’d spilled some of mine along the way. You had a wife and a kid, and I was in Crabapple Cove with a bed that was actually wide and long and all I wanted was a painful little cot that was big enough for one-half.” Hawkeye’s voice is factual, like he’s listing off someone’s chart or the possible hands in poker, but there’s an edge, raw and brittle, that puts BJ back in Korea and back in their tent and back at the operating tables for thirty-seven hour stretches. “I thought writing her would help. I was trying to do the right thing, make friends with the missus so she wouldn’t suspect.”
“She did,” BJ says and sighs heavily, not missing the way Erin is blatantly eavesdropping. “Apparently, she has for awhile.”
“That wasn’t my intention.”
It never is, BJ thinks but doesn’t say. He could use it, poke Hawk with the knowledge that his best intentions usually end up with him in deep trouble, but he’s the nice one, always has been. Not because it’s easier and not because he’s particularly passive, but because he just doesn’t have it in him to be cruel without good reason. Neither does Hawk. Which is why Hawk’s never mentioned the letter and why BJ won’t go on a hunting trip for Hawkeye’s open wounds. He knows them all too well as is. “I think Peg knew it too. That’s why she didn’t say anything.”
“Until Erin.”
“Yeah.” BJ glances over his shoulder and glares at Erin. She leans back in her chair and takes a sip of her beer. “Is there any chance,” he asks Hawk in a stage whisper, “of passing your stubbornness through osmosis to my darling daughter?” He doesn’t miss Erin’s grin, which he recognizes as his own. Somehow, that makes it more obnoxious. “Do you think-“
“You are not allowed to use any medical terminology in this conversation, Beej. This isn’t a medical problem. It is what it is.”
“For Erin or for us?”
There’s a pause, heavy with the weight of everything they’ve avoided saying for so very long. BJ stares at the wall, notices a scratch he hasn’t seen before. He wonders what Hawkeye’s staring at all the way across the country.
“Beej,” it’s Hawkeye’s soft voice, the one he always used back in Korea to talk BJ down from the high, windy places in his mind. “We’re not supposed to talk about it. It’s better if we don’t talk about it.”
“Why?”
“Because you have a wife and three kids.”
It feels like a brick has landed in BJ’s stomach. He can’t breathe for a minute. “Hawk-“
“We don’t talk about it, BJ.” And Hawkeye hangs up the phone.
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no subject
on 2007-07-27 10:06 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2007-07-28 12:34 am (UTC)no subject
on 2007-12-29 02:56 am (UTC)And then I found this fic, and I just have to say that it is wonderful. You have the character voices down pat, which can be difficult given the wonderful dialogue written for the show, and the idea of writing from twenty years after the end of the series is brilliant. I love this story so far, and I am running off right now to read the rest of it. :)
so far...
on 2008-04-11 11:16 am (UTC)wow! am i glad i've run into your journal again... i'm convinced i've seen you (your writing) before, as it seems we have a few fandoms in common... heroes, numb3rs... and i've been looking for another where i could find some more fic to read.
and, viola! here you are!
i haven't given mash a chance at all, b/c i just didn't believe i would buy into it. but your style, your word selection, the candid emotion... you're a little addictive perpetual_motion.
this was a great story. reality, duplicity, confusion, understanding. i can't wait to continue the next parts.
-a
Re: so far...
on 2008-04-11 02:43 pm (UTC)