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Description
Potter’s POV

You don’t bother looking up from the paperwork on your desk. "If you're gonna be making accusations this serious, Burns, you better have something to back 'em up."
"Everyone knows it, sir," Houlihan snaps immediately, coming to Frank's defense. "The whole camp's talking about it."
"Are you going to do something about it, or not?" Frank demands.
“Well, for such a big problem that everyone knows about, you two are the only ones making a fuss about it."
"No one else cares enough to."
"Then I think you answered your own question, Burns."
"Colonel, it's for the good of the outfit! If they're not stopped, their corruption could spread! Heaven only knows what I've been exposed to, living with them. Not to mention the patients…."
"I'll think about it. Now don't you two have places you're supposed to be?"

It’s a wheel web resting in the middle of a cherry blossom tree on the edge of camp, which you pass every day when you walk Sophie. Magnificent, at least seven inches in diameter, cartoonish in its perfection. Though you occasionally see little winged insects caught in the delicate silk, you’ve never seen the builder of the web—it’s probably become breakfast for a red-backed shrike or squashed under some foot soldier's boot. But her web remains, strewn between the thin branches and beneath the soft pink blossoms in full bloom.
"Colonel sir, how does a little old spider make somethin' that big? How do its little legs stretch it across the tree?" Radar asks you one day, squinting at the web glinting under a layer of dew in the early morning sun.
You chuckle. "Well, some folks say they can fly, but that's a load of meadow muffins."
"Do they throw it, sir?"
"You could say that," you explain, patting Sophie's nose gently. "She releases a thread that the wind catches and, if she's lucky, attaches to the branch. Mind, it's a sticky kind of thread. That's the first bridge. She's gotta cross it carefully, and she does that a few times, adding more and more of the sticky thread until it's nice and sturdy."
"Gee, sir, doesn't she fall? What if that first thread doesn't attach right away?"
"She tries until she gets it right. Once she makes a few more sections like that, she starts makin' the circular threads, until it's all done and she's ready to catch her prey. It's nice and sturdy but even the smallest bit o' damage can make it fall apart—" you snap you fingers, "—like that. But it can always be fixed, if she's still around to do the repairin'."
Radar shudders. "I'm glad she's not around. No offense but I don't like spiders, sir."
"I wouldn't exactly want one crawlin' in next to me in bed either, son."
"'ello gents," Hawkeye and BJ appear behind you, standing inches apart, hands brushing.
"What are we doing gathered around this tree?" BJ asks.
"Learning about spider webs, sirs. It's pretty interesting, you know, even though they're creepy-crawly. Colonel Potter really knows his stuff."
"Major Burns and Major Houlihan could do with a little enlightenment on the subject, too," you mutter, and when Radar asks, "What, sir?" you shake your head.
The younger surgeons wander away in search of other activities to kill the boredom, Hawkeye's arm slung casually around BJ's shoulder. A friendly gesture, nothing to see here. Like everyone doesn’t already know. Despite what Houlihan and Burns may think, you’re not blind, either.
You admire the glittering web once more, so intricately woven; wonder how many times the spider had attempted it, what a relief it must've been to complete it so perfectly. You wonder how it'd begun for Hawkeye and BJ, how many times they'd thrown that silk into the wind, waiting for it to hit something, anything, and make the connection.
"I was always taught to leave the spider webs alone, son," you tell Radar then. "Just think of how hard she worked on it. Who'd wanna rip up somethin’ so pretty anyway?"

Hawkeye's POV

cites events from episodes ‘preventative medicine’ (many soldiers are wounded due to an officer’s awful carelessness; Hawkeye convinces the perfectly healthy colonel he needs his appendix out – and actually operates – to keep Lacy out of action, which gets BJ royally pissed off) and ‘hepatitis’ (the whole shirt thing)

(the deluge of memories is incessant, ocean waves crashing down to engulf your world and roaring in your ears) You can't recall exactly when you stop looking at BJ with the twinge of resentment you swore you'd never shake – that little prickle of confusion at being confronted with this not-Trapper, a usurper lying sprawled across Trapper's old bed in warm, muzzy sleep, never imagining how the bunk's previous occupant had lain just so, languorous, in those same covers. Don't know precisely when you stop noticing what BJ does wrong when he stitches a patient with a strange movement of fingers or shaves with a smooth twist of the wrist that doesn't quite ring true, and start liking what he does…differently.
There's something in the way he moves, open and uninhibited, so totally unlike the calculated sinuousness of Trap's motions when you were alone that, even as you found yourself fascinated by them, disconcert you. You don't dare point it out, for fear of shattering that easy assuredness forever. He's too pristine to come out of the war unsullied. And when BJ tilts his head in frank concern one day and offers to touch you, confident, unashamed, you're almost ready to attribute it to that beautiful ignorance again. It surprises you, of course, enough that you look up in a moment of unguarded earnestness and meet BJ's eyes. There is something very self-aware in those eyes, and yet still they're unembarrassed. That's what I asked, they say, you heard right. Take it or leave it as it is. You, your own face an open book of God knows what, fear and shock and longing, have to swallow so hard you nearly bite your tongue to keep from gasping at him, Yes, I'll take it, and you along with it, to keep from lunging up and upsetting the still as you do just that. In a while the urge passes, and you choke and laugh, choking on the laugh because deceit with BJ makes the bile rise in your throat, hating the laugh, and tell BJ to put his shirt on. It's the last thing you want.
It happens eventually, inevitably. The third casualty of war, someone once told you, the third casualty of war has to be fidelity. (Third now, and moving up fast. Fidelity coming up on the inside track, passing Sobriety - martini glasses forgotten together on the grimy floor -- breaking past Truth in a desperate lunge as BJ says with his eyes, Really, no lie, love).
BJ, smiling openly, lit by the single stark lamp. No equivocation. No favors asked. He doesn't have to say it again; you both know that. But you, with a trace of the old flippancy, remark, "I thought you said you never mean what you say."
BJ exhales, slides closer, kisses you. When, at length, you pull apart, he grins again, his face earnest and inches from yours, and says, "I didn't mean that."
You move over to make space for BJ, gladly accepting whatever casualties you're letting yourself in for.

/…don’t say maybe
I gotta know if your sweet love is
gonna save me
We may lose and we may win
but we will never be here again
so open up, I’m climbing in/

You tip your head back to finish off the last of your drink. Through the curve of the glass, you can pick out tinted fragments of life: the spread spectrum of refracted light, the ceiling arching away to an apex, and the translucent images of your fellow drinkers, glowing, transposed into the oblivion of reflection. When you set the glass down, the world is all straight lines again, crudely harsh lamps, and tired people slouched on their respective stools. Under the faint, bluish blur of alcohol, everyone is faded and beautiful, soft-fleshed and cool forever in the haze, all the lines dissolved. All of them, no boundaries, no delineation, no this-is-right-and-this- is-wrong under the white bar-lamps, as there is in OR, as there is even in the Swamp on mail days...
BJ is coming, however, and you owe it to him to be halfway sober. Not for yourself, not because your liver hasn't already ejected itself in despair, but because to try to drink BJ away makes no sense. The clarity of BJ is not brittle, not painful, but necessary. Where else can you find something so bright: swift arms across the operating table, earnest grin across the poker table, sharply defined warmth across the sheets? A little scuffed at the edges, maybe, that smoothness rubbed away to a mustache, a brief spasm of anger in the lips against your lips, but the war finds everyone somewhere.
"Sir?" says someone, down near your elbow and a little to the right.
Without stirring, you murmur, into your glass, "Only at snap inspections and court-martials."
Radar slides onto the stool beside you, frowning. "Huh?"
"I don't respond to 'Sir.' You can call me names, call my bluff, call my bet, call me a cab - " you break off, turning the glass listlessly in your hand. "Oh, hell, never mind.”
you lose your train of thought, but there are always words poised on the tip of your tongue, and tonight it’s all falling out; “Sometimes I feel pretty dumb. Do you ever get the feeling that God invented war just for that purpose - to make us feel dumb?"
"Nah. Generals aren't capable of feeling dumb. They're too dumb to know they're too dumb to feel dumb, so they fight wars to try and convince themselves they're not as dumb as they don't think they are."
You shake you head. "Now that may just be the best explanation anyone's ever given for why wars are started. Radar, they should give you a medal. Or a Section 8.”
Radar bites his lip, shooting you a nervous sideways look. "Uh, yeah, okay. Look, Hawkeye, with all done respect--"
"It's 'due,' Radar."
"What's due? I checked all of today's mail already, an' even tomorrow's, an' we've paid off every red cent on that new movie projector!"
You kick him gently under the counter.
"No, I meant that, at least in my version of American English, the phrase is generally 'with all due respect.'"
"Right, but I'm talkin' in past tense, like, uh, the thing's already kinda happened." You're vaguely amused, but decide against interrupting. "I was just wondering why you've been sittin' here all morning."
"I was stood up," you joke, but Radar stares back without comprehension. You chuckle dryly. "Nah, I'm just waiting for BJ, though I'm starting to think it boils down to the same thing."
"Yeah, well, see, he's in the OR."
You drop your glass abruptly and swing to face him. "What for? Lacy?
Radar draws back a little, as though the fear seizing your body is palpable (maybe it is; nobody knows what exactly is accessible to the kid), and puts out an awkward hand to touch your arm.
"No, he said the Colonel's fine. But one of his patients, that lieutenant, all of a sudden keeled over in post-op. Well, I mean, he kinda just leaned over, ..cause he was in bed, but he was all limp." It's a shared fear, suddenly, as if you've infected him: Radar's sheer bright animal terror at the memory (eyes running into white and the quick startled movements of seizing limbs, which you're no stranger to anymore, but must be terrifying for him) and your aching, visceral defensiveness, the edge of panic subsiding but the base feeling still there, pulse thumping BJ's name. Overlaying it all, flowing and flickering, Radar's fear for you, waiting here alone at Rosie's, everywhere the smell of gin and guilt and BJ like crushed cloves. You press your lips together and, wincing slightly as you move your sore arm, climb down off your stool.
"How long's he been in there?"
"Three hours, maybe."
Your wince deepens for a moment -- not the wrenched muscle anymore, but something farther down, secret and unlighted.
"Oh, damn. I thought that kid was doing so well." Rummage in your pockets until you come up with a fistful of coins, toss them at Radar. "Here, pay Igor for me, would you? Get yourself a grape Nehi or something."
Radar catches the money open-palmed, spilling some of it across the dingy floor. "You gonna go see BJ?"
"Yeah," you say distractedly, "yeah." Turn and move toward the door; a few long strides and you're there, pausing on the precipice. “Thanks for letting me know, Radar "
"No problem," Radar murmurs as you ripple out, skittishly, through the entrance curtain.

BJ's already sitting in the scrub room when you arrive: his front bloodied, head against the wall, mouth slightly agape, like a dying fish. You hover in the doorway, eyes going reflexively to the curtain dividing you both from the OR.
"What happened?" you ask after a few minutes, the words falling into a silence punctuated only by the stabs of BJ's sharp, staccato breaths. He doesn't move. You're well aware he's known it was you since the thick heat of the outside air had rolled in through the opened door, but you don't want to push it, you're all fragile enough -
"Oh... aneurysm," BJ says quietly. "Sudden. The aortic wall just couldn't hold up."
You go to him, lean on the bench before him, just inside the circle of his slumped shoulders, and say, helplessly, "It happens."
"I'm a doctor, Hawk," he retorts. "It's not supposed to happen to me."
You flinch ever so slightly and, "God, BJ," gently, take BJ's chin between your palms, tilt it down, and wait, breath mingling hot between you both, "whatever you do, you're forgiven." BJ shudders almost imperceptibly, but you feel it beneath you, BJ's chest jerking just under your own ribcage. "Whatever you do -- I don't care."
He breaks away sharply, opening his eyes and grasping you by the arms. You start, but hold his gaze.
"I didn't ask you to approve of it," he mutters, "I didn't ask for absolution. He was my patient."
"All right," you murmur, placating, "all right. Listen, let's go home, huh?"
"I thought you wanted to talk."
"Did I?" you do a double take, blinking once because for a moment BJ's eyes seemed hard and flat and black, without depth -- a trick of the light, surely. "Oh, right, but not now. It can wait."
"No, it can't. You wouldn't ask me to talk if it wasn't important. God knows you never want to talk otherwise. Never talk, just" -- and his lips tighten, like his fingers on your arms -- "goddamn wisecracks all the time, cute remarks, everybody thinking you're just kidding when you say you're glad Peg's not here to distract me."
"Fine," and your voice is brittle, jagged. "I wanted to apologize for that idiocy with Lacy. I don't know what the hell bothered you so much about it, but I was sorry. I was. I don't know why now, because I did the right thing."
"Why do you always have to oversimplify everything?"
"Oversimplify?" BJ's words sting, and you answer hotly, "You were the one spouting off about moral absolutes back there, you and your Hippocratic oath -- or should we say hypocritical oath? Where do you get off, telling me what to do? It's my job to weigh these things, and there is such a thing as common good--"
"Dammit, Hawkeye, this isn't about doctoring for you. You make it so easy: you're omniscient, you get to be God, what you want is automatically correct. And it's not just the Hippocratic oath I'm going by, it's" -- BJ puts out a hand abstractedly -- "it's what medicine is. Galen: 'First do no harm.' There are always absolutes."
You're momentarily silent, staring, stunned. Then you shake your head and say, "No, I can't believe that."
"You have to. We're not just filling out scorecards here; we're treating people."
You rally again; "Do you think I don't know that? I've been here twice as long as you, and if anyone knows the people in this war, it's me."
A muscle twitches in BJ's jaw, and his expression shifts subtly. "And if you had your way, you'd know all of them."
Just like that, the conversation slips off its axis, and glancing sideways, you see something in BJ's eyes blaze like a flare and die out. "Listen, if…this is about Trapper, say so. Don't try to lambaste my surgery."
BJ seems to shrug off that thought as he flicks a glance toward the post-op ward through the door. "You put a man in one of those beds for no valid surgical reason at all. I have a right to say something about it." He shifts on the bench, and you realized how close you are, knees tangled together, your suspended elbows almost brushing BJ's chest. BJ keeps his grip on your forearms. "The minute you cut into someone, you're inside him. It's not just about you anymore."
"This conversation is not just about me anymore," you venture.
There's a flash of cold, ancient pain in BJ's face.
"You can't do that," he says finally, panting a little. "You can't just reach into a person's body and wash your hands of it afterward."
There's a silence; then you move in slowly, with calculatedly smooth movements, palms turned upwards, fingers splayed, like a man approaching a panicked horse. You meet in the still air, breath on each other's faces, warm press of bodies.
"I don't do that, Beej," you tell him softly. After a pause, you amend, "Not here. Never here." And yet, and yet, even though BJ does everything for you - tells Margaret to lay off, tells Charles to stop criticizing, tells you to let Lacy alone or you'll hate yourself for the rest of your life - even so, you know you'll take BJ and make you hate yourself anyway, and Peg too, for brief quicksilver moments in the morning (if jealousy is a green eyed monster, what is guilt?).

/though you drown in good intentions
you will never quench the fire
you'll give in to your desire/

In the dim slant of light, BJ's eyes are slightly wild.
"You can't take somebody in there and just -- just -- it's not that simple. You can't just cut that out of him, what he was doing, what he felt. It's never that easy."
Your propinquity is overwhelming – BJ's cheek against your shoulder – and you hold him, graceless, shaking, and think, This is where we should be, the white noise of the war outside, beyond that curtain enough static to drown in, but here the beat of BJ's heart, the hard contours of his body, solid, familiar to your fingertips, and yet--
Beneath BJ's skin, transient as breeze, you feel the ripple of muscle. Beneath the surface, world without light. You can't hold that, you can't cut that out, said BJ, hammering blood and dead, dense bone. Someday he'll go home to the soup and potatoes Peg's kept warm in crinkling tin foil, watching some stranger across the room, overhead lights on warm skin, what the hell are you thinking? All of those feelings fossilized; stiff and atrophied muscles, cold in disuse, thawing out under your touch.
First do no harm, said Galen: medical directive, moral absolute, imperative verb. Thou shalt not covet thy--
No. Leave it alone.
Shakily you find a seat on the bench, keeping your hands on BJ's face: one finger running down his cheek, BJ arching against you and shrinking away all at once.

"It's okay," you say desperately, as much to the shade of Peg on BJ's lips as to BJ himself. It's all right, Peg, I won't leave a scar. I know my surgical technique. First do no harm. He's not mine, I'm not going to cut in and leave myself under his skin where you'll find the traces some night, I'm not, I'm not kissing him--
You are. Hard, fierce, crushing, beer and blood in your mouths, until you hear BJ gasp a little, and you climb out, pull away. Someone's blood was on your lips. BJ's, maybe.
"Am I hurting you?" you ask, suppressing a shudder of longing.
"Of course," says BJ, his hand on your elbow, drawing you in. His voice is hollow until you lean back in and fill it, fill you both with the echoes of pain.

/don't have any reasons, left 'em all behind/

You and BJ had gotten your 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 you as being at odds with the flippancy of his words. You had reflected, with a clenching in your stomach, that BJ's frankness about what was really on his mind would have to be listed as another casualty of the war..
Years later, you put your palm over the thing on the ground, cupping your fingers defensively; then you scoop it up and lift it toward the light.
It's an old photograph, criss-crossed by indistinct white lines where it has been creased and re-creased. It shows 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, jumbling together in oblique lines of jutting roofs and sagging walls, rises a cluster of buildings, lit from behind by the lusterless sun.
In the foreground, their grainy forms limned with a whitish glow that makes them look almost pasted-on, stand two men. The taller one wears a pair of dark surgical scrubs and an exaggerated mustache that droops over the edges of his wide grin. There is a clean, earnest cast to his face, an unabashed and unashamed humor about the mouth and eyes. Still, his jaw is set, and in his eyes there is a rigid and pained glint. His arm is extended, and --
You pause there, breath coming quick and arrhythmic. A few fervent curses leave your lips to peter out into nothingness, and you lean closer toward the photo. There is undeniably a harshness in BJ's eyes -- and you had thought you had forgotten. You had thought you had forgotten the most heinous crime of the war, the insidious brutality that had gotten to you all, sooner or later, but that shouldn't have gotten to BJ. Shouldn't have forced him, too, to turn to the wonders of homemade gin to blur the clarity of your 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. You nearly choke on your hate for the war, thinking of that and seeing those eyes, because it's taken BJ, the only goddamn good thing that might have come out of it.
You remember how you saw yourself reflected in his eyes sometimes, and you remember how he gave you the truth, gave you goodbye – how it broke him, but set you free in the end.
In the photo, BJ's arm is draped over the shoulder of the other man. You don't have to study that man; much as you try to avoid it, your own mirror shows the same person. You know the haggard face, lips lifted in a bemused and weary smile that doesn't look quite sincere, hair fading into gray above the ears, 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). You know them, and yet can't force yourself to claim them.
Your mother had once bought you a bird, a beautiful parakeet that lived for years in its wire cage. The day she died you opened the door to the cage, begged the bird to fly away.
You were angry, didn't want to be haunted by it and your mother's ghost.
It stayed (why, why, why?)
and now you know the feeling.

Peg's POV

BJ lies still beside you, and when you put your head on his chest, you can hear his heart thrumming, but like the crash of bombs, not so much a sound as an echo within his ribcage. He strokes your hair, but his fingers are cold, and you don't know for certain if he's even awake.
You see the stars wink out one by one through the blurry window over your bed, and you know the feeling.

and, one day
you watch BJ move in the circumscribed lens of the rearview mirror, with that grace rolling in his shoulder blades. It's just flashes of familiarity you see in him now: a look that dies out in his eyes almost as soon as it kindles, the way his forehead creases in consternation. Small mannerisms that belong to you, superimposed on this stranger, this man with sun-bleached hair and new lines around his eyes and an outsized mustache. That mustache slides over your skin when he kisses you (rougher, more bruising, than you remember), and you realize, stomach growing cold, that you don't know from what place in BJ it had come, what irrational need it fills--
you don't know who he's been, aren't sure who he's become, and a spire of unease runs through you. War might be hell, but that doesn't make peace heaven.

Epilogue

In the end, it's true, in the way all clichés are true, discredited because no one wants to believe that humanity is so predictable:
You really can't go home again

Description
Potter’s POV

You don’t bother looking up from the paperwork on your desk. "If you're gonna be making accusations this serious, Burns, you better have something to back 'em up."
"Everyone knows it, sir," Houlihan snaps immediately, coming to Frank's defense. "The whole camp's talking about it."
"Are you going to do something about it, or not?" Frank demands.
“Well, for such a big problem that everyone knows about, you two are the only ones making a fuss about it."
"No one else cares enough to."
"Then I think you answered your own question, Burns."
"Colonel, it's for the good of the outfit! If they're not stopped, their corruption could spread! Heaven only knows what I've been exposed to, living with them. Not to mention the patients…."
"I'll think about it. Now don't you two have places you're supposed to be?"

It’s a wheel web resting in the middle of a cherry blossom tree on the edge of camp, which you pass every day when you walk Sophie. Magnificent, at least seven inches in diameter, cartoonish in its perfection. Though you occasionally see little winged insects caught in the delicate silk, you’ve never seen the builder of the web—it’s probably become breakfast for a red-backed shrike or squashed under some foot soldier's boot. But her web remains, strewn between the thin branches and beneath the soft pink blossoms in full bloom.
"Colonel sir, how does a little old spider make somethin' that big? How do its little legs stretch it across the tree?" Radar asks you one day, squinting at the web glinting under a layer of dew in the early morning sun.
You chuckle. "Well, some folks say they can fly, but that's a load of meadow muffins."
"Do they throw it, sir?"
"You could say that," you explain, patting Sophie's nose gently. "She releases a thread that the wind catches and, if she's lucky, attaches to the branch. Mind, it's a sticky kind of thread. That's the first bridge. She's gotta cross it carefully, and she does that a few times, adding more and more of the sticky thread until it's nice and sturdy."
"Gee, sir, doesn't she fall? What if that first thread doesn't attach right away?"
"She tries until she gets it right. Once she makes a few more sections like that, she starts makin' the circular threads, until it's all done and she's ready to catch her prey. It's nice and sturdy but even the smallest bit o' damage can make it fall apart—" you snap you fingers, "—like that. But it can always be fixed, if she's still around to do the repairin'."
Radar shudders. "I'm glad she's not around. No offense but I don't like spiders, sir."
"I wouldn't exactly want one crawlin' in next to me in bed either, son."
"'ello gents," Hawkeye and BJ appear behind you, standing inches apart, hands brushing.
"What are we doing gathered around this tree?" BJ asks.
"Learning about spider webs, sirs. It's pretty interesting, you know, even though they're creepy-crawly. Colonel Potter really knows his stuff."
"Major Burns and Major Houlihan could do with a little enlightenment on the subject, too," you mutter, and when Radar asks, "What, sir?" you shake your head.
The younger surgeons wander away in search of other activities to kill the boredom, Hawkeye's arm slung casually around BJ's shoulder. A friendly gesture, nothing to see here. Like everyone doesn’t already know. Despite what Houlihan and Burns may think, you’re not blind, either.
You admire the glittering web once more, so intricately woven; wonder how many times the spider had attempted it, what a relief it must've been to complete it so perfectly. You wonder how it'd begun for Hawkeye and BJ, how many times they'd thrown that silk into the wind, waiting for it to hit something, anything, and make the connection.
"I was always taught to leave the spider webs alone, son," you tell Radar then. "Just think of how hard she worked on it. Who'd wanna rip up somethin’ so pretty anyway?"

Hawkeye's POV

cites events from episodes ‘preventative medicine’ (many soldiers are wounded due to an officer’s awful carelessness; Hawkeye convinces the perfectly healthy colonel he needs his appendix out – and actually operates – to keep Lacy out of action, which gets BJ royally pissed off) and ‘hepatitis’ (the whole shirt thing)

(the deluge of memories is incessant, ocean waves crashing down to engulf your world and roaring in your ears) You can't recall exactly when you stop looking at BJ with the twinge of resentment you swore you'd never shake – that little prickle of confusion at being confronted with this not-Trapper, a usurper lying sprawled across Trapper's old bed in warm, muzzy sleep, never imagining how the bunk's previous occupant had lain just so, languorous, in those same covers. Don't know precisely when you stop noticing what BJ does wrong when he stitches a patient with a strange movement of fingers or shaves with a smooth twist of the wrist that doesn't quite ring true, and start liking what he does…differently.
There's something in the way he moves, open and uninhibited, so totally unlike the calculated sinuousness of Trap's motions when you were alone that, even as you found yourself fascinated by them, disconcert you. You don't dare point it out, for fear of shattering that easy assuredness forever. He's too pristine to come out of the war unsullied. And when BJ tilts his head in frank concern one day and offers to touch you, confident, unashamed, you're almost ready to attribute it to that beautiful ignorance again. It surprises you, of course, enough that you look up in a moment of unguarded earnestness and meet BJ's eyes. There is something very self-aware in those eyes, and yet still they're unembarrassed. That's what I asked, they say, you heard right. Take it or leave it as it is. You, your own face an open book of God knows what, fear and shock and longing, have to swallow so hard you nearly bite your tongue to keep from gasping at him, Yes, I'll take it, and you along with it, to keep from lunging up and upsetting the still as you do just that. In a while the urge passes, and you choke and laugh, choking on the laugh because deceit with BJ makes the bile rise in your throat, hating the laugh, and tell BJ to put his shirt on. It's the last thing you want.
It happens eventually, inevitably. The third casualty of war, someone once told you, the third casualty of war has to be fidelity. (Third now, and moving up fast. Fidelity coming up on the inside track, passing Sobriety - martini glasses forgotten together on the grimy floor -- breaking past Truth in a desperate lunge as BJ says with his eyes, Really, no lie, love).
BJ, smiling openly, lit by the single stark lamp. No equivocation. No favors asked. He doesn't have to say it again; you both know that. But you, with a trace of the old flippancy, remark, "I thought you said you never mean what you say."
BJ exhales, slides closer, kisses you. When, at length, you pull apart, he grins again, his face earnest and inches from yours, and says, "I didn't mean that."
You move over to make space for BJ, gladly accepting whatever casualties you're letting yourself in for.

/…don’t say maybe
I gotta know if your sweet love is
gonna save me
We may lose and we may win
but we will never be here again
so open up, I’m climbing in/

You tip your head back to finish off the last of your drink. Through the curve of the glass, you can pick out tinted fragments of life: the spread spectrum of refracted light, the ceiling arching away to an apex, and the translucent images of your fellow drinkers, glowing, transposed into the oblivion of reflection. When you set the glass down, the world is all straight lines again, crudely harsh lamps, and tired people slouched on their respective stools. Under the faint, bluish blur of alcohol, everyone is faded and beautiful, soft-fleshed and cool forever in the haze, all the lines dissolved. All of them, no boundaries, no delineation, no this-is-right-and-this- is-wrong under the white bar-lamps, as there is in OR, as there is even in the Swamp on mail days...
BJ is coming, however, and you owe it to him to be halfway sober. Not for yourself, not because your liver hasn't already ejected itself in despair, but because to try to drink BJ away makes no sense. The clarity of BJ is not brittle, not painful, but necessary. Where else can you find something so bright: swift arms across the operating table, earnest grin across the poker table, sharply defined warmth across the sheets? A little scuffed at the edges, maybe, that smoothness rubbed away to a mustache, a brief spasm of anger in the lips against your lips, but the war finds everyone somewhere.
"Sir?" says someone, down near your elbow and a little to the right.
Without stirring, you murmur, into your glass, "Only at snap inspections and court-martials."
Radar slides onto the stool beside you, frowning. "Huh?"
"I don't respond to 'Sir.' You can call me names, call my bluff, call my bet, call me a cab - " you break off, turning the glass listlessly in your hand. "Oh, hell, never mind.”
you lose your train of thought, but there are always words poised on the tip of your tongue, and tonight it’s all falling out; “Sometimes I feel pretty dumb. Do you ever get the feeling that God invented war just for that purpose - to make us feel dumb?"
"Nah. Generals aren't capable of feeling dumb. They're too dumb to know they're too dumb to feel dumb, so they fight wars to try and convince themselves they're not as dumb as they don't think they are."
You shake you head. "Now that may just be the best explanation anyone's ever given for why wars are started. Radar, they should give you a medal. Or a Section 8.”
Radar bites his lip, shooting you a nervous sideways look. "Uh, yeah, okay. Look, Hawkeye, with all done respect--"
"It's 'due,' Radar."
"What's due? I checked all of today's mail already, an' even tomorrow's, an' we've paid off every red cent on that new movie projector!"
You kick him gently under the counter.
"No, I meant that, at least in my version of American English, the phrase is generally 'with all due respect.'"
"Right, but I'm talkin' in past tense, like, uh, the thing's already kinda happened." You're vaguely amused, but decide against interrupting. "I was just wondering why you've been sittin' here all morning."
"I was stood up," you joke, but Radar stares back without comprehension. You chuckle dryly. "Nah, I'm just waiting for BJ, though I'm starting to think it boils down to the same thing."
"Yeah, well, see, he's in the OR."
You drop your glass abruptly and swing to face him. "What for? Lacy?
Radar draws back a little, as though the fear seizing your body is palpable (maybe it is; nobody knows what exactly is accessible to the kid), and puts out an awkward hand to touch your arm.
"No, he said the Colonel's fine. But one of his patients, that lieutenant, all of a sudden keeled over in post-op. Well, I mean, he kinda just leaned over, ..cause he was in bed, but he was all limp." It's a shared fear, suddenly, as if you've infected him: Radar's sheer bright animal terror at the memory (eyes running into white and the quick startled movements of seizing limbs, which you're no stranger to anymore, but must be terrifying for him) and your aching, visceral defensiveness, the edge of panic subsiding but the base feeling still there, pulse thumping BJ's name. Overlaying it all, flowing and flickering, Radar's fear for you, waiting here alone at Rosie's, everywhere the smell of gin and guilt and BJ like crushed cloves. You press your lips together and, wincing slightly as you move your sore arm, climb down off your stool.
"How long's he been in there?"
"Three hours, maybe."
Your wince deepens for a moment -- not the wrenched muscle anymore, but something farther down, secret and unlighted.
"Oh, damn. I thought that kid was doing so well." Rummage in your pockets until you come up with a fistful of coins, toss them at Radar. "Here, pay Igor for me, would you? Get yourself a grape Nehi or something."
Radar catches the money open-palmed, spilling some of it across the dingy floor. "You gonna go see BJ?"
"Yeah," you say distractedly, "yeah." Turn and move toward the door; a few long strides and you're there, pausing on the precipice. “Thanks for letting me know, Radar "
"No problem," Radar murmurs as you ripple out, skittishly, through the entrance curtain.

BJ's already sitting in the scrub room when you arrive: his front bloodied, head against the wall, mouth slightly agape, like a dying fish. You hover in the doorway, eyes going reflexively to the curtain dividing you both from the OR.
"What happened?" you ask after a few minutes, the words falling into a silence punctuated only by the stabs of BJ's sharp, staccato breaths. He doesn't move. You're well aware he's known it was you since the thick heat of the outside air had rolled in through the opened door, but you don't want to push it, you're all fragile enough -
"Oh... aneurysm," BJ says quietly. "Sudden. The aortic wall just couldn't hold up."
You go to him, lean on the bench before him, just inside the circle of his slumped shoulders, and say, helplessly, "It happens."
"I'm a doctor, Hawk," he retorts. "It's not supposed to happen to me."
You flinch ever so slightly and, "God, BJ," gently, take BJ's chin between your palms, tilt it down, and wait, breath mingling hot between you both, "whatever you do, you're forgiven." BJ shudders almost imperceptibly, but you feel it beneath you, BJ's chest jerking just under your own ribcage. "Whatever you do -- I don't care."
He breaks away sharply, opening his eyes and grasping you by the arms. You start, but hold his gaze.
"I didn't ask you to approve of it," he mutters, "I didn't ask for absolution. He was my patient."
"All right," you murmur, placating, "all right. Listen, let's go home, huh?"
"I thought you wanted to talk."
"Did I?" you do a double take, blinking once because for a moment BJ's eyes seemed hard and flat and black, without depth -- a trick of the light, surely. "Oh, right, but not now. It can wait."
"No, it can't. You wouldn't ask me to talk if it wasn't important. God knows you never want to talk otherwise. Never talk, just" -- and his lips tighten, like his fingers on your arms -- "goddamn wisecracks all the time, cute remarks, everybody thinking you're just kidding when you say you're glad Peg's not here to distract me."
"Fine," and your voice is brittle, jagged. "I wanted to apologize for that idiocy with Lacy. I don't know what the hell bothered you so much about it, but I was sorry. I was. I don't know why now, because I did the right thing."
"Why do you always have to oversimplify everything?"
"Oversimplify?" BJ's words sting, and you answer hotly, "You were the one spouting off about moral absolutes back there, you and your Hippocratic oath -- or should we say hypocritical oath? Where do you get off, telling me what to do? It's my job to weigh these things, and there is such a thing as common good--"
"Dammit, Hawkeye, this isn't about doctoring for you. You make it so easy: you're omniscient, you get to be God, what you want is automatically correct. And it's not just the Hippocratic oath I'm going by, it's" -- BJ puts out a hand abstractedly -- "it's what medicine is. Galen: 'First do no harm.' There are always absolutes."
You're momentarily silent, staring, stunned. Then you shake your head and say, "No, I can't believe that."
"You have to. We're not just filling out scorecards here; we're treating people."
You rally again; "Do you think I don't know that? I've been here twice as long as you, and if anyone knows the people in this war, it's me."
A muscle twitches in BJ's jaw, and his expression shifts subtly. "And if you had your way, you'd know all of them."
Just like that, the conversation slips off its axis, and glancing sideways, you see something in BJ's eyes blaze like a flare and die out. "Listen, if…this is about Trapper, say so. Don't try to lambaste my surgery."
BJ seems to shrug off that thought as he flicks a glance toward the post-op ward through the door. "You put a man in one of those beds for no valid surgical reason at all. I have a right to say something about it." He shifts on the bench, and you realized how close you are, knees tangled together, your suspended elbows almost brushing BJ's chest. BJ keeps his grip on your forearms. "The minute you cut into someone, you're inside him. It's not just about you anymore."
"This conversation is not just about me anymore," you venture.
There's a flash of cold, ancient pain in BJ's face.
"You can't do that," he says finally, panting a little. "You can't just reach into a person's body and wash your hands of it afterward."
There's a silence; then you move in slowly, with calculatedly smooth movements, palms turned upwards, fingers splayed, like a man approaching a panicked horse. You meet in the still air, breath on each other's faces, warm press of bodies.
"I don't do that, Beej," you tell him softly. After a pause, you amend, "Not here. Never here." And yet, and yet, even though BJ does everything for you - tells Margaret to lay off, tells Charles to stop criticizing, tells you to let Lacy alone or you'll hate yourself for the rest of your life - even so, you know you'll take BJ and make you hate yourself anyway, and Peg too, for brief quicksilver moments in the morning (if jealousy is a green eyed monster, what is guilt?).

/though you drown in good intentions
you will never quench the fire
you'll give in to your desire/

In the dim slant of light, BJ's eyes are slightly wild.
"You can't take somebody in there and just -- just -- it's not that simple. You can't just cut that out of him, what he was doing, what he felt. It's never that easy."
Your propinquity is overwhelming – BJ's cheek against your shoulder – and you hold him, graceless, shaking, and think, This is where we should be, the white noise of the war outside, beyond that curtain enough static to drown in, but here the beat of BJ's heart, the hard contours of his body, solid, familiar to your fingertips, and yet--
Beneath BJ's skin, transient as breeze, you feel the ripple of muscle. Beneath the surface, world without light. You can't hold that, you can't cut that out, said BJ, hammering blood and dead, dense bone. Someday he'll go home to the soup and potatoes Peg's kept warm in crinkling tin foil, watching some stranger across the room, overhead lights on warm skin, what the hell are you thinking? All of those feelings fossilized; stiff and atrophied muscles, cold in disuse, thawing out under your touch.
First do no harm, said Galen: medical directive, moral absolute, imperative verb. Thou shalt not covet thy--
No. Leave it alone.
Shakily you find a seat on the bench, keeping your hands on BJ's face: one finger running down his cheek, BJ arching against you and shrinking away all at once.

"It's okay," you say desperately, as much to the shade of Peg on BJ's lips as to BJ himself. It's all right, Peg, I won't leave a scar. I know my surgical technique. First do no harm. He's not mine, I'm not going to cut in and leave myself under his skin where you'll find the traces some night, I'm not, I'm not kissing him--
You are. Hard, fierce, crushing, beer and blood in your mouths, until you hear BJ gasp a little, and you climb out, pull away. Someone's blood was on your lips. BJ's, maybe.
"Am I hurting you?" you ask, suppressing a shudder of longing.
"Of course," says BJ, his hand on your elbow, drawing you in. His voice is hollow until you lean back in and fill it, fill you both with the echoes of pain.

/don't have any reasons, left 'em all behind/

You and BJ had gotten your 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 you as being at odds with the flippancy of his words. You had reflected, with a clenching in your stomach, that BJ's frankness about what was really on his mind would have to be listed as another casualty of the war..
Years later, you put your palm over the thing on the ground, cupping your fingers defensively; then you scoop it up and lift it toward the light.
It's an old photograph, criss-crossed by indistinct white lines where it has been creased and re-creased. It shows 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, jumbling together in oblique lines of jutting roofs and sagging walls, rises a cluster of buildings, lit from behind by the lusterless sun.
In the foreground, their grainy forms limned with a whitish glow that makes them look almost pasted-on, stand two men. The taller one wears a pair of dark surgical scrubs and an exaggerated mustache that droops over the edges of his wide grin. There is a clean, earnest cast to his face, an unabashed and unashamed humor about the mouth and eyes. Still, his jaw is set, and in his eyes there is a rigid and pained glint. His arm is extended, and --
You pause there, breath coming quick and arrhythmic. A few fervent curses leave your lips to peter out into nothingness, and you lean closer toward the photo. There is undeniably a harshness in BJ's eyes -- and you had thought you had forgotten. You had thought you had forgotten the most heinous crime of the war, the insidious brutality that had gotten to you all, sooner or later, but that shouldn't have gotten to BJ. Shouldn't have forced him, too, to turn to the wonders of homemade gin to blur the clarity of your 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. You nearly choke on your hate for the war, thinking of that and seeing those eyes, because it's taken BJ, the only goddamn good thing that might have come out of it.
You remember how you saw yourself reflected in his eyes sometimes, and you remember how he gave you the truth, gave you goodbye – how it broke him, but set you free in the end.
In the photo, BJ's arm is draped over the shoulder of the other man. You don't have to study that man; much as you try to avoid it, your own mirror shows the same person. You know the haggard face, lips lifted in a bemused and weary smile that doesn't look quite sincere, hair fading into gray above the ears, 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). You know them, and yet can't force yourself to claim them.
Your mother had once bought you a bird, a beautiful parakeet that lived for years in its wire cage. The day she died you opened the door to the cage, begged the bird to fly away.
You were angry, didn't want to be haunted by it and your mother's ghost.
It stayed (why, why, why?)
and now you know the feeling.

Peg's POV

BJ lies still beside you, and when you put your head on his chest, you can hear his heart thrumming, but like the crash of bombs, not so much a sound as an echo within his ribcage. He strokes your hair, but his fingers are cold, and you don't know for certain if he's even awake.
You see the stars wink out one by one through the blurry window over your bed, and you know the feeling.

and, one day
you watch BJ move in the circumscribed lens of the rearview mirror, with that grace rolling in his shoulder blades. It's just flashes of familiarity you see in him now: a look that dies out in his eyes almost as soon as it kindles, the way his forehead creases in consternation. Small mannerisms that belong to you, superimposed on this stranger, this man with sun-bleached hair and new lines around his eyes and an outsized mustache. That mustache slides over your skin when he kisses you (rougher, more bruising, than you remember), and you realize, stomach growing cold, that you don't know from what place in BJ it had come, what irrational need it fills--
you don't know who he's been, aren't sure who he's become, and a spire of unease runs through you. War might be hell, but that doesn't make peace heaven.

Epilogue

In the end, it's true, in the way all clichés are true, discredited because no one wants to believe that humanity is so predictable:
You really can't go home again