Fic:: Talitha Cumi [M*A*S*H]
Jul. 14th, 2013 07:00 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ravenI was writing a totally srs business longer story, and I still am writing it, but I broke off on Thursday to write this after it arrived in my mind fully-formed in the dentist's chair. I should floss more. elb very kindly gave me some academic theology 101 for this, and also listened patiently while I worked out my daemon AU; thank you, dear.
Fic:: Talitha Cumi
by Raven
6500w, M*A*S*H, gen, daemon AU, BJ and Hawkeye and Mulcahy and everyone else. "Don't be afraid," Hawkeye says. "Don't be afraid. Trust the scientific method. They'll slug it out in peer review. I can't wait."
Of daemons, and enduring distance.
It’s on his second day, in his last pair of scrubs, heading out into a night that will end with his third terrible skull-cracking hangover since he arrived in Korea, that BJ sees something that he really should have seen before. Hawkeye is standing half-turned away from him, his back arched as he leans through the door to call out something to Potter. BJ takes in the lines of his body by instinct, his public hospital training never buried too deeply, notes the straight spine and traces of fatigue and the slight, hypoglycaemic tremor to the raised hand as Hawkeye laughs at whatever Potter is saying to him from the now-emptying OR. BJ scans quickly in the way one does, with children – looking for the mouse or butterfly or hummingbird, the flash of movement of something that he can’t quite see – before it comes to him abruptly that Hawkeye is an adult well-past the age of settling, and when meeting him for the first time, a few days and a whole lifetime ago, BJ's eyes went straight to the sleek shape at his heels. Hawkeye is standing quite alone in the space of this room, with the double doors next to him now closing.
For a moment he thinks he must be dead – that Hawkeye must be dead, that he must be dead himself, that this has all been blood-red khaki-green purgatory – and then BJ’s own daemon squawks on his shoulder as he takes a violent step back, presses himself back against the wooden wall, with the word slipping out before he can help it. “Witch.”
Hawkeye turns as though struck. When he takes a step forwards, it's with kind of savagery in his movement, BJ pressing back further against the wall. “You and I need to talk,” Hawkeye mutters, and under those words BJ has a distinct impression of a cat hissing; then somehow he’s out in the compound, Hawkeye pushing him along none-too-gently and cradling his daemon with his other arm. BJ doesn’t have time to wonder where she suddenly sprang from before they’re in the Swamp, facing each other on opposite cots. They stare at each other for a moment, Hawkeye scratching behind his daemon's ears, almost defiantly.
“Potter was going to have a quiet word,” he says, abrupt. “In a few days. Guess he didn’t count on your powers of observation.”
It’s easier to recognise that fluffed-up fur, that attitude that just falls short of cringing from a blow, in the cat than in the man. BJ touches his own left shoulder reflexively and waits for Elspeth’s comforting finger nip. “Listen, Hawkeye, I’m sorry,” he says, quickly. “I’m really sorry. I was surprised, that’s all, but it was an unforgivable word to use.”
Hawkeye seems to relax at that, leaning back and letting his daemon bounce down to the floor. She curls up in front of the stove and begins washing herself. “Apology accepted,” he says. After a minute, he gestures downwards. “This is Halle; I figure we’d best finish getting acquainted.”
“She's Elspeth,” BJ says, and Elspeth squawks again, takes off and flutters above his head before coming back to rest. “Don’t mind her, she’s getting used to it all.”
“She’s lovely,” Hawkeye murmurs, looking up at her hovering above his head, wing-feathers flashing red and green and violet. “She’s the most colour I’ve seen around here in a long time.” He reaches out towards Halle, knotting his fingers in her fur. “How far,” he asks, with casualness that’s almost studied, “can you two separate, as a general thing? I know people with birds can sometimes…”
“Sometimes,” BJ agrees, “but not in my case. We can’t get more than maybe five, six feet apart. Just about average, I reckon.” And because he can't help himself, because a part of him has been dying with curiosity ever since he saw Hawkeye in the scrub room, standing alone, he asks, “How far can you…”
Hawkeye looks at him expressionlessly, then snaps his fingers very lightly. The little silver tabby gets to her feet, bounds to the other side of the Swamp and vanishes under the tent-flap. In twin parts horror and reluctant admiration, BJ gets up and looks out, watching her moving unhurriedly on, disappearing into occasional shadow. She reaches the other side of the compound, around fifty yards away, before BJ hears Hawkeye’s inward catch of breath. There’s a pause, as though the two of them are testing their bond, and then Halle scurries back, faster than she went, and comes back into the tent to her spot by the stove.
“Wow,” BJ says, because he can’t think of anything else to say. “Wow. That was… wow.” He looks up at Hawkeye, still carefully blank, as though waiting for BJ to react. “How long have you been able to do that?”
Hawkeye sighs. “This is where Potter’s quiet word comes in, I guess. It’s just… it’s something that happens, over here. Don’t be afraid, okay? Henry and I used to think we were the only people who noticed it, then when Potter came he told me he’d seen it in some people back in what he calls the Great War. As far as I can guess, which isn’t very far, it comes from a lot of pain and stress and drinking too much. It kinda… changes you.”
Unlike Hawkeye and Peg and many others he’s known, BJ doesn’t have the sort of daemon that he can easily draw comfort from holding, but right now he wants to pick up Elspeth, feathers, claws, sharp beak and all, and put her inside his shirt, next to his skin. “Is it” – he swallows – “a weaker bond, than…”
“No!” Hawkeye looks up at him in dismay. “No, no, no. Don’t be afraid.” He’s spooked; he picks up Halle and holds her in just the way Peg holds her daemon, at eye level at arm’s length. “It’s nothing like that. Just changed, that’s all.”
He looks up at BJ and smiles, wry and warm. BJ doesn’t ask the question he was going to ask, because from that look he thinks he knows: it is permanent. “I’m surprised,” he says after a minute, “that I hadn’t heard of this before. You would think that there would be medical attention, studies done. It could tell us a lot about the relationship between body and daemon.”
“People don’t like to talk about it,” Hawkeye says, and then smiles again. “Maybe you should write a paper, after the war. Send it to the New England Journal of Medicine. I’ll let you be first author.”
“You can be et al,” BJ shoots back, and they both laugh, and something in the air between them eases.
*
Although he’s pretty sure Hawkeye meant it as a joke, somehow the idea sticks with BJ, and around a week later, when they’ve had three full waves of wounded total and two days of glorious stand-down, BJ goes to Potter with it, first thing in the morning before breakfast, walking through the compound in a strangely pretty, dusty pink dawn.
Potter receives him kindly enough, and listens to his idea with good humour mixed with wariness. “I’m glad Pierce spoke to you, son,” he says. “And it’s not a bad idea by any means. But I’m sure he mentioned that people – well, they just don’t like to talk about it. You might have trouble.”
“Hawkeye also told me not to be afraid,” BJ says steadily. “Twice, in fact. Maybe if it were talked about more, people wouldn’t be afraid. If I do write up this study and get it published, maybe it’ll do something about the fear of the unknown.”
Potter looks at him seriously, not disapproving, and finally nods. “All right, BJ. How do you propose to go about it?”
“Structured interviews,” BJ says promptly. “I’m going to ask people if they’ve ever heard of the phenomenon, ask them if they’ve experienced it themselves, take a general medical history – see if we can get a handle on how and when it happens. I suppose we’ll have to think of a proper name for it.”
“Kids I was in WW1 with called it breaking,” Potter says, and BJ knows at once, instinctively, both that that’s the name that will stick and that Hawkeye will not like it, not at all. “Right, Captain Hunnicut, if that’s all?”
“That’s all – no, wait.” BJ pauses on the threshold, turns and looks back. “How about you, sir? Will you volunteer?”
Potter smiles. “Can’t send the men in where I’ve never been, eh? Catch me after the mid-morning paperwork. Petunia” – his spaniel daemon trots across the floor, buries her muzzle in his outstretched hand – “cover your ears, dear, we’ll be talking about you. Good luck, BJ.”
“Thanks, Colonel,” BJ says, and sees himself out. “That went well,” he tells Elspeth, as she takes flight from his shoulder and hovers above, brighter than ever in the dim morning light.
“Hard part’s yet to come,” she says, her voice silvery as a flute, and BJ is conscious, suddenly, of the space between them.
*
Sidney Freedman, up from Seoul to deal with young Private Evans, who was split from his daemon in a localised shell blast, thinks it’s a good idea. “It’ll be nice to see someone bringing some clarity of mind to the whole problem,” he says, over the night's poker game. “You wouldn't believe the claptrap that otherwise quite sensible people spout on the subject of daemons. Just because it’s a little-understood area of psychiatry doesn’t mean it’s one where common sense ceases to hold sway.”
“In or out, Doctor,” Hawkeye says, from Sidney's other side, and BJ is startled.
Sidney glances down at the table and his daemon, a bright-eyed little fieldmouse, scurries backwards into his sleeve with a squeak. “Too rich for my pair of deuces. Fold. I had one colleague back in the States who tried to tell me that a daemon represents nothing more, or less, can you believe, than what a man gets from his mother, neatly compartmentalised away to allow for good honest masculinity in the remainder of his psyche. I swear, that's what he said.”
“But what about,” BJ says, not even sure where he's going to begin, and Sidney grins.
“Well, precisely. Some months later his firstborn son arrived in this world with a daemon whose name is, I believe, Zachariah. A fine Jewish name. My friend is revising his ideas, with the help of therapy, and his wife. To be honest, mostly his wife.”
BJ laughs, and Klinger groans and waves a feather off his hat. "Sirs, is this a poker game or a medical conference?"
"Want to volunteer, Klinger?" BJ asks.
"Only if you want a crazy man fouling up your results," Klinger says, and Sidney rolls his eyes. "Okay, okay. Sure I'll help you out, Doc. Amira thinks you're dishy."
"Ante up," Sidney says calmly. "Klinger, give it up, I'm off duty."
"In for ten," Klinger says, glowering at his hand. "Oh, come on, Major Freedman, is this the action of a sane man?"
"Res ipsa loquitor," Sidney says impressively and BJ laughs and Frank sniffs and Klinger says, "Bless you, sir" and into the comforting resultant bickering, Hawkeye says: "Call."
BJ is startled again, and unnerved by the way Hawkeye looks at him for a second, then dips his eyes. Hawkeye wins that game, and the next two after that, BJ losing a couple of five-dollar chips each time before folding, conscious all the while of Hawkeye avoiding his gaze.
*
“Oh, your project,” Margaret says, a little vaguely, her eyes on the patient’s chart. “Yes, I’ll help if I can. If you really want me to.”
“Why wouldn’t I want you to?” BJ asks, jogging to keep up as she moves on to the next bed. It’s mid-morning in post-op and he’s not the only one making rounds. Klinger is pushing a trolley of orange juice cups and Father Mulcahy is sitting beside the end bed, talking earnestly to a soldier with white gauze wrapped around his hands.
“Some people might not want to spend too much time around him.” She pushes up her sleeve and her daemon's flat head comes out from underneath her cuff, uncoiling from her wrist. He tastes the air with a forked tongue, making a low sound like the whistling of a kettle. “Some people” – she fixes BJ with a glare – “are scared.”
“I’m scared,” Elspeth whispers in BJ’s ear. “Look at the teeth on that thing!”
“Imagine someone calling you a thing,” BJ says very quietly, and louder: “I am a little, Major.” There were snakes in the backyard when he was growing up and generally he didn’t mind them too much, learning early what colours and patterns to watch out for, but he finds something deeply unsettling about that fluid, inexorable movement. For a moment the daemon’s eyes meet his and BJ swallows hard. “But I’d really appreciate your help.”
“You’ll have it, then. Private Hesketh, how are you feeling today?”
Hesketh opens bleary eyes and says, “All the better for seeing you” – and BJ laughs with delight at the kid, eighteen years old with a heart that two days earlier stopped on the table, his daemon fading to translucency in the gas-passer’s arms, but still waggling his eyebrows at his nurse. Margaret laughs, too.
“I’ll write ‘in good spirits’ on your notes,” she says, and scribbles. “You didn’t have a belly wound, Private, you can have some orange juice when Klinger comes by.”
“Thanks, nurse,” he says, still cheerful, and BJ smiles back at him. His daemon is roosting on the edge of the bedframe, head under her wing, and her ragged look contrasts sharply with his upbeat air. BJ makes a note.
“What’s his name?” he asks, motioning to Margaret’s daemon as they go on.
“Tacitusssssss.” Margaret grins at him. “Sibilance optional, of course.”
“Of course,” he agrees solemnly.
“At least you admit you’re scared,” she says. “Ask me about the men who said I was hard to get close to, or just found me too cold.”
BJ makes another note.
*
Two beds over, Hawkeye and Father Mulcahy are an improbable tag-team. Private Jones is sitting up in bed, looking frightened, clutching his little bobcat daemon. BJ hangs back – the kid is Hawkeye’s patient – but he’s curious. “Please, Tommy,” Hawkeye is saying. “It's just for a minute, but it's important. I'd like to examine her because how she’s doing will tell me important stuff about how you’re doing. I got a concussion once, my daemon walked into things for a week. It won’t take long.”
“It’s for the best, my son,” Father Mulcahy says, earnest. “The doctors here are all very good, they won’t hurt her or you, I promise.”
“What if I say no?” Jones asks, frowning.
“Then I won’t do it.” Hawkeye shrugs. “But as your doctor, I can’t recommend that you say no. It doesn’t have to be me, you know – Father Mulcahy can do it if that would make you feel more comfortable, or one of the nurses.”
Jones mutters, mutinously, “How would you feel if someone touched your daemon?”
Without missing a beat Hawkeye scoops up his own daemon from under his chair and says, “I’ll let you touch her, if that’s what it will take…”
“Hawkeye!” Father Mulcahy says, outraged.
“Sorry, Father.” Hawkeye looks at the kid. “I will, though” – and Mulcahy raises his eyes to heaven and offers a pointed, “Bless you, my son.”
*
“You don’t want to go back to the front lines? No one wants to go back to the front lines, soldier!”
“That sounds like the famous Frank Burns tact and compassion,” BJ says out of the corner of his mouth to Hawkeye, who doesn't answer, and BJ goes to the other end of post-op to find out what it’s about. Frank is face-to-face with a soldier who looks, if possible, even younger than is typical; his knees are drawn up his chest and he’s hugging his daemon, a March hare, to himself as though she were a teddy-bear.
“No one volunteered to be here, pal!” Frank howls, and BJ is about to jump in and tell him to knock it off when the patient in the bed next to the private speaks up.
“All except me, I guess.” It’s a smooth Southern drawl, sweet as honey. “I volunteered.”
Frank seems momentarily off balance. “You volunteered?”
Klinger pauses in the act of handing out a cup and says, “You really are crazy.” He adjusts his dress. “Crazier than me, I mean.”
“They don’t put guys like me on the front lines,” the soldier says. BJ looks at the clipboard on his bed: Corporal Adams, compound fracture of the humerus. “They said Stella was too big for the choppers and they didn’t want to take responsibility, but all my buddies were going and I didn’t want to get left behind.” From under his bed emerges a massive paw, claws gleaming. “So I volunteered. When we got hit they got me here in an ambulance with her running behind.”
“What kind of guy volunteers to go to the front?” Klinger demands, voice full of bafflement and some awe.
“The kind of guy with a lioness daemon, I guess,” BJ says, with that same admiration. Even Frank looks impressed, staring at Adams for a moment before he moves silently on to the next bed.
"Doctor," says the kid with the March hare, and BJ takes advantage of Frank's distraction.
"You won't have to go back," he says, gently. "After this we're sending you to the 121st evac, then home to heal."
The kid sighs with relief. "Hey, Doc," he says after a minute, "that's not your daemon, is it?"
BJ looks where he's pointing, then up at Elspeth perched on a light fitting. "No," he says, staring at the weasel curled up and yawning on the end of the next bed, with no one else close by. "That's…"
"That's Alma," Hawkeye says, appearing as if from nowhere. "She's Frank's better nature. Mostly she's sleeping."
"Hawkeye," BJ tries, but Hawkeye moves on without speaking, striding down the ward with his daemon clinging to his shoulders by her claws.
*
It's a little later, when the sun's getting close to the yardarm and a cool breeze is coming in through the windows, when BJ returns to Private Evans, the boy with no daemon. Sidney has tried his best, and now Evans will be sent to Tokyo and then Stateside, for whatever help can be found for him there, which BJ suspects may not be very much more than they can give him here. For now Mulcahy is sitting beside his bed, reading from a book of stories, because they can't think what to do except not leave him alone. "I've seen a lot of sad things over here, BJ," Mulcahy says, quietly, "but somehow there are always more left to see."
"Come to the mess tent with me," BJ says, noting the signs of exhaustion around his eyes. "Nurse Donovan can take over for a little while, and you look like some food would do you good."
Nurse Donovan waves from the end-table and Mulcahy gets up, stretching out so his muscles creak. "Perhaps you're right. Talitha, dear one, come along."
His daemon hops across the floor, whiskers twitching, and BJ leads the way out to the compound. "You know," he says, suddenly remembering, "back in Mill Valley, when I was a kid, the pastor came down on us like a tonne of bricks for that. Said to use an endearment towards a part of oneself was self-love of the worst order."
"A Methodist, perhaps?" Mulcahy asks, some of the humour coming back into his expression.
"Presbyterian," BJ says, and Mulcahy smiles for a moment. Something about that smile, contrasted with the blankness he just saw in post-op, makes BJ say, suddenly, "Is a daemon a soul, Father, really?
"What do you think?" Mulcahy asks, very gently.
"I don't know," BJ says, honest. "I've always been told that a daemon is part of you. In med school they teach us that a daemon is – well, a kind of psychic manifestation. Corporal Adams doesn't have to eat enough to feed a lion. But if a daemon is your soul – than what's Evans, now?"
Mulcahy is standing still beside him, no longer walking forwards. "I don't know, BJ. I don't know." He pauses. "I imagine it might be like… can you imagine, say, that you were to hear of the death of your wife? You might well say that you'd…"
"Lost a part of myself," BJ supplies, and shudders inwardly.
"But you would go on, nonetheless," Mulcahy says, steadily, and BJ envies him fiercely for a second. With no nursing training other than a first-aid course he did the year after his ordination, Mulcahy has stood with his hand inside a shattered and steaming human body, holding blood vessels and sinew together, and still believes that human beings are more than just atoms and skin. "You would be alive. There's still hope, BJ. Private Evans is alive, and he has a family at home who love him."
Who haven't been told yet, BJ remembers; Potter was adamant that he wouldn't write the letter. "It's not that the boy's dead," he said, and that was that.
"You know," BJ says, as they start walking again, "when his buddies found out what had happened they risked everything to find her. Ran around calling her name when they were still being shot at. But… they didn't find her. And I don’t know what they would have done, if they had."
For a second he's imagining Sidney and his army of psychiatrists, wielding needles, sewing Evans back together with invisible thread; and then he's thinking, inevitably, of Elspeth; of the day when they were eleven when something inside him stilled, and something else took flight; of Peg's daemon, Ariel, antlers visible in the long grass on summer nights in their backyard; of his mother's squirrel; of his father's blackbird; and of how Hawkeye's breathing, late at night on the edge of sleep, can sound like a purr.
"I don't know, either," Mulcahy says, and his eyes are troubled. "I have faith that I have an immortal soul and that Talitha is a God-given gift, to remind me of that. But I have faith; I don't know. What does that mean?"
"It means you haven't eaten since last night's dinner," Talitha informs him, ears pricking up, and BJ laughs.
"Sound medical advice, Father," he says, and holds the mess tent door open. He lingers to let Elspeth catch up, fluttering through the closing door, and holds out his hand for her to land, perfectly, on the tips of his fingers.
In the afternoon, Jones decides he's willing for his daemon to be examined for injuries if one of the nurses does it; Hesketh informs Margaret he's always had a passion for older women; Hawkeye spends ten increasingly futile minutes trying to convince Klinger's Amira that painting herself yellow is not going to get them out of the army and gives up when she trots off to Adams' daemon for roaring lessons. BJ sends Mulcahy to get some sleep and sits down with Evans for a while, talking about nothing in particular, about the Giants and the weather and the movie they were showing in the mess tent last night in which New York, Evans' home city, got thoroughly trodden on by King Kong. Evans never says a word, staring at his hands folded on his lap, but when after a while BJ gets up to fetch him a glass of water, Evans' eyes track him across the room.
*
After a week of conducting interviews and making extensive notes, BJ is feeling confident in his hypotheses.
It's getting late. Frank is on duty, dozing in a chair on the far side of the room; BJ is sitting at the end-table, working; the two night nurses are keeping an eye on things, talking quietly as they walk through, checking on the patients. Between the giggles, BJ catches the words hissing contest and deduces that at some point this afternoon Hawkeye and Margaret have gone three rounds about something, but it's quiet now, quiet and still. BJ goes through his notes.
Of the enlisted men, he’s had several confirmed instances of the breaking phenomenon, plus Sergeant Zale, who believes but wouldn’t like to swear under God that his Lyssa, a dragonfly, can zoom upwards further than she could before. BJ thought about a possible future longitudinal study. Among the nurses, there are three: the two longest-serving nurses, interestingly, as well as Major Houlihan. And among the doctors it’s more variable: those whose bonds have changed include Hawkeye and Frank and reportedly, Henry Blake; but if happened to him Trapper John never said anything about it, and Potter confirms that he and his Petunia can go no further from each other than when she used to ride on the back of his saddle in the cavalry. BJ hadn't meant to speak to any of the current patients, but Corporal Adams came to him of his own accord, to talk in bemused tones about the expanding space between a bed inside an ambulance and a lioness keeping a safe distance behind. BJ was able to be both kind and honest, and for that alone, he thinks, it's been worth doing this.
“Although I can’t help but notice,” Elspeth says, as BJ lays the cards out on the table, ”there’s an interview card here that’s conspicuous by its absence.”
He glances at her and takes a moment to sigh at her perspicuity, or, he supposes, what he should really call his own self-awareness. Hawkeye has been politely, distantly helpful throughout the project, giving him tips on producing a standard framework of questions, offering thoughtful suggestions about the structure of the final paper, not meeting his eyes.
BJ gets up, picks up his cards, nods at the nurses on duty and walks through the camp to the Swamp, letting his feet do the thinking. Elspeth caws gently as she flutters to keep up, but says nothing as he pushes open the door.
"Hawkeye,” BJ says, before he can lose his nerve, “you’re the one who brought all this to my attention in the first place. Will you let me ask you a few questions about your experience with the” – he winces – “the breaking?”
Hawkeye is on his cot with the light on above his head, a pair of knitting needles discarded on the floor below his outstretched hands. "That is a misnomer," he says, through gritted teeth. "In fact I'd call it reckless misinformation."
"Hawk, I'm sorry," BJ says, uncomfortably remembering the last apology he made to Hawkeye, "it's what it seems to be called, Potter said that when he was…"
"BJ," Hawkeye interrupts, and he has that unnerving look again, watchful, his hands clasping and unclasping. BJ thinks he catches a glimpse of green cat's eyes in the shadows and holds absolutely still, as though trying not to scare an animal. Hawkeye gets up and sits down again, moves towards the still, then draws back. BJ follows his gaze to the door and thinks he'll run, but seconds pass and Hawkeye is still sitting there, motionless, his daemon leaping up in his arms.
BJ waits a little longer, then pours himself a drink and sits down beside Hawkeye, who at least shifts to gave him space. "You didn't answer my question," he says after a while.
"I don't want to do this." Hawkeye sounds almost petulant. "You've got your dime-a-dozen interview subjects."
"No," BJ says, realising this for the first time, "not that question." He takes a sip of gin and a deep breath and reaches towards Elspeth, listening for her answering squawk, before he goes on. "Hawk. How long have you been able to do this?"
Hawkeye looks at him and says nothing, his pupils dilated in the stark shadow. Afterwards BJ will not be able to explain what intuition, what confluence of subconscious clues, makes him say, hesitantly: "Your mother…"
"Ah." Hawkeye turns to look at him and BJ can't read the look on his face, somewhere between amused and relieved and fearful. "So we're doing this, then, my dear," he says. It takes BJ a moment to realise he's talking to his daemon, who doesn't reply; like Peg's Ariel, she never speaks when anyone else is present.
"You don't have to tell me anything you don't want to," BJ says, awkwardly, knowing it's a lie, knowing that with Hawkeye sharing his tent and the air he breathes and somehow, his skin, that in this place they will not keep secrets from one another. Hawkeye has tried, and here they are with their daemons down on the dirt floor together; here BJ is, in this place, thinking of Hawkeye in the same breath as Peg.
Hawkeye leans back on his cot, half in shadow. He's silent for a long time before saying, "My mother is gone."
BJ lets out a breath. "But she was – and you are…"
This time BJ can't say it, the word lingering moist and unpleasant in his mouth, like a bite of sour fruit.
Hawkeye glances at him. "Something like that."
"I was always told," BJ says carefully, "that there are no American witches."
"You were told right." Hawkeye covers his eyes with one hand, speaking into the air. "A small town in Maine, near the – near the border. Near, ah, more borders than one. There's a place, there, close to where I grew up." His voice is getting slower and more melodic, as though he's reciting something he was taught long ago. "If a girl wants something more than what she has, and she's willing to pay for it, she goes to that place. She leaves her daemon on the bank, where the cloud-pine grows. She goes down and unties the little boat. She steps onto the boards and rows out across the water, across that world's water, deep, black, shining. It will hurt, rowing across that water, like heartbreak and leaving and other things, things you're too young to know yet, my love, my love. She rows across that water and when she returns, when she climbs out of the boat onto the bank where the cloud-pine grows, everything is changed." He looks up and his eyes snap open. "Am I disturbing you?"
"You," BJ says. "But you…"
"My father was grateful I wasn't a girl." Hawkeye gives him a half-smile, tentative and luminous. "And then when I was ten – well. It was long ago. "
"Hawkeye," BJ says, helplessly, and then: "Isn't that Lamarckian inheritance?"
Hawkeye gives a startled laugh. "I guess it is. But witches are made, as well as born."
BJ stares at him for a minute. "Why is this happening to us, now, here?"
"Witches are made," Hawkeye says again. "All it takes is time, and distance, and the endurance of pain."
"You've known this all along." BJ leans back and thinks about that. "You’ve known all along that…"
"Something in the fabric of the world is changing." Hawkeye spreads his hands. "I don’t know if it's electrification or water fluoridation or the war to end all wars or just the plain old endless capacity of human beings for evolution. But whether we can explain it, it's happening."
"You didn't want to tell me, though," BJ says, and then, because he's genuinely curious: "Who knows about this?"
"Margaret." Hawkeye shrugs. "Sidney."
BJ wonders what Sidney can make of a mind with a part of itself always at a distance, and then he's thinking, inevitably, of self and soul and Peg. "My paper," BJ says, suddenly. "That's it, isn't it? If you don't want, I won't…"
"Publish it," Hawkeye says, forceful. "Publish it as it is, it's important. If the old way of things is changing there needs to be someone watching. You were right, you know."
"I was?"
"Don't be afraid," Hawkeye says. "Don't be afraid. Trust the scientific method. They'll slug it out in peer review. I can't wait."
BJ laughs, suddenly. "Okay. Write it up, publish, be damned."
Hawkeye raises his glass and toasts Elspeth and Halle ironically. "Not at all. Here's my soul; here's yours."
BJ stares at him for a moment, than laughs, awash with affection. He thinks about asking whether Hawkeye really believes a daemon is a soul, and decides he doesn't need to know; he believes there's more to himself than homesickness and cells and more to Hawkeye than sharp claws and enduring distance; he'll come to an answer in the general case on his own, eventually, given time, faith, and, perhaps, a little help from his friends.
"I should go back to post-op," BJ says, a little awkwardly, and Elspeth lands gently on his shoulder.
"Yes, you should," Hawkeye says, but when he looks up he meets BJ's eyes. "Wake me for the shift change."
BJ nods, puts his index cards away, and gets up, but Hawkeye calls him back. "BJ?"
"Yeah, Hawk," BJ says, still with that quiet affection.
"Call it whatever you want," Hawkeye says, waving a hand, "but I am not broken."
"I know," BJ says, helplessly, warmly, "I know."
*
Evans dies the following morning, so early the sun hasn't clipped the horizon. Margaret is sleeping in the chair beside his bed with Mulcahy's book of stories closed on her thumb. BJ is on the other end of the room, checking a patient's vital signs when Elspeth suddenly takes flight, crossing the space like a winged ghost. "BJ," she calls softly, and before BJ has taken the few steps across the ward, he knows.
"Nurse," he calls to Donovan, "go and wake Father Mulcahy. Margaret…"
Margaret comes awake with a sharp catch of breath, looks up at BJ and across at Evans lying awkwardly across the sheet, and BJ sees the understanding dawn on her face, her daemon coiling lovingly around her neck.
"Oh," she says, and starts to cry. BJ puts a hand on her shoulder and reaches across to close Evans' eyes.
"What were you reading to him?" BJ asks, very quietly.
"Fairy tales," Margaret says, sniffing. "Witches, magic, bears who made their own souls from falling stars. I thought…"
"I know," BJ says, because there's nothing else to say. They stand together for a few moments, in silence.
"BJ," says a quiet voice, and BJ looks up at Hawkeye, leaning against the doorway with his daemon inside his robe. "Father Mulcahy woke me. I'm sorry."
BJ takes the hand he offers and grips it tightly for a minute, watching Mulcahy administer the last rites. He wonders, tiredly, from a great distance, if Evans died here or six days ago in that foxhole under that shell blast; if, in this silence, it matters, if anything matters at all.
"I'm so sorry, Doctor," Margaret says, and he wants to say she shouldn't be; that dozens of patients pass through here every day, and some of them, many of them die. For the death certificate he needs to write the cause of death and for an exhausted moment he thinks he's going to write heartbreak, or just, war; but when his pen moves, it writes: daemon destroyed in freak pinpoint shell blast; delayed shock. They look at the dead man's dogtags to find out what was the name of his daemon.
Hawkeye waits quietly for the formalities to be concluded, and afterwards holds out an arm; BJ takes it, and they go out into the compound together, blinking in the rising light. BJ is thinking that if people can make their own souls, it's not out of fallen stars but plain old stones and rock and dirt, the ground beneath their feet as they keep on going. If people can make their own souls, then a part of him will always be here in this place, standing in post-op staring at a man without a daemon, in a world spinning towards something he doesn't understand yet.
In the Swamp the light has crept halfway across the floor and Frank is still sleeping, his daemon murmuring softly as they push open the door.
"You should get some sleep," Hawkeye says, gently. "I'll be back in a while."
He stays a minute while BJ unlaces his boots, then sets out again. "He's right, you know," Elspeth says, quietly, the first time she's spoken since post-op.
"You try sleeping," he tells her. And then, for the first time: "Do you think, if we're here long enough, we're going to…"
He trails off.
"Not break apart," Elspeth says. "Not fade away."
"Right," BJ says. From somewhere outside in the distance, BJ can hear Hawkeye laughing, tiredly and reluctantly, at his daemon chasing whirls of dust. He thinks he can hear her answering voice, higher-pitched than he might have expected. BJ pushes back the tent flap to see the two of them a dozen metres apart, Hawkeye seemingly making a decision and crossing the distance between them, scooping her up so she rides on his shoulder towards post-op.
"Night night, sleep tight," Elspeth says, something BJ's mother used to say.
BJ's last thought, before laying himself down flat and spreading out the blanket, is that if he stays here for very long Hawkeye, too, will become a part of him, not like Elspeth but like his mother and like Erin and Peg, in that red robe in this blood-red dawn, not broken, not fading away.
"Night night," he echoes, and falls asleep not long after with his daemon perched close by, dreaming of the light filtering through dust.
end.
elb very kindly gave me some academic theology 101 for this, and also listened patiently while I worked out my daemon AU; thank you, dear. Fic:: Talitha Cumi
by Raven
6500w, M*A*S*H, gen, daemon AU, BJ and Hawkeye and Mulcahy and everyone else. "Don't be afraid," Hawkeye says. "Don't be afraid. Trust the scientific method. They'll slug it out in peer review. I can't wait."
Of daemons, and enduring distance.
It’s on his second day, in his last pair of scrubs, heading out into a night that will end with his third terrible skull-cracking hangover since he arrived in Korea, that BJ sees something that he really should have seen before. Hawkeye is standing half-turned away from him, his back arched as he leans through the door to call out something to Potter. BJ takes in the lines of his body by instinct, his public hospital training never buried too deeply, notes the straight spine and traces of fatigue and the slight, hypoglycaemic tremor to the raised hand as Hawkeye laughs at whatever Potter is saying to him from the now-emptying OR. BJ scans quickly in the way one does, with children – looking for the mouse or butterfly or hummingbird, the flash of movement of something that he can’t quite see – before it comes to him abruptly that Hawkeye is an adult well-past the age of settling, and when meeting him for the first time, a few days and a whole lifetime ago, BJ's eyes went straight to the sleek shape at his heels. Hawkeye is standing quite alone in the space of this room, with the double doors next to him now closing.
For a moment he thinks he must be dead – that Hawkeye must be dead, that he must be dead himself, that this has all been blood-red khaki-green purgatory – and then BJ’s own daemon squawks on his shoulder as he takes a violent step back, presses himself back against the wooden wall, with the word slipping out before he can help it. “Witch.”
Hawkeye turns as though struck. When he takes a step forwards, it's with kind of savagery in his movement, BJ pressing back further against the wall. “You and I need to talk,” Hawkeye mutters, and under those words BJ has a distinct impression of a cat hissing; then somehow he’s out in the compound, Hawkeye pushing him along none-too-gently and cradling his daemon with his other arm. BJ doesn’t have time to wonder where she suddenly sprang from before they’re in the Swamp, facing each other on opposite cots. They stare at each other for a moment, Hawkeye scratching behind his daemon's ears, almost defiantly.
“Potter was going to have a quiet word,” he says, abrupt. “In a few days. Guess he didn’t count on your powers of observation.”
It’s easier to recognise that fluffed-up fur, that attitude that just falls short of cringing from a blow, in the cat than in the man. BJ touches his own left shoulder reflexively and waits for Elspeth’s comforting finger nip. “Listen, Hawkeye, I’m sorry,” he says, quickly. “I’m really sorry. I was surprised, that’s all, but it was an unforgivable word to use.”
Hawkeye seems to relax at that, leaning back and letting his daemon bounce down to the floor. She curls up in front of the stove and begins washing herself. “Apology accepted,” he says. After a minute, he gestures downwards. “This is Halle; I figure we’d best finish getting acquainted.”
“She's Elspeth,” BJ says, and Elspeth squawks again, takes off and flutters above his head before coming back to rest. “Don’t mind her, she’s getting used to it all.”
“She’s lovely,” Hawkeye murmurs, looking up at her hovering above his head, wing-feathers flashing red and green and violet. “She’s the most colour I’ve seen around here in a long time.” He reaches out towards Halle, knotting his fingers in her fur. “How far,” he asks, with casualness that’s almost studied, “can you two separate, as a general thing? I know people with birds can sometimes…”
“Sometimes,” BJ agrees, “but not in my case. We can’t get more than maybe five, six feet apart. Just about average, I reckon.” And because he can't help himself, because a part of him has been dying with curiosity ever since he saw Hawkeye in the scrub room, standing alone, he asks, “How far can you…”
Hawkeye looks at him expressionlessly, then snaps his fingers very lightly. The little silver tabby gets to her feet, bounds to the other side of the Swamp and vanishes under the tent-flap. In twin parts horror and reluctant admiration, BJ gets up and looks out, watching her moving unhurriedly on, disappearing into occasional shadow. She reaches the other side of the compound, around fifty yards away, before BJ hears Hawkeye’s inward catch of breath. There’s a pause, as though the two of them are testing their bond, and then Halle scurries back, faster than she went, and comes back into the tent to her spot by the stove.
“Wow,” BJ says, because he can’t think of anything else to say. “Wow. That was… wow.” He looks up at Hawkeye, still carefully blank, as though waiting for BJ to react. “How long have you been able to do that?”
Hawkeye sighs. “This is where Potter’s quiet word comes in, I guess. It’s just… it’s something that happens, over here. Don’t be afraid, okay? Henry and I used to think we were the only people who noticed it, then when Potter came he told me he’d seen it in some people back in what he calls the Great War. As far as I can guess, which isn’t very far, it comes from a lot of pain and stress and drinking too much. It kinda… changes you.”
Unlike Hawkeye and Peg and many others he’s known, BJ doesn’t have the sort of daemon that he can easily draw comfort from holding, but right now he wants to pick up Elspeth, feathers, claws, sharp beak and all, and put her inside his shirt, next to his skin. “Is it” – he swallows – “a weaker bond, than…”
“No!” Hawkeye looks up at him in dismay. “No, no, no. Don’t be afraid.” He’s spooked; he picks up Halle and holds her in just the way Peg holds her daemon, at eye level at arm’s length. “It’s nothing like that. Just changed, that’s all.”
He looks up at BJ and smiles, wry and warm. BJ doesn’t ask the question he was going to ask, because from that look he thinks he knows: it is permanent. “I’m surprised,” he says after a minute, “that I hadn’t heard of this before. You would think that there would be medical attention, studies done. It could tell us a lot about the relationship between body and daemon.”
“People don’t like to talk about it,” Hawkeye says, and then smiles again. “Maybe you should write a paper, after the war. Send it to the New England Journal of Medicine. I’ll let you be first author.”
“You can be et al,” BJ shoots back, and they both laugh, and something in the air between them eases.
Although he’s pretty sure Hawkeye meant it as a joke, somehow the idea sticks with BJ, and around a week later, when they’ve had three full waves of wounded total and two days of glorious stand-down, BJ goes to Potter with it, first thing in the morning before breakfast, walking through the compound in a strangely pretty, dusty pink dawn.
Potter receives him kindly enough, and listens to his idea with good humour mixed with wariness. “I’m glad Pierce spoke to you, son,” he says. “And it’s not a bad idea by any means. But I’m sure he mentioned that people – well, they just don’t like to talk about it. You might have trouble.”
“Hawkeye also told me not to be afraid,” BJ says steadily. “Twice, in fact. Maybe if it were talked about more, people wouldn’t be afraid. If I do write up this study and get it published, maybe it’ll do something about the fear of the unknown.”
Potter looks at him seriously, not disapproving, and finally nods. “All right, BJ. How do you propose to go about it?”
“Structured interviews,” BJ says promptly. “I’m going to ask people if they’ve ever heard of the phenomenon, ask them if they’ve experienced it themselves, take a general medical history – see if we can get a handle on how and when it happens. I suppose we’ll have to think of a proper name for it.”
“Kids I was in WW1 with called it breaking,” Potter says, and BJ knows at once, instinctively, both that that’s the name that will stick and that Hawkeye will not like it, not at all. “Right, Captain Hunnicut, if that’s all?”
“That’s all – no, wait.” BJ pauses on the threshold, turns and looks back. “How about you, sir? Will you volunteer?”
Potter smiles. “Can’t send the men in where I’ve never been, eh? Catch me after the mid-morning paperwork. Petunia” – his spaniel daemon trots across the floor, buries her muzzle in his outstretched hand – “cover your ears, dear, we’ll be talking about you. Good luck, BJ.”
“Thanks, Colonel,” BJ says, and sees himself out. “That went well,” he tells Elspeth, as she takes flight from his shoulder and hovers above, brighter than ever in the dim morning light.
“Hard part’s yet to come,” she says, her voice silvery as a flute, and BJ is conscious, suddenly, of the space between them.
Sidney Freedman, up from Seoul to deal with young Private Evans, who was split from his daemon in a localised shell blast, thinks it’s a good idea. “It’ll be nice to see someone bringing some clarity of mind to the whole problem,” he says, over the night's poker game. “You wouldn't believe the claptrap that otherwise quite sensible people spout on the subject of daemons. Just because it’s a little-understood area of psychiatry doesn’t mean it’s one where common sense ceases to hold sway.”
“In or out, Doctor,” Hawkeye says, from Sidney's other side, and BJ is startled.
Sidney glances down at the table and his daemon, a bright-eyed little fieldmouse, scurries backwards into his sleeve with a squeak. “Too rich for my pair of deuces. Fold. I had one colleague back in the States who tried to tell me that a daemon represents nothing more, or less, can you believe, than what a man gets from his mother, neatly compartmentalised away to allow for good honest masculinity in the remainder of his psyche. I swear, that's what he said.”
“But what about,” BJ says, not even sure where he's going to begin, and Sidney grins.
“Well, precisely. Some months later his firstborn son arrived in this world with a daemon whose name is, I believe, Zachariah. A fine Jewish name. My friend is revising his ideas, with the help of therapy, and his wife. To be honest, mostly his wife.”
BJ laughs, and Klinger groans and waves a feather off his hat. "Sirs, is this a poker game or a medical conference?"
"Want to volunteer, Klinger?" BJ asks.
"Only if you want a crazy man fouling up your results," Klinger says, and Sidney rolls his eyes. "Okay, okay. Sure I'll help you out, Doc. Amira thinks you're dishy."
"Ante up," Sidney says calmly. "Klinger, give it up, I'm off duty."
"In for ten," Klinger says, glowering at his hand. "Oh, come on, Major Freedman, is this the action of a sane man?"
"Res ipsa loquitor," Sidney says impressively and BJ laughs and Frank sniffs and Klinger says, "Bless you, sir" and into the comforting resultant bickering, Hawkeye says: "Call."
BJ is startled again, and unnerved by the way Hawkeye looks at him for a second, then dips his eyes. Hawkeye wins that game, and the next two after that, BJ losing a couple of five-dollar chips each time before folding, conscious all the while of Hawkeye avoiding his gaze.
“Oh, your project,” Margaret says, a little vaguely, her eyes on the patient’s chart. “Yes, I’ll help if I can. If you really want me to.”
“Why wouldn’t I want you to?” BJ asks, jogging to keep up as she moves on to the next bed. It’s mid-morning in post-op and he’s not the only one making rounds. Klinger is pushing a trolley of orange juice cups and Father Mulcahy is sitting beside the end bed, talking earnestly to a soldier with white gauze wrapped around his hands.
“Some people might not want to spend too much time around him.” She pushes up her sleeve and her daemon's flat head comes out from underneath her cuff, uncoiling from her wrist. He tastes the air with a forked tongue, making a low sound like the whistling of a kettle. “Some people” – she fixes BJ with a glare – “are scared.”
“I’m scared,” Elspeth whispers in BJ’s ear. “Look at the teeth on that thing!”
“Imagine someone calling you a thing,” BJ says very quietly, and louder: “I am a little, Major.” There were snakes in the backyard when he was growing up and generally he didn’t mind them too much, learning early what colours and patterns to watch out for, but he finds something deeply unsettling about that fluid, inexorable movement. For a moment the daemon’s eyes meet his and BJ swallows hard. “But I’d really appreciate your help.”
“You’ll have it, then. Private Hesketh, how are you feeling today?”
Hesketh opens bleary eyes and says, “All the better for seeing you” – and BJ laughs with delight at the kid, eighteen years old with a heart that two days earlier stopped on the table, his daemon fading to translucency in the gas-passer’s arms, but still waggling his eyebrows at his nurse. Margaret laughs, too.
“I’ll write ‘in good spirits’ on your notes,” she says, and scribbles. “You didn’t have a belly wound, Private, you can have some orange juice when Klinger comes by.”
“Thanks, nurse,” he says, still cheerful, and BJ smiles back at him. His daemon is roosting on the edge of the bedframe, head under her wing, and her ragged look contrasts sharply with his upbeat air. BJ makes a note.
“What’s his name?” he asks, motioning to Margaret’s daemon as they go on.
“Tacitusssssss.” Margaret grins at him. “Sibilance optional, of course.”
“Of course,” he agrees solemnly.
“At least you admit you’re scared,” she says. “Ask me about the men who said I was hard to get close to, or just found me too cold.”
BJ makes another note.
Two beds over, Hawkeye and Father Mulcahy are an improbable tag-team. Private Jones is sitting up in bed, looking frightened, clutching his little bobcat daemon. BJ hangs back – the kid is Hawkeye’s patient – but he’s curious. “Please, Tommy,” Hawkeye is saying. “It's just for a minute, but it's important. I'd like to examine her because how she’s doing will tell me important stuff about how you’re doing. I got a concussion once, my daemon walked into things for a week. It won’t take long.”
“It’s for the best, my son,” Father Mulcahy says, earnest. “The doctors here are all very good, they won’t hurt her or you, I promise.”
“What if I say no?” Jones asks, frowning.
“Then I won’t do it.” Hawkeye shrugs. “But as your doctor, I can’t recommend that you say no. It doesn’t have to be me, you know – Father Mulcahy can do it if that would make you feel more comfortable, or one of the nurses.”
Jones mutters, mutinously, “How would you feel if someone touched your daemon?”
Without missing a beat Hawkeye scoops up his own daemon from under his chair and says, “I’ll let you touch her, if that’s what it will take…”
“Hawkeye!” Father Mulcahy says, outraged.
“Sorry, Father.” Hawkeye looks at the kid. “I will, though” – and Mulcahy raises his eyes to heaven and offers a pointed, “Bless you, my son.”
“You don’t want to go back to the front lines? No one wants to go back to the front lines, soldier!”
“That sounds like the famous Frank Burns tact and compassion,” BJ says out of the corner of his mouth to Hawkeye, who doesn't answer, and BJ goes to the other end of post-op to find out what it’s about. Frank is face-to-face with a soldier who looks, if possible, even younger than is typical; his knees are drawn up his chest and he’s hugging his daemon, a March hare, to himself as though she were a teddy-bear.
“No one volunteered to be here, pal!” Frank howls, and BJ is about to jump in and tell him to knock it off when the patient in the bed next to the private speaks up.
“All except me, I guess.” It’s a smooth Southern drawl, sweet as honey. “I volunteered.”
Frank seems momentarily off balance. “You volunteered?”
Klinger pauses in the act of handing out a cup and says, “You really are crazy.” He adjusts his dress. “Crazier than me, I mean.”
“They don’t put guys like me on the front lines,” the soldier says. BJ looks at the clipboard on his bed: Corporal Adams, compound fracture of the humerus. “They said Stella was too big for the choppers and they didn’t want to take responsibility, but all my buddies were going and I didn’t want to get left behind.” From under his bed emerges a massive paw, claws gleaming. “So I volunteered. When we got hit they got me here in an ambulance with her running behind.”
“What kind of guy volunteers to go to the front?” Klinger demands, voice full of bafflement and some awe.
“The kind of guy with a lioness daemon, I guess,” BJ says, with that same admiration. Even Frank looks impressed, staring at Adams for a moment before he moves silently on to the next bed.
"Doctor," says the kid with the March hare, and BJ takes advantage of Frank's distraction.
"You won't have to go back," he says, gently. "After this we're sending you to the 121st evac, then home to heal."
The kid sighs with relief. "Hey, Doc," he says after a minute, "that's not your daemon, is it?"
BJ looks where he's pointing, then up at Elspeth perched on a light fitting. "No," he says, staring at the weasel curled up and yawning on the end of the next bed, with no one else close by. "That's…"
"That's Alma," Hawkeye says, appearing as if from nowhere. "She's Frank's better nature. Mostly she's sleeping."
"Hawkeye," BJ tries, but Hawkeye moves on without speaking, striding down the ward with his daemon clinging to his shoulders by her claws.
It's a little later, when the sun's getting close to the yardarm and a cool breeze is coming in through the windows, when BJ returns to Private Evans, the boy with no daemon. Sidney has tried his best, and now Evans will be sent to Tokyo and then Stateside, for whatever help can be found for him there, which BJ suspects may not be very much more than they can give him here. For now Mulcahy is sitting beside his bed, reading from a book of stories, because they can't think what to do except not leave him alone. "I've seen a lot of sad things over here, BJ," Mulcahy says, quietly, "but somehow there are always more left to see."
"Come to the mess tent with me," BJ says, noting the signs of exhaustion around his eyes. "Nurse Donovan can take over for a little while, and you look like some food would do you good."
Nurse Donovan waves from the end-table and Mulcahy gets up, stretching out so his muscles creak. "Perhaps you're right. Talitha, dear one, come along."
His daemon hops across the floor, whiskers twitching, and BJ leads the way out to the compound. "You know," he says, suddenly remembering, "back in Mill Valley, when I was a kid, the pastor came down on us like a tonne of bricks for that. Said to use an endearment towards a part of oneself was self-love of the worst order."
"A Methodist, perhaps?" Mulcahy asks, some of the humour coming back into his expression.
"Presbyterian," BJ says, and Mulcahy smiles for a moment. Something about that smile, contrasted with the blankness he just saw in post-op, makes BJ say, suddenly, "Is a daemon a soul, Father, really?
"What do you think?" Mulcahy asks, very gently.
"I don't know," BJ says, honest. "I've always been told that a daemon is part of you. In med school they teach us that a daemon is – well, a kind of psychic manifestation. Corporal Adams doesn't have to eat enough to feed a lion. But if a daemon is your soul – than what's Evans, now?"
Mulcahy is standing still beside him, no longer walking forwards. "I don't know, BJ. I don't know." He pauses. "I imagine it might be like… can you imagine, say, that you were to hear of the death of your wife? You might well say that you'd…"
"Lost a part of myself," BJ supplies, and shudders inwardly.
"But you would go on, nonetheless," Mulcahy says, steadily, and BJ envies him fiercely for a second. With no nursing training other than a first-aid course he did the year after his ordination, Mulcahy has stood with his hand inside a shattered and steaming human body, holding blood vessels and sinew together, and still believes that human beings are more than just atoms and skin. "You would be alive. There's still hope, BJ. Private Evans is alive, and he has a family at home who love him."
Who haven't been told yet, BJ remembers; Potter was adamant that he wouldn't write the letter. "It's not that the boy's dead," he said, and that was that.
"You know," BJ says, as they start walking again, "when his buddies found out what had happened they risked everything to find her. Ran around calling her name when they were still being shot at. But… they didn't find her. And I don’t know what they would have done, if they had."
For a second he's imagining Sidney and his army of psychiatrists, wielding needles, sewing Evans back together with invisible thread; and then he's thinking, inevitably, of Elspeth; of the day when they were eleven when something inside him stilled, and something else took flight; of Peg's daemon, Ariel, antlers visible in the long grass on summer nights in their backyard; of his mother's squirrel; of his father's blackbird; and of how Hawkeye's breathing, late at night on the edge of sleep, can sound like a purr.
"I don't know, either," Mulcahy says, and his eyes are troubled. "I have faith that I have an immortal soul and that Talitha is a God-given gift, to remind me of that. But I have faith; I don't know. What does that mean?"
"It means you haven't eaten since last night's dinner," Talitha informs him, ears pricking up, and BJ laughs.
"Sound medical advice, Father," he says, and holds the mess tent door open. He lingers to let Elspeth catch up, fluttering through the closing door, and holds out his hand for her to land, perfectly, on the tips of his fingers.
In the afternoon, Jones decides he's willing for his daemon to be examined for injuries if one of the nurses does it; Hesketh informs Margaret he's always had a passion for older women; Hawkeye spends ten increasingly futile minutes trying to convince Klinger's Amira that painting herself yellow is not going to get them out of the army and gives up when she trots off to Adams' daemon for roaring lessons. BJ sends Mulcahy to get some sleep and sits down with Evans for a while, talking about nothing in particular, about the Giants and the weather and the movie they were showing in the mess tent last night in which New York, Evans' home city, got thoroughly trodden on by King Kong. Evans never says a word, staring at his hands folded on his lap, but when after a while BJ gets up to fetch him a glass of water, Evans' eyes track him across the room.
After a week of conducting interviews and making extensive notes, BJ is feeling confident in his hypotheses.
It's getting late. Frank is on duty, dozing in a chair on the far side of the room; BJ is sitting at the end-table, working; the two night nurses are keeping an eye on things, talking quietly as they walk through, checking on the patients. Between the giggles, BJ catches the words hissing contest and deduces that at some point this afternoon Hawkeye and Margaret have gone three rounds about something, but it's quiet now, quiet and still. BJ goes through his notes.
Of the enlisted men, he’s had several confirmed instances of the breaking phenomenon, plus Sergeant Zale, who believes but wouldn’t like to swear under God that his Lyssa, a dragonfly, can zoom upwards further than she could before. BJ thought about a possible future longitudinal study. Among the nurses, there are three: the two longest-serving nurses, interestingly, as well as Major Houlihan. And among the doctors it’s more variable: those whose bonds have changed include Hawkeye and Frank and reportedly, Henry Blake; but if happened to him Trapper John never said anything about it, and Potter confirms that he and his Petunia can go no further from each other than when she used to ride on the back of his saddle in the cavalry. BJ hadn't meant to speak to any of the current patients, but Corporal Adams came to him of his own accord, to talk in bemused tones about the expanding space between a bed inside an ambulance and a lioness keeping a safe distance behind. BJ was able to be both kind and honest, and for that alone, he thinks, it's been worth doing this.
“Although I can’t help but notice,” Elspeth says, as BJ lays the cards out on the table, ”there’s an interview card here that’s conspicuous by its absence.”
He glances at her and takes a moment to sigh at her perspicuity, or, he supposes, what he should really call his own self-awareness. Hawkeye has been politely, distantly helpful throughout the project, giving him tips on producing a standard framework of questions, offering thoughtful suggestions about the structure of the final paper, not meeting his eyes.
BJ gets up, picks up his cards, nods at the nurses on duty and walks through the camp to the Swamp, letting his feet do the thinking. Elspeth caws gently as she flutters to keep up, but says nothing as he pushes open the door.
"Hawkeye,” BJ says, before he can lose his nerve, “you’re the one who brought all this to my attention in the first place. Will you let me ask you a few questions about your experience with the” – he winces – “the breaking?”
Hawkeye is on his cot with the light on above his head, a pair of knitting needles discarded on the floor below his outstretched hands. "That is a misnomer," he says, through gritted teeth. "In fact I'd call it reckless misinformation."
"Hawk, I'm sorry," BJ says, uncomfortably remembering the last apology he made to Hawkeye, "it's what it seems to be called, Potter said that when he was…"
"BJ," Hawkeye interrupts, and he has that unnerving look again, watchful, his hands clasping and unclasping. BJ thinks he catches a glimpse of green cat's eyes in the shadows and holds absolutely still, as though trying not to scare an animal. Hawkeye gets up and sits down again, moves towards the still, then draws back. BJ follows his gaze to the door and thinks he'll run, but seconds pass and Hawkeye is still sitting there, motionless, his daemon leaping up in his arms.
BJ waits a little longer, then pours himself a drink and sits down beside Hawkeye, who at least shifts to gave him space. "You didn't answer my question," he says after a while.
"I don't want to do this." Hawkeye sounds almost petulant. "You've got your dime-a-dozen interview subjects."
"No," BJ says, realising this for the first time, "not that question." He takes a sip of gin and a deep breath and reaches towards Elspeth, listening for her answering squawk, before he goes on. "Hawk. How long have you been able to do this?"
Hawkeye looks at him and says nothing, his pupils dilated in the stark shadow. Afterwards BJ will not be able to explain what intuition, what confluence of subconscious clues, makes him say, hesitantly: "Your mother…"
"Ah." Hawkeye turns to look at him and BJ can't read the look on his face, somewhere between amused and relieved and fearful. "So we're doing this, then, my dear," he says. It takes BJ a moment to realise he's talking to his daemon, who doesn't reply; like Peg's Ariel, she never speaks when anyone else is present.
"You don't have to tell me anything you don't want to," BJ says, awkwardly, knowing it's a lie, knowing that with Hawkeye sharing his tent and the air he breathes and somehow, his skin, that in this place they will not keep secrets from one another. Hawkeye has tried, and here they are with their daemons down on the dirt floor together; here BJ is, in this place, thinking of Hawkeye in the same breath as Peg.
Hawkeye leans back on his cot, half in shadow. He's silent for a long time before saying, "My mother is gone."
BJ lets out a breath. "But she was – and you are…"
This time BJ can't say it, the word lingering moist and unpleasant in his mouth, like a bite of sour fruit.
Hawkeye glances at him. "Something like that."
"I was always told," BJ says carefully, "that there are no American witches."
"You were told right." Hawkeye covers his eyes with one hand, speaking into the air. "A small town in Maine, near the – near the border. Near, ah, more borders than one. There's a place, there, close to where I grew up." His voice is getting slower and more melodic, as though he's reciting something he was taught long ago. "If a girl wants something more than what she has, and she's willing to pay for it, she goes to that place. She leaves her daemon on the bank, where the cloud-pine grows. She goes down and unties the little boat. She steps onto the boards and rows out across the water, across that world's water, deep, black, shining. It will hurt, rowing across that water, like heartbreak and leaving and other things, things you're too young to know yet, my love, my love. She rows across that water and when she returns, when she climbs out of the boat onto the bank where the cloud-pine grows, everything is changed." He looks up and his eyes snap open. "Am I disturbing you?"
"You," BJ says. "But you…"
"My father was grateful I wasn't a girl." Hawkeye gives him a half-smile, tentative and luminous. "And then when I was ten – well. It was long ago. "
"Hawkeye," BJ says, helplessly, and then: "Isn't that Lamarckian inheritance?"
Hawkeye gives a startled laugh. "I guess it is. But witches are made, as well as born."
BJ stares at him for a minute. "Why is this happening to us, now, here?"
"Witches are made," Hawkeye says again. "All it takes is time, and distance, and the endurance of pain."
"You've known this all along." BJ leans back and thinks about that. "You’ve known all along that…"
"Something in the fabric of the world is changing." Hawkeye spreads his hands. "I don’t know if it's electrification or water fluoridation or the war to end all wars or just the plain old endless capacity of human beings for evolution. But whether we can explain it, it's happening."
"You didn't want to tell me, though," BJ says, and then, because he's genuinely curious: "Who knows about this?"
"Margaret." Hawkeye shrugs. "Sidney."
BJ wonders what Sidney can make of a mind with a part of itself always at a distance, and then he's thinking, inevitably, of self and soul and Peg. "My paper," BJ says, suddenly. "That's it, isn't it? If you don't want, I won't…"
"Publish it," Hawkeye says, forceful. "Publish it as it is, it's important. If the old way of things is changing there needs to be someone watching. You were right, you know."
"I was?"
"Don't be afraid," Hawkeye says. "Don't be afraid. Trust the scientific method. They'll slug it out in peer review. I can't wait."
BJ laughs, suddenly. "Okay. Write it up, publish, be damned."
Hawkeye raises his glass and toasts Elspeth and Halle ironically. "Not at all. Here's my soul; here's yours."
BJ stares at him for a moment, than laughs, awash with affection. He thinks about asking whether Hawkeye really believes a daemon is a soul, and decides he doesn't need to know; he believes there's more to himself than homesickness and cells and more to Hawkeye than sharp claws and enduring distance; he'll come to an answer in the general case on his own, eventually, given time, faith, and, perhaps, a little help from his friends.
"I should go back to post-op," BJ says, a little awkwardly, and Elspeth lands gently on his shoulder.
"Yes, you should," Hawkeye says, but when he looks up he meets BJ's eyes. "Wake me for the shift change."
BJ nods, puts his index cards away, and gets up, but Hawkeye calls him back. "BJ?"
"Yeah, Hawk," BJ says, still with that quiet affection.
"Call it whatever you want," Hawkeye says, waving a hand, "but I am not broken."
"I know," BJ says, helplessly, warmly, "I know."
Evans dies the following morning, so early the sun hasn't clipped the horizon. Margaret is sleeping in the chair beside his bed with Mulcahy's book of stories closed on her thumb. BJ is on the other end of the room, checking a patient's vital signs when Elspeth suddenly takes flight, crossing the space like a winged ghost. "BJ," she calls softly, and before BJ has taken the few steps across the ward, he knows.
"Nurse," he calls to Donovan, "go and wake Father Mulcahy. Margaret…"
Margaret comes awake with a sharp catch of breath, looks up at BJ and across at Evans lying awkwardly across the sheet, and BJ sees the understanding dawn on her face, her daemon coiling lovingly around her neck.
"Oh," she says, and starts to cry. BJ puts a hand on her shoulder and reaches across to close Evans' eyes.
"What were you reading to him?" BJ asks, very quietly.
"Fairy tales," Margaret says, sniffing. "Witches, magic, bears who made their own souls from falling stars. I thought…"
"I know," BJ says, because there's nothing else to say. They stand together for a few moments, in silence.
"BJ," says a quiet voice, and BJ looks up at Hawkeye, leaning against the doorway with his daemon inside his robe. "Father Mulcahy woke me. I'm sorry."
BJ takes the hand he offers and grips it tightly for a minute, watching Mulcahy administer the last rites. He wonders, tiredly, from a great distance, if Evans died here or six days ago in that foxhole under that shell blast; if, in this silence, it matters, if anything matters at all.
"I'm so sorry, Doctor," Margaret says, and he wants to say she shouldn't be; that dozens of patients pass through here every day, and some of them, many of them die. For the death certificate he needs to write the cause of death and for an exhausted moment he thinks he's going to write heartbreak, or just, war; but when his pen moves, it writes: daemon destroyed in freak pinpoint shell blast; delayed shock. They look at the dead man's dogtags to find out what was the name of his daemon.
Hawkeye waits quietly for the formalities to be concluded, and afterwards holds out an arm; BJ takes it, and they go out into the compound together, blinking in the rising light. BJ is thinking that if people can make their own souls, it's not out of fallen stars but plain old stones and rock and dirt, the ground beneath their feet as they keep on going. If people can make their own souls, then a part of him will always be here in this place, standing in post-op staring at a man without a daemon, in a world spinning towards something he doesn't understand yet.
In the Swamp the light has crept halfway across the floor and Frank is still sleeping, his daemon murmuring softly as they push open the door.
"You should get some sleep," Hawkeye says, gently. "I'll be back in a while."
He stays a minute while BJ unlaces his boots, then sets out again. "He's right, you know," Elspeth says, quietly, the first time she's spoken since post-op.
"You try sleeping," he tells her. And then, for the first time: "Do you think, if we're here long enough, we're going to…"
He trails off.
"Not break apart," Elspeth says. "Not fade away."
"Right," BJ says. From somewhere outside in the distance, BJ can hear Hawkeye laughing, tiredly and reluctantly, at his daemon chasing whirls of dust. He thinks he can hear her answering voice, higher-pitched than he might have expected. BJ pushes back the tent flap to see the two of them a dozen metres apart, Hawkeye seemingly making a decision and crossing the distance between them, scooping her up so she rides on his shoulder towards post-op.
"Night night, sleep tight," Elspeth says, something BJ's mother used to say.
BJ's last thought, before laying himself down flat and spreading out the blanket, is that if he stays here for very long Hawkeye, too, will become a part of him, not like Elspeth but like his mother and like Erin and Peg, in that red robe in this blood-red dawn, not broken, not fading away.
"Night night," he echoes, and falls asleep not long after with his daemon perched close by, dreaming of the light filtering through dust.
end.
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on 2013-07-14 09:48 pm (UTC)no subject
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on 2013-07-19 03:24 am (UTC)Also:
9:20:09 PM the Dormouse: are you familiar, at least in general, with Pullman's His Dark Materials (the concept of daemons, and witches) and with M*A*S*H?
9:20:17 PM Radish: yes
9:20:30 PM Radish: enough that the combined question has my brain lighting up in horror/intrigue.
9:20:45 PM the Dormouse: it's okay.
9:20:49 PM the Dormouse: It's Raven.
9:20:51 PM the Dormouse: http://raven.dreamwidth.org/723355.html
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on 2013-07-20 12:33 pm (UTC)no subject
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on 2013-07-14 08:27 pm (UTC)I have never written any Pullman fanfic, but now I am wondering about a WWI, story.
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on 2013-07-19 06:03 am (UTC)Your characterization is spot-on. The whole thing is. It's gorgeous.
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on 2013-07-19 05:17 pm (UTC)