First time poster, - What's Left Behind, by Jordan Desolated

[jordandesolated.livejournal.com]

Hello there, everyone! I'm Jordan, and I've only just gotten into MASH, but I've quickly fallen in love with the BJ/Hawkeye pairing, so I simply had to write a fic... I hope you enjoy.

Title: What's Left Behind
Author: JordanDesolated
Pairing: Implied BJ/Hawkeye, BJ/Peg
Warnings: Angsty, that's about it.
Word Count: 671
Rating: Er, 7+? Mentions of sex, but nothing explicit.
Timeline: Post-Goodbye, Farewell and Amen
Disclaimer: I own nothing. Please don't sue me.
Summary: Peg watches BJ after he returns from the war.

 

What's Left Behind

He confesses the adultery to her almost the day he gets home, though he doesn't use that word... it's just something guys do in the army, he claims, out of loneliness and fear, and it doesn't mean anything. Didn't mean anything, and he thought of her the whole time.

Peg's a reasonable person. She's hurt, but she understands... she might have been tempted too, if she hadn't had Erin to care for and distract her from the loneliness... the fear part she doesn't even like to consider; what her husband must have felt out there in Korea, so far away from his family and anything else he'd ever known. She tries to believe that shells falling from the sky might have been enough to drive him into another man's bed, to take what comfort he can really hold on to.

And she might have been able to accept that. She might have been able to forgive him and forget about it, to go on with their lives.

Except that it's obvious that BJ hasn't done that himself. Hasn't left it behind. She can't find any way to write it off to the trauma of the war that BJ snatches the mail almost hungrily from her hands each time she brings it in from the box, his eyes reading their address over and over in search of some familiar handwriting, and the way he seems to go flat upon not finding it. The way she comes home to catch him scribbling letters himself, his handwriting so hurried and strained that even she cannot make out more than a few words and something she thinks might be a name when she gathers the crumbled starts up from the floor where he scatters them frustratedly, using measureless amounts of paper and ink but never a single stamp.

The way he makes love to her as slowly and carefully as it ever was before, but while she watches his face, searching for the connection they used to have, his eyes remain tightly closed, his hands on her shoulders instead of her breasts, and though she always fears he will cry out that other name in climax he never does, but he doesn't breathe her name either, the post coital whispers of love and commitment so vehement she can only think that he is trying to convince himself, because otherwise she would never have doubted them.

He isn't happy. She never imagined that particular outcome of his stay in Korea, that he could be anything but overjoyed to be back in the states with his wife and child... that there could possibly be things he'd miss. But this isn't the BJ she knows, with a joke always handy to defuse the tensest situation, and a smile which never failed to bring warmth to a room... He doesn't even play with Erin like he used, when he used to be the very best with her, and though they still fall asleep close, his arms around her tightly with her nose pressed into the crook of his neck, she often awakens to him rolled away, curled up tightly on his side like he needs to be held himself, and murmuring fearfully to wordless nightmares.

BJ isn't happy, and honestly Peg doesn't think he ever will be. But if she were to speak, to point this out over breakfast, to ask him if what he's searching the pages of that day's paper so intently for is news from Crabapple Cove, he might be forced to face that truth himself, and if BJ were to look at her straight, with those kind, flat eyes, and admit what she already knows – that this man is the one he wants, the one who could make him smile again... she knows that she wouldn't be able to keep him.

So she only smiles herself when he claims too forcefully that he loves her, and learns to shuffle through the letters before bringing them back to her husband, just in case it turns out that Hawkeye loves him in return.