unless first a dream (BJ/Hawkeye)

[nutmeg4077.livejournal.com]

Title: unless first a dream
By: nutmeg4077
Rating: Everyone.
Pairing: BJ/Hawkeye…ish?
Summary: When he dreams of BJ, it's a jarring albeit welcome escape from his frequent nightmares.
Warnings: Angst. Horrible, horrible angst of the worst kind.
Notes: A drabble that became a double drabble and eventually a very short ficlet. Yeah, longer than originally intended but still pretty damn pointless.


-.-.-.-
He dreams of the war often, sometimes triggered by the wail of an ambulance or the buzz of a plane overhead; sometimes triggered by something as simple as the metallic smell of blood in the exam room as he's stitching a deep cut on a child's knee.

They're slow motion and suffocating, bizarrely macabre, seem to last hours. Mud's a common factor. So are the dark, and the despair, and the blood. But then, those were common factors of the war.

He rarely ever sees or notices the identities of the bloody soldiers or the men in khaki around him, is too busy focusing on the fact that he can hardly move his limbs to offer help to the people who need it, the people who are crying out to him.
---
He sees BJ on the rocks by a fishing hole Hawkeye hasn't been to since he was ten. Like things were the way BJ had promised they would be, like Hawkeye hadn't let the letters with the Mill Valley postmark pile up on his desk, unopened and gathering dust.

"Hawkeye, help!"

And Hawkeye stands behind him, hands over hands over hands over hands on the flexing rod, which is already splitting. Together, they bring the end of the line to shore, but it isn't a fish, it's a pair of pink wool baby booties. They remind BJ that he has to get home, to Peggy, to Erin, and Hawkeye chases after him down the shoreline and up the steep hill to the harbor.

But he loses him somewhere in the morning fog, and when he returns home, dejected, BJ is miraculously there; waiting on the couch with a martini glass in each hand, making the choice Hawkeye knew he never could in reality.
---
When he dreams of BJ, it's a jarring albeit welcome escape from his frequent nightmares.

Sun-soaked, bright, and all too fleeting—a perfect contrast. But they all run together and by the morning they do not make sense—like so many things about BJ, like so many things about their time together and this time apart.

They almost inspire him to reply to the letters, or pick up the phone and dial the number.

Strange. He's happier in these dreams than in the waking world most days. Yet they're somehow more haunting, disquieting...more troubling than any war nightmare.
-.-.-.-