Fic: Reports Of My Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated (1/4)

[skew-whiff.livejournal.com]

Title: Reports Of My Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated, Part 1
Summary: In which Henry Blake gets to go home, wherever that might be.
Rating: PG
Word Count: ~2500
Disclaimer: I don't own M*A*S*H. No money's being made.
Notes: Kind of AU, possibly. Very spoilery, for the series in general and Abyssinia Henry in particular. Mostly gen, with slashy undertones (a bit like the actual series).


Part One: The Descent



Death, it turned out, was cold. It had icy fingers that reached out and grasped tightly, pulling irresistibly downwards.

Henry Blake drifted through the dark, the cold crushing in all around him, and though he knew these were his final moments, all he could think about was what a shame it was that the last thing he ever said to his wife was a criticism of her mother's taste in costumes. He felt regret, and then he felt nothing.



And then there was light.

The fingers unclenched and Henry rose, ascending with increasing speed to the light shining above him. Oh god, they were right, Henry thought, and his only hope was that St Peter would be understanding as regards the seventh commandment.

It seemed like forever that he fell upwards, but at last he broke through. There were no pearly gates or herald angels awaiting him on the other side. Only a boat, the men on it regarding him with some curiosity. He heard voices calling in a language he didn't speak, and something thudded into the water beside him.

Through some superhuman effort, Henry raised an arm that felt like it weighed a thousand tons, and clung as best as he could. He was hauled towards the boat; hands came down to grasp the back of his ragged, ruined jacket and pull him up, over the rail and slithering down onto the deck.

Henry turned onto his side, convulsing as he coughed up water, and just before he blacked out again decided Heaven was not all it was cracked up to be.



When he came to, Henry began to wonder if maybe he'd been sent to the other place instead. He was lying on a concrete floor, in a small, chilly room that smelled very strongly of fish. He could hear the sounds of conversation, and see their feet out of the corner of his eye.

He tried to move, and regretted it instantly. Nothing felt broken, but he was cut and bruised all over. His groans aroused the attention of his rescuers, one of whom came over and knelt beside him. He said something, and although Henry spoke little to no Korean, he could guess that that it was probably,

"Are you alright?"

He wasn't sure of the answer himself, and even if he was, he didn't have the strength to speak. The Korean helped him up to a sitting position, propping him against some crates. He looked younger than the other fishermen in the room, and his expression was concerned. Henry managed a weak smile as the boy remove his jacket and tried to dry him off a little.

"Thank you," he croaked. The boy smiled widely at him.

Henry was going to try to say something else, make some bad joke about how he wasn't much of a catch, but then two more fishermen came storming into the room, followed by two other men in uniform. The group started talking, gesturing in Henry's direction. One of them had something in his hand that he was showing to the uniformed men; Henry squinted through the low light, and saw that it was a set of dogtags. There was further discussion, and one of the uniformed men approached Henry.

"American?" he said, looking down at him. Henry nodded.

"Yes, but I'm a civilian," he said. The man shook the tags in his face.

"I was discharged a few days ago," Henry said, and noticing the frown of incomprehension, simplified. "I'm not in the army. Not any more. I was going home." He looked around himself, wondering if there was a prop or something he could use to make his meaning clear.

The Korean officer just scowled, leaning in close.

"American swine," he said.

("Swine, Frank?" Hawkeye said, smirking in the major's direction. "Give me a little credit. At the very least I'm veal."

"Soft, pale, trapped in a crate?" Trapper butted in.

"Exactly!" The two of them shared self-satisfied grins. Frank's only response was to twitch.

"Oh, knock it off, guys," Henry said with a sigh, and stared mournfully into the beige mass he had been informed was potato.)

"You come with us," the officer said. Before Henry could react, the others had moved in, ignoring his cries of pain as they dragged him to his feet.

"I can't!" Henry said, glancing around. "I nearly drowned back there! I'm a civilian, for Pete's sake!" He could barely stand, knees crumpling beneath him. The burlier of the two officers wrapped an arm around him, and Henry sagged onto the man's shoulders, staying there until the feeling of a gun pressed to his back forced him to stagger forwards.

There was a small truck waiting outside, and he was pushed roughly inside, the only response to his desperate protestations the echo of his own voice. Soon he hadn't even the energy to shout. The rest of the day was spent locked in darkness, curled up on himself and cursing every bump in the road. The only time they interacted with him was when they stopped to let him out to pee and give him a meagre handful of rations, and then he'd be shoved back in the truck again. Henry had no idea how long this routine continued. It could have been a day or a week for all he knew, deprived of information and drifting in and out of consciousness.

Eventually, though, they came to their final destination. The truck juddered to a halt and the doors were flung wide. Henry cringed away from the light at first, until they came in and pulled him out. Henry was just able to stand unaided now, and raised his head, trying to make sense of where he was.

He seemed to be outside some kind of camp, but not like the one he'd left some time ago. He could see ragged lines of men trudging over the rocky ground, being shouted at by North Korean guards; the perimeter was fenced off and lined by armed men. It didn't take long for Henry to realise where he must be.

"You can't do this to me," he said, voice hoarse from lack of water, "I was discharged. I'm a civilian!"

He wished he had a dictionary with him, or better yet, a copy of the Geneva Convention, but it probably wouldn't have been any use.

One of the officers prodded him in the chest.

"Enemy," he said. "Prisoner."

"I'm not your enemy," Henry said plaintively. "I'm not anybody's enemy!"

The gun at his back said otherwise. Henry's head dropped, and he staggered forwards through the gate, beaten at last.



After a few weeks at the 4077th, Henry had thought life couldn't get much worse. The lodgings were poor, the food worse, and the casualties kept on coming. He might've kept a tighter lid on his feelings than Pierce ever did, but he felt the strain just as keenly.

All of that was a holiday compared to a POW camp. The North Koreans, it appeared, didn't care much about rules. The UN prisoners held here were essentially slaves, and hard labour was the order of the day. The work at the 4077th was hard, but there'd always been a sense of purpose and just enough opportunities to blow off steam to stop everyone going mad. There wasn't any of that here - just day after day of back-breaking work, with a few hours' respite of blessed sleep.

Not that the hardship enforced on them could prevent friendships being made and comfort being found wherever you could make it. They had all kinds here. There was Cal Carter from West Virginia, always with a smile on his face and a song in his heart, old hymns and blues songs ringing out in his deep, rich bass no matter how hard they made him work. There was Willy Davis, a skinny little kid from Wales who could steal almost anything. Jakob Smuts, a soft-spoken Dutch guy who could capture a likeness with a few scratches of a stick in the dust. And so on, and so on, every man with his own talents (and they were only men; there were no female prisoners or guards, and the only mercy was that the hard work killed off their libidos).

Henry, for his part, fell into the same role he always seemed to: surrogate father to all these lost boys. He was one of the oldest men in camp and people always seemed to rely on him for advice and support. On the nights when they didn't all fall asleep when they hit their bunks, when people were kept awake by fear or sickness, they'd all gather close and Henry would tell them tales from better days.

"Tell us a story, Henry," would come a whisper from one of the bunks.

"A Hawkeye and Trapper story." Henry had told them all - Klinger's wild escape plans, Radar's pets, his own misadventures in Tokyo and Seoul, but the stories that got requested time and again were the ones about Hawkeye and Trapper. In the telling, they became almost mythological in stature, Brer Rabbits in olive drab. They'd have probably appreciated that, if they'd known.

"Okay," Henry would start, one night, and every man turned to face him. "I ever tell you the one about Five O'Clock Charlie?" If it wasn't, "I ever tell you about the incubator?" or "I ever tell you about the time a bomb landed in camp?" or all the other tall stories he had saved up. It never mattered if they had heard it or not; the telling was enough, and he didn't know if it benefitted them or him more.

Those were the good days. Other days, Henry hadn't the time or the spirit for story-telling, and some days, the best he could do just wasn't enough.

Once Henry had managed to convey to the Koreans that he was a doctor, they began to give him some access to medical supplies, but what they had was limited and primitive. It was rare a week went by without somebody dying, and the worst thing was that Henry knew he could have probably saved them if they'd allowed him to. During his first winter there, twelve men were lost to pneumonia they'd never have caught if they hadn't been made to work without coats or shoes; when summer came, another ten died of dysentery. Henry did what he could, when he could, but it was so very little, and often he had to turn away from the sick because there was nothing he could do for them.

("And rule number two is that doctors can't change rule number one," he'd said, and Hawkeye just shook his head, tears streaming down his face. He'd never liked to be bound by rules.)

He had sworn an oath not to let people come to harm, and sometimes, he wondered that if a better man had been in his place, he would have tried harder. If Hawkeye had been taken prisoner, he'd have gone crazy railing at the guards, using up every ounce of that wild energy he had to save others, to come up with ever more elaborate escape plans or just keep spirits up.

Yeah. Gone crazy. Henry had seen his edges begin to fray back at the MASH. This place would've probably broken him. He thought of Hawkeye a lot, out here. He thought of them all, of course, missed them so much it ached, even Frank, but he thought of Hawkeye most of all. The man was brilliant, but fragile. It sounded ridiculous, but Henry had always felt like he had an obligation to look after him. All he could hope now was that Hawkeye would come out of the war in one piece, and that one day he could fly home on a plane that would hold true all the way back to America.

In the meantime, he had two things that helped him get through the days. The first thing was to remember he was still pretty lucky: the food was poor but no worse than what the locals lived off, and going by the rumours that drifted through, the UN prisoners were at least treated better than captured South Koreans.

(There was a regular at the clinic who had chronic lung disease. He was no older than Henry in years, but his eyes were ancient. His voice was hoarse, thickly accented, and there was a number tattooed on his forearm.)

The second thing was to never give up hope. Every time he came close, he remembered men had survived worse conditions than this, and nothing, no matter how bad, lasted forever.



Sure enough, one fine summer day, the news they had all been waiting for came through.

The first indication that something was up was that they weren't roused from their cots. No alarm call came over the PA, no officers came shouting into their bunkrooms. Instead, they emerged into the day to find the soldiers in disarray and works abandoned. Hasty discussion spread fast, wild rumours quickly emerged, and in the middle of the chaos, Henry loped off towards the fence.

Some of the guards were still there, but not all of them, and the ones that were weren't as rigid or poised as usual. He tapped one of them on the shoulder. On any other day, that'd have got him thrown into solitary confinement; today, the guard just turned around, his eyes glassy and dull like he'd been replaced with a waxwork.

"What's going on?" Henry asked. "Is what they're saying true?"

The guard nodded slowly.

"All over now," he said.

Henry turned and walked slowly back into camp, to the confused men milling around.

"It's over," he said, simply.

There should have been singing and dancing and wild celebrations, but instead the news was taken in silence. The sense of relief was palpable, but it came tinged with melancholy.

"What do we do now?" someone called out. Henry smiled.

"We're going home, guys," he said. "We're going home."



It didn't happen overnight. It was a couple of weeks before the Koreans started to dismantle the camp and let them go free. A few of the healthier, fitter men escaped beforehand, knowing they wouldn't be pursued, but Henry was willing to wait.

At last the day came when the gate was opened wide. Henry walked out alone, down the track and up a nearby hill, to sit and take stock of his situation. Looking out, he could see the tents and bunkrooms being taken down, trucks coming and going to take materials away, and actually felt a brief pang of pity. At least he got to go home. The Koreans, North and South, had to remain here, and make of it what they could.

Henry lay back in the scrubby grass and felt the sun on his face, savouring the moment of peace. From now on, everything was going to be all right. He was sure of it.