Chapter Text
Captain Doctor BJ Hunnicutt shows up in Korea looking like an Army recruitment poster. He knows that. He’s seen the one he looks like. It’s from 1942. On one side, a sneering Nazi falls to a gunshot wound, his German shepherd swirling into Dust at his feet. On the other, a blond haired, blue eyed, red blooded American officer stands over him in class As with a smoking service pistol, a trusty golden retriever at his side. Do Your Bit to Win the War! Join Up Today! Army USA!
The first time he saw that poster, he was sixteen years old, and his Pa had just joined the National Guard. He puffed up his chest, grinned down at Sally, and she settled on the spot.
So yeah, he knows what he looks like, fresh pressed and squeaky clean. The shine of the military wore off for him a long time ago, and getting the draft a month before he became a father tarnished the brass still further, but he can’t deny a little wistful boyish pride as he straightens his hat, or catches sight of Sally in her dress collar and her captain’s bars.
He lands in Korea, and it all turns sour.
It’s hot. It’s dusty. Everything is brown and if it’s not brown, its olive drab. Sally blends right in to the sandy soil, and BJ feels like he’s gonna boil right out of his uniform, even after he takes his coat off. They’re the only people in sight wearing class As. His bags feel about twenty pounds heavier, even the little one, and his hat is sliding down his forehead in the sun. There’s so much busyness, like unsmoked bees on a broken comb. Everybody and their daemon has somewhere to be and something to do, a purpose in their stride and something hard in their eyes. BJ's not one to panic but he's the new kid on the block in a way he hasn't been since intern year and he's never done well with that pressure and now he's here in a warzone on the other end of the world and he has people to meet and orders to follow and absolutely no idea where to go, and there’s all these trucks and all these guns and all this noise, and—
Sally presses her cold nose into his hand, and BJ breathes.
There's the US Army and there's BJ. They're the us; he's the them. He's on the outside looking in.
But he's got Sally, and they'll make it work.
Sally’s name isn’t actually Sally. It’s short for Salome, which meant ‘peace’ according to Mrs Hatfield’s Exotic and Meaningful Names for Your Child’s Daemon, New Edition for 1926. Ma and Pa Hunnicutt agreed that if BJ was a boy, Pa would name the baby, and Ma would name the daemon. And so, BJ is named after his parents, Bea and Jay, and Sally is named after the lady in the Bible who ordered John the Baptist’s head on a plate for her birthday party.
BJ loves his parents, but they aren’t very good at naming things.
His wife, Peggy, is not much better off. Her daemon’s a golden retriever too, and his name is Harry, short for Herod, who’s the fella who did the beheading for the birthday girl. Her father picked it out of a Gideon Bible in the hospital where she was born. He only knew about the three kings and thought Herod was one of them. What a pair they make.
He thought they’d done a better job with Erin and her little Harvey. She’s named after Peggy’s Irish heritage, and he’s named after the fella who discovered the circulation of the heart in 1628. A bringer of life, he’d thought, not a bringer of death.
If he survives this war, if he and Peggy are blessed with another, he’ll choose a name less bloody.
Twenty minutes on the ground, and he’s met up with his unit, lost a whole jeep, broke maybe five of those regulations BJ barely remembers, smuggled a corporal into an officer’s club wearing a pair of BJ’s stripes, and now they’re drinking before noon. The company clerk is a nervous wreck with a moth for a daemon, the chief surgeon is a lunatic with a radical for a daemon, and BJ doesn’t think he’s ever been in better company. He’s gotta know.
“What's the 4077 like?” he asks, eager as a new kid at school but trying not to show it. If the rest of the company is anything like these two, he’s either gonna love it or be home in time for Peggy’s birthday with a section 8 tucked in the loops of his straitjacket.
Captain ‘call me Hawkeye’ Pierce shakes his head. “Meatball surgery,” he says, managing a rueful glance around a mouthful of popcorn. “Nothing pretty. But once we get a casualty to our front door…”
He trails off on a shrug, and his daemon takes up the slack. “His chance of survival is 97.8 percent,” she says, and not a lick of pride in her voice.
Sally can’t purse her lips, but she gives her best impression of an impressed whistle. BJ hopes like hell it’ll stay that high under his knife, too. “That says a lot for the staff.”
Pierce nods, looking serious and exhausted, like he can’t be one without the other. “It's a good bunch,” he says, voice heavy. That 2.2 percent still chew him up at night, seems like. BJ liked him before, but now he realizes he wants Pierce’s approval. “You missed two of the greatest guys in the world though.”
Pierce’s daemon, Coralise, makes a small, sad mew. “Henry Blake was our CO.” she says, and Pierce gives her a stroke. O’Reilly’s daemon Eleanor, the she's-a-moth-sir-not-a-butterfly, flutters down in front of her, and Coralise noses at her halfheartedly.
“Henry was okay, from the navel out in every direction,” says Pierce, watching the byplay, his fingers deep in Coralise’s fur. “Seraphine too.”
“She sure was,” says O’Reilly. His daemon lands on Coralise’s ear, wings drooping.
BJ can hear it coming, but it’s still rough when Coralise sighs, “They never made it home.”
Pierce bangs his hand on the bartop, a fit of sudden energy, and Sally jumps. “And I just missed Trapper John—“
“—the guy you're replacing—“ hisses Coralise.
“—by ten minutes. Ten minutes!” He makes a sound that would fit better coming out of Coralise’s mouth, and really actually shakes his fist in the air.
“We tried to call you!” protests O’Reilly. Eleanor is flying lopsided circles around his head again.
“You sure he didn't leave a message or anything?”
“No, just what I gave you, and please don't ask for another one!”
“And nothing from Ansalie, either?”
“Nothing but her cobwebs.”
More of this business from before that BJ doesn’t understand, making him feel even more like an outsider than he already is. Sally licks his hand to comfort him, but Coralise’s back is arched and Pierce is snarling in real frustration, and he knows they’re not doing it on purpose.
O’Reilly throws Pierce a significant glance, and says, “Listen, Major Burns is waiting for us!” Then BJ gets one, and he explains, “That's our CO now.”
Pierce snarls again. “Bottom of the barrel, Major Burns.”
“Major Frank Burns,” says Coralise, voice dripping with disdain.
Pierce snorts a laugh to himself, and passes BJ a conspiratorial grin. “Everybody calls him Ferret Face, that'll give you an idea how devoted we are to him.”
BJ sobers. He’s not quick to judge, but there’s a few things that’ll make him an instant enemy, and slurs at a man’s daemon is one of them. “Not on account of his daemon, I hope.”
“Oh, God, no, what do you take us for?” cries Pierce with just the right amount of indignation for it to be honest. “We may be savages, but we’re not uncouth!”
“And anyway, Martha’s a weasel,” says Coralise in that bald way daemons have of talking about each other. Then her whiskers tilt up in a conspiratorial grin of her own, and she flicks an ear at Sally. “And not just any weasel, the Least weasel, honest, that’s her species.”
Pierce cocks an eyebrow at BJ. “Don’t you think we’d call him that if we were gonna stoop that low?”
“To demean a daemon,” purrs Coralise in a horrible aristocratic accent, shaking her noble head. “Truly the lowest form of thuggery. No skill. No class. No talent!”
“Just like Frank, imagine that,” says Pierce, and BJ laughs despite himself. Against his leg, Sally’s winning the battle but losing the war. “We disrespect him plenty on his own merits.”
“Is he a good surgeon, at least?” Surely the Army’s not so stupid as to leave a total fink in charge of a whole hospital in a warzone.
“Same light touch as a German jazz band,” sighs Pierce with longsuffering fondness, and under the bar, Sally loses it completely.
“Number one nurses, though,” says Coralise, like she’s trying to make up for it.
“And a good young chaplain,” says Pierce, and then starts laughing ahead of his own joke. “If he were any holier, his daemon’d be a sacrificial lamb. Don’t tell her I said that.”
Coralise rolls her eyes and swats at Pierces chest. “Sister will skin you alive if Father Mulcahy doesn’t get to you first, and she’ll pray over me while she does it!” She shakes her head at Pierce again. “You idiot.”
“Aw, c’mon, you love me!”
“I’m metaphysically attached to you, it’s not like I got a choice!”
And they’re off, the pair of them, hooting like a coupla loons on nitrous, and BJ has to laugh to see them at it, and half the bar does too. Even O’Reilly relaxes a bit, giggling spasmodically through his nerves, and he looks up at BJ helplessly and says, “Sister Mary-Claire is a lion.”
BJ was top ten in his class at Stanford. Sally was top canine in their year, and in the top third overall—the primates always outperformed everyone else on account of their opposable thumbs, the little cheats.
After his intern year, which was only one but felt like three, when he and Sally started feeling like they might actually be able to make this crazy medicine lark work, they’d been groomed for emergency. BJ was good at it, sure, but Sally was really useful there. Not every daemon was big enough to scoop up a patient in their mouths and run along behind a gurney rolling stat down to the OR. Not every daemon was as wholesome as Sally, with her lolling pink tongue and her steady doggy smile and her bright yellow fur. Not every daemon could reassure a patient or their family just by showing up.
BJ’s attending Dr Chen, for example, had a fastidious little golden snub-nose monkey called Cee-Sing. She had the best hands in the whole hospital. She was certified in mammalian, reptilian, and avian resuscitation, and in a pinch, could stabilize the twelve most common species of daemons until the specialists arrived. She was a dab hand with humans, too, and in her little gloves she placed the finest microsutures BJ had ever seen, even in a textbook. She would climb up onto Dr Chen’s patient, scrubbed and covered top to tail so she wouldn’t accidentally touch the patient skin to skin, and crouch right in the sterile field and tat the most beautiful lace you ever saw.
But Cee-Sing was a monkey, and people don’t trust a man with a primate daemon, usually. Too intelligent. Too close to human. Too much could be going on behind those eyes, too much could go missing into those grasping little hands. On top of that, she was foreign-looking, with blue skin around her eyes and her breasts not quite hidden enough by her bright orange fur. By the time BJ got to know them, all the pains Dr Chen had taken in ‘41 to make it well known that they were Chinese-not-Japanese had turned around and caught them in the teeth. For all Cee-Sing’s skill, Sally could do more for a patient’s state of mind just by turning up in her cap and mask and wagging her tail out the back of her scrubs.
BJ doesn’t know what they’ll do when they get back to California, if they’ll head back to Sausalito, or down to SF General and the trauma center there or stay up in Marin and do elective gallbladders the rest of their lives, but he hopes they’ll meet the Doctors Chen again.
They’ve had no new wounded for a week now, and it’s a good thing, too, cuz the mercury is topped out in all the thermometers and the blood is going bad. Nothing is happening. Everybody's just trying to survive the best they can until the evening, when the sun goes down and they can come to life again.
BJ has melted into Hawk’s lounge chair. He hasn’t got the energy to hold up his own head, but he’s the only one even partway upright in the whole tent, and he can see out the mosquito net sides of the Swamp that there’s not a lick of life or wind or movement anywhere at all. It's the heat of the day, broad daylight, the sun pouring down with boiling intensity, but it feels like the quiet of a moonless night at three AM.
“What do you think it’ll be like, after the war?”
It’s a daemon who said it, because it’s a female voice and the rats are alone in the Swamp, but the heat is incredible, and everything’s gone hazy around the edges, so BJ couldn’t put money on which one it was. He wonders vaguely if he’s feeling homesick enough for it to have been Sally without his knowing.
“I don’t know,” he hears himself say. “I hope it’ll be like when I left, but…”
“It won’t,” says Hawkeye from where he lies in a heap on his bunk. He sounds like BJ feels: wrung out to dry.
“Right,” says BJ.
“I know what I’d like,” says Sally, hugging the cool metal of their stove for all the relief it can give her. “An office by the bay, where the sea breeze can reach and I can smell the pines. And a new puppy.”
“What, a real puppy?” BJ’s heard of people keeping actual animals as pets before, but the idea’s so strange he’s never thought of it.
“No, you idiot,” she huffs, thumping her tail on the ground. “A puppy for me and Harry. A brother and sister for Erin and Harvey. You know," she huffs again, like he's being incredibly dense. "A baby.”
“Beej, you fink, you think she meant an actual dog?” says Hawk. He sounds like he’d be laughing but he hasn’t made the effort. “Where’d you even get one?”
BJ shrugs, but only one shoulder. Two is too much work. “If it’s what Sally wants.”
“I can see it now,” says Hawkeye. He hasn’t moved an inch in over an hour, and his voice oozes out of him like melting plastic, a little squashed where it's pressed into his pillow. “The eminent Captain Doctor BJ Hunnicut, US Army retired. War hero, distinguished service medal, never got the purple heart. Surgeon extraordinaire. Chief of General Surgery at UC San Francisco, everybody’s favorite professor, patient list a mile long, corner office with a view of the Golden Gate. Cholecystectomies in under ten minutes, appendectomies in under five, splenectomies half price on Thursdays, bowel resections a hundred dollars an inch. Beautiful wife, beautiful children, beautiful house with a two-car garage. And his daemon Sally, who owns an actual real live dog.”
BJ can’t help it. He laughs, a single great ha! that takes all the energy of a marathon. “You’ve done it Hawkeye, you’ve foretold the future.”
“Didn’t even need an alethiometer,” says Hawkeye.
Sally thumps her tail again. “Don’t make fun of my fictional future dog, Hawkeye, I’m naming him after you.”
“What, ‘Hawkeye’? That’s an amazing name for a dog. Make it a sighthound, with my blessing.”
“No, ‘Benjamin Franklin’.”
“You do that, it won't just be me making fun of im, ya know.”
“I know exactly what it’ll be like, after the war,” Frank says out of nowhere, sounding drugged and ludicrously happy. It’s the same way he talks in his sleep.
BJ sighs, and rolls his head over to look at him. Frank’s lying on his back on the floor, with Martha a little brown stripe on his olive drab shirt. “How’ll it be after the war, Frank?”
“I’ll go back to my practice, and my wife, and get filthy rich…” he trails off, smiling to himself, and giggles, “and I’ll never have to see you two imbeciles ever again.”
“Hear, hear,” slurs Hawkeye.
“Yeah, you said it, Frank, good riddance,” says Coralise. She’s curled in their athletic-supporter basketball hoop, and BJ had honestly thought she was asleep.
Frank doesn’t move, but Martha lifts her head a little off his chest and says, “Well, what about you, pussycat?”
“Watch it, Frank,” grumbles Hawkeye. If there’s any heat in his voice, BJ can’t tell. The air is hotter.
Coralise flicks her tail. “I’m going home to Crabapple Cove to work three hour days and catch lobster with my own claws. Right, Hawk?”
“Right.”
“Three hour days,” sighs Sally. “That’s the life.”
“That’s your problem, Pierce,” mumbles Frank. “No passion. No ethos. No drive.”
“No Athos, no Porthos, no Aramis?”
“Too content to laze around all day like the do-nothing degenerate you are!”
“You include yourself in that statement, Frank? Look what you’re doing now.”
“Comes of having a cat daemon, you know.”
“Big words, Ferret Face.”
“‘Sides, Cora’s got more drive than you in her dewclaws.”
“Wisdom in her whiskers?”
“Talent in her tonsils?”
“They’re better at fighting infection, that’s for sure.”
“Aw knock it off!” moans Frank. “I’m not just gonna sit here and be insulted!”
“You’re not sitting anywhere, you’re taking it lying down.”
“Yeah, stop lying, Frank.”
“Oh, for crying out loud!” explodes Frank in a sudden burst of energy, sitting bolt upright and reaching for his boots. “If you two are just gonna sit here and sling mud, then I’m leaving!”
“Sling mud? Oh now you're just being insulting.”
"We wouldn't waste good mud on you."
"Disgraceful. No good layabouts. Finks!"
"Gowan Frank, tell us how you really feel."
Frank finally makes it to his feet, boots untied and Martha clasped in one hand, and scowls at them. It's a particularly good effort: eyes narrowed, lip curled, face like curdled milk. Positively seething.
BJ wonders where on earth he got that much energy.
"I'm sure there's something you coupla ingrates ought to be doing," he says, brandishing Martha at them like a chittering whiskered sword. "An when I find out what it is, I'm gonna throw the book at you! Shirking duty--"
"What duty, Frank?"
"--disrespecting a superior officer--"
"You don't mean you, surely."
"--and I'll go straight to General Waterman with it and see you brought up on charges!" He jabs Martha at BJ again, a little furry bayonet.
“What happened to never seeing us again?” says Sally.
"Yeah, can we go back to that plan?" says Coralise.
Frank growls in frustration, and bangs out of the Swamp. “If I never see you buncha deviants again, it’ll be too soon!”
Hawk’s been blind from his burns for five days, and there’s another two to go before the 121st‘s ophthalmologist hands down his verdict. BJ’s not touching his bandages with a ten-foot pole, not with Hawk’s eyes on the line, but he checks on Cora’s dressings daily. To judge by the new pink skin growing in the singed patches on her tail and leg, he’s healing well.
They’ve been lucky this week that casualties have been low, but they had a fresh batch today and even Hawk’s little sojourn through the OR, catching that perforated bowel of BJ’s on scent alone like some kinda bloodhound, hadn’t made up for the fact that they’re short a surgeon. Hawkeye’s been here the longest out of everyone in the unit, and he’s the fastest knife they’ve got by far. Without him, it takes a long damn time to get through em all.
It’s well into the wee hours by the time they finish, nineteen hours straight. Frank staggers off with Margaret without even thinking of trying to hide where he’s going, Martha a little exhausted strip of brown buried in George’s white feathers. BJ smiles to see it despite himself, touches his gloved fingers to Sally’s head, and thinks of Peggy and Harry and home.
Without Frank, the Swamp looks dark and silent and inviting, a beacon of sleep and warmth. Sally rushes forward, and BJ lurches after her gratefully on tired legs. Sally has a cot of her own for the summer, but in winter she sleeps with him and makes the best blanket in the world.
“Hurry up, BJ!” Sally woofs in stage whisper. “I’m freezing!”
"Quiet, girl, you'll wake the invalids!"
Cora led Hawk back to the Swamp around the twelfth hour of surgery, when they'd got through all the really urgent cases and it became clear they had done all they could. BJ could be envious, but honestly he’s just been glad that, out of all of them, Hawk and Cora will get some sleep tonight. But when he gets to the Swamp’s door, Sally nosing at it urgently to be let in, he can see a light, and hear Coralise’s voice rising and falling in gentle cadence.
BJ woke up four nights out of the last five to the memory of the explosion, of her and Hawk screaming, of Hawk in too much pain to speak and Cora wide-eyed, shrieking, “can’t see anything,” and the fifth night it was to the real thing. This is a welcome change.
He opens the door as quiet as he can, lets Sally in ahead of him, and slips through.
Hawk is sitting up in his bunk holding a book, but it’s Cora doing the reading. She’s curled in his lap, and as BJ watches, Hawk turns the page for her without having to be told. They both flick an ear to the door when he comes in.
“Whatcha reading?” asks Sally, padding over and propping her front paws on Hawk’s blanketed knee.
“Last of the Mohicans,” says Cora.
BJ snorts. “Of course.”
Hawk has already acquired that sightless way of looking with his ears and not his eyes, and he tracks BJ across the tent, shedding coat and scarf and boots. “How’d it go in there?”
"You saw the worst of it." BJ groans, stretching, and he flops into bed, scrub cap and all, and throws an arm over his eyes. “There’s a bad case of flail chest with a side of pneumonia we might still lose, but otherwise alright.”
“What time is it, anyway?”
“Damned if I know.”
“We were in there nineteen hours, you do the math,” says Sally. With his eyes shut, BJ can hear her coming, picking up his boots from where he left them and throwing them under his bunk. She crawls up onto BJ’s lap and lays her head down on his chest. Her warm breath over his face feels like a gift from God.
Hawk’s right, it’s not so bad in the dark.
“G’night, Beej,” says Hawk, and BJ can hear him shift as he closes his book, reaches to switch off the lamp.
“Don’t stop on our account,” says Sally.
Hawk freezes, and BJ can hear him do it. “You sure?”
“Sure, I’m sure.”
“Okay,” says Hawkeye, settling back down. The spine of his book creaks like a reed in the wind, and pages turn like only pages can. “Chapter two, chapter two... Stop me when I get there, Cora.”
“There, stop. Ok, where were we? ‘God’s good mercy’, ‘glorious art’, ah! ‘Practiced in psalmody’, here we are.”
Her voice tilts headlong into that storytelling cadence again, and she reads:
“‘The man is, most manifestly, a disciple of Apollo,’ cried the amused Alice, ‘and I take him under my especial protection. Nay, throw aside that frown, Heyward, and in pity to my longing ears, suffer him to journey in our train. Besides,’ she added, in a low and hurried voice, casting a glance at the distant Cora, who slowly followed the footsteps of their silent, but sullen guide, ‘it may be a friend added to our strength, in time of need.’
‘Think you, Alice, that I would trust those I love by this secret path, did I imagine such a need could happen?’
‘Nay, nay, I think not of it now; but this strange man amuses me, and if he ‘hath music in his soul’, if his daemon deigns to sing, let us not churlishly reject his company.’…”
"Hawkeye," says BJ, over bourbon and water, water neat for Sally. BJ's regretting the water already. It’s awful enough he can taste it through the bourbon, and he can’t stop thinking about what Captain Pierce said, about hot and cold running dysentery. "Why Hawkeye?"
"That's from The Last of the Mohicans," says Pierce. "My father's crazy about that book. He's crazy about Indians. My grandfather used to sell em whiskey and hors d'oeuvres." He knocks back a hard swallow of his own bourbon-water, doesn't bat an eye. "Cora too. You know there's only two girls in that whole book? Dad had to name her after both of em. ‘Course, they didn’t name the daemons in the books back then.”
“‘Seen and not heard’ my tail!” spits Coralise.
Another plane swoops over their heads so low it rattles BJ's teeth, the second in as many minutes. Sally whines at his feet.
"It’s an airfield, pup, you’ll get used to it," says Coralise. She's curled up on Hawkeye's lap, staring down at Sally over her crossed paws, tail flicking lazily along the bar. "Incidentally, how are you with fireworks?"
It hits him like a sledgehammer all over at once, ten out of ten, a systemic white-hot poker, pain like he’s never felt before, and so unexpected it knocks him flat.
Only then does he hear the gunshot, and remembers: Frank was cleaning his gun.
When he can see again, he’s fallen onto his bunk somehow, and his legs are both on fire. Sally is whimpering on every breath and Martha screeches incoherently in the corner.
“You moron!” BJ yells, top of his lungs, one hand clamped to his thigh. “You coulda killed me!”
“It was an accident!” cries Frank, hugging his gun to his chest like the twitchy little weasel he is. “It ricocheted off the footlocker!”
“I’ll ricochet your nose off the footlocker!”
Hawkeye slams into the Swamp, straight from the shower, dripping wet with suds still up half his neck. “What happened?”
“Hop-along Ferret Face just shot me in the leg!”
“He’s sorry!” squeaks Martha from Frank’s breast pocket.
“I’m sorry,” Frank says, half a beat behind, like he’s anything but.
Hawkeye rolls his eyes, reaches for the edge of BJ’s robe. “Alright, alright, lemme take a look at it.”
BJ rolls onto his stomach so Hawk can get a better view. Half the camp is staring at them through the net sides of the Swamp, looks like. Gotta make em think it’s not too serious. He cracks a joke and sees at least three nurses sigh in relief. A grimace looks a lot like a smile, Ma always said.
“He just grazed it,” says Hawkeye, and BJ sighs in relief himself. “Gonna hafta have a couple stitches, though. Come on, help me get him to the OR.”
This last is to Frank. They come around to his either side and take his arms, and between them, lever him up off his bunk. The pain is incredible, and it’s not going down. Sally’s still whimpering.
“Frank, you’re a credit to the enemy,” says BJ, wincing heavily. Is it possible to limp on both legs? He can’t seem to put weight on either of em. “You sure it’s just a graze, Hawk?”
“Pretty sure,” says Cora.
Martha chitters uncomfortably close to his ear. “Aw, he said he’s sorry, what more can he do?”
“Put an apple in your mouth, we’ll play William Tell,” says BJ as they head out the door, and without warning, pain slams into his chest again. His legs go out from under him, and he’s hanging off Frank and Hawkeye. For a second he thinks he’s been shot again, and he opens his mouth to scream, but a croak comes out instead, like it's been punched out of him, “Sally.”
He is too far away from her. He moved, and she didn't follow.
“You take him,” Hawk says, shoving BJ bodily into Frank’s arms, urgency back in his voice, and disappears.
A furry head bunts up against his boot and it takes BJ a minute to realize it’s not Sally. It’s Coralise, purring up a storm.
“It’ll be okay, Beej,” says Cora, twining between his legs. One of her whiskers brushes his skin, and BJ shivers. The feel of even that slightest touch from her is so overwhelming that BJ forgets all the pain he’s in for a second. He can feel Hawk’s worry, his anger, as sharp as his own, his care and concern, and Cora’s own desperate desire to comfort him. “Hawk’s got her.”
“Hey,” says Frank, noticing Cora for the first time. “Hey! Stop that, you pervert, get away from him!”
“Stop touching him!” shrieks Martha. “That’s disgusting!”
“Put a cork in it, Martha!” yowls Coralise, but she uncurls her tail from around BJ’s ankles all the same.
Frank shivers in rage, but he’s all that’s keeping BJ off the ground right now, and they both know it. “Captain Pierce,” he whines impotently. “Control your daemon, she’s being indecent!”
“You’re an absolute fiend, Frank Burns!” Hawkeye roars from within the Swamp. “You hit Sally!”
BJ’s eyes shutter closed. No wonder. The pain in his left thigh is real, from the graze Hawk saw before, but the pain in his heart and his soul comes from her.
“Oh God!” moans Martha.
“Quiet, Martha!” snaps Frank.
“I’m gonna have to touch her, Beej, prepare yourself!” shouts Hawkeye, and BJ feels—
—pain, for starters, both white and overwhelming and dark and syrupy and centered on two points, a long stripe on the back of a human thigh, and a small patch burning like a star on a golden retriever’s hock—nimble, questing fingers, combing through fur BJ doesn’t have—a slick of soap suds sliding down his chest under a purple robe— hope and longing, wit and courage, fear and love—an ache across his shoulders that is not his own—the fur of a Maine coon in midwinter—the burn of home distilled gin in the world’s driest martini—what having whiskers is like—a lick of feline grace, of righteous fury, of deep personal conviction and deep personal doubt, of honest decency under a veil of sardonic humor—a kindred spirit—
—nothing. Hawk’s stopped touching her.
Frank shifts the hold he has on BJ, and tries to edge Coralise a little further away from them with his boot, like he believes that old wives tale about touching daemons out of marriage making hair grow on your palms.
“Say Beej,” he says, like they’re somehow friends, like he’s ever called BJ anything but Hunnicutt or pervert or fink. “You’re not gonna report me or anything, are you?”
BJ’s so stunned he doesn’t know what to say. “I think I’m gonna have to.”
“Frank, stop acting like a sniveling idiot!” yells Hawkeye, and his voice is back to normal, the tension gone. They really are gonna be okay.
“I’m not acting!” Frank snaps. BJ’s patience does too, and he shoves Frank off him as hard as he can.
“Oh, get away from me!”
It’s a bad decision. BJ can tell himself the only injury he has is to his left leg, can know that all the pain is daemogenic, but his body won’t cooperate when his soul’s in this much hurt. He starts to fall, but a hand comes up under his arm just in time.
“It’s okay, Beej, I got her,” says Hawkeye close to his ear.
BJ wrenches his eyes open like he’s swimming up through morphine. Hawk’s got Sally in one arm, propped on his hip like a baby, her head tucked over his shoulder. There’s a dull red splotch on her fur somewhere, and BJ can’t see where for all his vision is dancing the jitterbug, but he can feel exactly where she’s bleeding like it’s from his own body. He can feel Hawk’s arms around both of them, tight and shaking with anger or fear or both, but steady as a rock all the same.
Sally’s glassy eyes find BJ’s, and he can’t look away.
“Bullet's resting on the bone, but she’ll come out fine,” says Hawkeye. “Couple stitches each, and you’ll both be good as new.”
“You do it, Hawkeye,” croaks Sally, her eyes not leaving BJ’s. They’re in agreement on this. “No daemiatrist.”
“What do you think you’re doing, Pierce?” gasps Frank, horrified, and honestly, BJ had forgotten Frank was there. “It’s not right, you put her down! Cover her up, at least!”
“We’re going to the OR now, Frank, you can either help or get out of my way!”
BJ learned about trauma-settled daemons in daemiatric physiology, his first year of medical school, which means he didn’t spend anywhere near enough time on it, and he remembers exactly two things.
One: TSDs present with human/daemon mismatch of varying degree. There is no cure, and though usually mild, in some cases, the effect on quality of life can be severe. The exact etiology is unknown, but there are certain trends, and the daemon usually forms a response to the precipitating trauma, wolves following physical attack, mice following long term abuse, and dolphins following cases of near-drowning.
Two: it’s vanishingly rare, and should always be treated by a specialist daemiatrist.
Of course, in Korea, BJ sees it almost every day.
Four wounded they managed to save, and the first two are flying out on flimsy little gurneys tacked on the sides of a tiny chopper with nothing but a strap and a windshield to keep em there. Hawkeye’s loading the others on a second chopper, but BJ can’t take his eyes off the first two, flying away toward the mountains. Every time the chopper banks on a turn, he expects to see bodies falling, but they never do.
He can’t decide which would be worse, if the humans fell, or their daemons.
He makes himself stop watching, and runs back to Hawkeye at a crouch.
“You keep an eye on your boy, there, you hear?” Hawkeye is yelling to a soldier with mortar fragments in one leg and a vicious-looking bite from his own daemon on the other. He cradles his bleeding husky daemon to his chest anyway, looking like he’s set to cry. Hawkeye scribbles down a big TSD warning on the tag that’s apparently what does for a chart around here. “And when you get to the 8055th, you give em this, and you tell em to get Dr Sidney Freedman at the 121st Evac on the horn right away.”
“He’ll make it, though, won’t he, doc?” asks the kid, and he’s a weedy, poetic type in horn glasses, not a good fit for a husky at all, and Christ he sounds sixteen if he’s even a day. “He dragged me out of the shelling, and then he got hit, and he fell on the floor, and, and, and he just settled, right there!”
Hawkeye claps him on the shoulder, and says, “He’ll be pulling sleds by Christmas. I promise.”
The kid’s smile is a sight to behold, bright on his dark skin.
“There’s Dust in the wound,” Hawkeye says to BJ in a shouted undertone as he goes by, heading for the cockpit. It takes BJ a second to hear the capital ‘D’, and when he does his blood runs cold. BJ hadn’t even known that that could happen without active gangrene, and he’s regretting every moment he didn’t spend with his D-phys book in med school. But Hawkeye shakes his head, and says, “Don’t worry, I don’t think it’s theirs. Alright, Luis?”
“Sí, mi Capitán! All set back there?”
“You give these boys a smooth ride!” Hawkeye yells, throwing the pilot a thumbs up. “You’re still coming down next Friday?”
“Wouldn’t miss it!” shouts Luis. “Gotta teach you gringos Mexican poker, don’t I?” Hawkeye laughs with his whole body, but BJ can’t hear anything over the noise.
The whine of the rotor ramps up sharp, and BJ ducks out from under the blades without even thinking about it. The skids are already off the ground when Luis leans his head back out of the open side.
“Oh, Hawkeye!” he calls. “Give Juanacita a boost, está bien?”
“You got it!”
Hawkeye lopes out from under the downdraft and beelines it for the daemons where they’re waiting safe out of the downdraft. The pilot’s daemon, a tiny little sparrowhawk, is perched on Sally’s head like a hat, and Coralise looks like she’s trying very hard not to laugh.
“Quick Juanita, before he leaves without you,” says Hawkeye, offering her a finger. He’s balled the edges of his sleeve into his hand so she can stand on his finger without touching him. He doesn’t touch Sally either, even with his fingers covered, and BJ’s absurdly grateful. He likes Hawkeye plenty, but they only just met, and today’s been the worst day of BJ’s life so far, bar none. BJ crouches down himself and puts a hand on Sally’s back, threads his fingers in her fur.
Juanita steps daintily across onto Hawkeye’s finger, one talon at a time, clicking her beak in displeasure. She's only about the size of his hand. “Keen, isn’t he, Hawkeye?”
Hawkeye grins at her. “That’s why we call him Speedy.”
“Ay, Dios mío,” she grumbles, and ruffles her feathers, gripping Hawkeye tight as he stands up. “I’m not a pinche peregrine, you know?”
“Goodbye, Juana,” says Coralise very pointedly. “Vamoose!”
“Chocks away!” Hawkeye cries, and casts her off into the sky. Juanita screams, but it must be a signal, because the chopper banks its blades and starts away toward where the first went.
“Little warning next time, hombre, one hawk to another!” she calls back over her shoulder. “Nice meeting you, Sally!” and then she’s gone.
“Meatball surgery, huh?” says BJ. He’s tracking the helicopter again, just waiting. Sally presses her nose up under his chin.
“That’s right,” says Hawkeye. “Well. The fellas that make it to us are meatball. You’ve seen what passes for spaghetti.”
BJ thinks of the patient Sally lost out here, the little rat terrier from Cleveland, and the boy who went with her. His breath is still sour, and every time he blinks, he sees what was left of that soldier in front of his eyes. He thinks he’ll still be seeing it when he’s dead.
How he’ll ever eat spaghetti again, he doesn’t know.
“Just like Mother used to make,” says Coralise. Her ears are pinned flat to her head, but her voice is as cool as a clam. “Assuming your mother was a four-star.”
When BJ turns to look at them, Hawk’s bloodied hands are shaking.
Face down in the bottom of their footlocker, there’s a picture of Hawk and Cora from when they were in medical school. BJ saw it once when he was looking for a deck of cards. They’re in dissection, and Hawk’s got Cora draped over one shrugged-up shoulder like Klinger’s fox fur stole, and a sawed-off coronal section of ribcage in his hands. Cora has a ruff a lion would be proud of, and a thick, bushy tail curled in the air over Hawk’s head. Her front paws rest in the breast pocket of Hawk’s lab coat. They’re both staring down into the thoracic cavity with the same exact look on their faces, and it’s not quite that look of pinch-eyed concentration BJ knows like the back of his hand, but it’s the beginnings, and if BJ didn’t know better, he’d say they knew even then what they’d get up to in chests like that one day. Their hair is black as pitch, both of them, and it makes BJ wonder what they looked like in color, back then.
He doesn’t wonder when they started going grey, or why they started it so young. That much is obvious. It’s happening to BJ, too.
Hawk was going at the temples when they met, but he’s slate grey by now, and shot through with more silver every month, seems like. Cora’s fur is thin these days and streaked white from a few underlying scars. Her ruff is completely grey. Sometimes, when it gets bad, when Coralise’s patients aren’t even settled yet especially, she’ll sit on Hawk’s bunk after and lick and bite and chew until her paws are raw, and her belly is bald, and whole clumps of her fur fall in drifts around her like Christmas in July, and the whole time Hawk’ll just sit by the still and drink and drink and neither of them will say a word. The next day, after they've shaken the hangover and coughed up their hairballs, they’ll be back in surgery, both cracking wise like always, and Cora will sit below the table, where she and the gas-passer’s daemon can keep an eye on their own patient, her bandaged paws hidden under her scrub gown.
BJ hasn’t seen Hawkeye in ten hours, and Hawk’s been at the front for nine of them, and there’s a doctor dead up there, and no way to know if it was Hawk and Coralise or not. And all because BJ and Sally needed the groomers.
Sally whimpers a bit at the memory.
The wounded and the dead from Battalion Aid up there are coming down to the 4077th. That’s the bit that gets to BJ, in the times when he can go on autopilot, just closing up. If Hawk bought it up there, they’ll see him again. One of them’ll spot him in triage, Klinger’ll let the rest know they’ve got him, it’ll be their own nurses who pack him up for home, and Father Mulcahy who reads his service, and Colonel Potter and BJ who call through to Crabapple Cove to try and beat the telegram back to Doc Pierce. It’ll hurt—God almighty it’ll hurt something fierce, Sally’s whining just from BJ thinking about it, and he has the strangest urge suddenly to drive this needle deep into the pad of his thumb, if it wouldn’t contaminate his field—but they’ll see him again. If there’s anything to be done to make him more presentable, any skin to close over whatever kind of wound would be enough to shuffle Hawkeye Pierce right off his mortal coil, BJ will place the sutures himself, in white cotton vertical mattress stitch.
But if the worst has happened, and Hawkeye’s gone, they will never see Coralise again.
BJ wonders if the bits of her fur left in the Swamp will outlive her, or if they’ll turn to Dust too.
Maybe he should send Klinger to go check.
“Okay, that's this one done,” he says, terser than he means to, tying off the last stitch and flopping a dressing down over it. He hasn’t got the energy to be clever about it today. “Next!”
He’s stripped off his gloves when Sally pads up to him, jumps up and put her paws on his shoulders.
“What is it, girl?” he asks, holding his hands well out from her so he won’t have to scrub again. “Gloves, Nurse Baker. Sorry ‘bout her.”
Baker smiles at him, and Terrence warbles a little tune, fluttering over her shoulder with a fresh pair held in his feet. They’re all being very kind to them today. “Of course, Doctor.”
“BJ,” whispers Sally, her snout right up by BJ’s ear. “I think I smelled Hawk and Cora on that patient.”
BJ feels himself jolt. “What?” he yelps, and the first glove snaps over his wrist. “Are you sure?”
“Shhh!” growls Sally. “Not so loud! No, I’m not sure, I’da said for sure if I was sure.”
“Blood, sweat, or Dust?” he asks, barely above a whisper. The second glove goes on.
“I dunno,” Sally whines. “The scent’s too old, and I'm no bloodhound.”
“Well, it’s something, anyway,” BJ says, shoving her off with a free elbow. “Keep your nose to the ground, kid.” She drops to the floor and settles back down at her station. Nurse Kellye’s their gas-passer today, and Hiroko’s already got the patient’s box tortoise snug in a loop of his coils.
“Okay, what have we got here?” he asks himself, looking over the patient’s tag. It’s not in Hawkeye’s handwriting either, damn it. Penetrating mortar fragments, reads the card, largest removed. Sup. lacerated stomach wall sutured for transport. Nil daemiatric involvement. NPO, no potholes.
“Things must be slowing down up there,” he says to Baker as he removes the field dressing, and starts in after the fragments. “They had time to suture this, and someone up there’s a real wise guy. ‘No potholes’, he says, right in the chart.”
Terrence whistles. “You don’t think,” starts Baker, hesitant, like she’s afraid to jinx it.
“Not his handwriting,” says BJ flatly. Let’s nip that right in the bud.
It takes him less time than he expects to get the rest of the mortar fragments out. Largest removed his ass, they damn near got most of them. Whoever’s up there is real good at hide and seek.
“Okay, that’s done it,” he says, dropping the last little piece in the basin. “Let’s have a look at that stomach.”
He turns it over in his hands, feeling for the promised sutures along the lesser curvature, when he spots it: two neat little rows of bloodied white cotton running perpendicular to the wound, the most useful, delicate, unforgiving stitch in the world, winking up at him like a line of Morse code.
Hawkeye.
BJ laughs out loud, wild and giddy with relief. Beneath the table, Sally starts barking for joy.
Pa Hunnicutt was a surgeon in World War II. BJ had been a teenager at the time, and it was rough having his dad gone those two years, especially when he first started at Stanford as an underclassman, but it could always have been rougher.
Dr Jay Hunnicutt was a National Guardsman, and wasn’t called up until after D-Day. He shipped to the European theatre, safe and sound at the 111th evac in Holland for the duration. He never had to treat the prisoners like some poor bastards did, never had to see the full depravity of what the Nazis could do to the human body. He never had to go up to his elbows gloveless in a belly like BJ does, either, or go diving across his patient when the shells get too close. He got em nice and clean and packaged like how BJ ships em off to the 121st nowadays.
Lucky son of a gun.
Pa always used to say that there’re no green soldiers in a war, not after the first three seconds. Once you get that far, there are only veterans and the dead.
The shelling has stopped, but he hits the dirt—and the mud, blech!—with style.
“BJ!” Sally barks, clean as a whistle behind him, like he’s her puppy.
“Good shot,” says Hawkeye, calm as you please. “Lemme have that bag.”
Hawkeye’s got two live patients and Radar, and BJ has the medical bag. BJ can tell they’re both live because of their daemons. Coralise has already caught the little sparrow daemon between her paws, and is chanting “I’m a doctor, I’m a doctor,” in its terrified ears, which leaves the rat terrier for Sally. BJ clambers up out of the mud, hands over the bag, and crawls to the patient Hawkeye’s left for him.
Hawkeye gives him a cool look over a pressure bandage. “He’s had it,” he says, nodding at BJ’s patient.
BJ balks, stares around at Sally. She’s got the patient’s daemon shivering beneath her already. She gives a little whine, and licks the daemon’s snout.
“Well let’s try,” says BJ, reproachfully, and turns the patient over.
Well.
He’s had it, sure enough.
Sally yelps, loud in the sudden silence after the shells. The patient’s rat terrier is whining on every breath now, and shaking apart in her paws, but she’s still alive. Sally licks her snout over and over, but there’s nothing for it. She’s a Dust daemon walking.
BJ looks at Sally and the patient’s daemon, looks at Hawkeye bent over a patient of his own, looks at Coralise, watching him with her big blue eyes. He lets the soldier roll back onto his front. He crawls far enough away that he won’t bother Hawkeye's patient, and vomits into the grass.
They call it retching because it makes you wretched, he thinks.
When he comes back to himself, there’s a pressure against his leg, and hands on his forehead and his back. Someone shouts for Hawkeye, and Hawkeye must respond somehow, but he doesn’t leave. BJ spits the last of it out of his mouth and sits back. Coralise bunts her head into his side over his clothes. She’s not purring, but she’s warm. Hawkeye offers his hand.
BJ takes it.
“Don’t forget, this is your first day of school,” shouts Hawkeye over his shoulder as he starts toward the medic who called him. Coralise bounds away ahead of him, her bushy tail cutting a path in the scraggly grass. “The worst part is, you’ll get used to all of this!”
BJ turns to follow him at a stagger, but stops after two steps. He turns back.
“BJ, Radar!” shouts Hawkeye. “I need the bag!” Radar grabs it, rushes up to BJ, and pauses for a moment, but doesn’t stay long.
Sally is still crouched, whimpering over her patient as the rat terrier slides slowly into Dust. When the terrier is finally gone, Sally stands, and shakes herself all over.
“Her name was Rachel,” she says to him in an undertone as they jog toward Hawkeye. “His name was Isaac. They were 19, from Cleveland.”
“There was nothing you could do,” he tells her as they slide into home beside Hawkeye.
“There was nothing either of you could do,” says Hawkeye, even as he’s packing a wound in a lieutenant’s thigh, the ends of another pressure bandage in his teeth.
“First rule of thumb out here, don’t do that to yourselves,” says Coralise, kneading her patient gently with her paws and purring aggressively. The lieutenant’s daemon is a wild pig of some kind, completely unharmed and not even anxious. It must be a flesh wound. The lieutenant’ll do fine. “You’ll go crazy if you try.”
“Well,” says Hawkeye, shooting her a sardonic eyebrow, “Crazier.”
“Yeah, it’s all the Reds’ fault anyway,” says the lieutenant’s daemon. The lieutenant himself has his teeth gritted against whatever Hawkeye is doing to him. BJ isn’t paying attention to anything but the words in their mouths, and Sally’s ear in his hand. It is soft and yellow and obscene. “We got nothing to do with it. Commie bastards. Kill em all, I say. That’ll teach em.”
“Sure, we got nothing to do with it at all,” mutters Coralise, under her breath, and stops purring.
“Takes two to tango,” says Hawkeye, sweetly. “Whaddaya say, BJ? May I have this dance?”
Peggy tells him Harvey’s been spending a lot of time as a puppy lately, and most of that as a golden retriever. BJ thinks it’s pretty clear the reason why. Peggy’s Harry is a golden too, after all. That’s part of what he loves about her, that their souls are made of the same thing.
Even if, one day in the far future, and pray God BJ will be there to see it, Harvey settles that way in his own good time for his own good reason, and they become a little family of three blonde heads and three golden coats, BJ will still think it’s because of Harry. Girls take after their moms, of course they do, that’s basic psychology, and Harry has been the only settled daemon to be a consistent presence in Harvey’s life for going on two years now.
But he looks at Sally sometimes and hopes that Erin remembers her dad, and why he had to go.
“Captain Hunnicutt, sir?” says a voice behind him.
“That’s me,” says BJ, turning.
“Oh, good,” says a little fella in glasses and a cap, with a lime colored butterfly daemon of some sort pinned to his chest like a medal. “I’m Radar. I mean, Corporal O’Reilly, sir, company clerk.” He shrugs his shoulder forward with the daemon on it. “This is Eleanor.”
“Hello,” says BJ. Sally gives a small woof.
“Welcome to Korea, I guess, sir,” says O’Reilly, and slides one of BJ’s bags right out of his hand quicker than blinking. “Come on, we gotta find Captain Pierce, he’s at the MATS office.”
“He a surgeon too?”
“Oh, sure,” says O’Reilly. “Chief surgeon, 4077th MASH. There he is. Oh, Captain Pierce! Captain Pierce, Captain Hunnicutt!”
BJ can’t see any captain’s bars on anyone, but O’Reilly trots right up to a rangy fella in rumpled fatigues, so it must be him. BJ’s new boss stands arms akimbo and shoulders cockeyed, with one hiked up under the weight of the most enormous housecat daemon BJ’s ever seen. Captain Pierce’s back is to him, but his daemon tracks him coming with an ear.
“I missed Trapper by ten minutes!” Captain Pierce is saying to O’Reilly. It must mean something to O’Reilly because he makes a sad sound, his daemon fluttering on his lapel. “Ten lousy minutes!”
“Captain Pierce,” says BJ, sticking a hand out. This is his boss who’s ignoring him, on the surgical side at least. Gotta make a good first impression.
Pierce and his daemon turn to look at him. They’re a fine match, both with lots of dark hair, and very blue eyes, but the daemon is especially impressive. She’s black and silver, and looks far too majestic for the man she’s riding. Pierce just looks exhausted. They’re older than him and Sally, but still younger than BJ would have expected. Pierce turns back to O’Reilly, and shakes BJ’s hand without looking.
“Hi,” says Pierce’s daemon.
“Can you believe that?” says Pierce, but not to him.
O’Reilly comforts Pierce for whatever went wrong that BJ doesn’t understand, and then it turns out they’ve lost the jeep that got them there, and O’Reilly is almost flattened by a bus. BJ’s hands are full, but Pierce snatches him back with an inch to spare before BJ even realizes what’s gonna happen, before Sally even has a chance to bark, and he thinks to himself what his father used to say about war.
Does it count as a war if there was never even a declaration? Probably not. It’s been more than three seconds, after all, and BJ’s still breathing. He’s the only one not wearing green, but he gets the funny feeling he’s the only one who is.
“Things always this calm around here?” he says, to cover the sound of his thumping heart.
Pierce is still trying to calm O’Reilly, but his daemon shrugs from her perch on Pierce’s shoulder. “It’s the only war in town,” she says.
Oh, thinks BJ. It’s like that, huh? He glances down at Sally, who wags her tail at him, her tongue lolling out of her mouth. Okay, they can handle that.
“Radar,” Pierce is saying over O’Reilly’s adrenaline-fueled prattle, trying to get him to stay still. O’Reilly’s nickname, right. He’s still in a fuss over the lost jeep, calling for the MPs, his daemon fluttering madly over their heads. BJ can see why she’s a butterfly. “Radar. Radar! If you can keep your head while all about you are losing theirs, then you probably haven’t checked with your answering service.”
Ha, funny.
“Rudyard Kipling,” says Sally, attributing the misquote without batting an eye, wagging her tail hard enough to whack BJ in the leg.
Pierce looks at her, then at O’Reilly, and then at Sally again. He double takes with his whole body, slowly. His eyes flick up to BJ’s, and he turns back to O’Reilly, and says, “Knick-knack paddywack, give a dog a bone.”
BJ grins.
Pierce is still talking O’Reilly down about the jeep, but Pierce’s daemon leaps down from his shoulder in a single bound and presses her nose to Sally’s.
“Not too shabby, pup,” she says, sitting back on her haunches. She can look Sally straight in the eye even sitting down, she’s that huge. “What’s your name?”
“Sally,” says Sally, ears pricked and tail wagging. “This is BJ.”
“I’m Coralise,” says Pierce’s daemon. “That’s Hawkeye. Dr Pierce is our father.”
“And Captain Pierce was his father?”
“You catch on quick,” says Coralise, and leaps onto Sally’s back. Sally shifts under her weight, but she holds, and Coralise’s balance is impeccable. “Gimme a ride to the officer’s club, we’ll buy you a drink.”
the beginning.