Work Text:
B.J. and his wife have a talk before he leaves for Korea.
It’s dim in their bedroom, just the red lamp by the bed turned on, and she’s curled into his chest, one hand twisted into the sheets and the other around his stomach. “You can — see other people, if you’d like,” she whispers into him, her words practiced and resigned, business-like despite their sadness. “I won’t — be happy about it, exactly, but I’ll understand. A couple girls here and there. I’ll understand. You don’t even have to talk about it if you want, after.”
He sighs. “I don’t want to, at all, Peg.” He lifts her chin in the dark so he can see her face a little. You’re my one and only, you know that.”
She’s serious, though, and stubborn, and always has understood him perfectly.
“I know. I also know you’ll be lonely and away from home and might need some — comforting, at times.”
He’d turned away from her in bed, yanked the chain to turn off the light.
“Peg, I’m not going to sleep with anyone else. End of story.”
“Okay,” she’d said, reaching her hand over to him to lay her hand on his back.
His stomach twisted.
“But if you change your mind. I’ll live.”
***
At first, being faithful is easy.
Korea is a mess of guns in the corner of his vision at all times, olive green and bright red swimming in his mind when he closes his eyes. Hazy heat, burning cold, blurry thoughts. He can’t get his bearings and he’s constantly terrified and he’s so homesick he can’t think about anything else and nothing feels like home. He’s not even tempted, no capacity in his brain for things like love or lust when the only thing on his mind is Peg and the girls and how he might die any second.
And then Hawkeye talks to him. Smiles his crinkley smile at Beej yes, and-ing his terrible ideas. Places his hand on the small of his back as he throws up at the sight of his first carnage.
They get close because he has no other choice, because it feels like he’ll die if he doesn’t become Hawkeye’s best friend. Hawkeye distracts him in ways nothing else can, soothes him and teaches him blunt lessons in the same breath, knocks his walls down chunks at a time.
In return, he gets to see Hawkeye’s sensitive side — not the side that’s always performing, always cracking jokes, and not the side that’s beautifully eloquent and political, and not the side that’s saying the exact right thing to nurses at the exact right time. He gets to see the ugly side. The side that cries silently instead of performatively and loudly, and talks endlessly his childhood and life back home, and is sleepy-silly without any intentions, and can listen to other people talk without injecting his own ideas every ten seconds.
He finds that he’s always trying to impress Hawkeye. He’s obsessed with finding just the right pranks to get even with someone, or the perfect comeback, or the new best surgical technique in this hellhole. He finds that he’s jumpy whenever Hawkeye touches him, that he seeks it out anyways — a pat on the back, a shoulder rub, a bump of hips as they laugh together drunk, a hug, even, if he can. He finds that he smiles too, wide and crooked and real, whenever Hawkeye does his big twinkling smile.
He still doesn’t sleep with anyone.
He writes home faithfully, and treats letters from Peg like they’re gold or perfect foggy mornings or Ghirardelli chocolates, savoring them with his fingers and eyes and heart. And he doesn’t sleep with any of the nurses, not even when they brush up next to him during movies or whisper sweet nothings in his ear after dinner. Even when he thinks starts to feel something for a couple of them — he’ll just get a letter from Peg the next week and be reminded what real love is.
It’s being addicted to making someone laugh and smiling at even the thought of it. It’s missing someone’s touch so much that you burn when anyone else touches you. It’s wanting to make someone smile every day for the rest of their lives. It’s wanting to make their life easier and wanting to be around them always, even when you don’t want to be around yourself.
Meanwhile, he spends his days with Hawkeye, planning hijinks and crying over sour patients together and complaining about dinner and getting their hands on record players and dancing together even when Charles isn’t there to antagonize with their made-up waltzes and bad tangoing.
And one night, they’re lying in a ditch together, spying on Charles as part of an elaborate prank, when B.J. turns his head — looks at Hawkeye, who’s mid-snicker — and sees his sharp face lit from behind by a lamp, his eyes echoing the stars, his lopsided chin stuck so close to his — and his heart catches in his chest — and he thinks, oh — and there’s hardly enough time to register what the feeling is before he leans in and meets Hawkeye halfway to wiping the smile off his face.
And it feels like exploding into something new and coming home all at once.
And he wants to spend the rest of his life doing it.