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36 hours (and no sign of his shorts) later
X*X*X*X
Hawkeye pulls off his scrub cap as he all but falls through the door to the Swamp. The promised flood of casualties had derailed his search for his not-lucky-but-necessary shorts and kept them all on their feet for the next hundred years after that. His position as Chief Surgeon gave him the prerogative to punish himself with the first shift in post-op, and for the first time in his life he’d experienced a feeling of real joy at the sight of Winchester – when the man showed up to relieve him five minutes ago.
“Be it ever so rumpled…” Hawkeye says, casting a loving look down at his cot as he crosses to the still for his bedtime snack.
“Hey, Hawk?” BJ’s voice floats over the air between them, cutting through the cottony tinnitus of his own exhaustion.
“Yeah, Beej,” he hits his cue, reaching for a martini glass.
“Don’t sit down yet, I have something to show you.”
Hawkeye groans. “The only thing I want to see right now are the insides of my eyelids.” Thus speaking, his feet carry him dutifully over to BJ’s side of the tent. The only light in the Swamp is coming from the bulb over BJ’s bunk, illuminating him like a he’s a character in a stage play. The pulchritudinous hero in sublime repose, Hawkeye thinks, and then, Good god, I must really be tired.
“Where is it, Beej?”
“Where’s what?” BJ gazes placidly up at him, his hands folded behind his head.
“Whatever it is you want to show me.”
“Oh, that. It’s under here.”
“Under where?” Hawkeye asks, and feels his stomach flip as a smirk spreads across BJ’s face making him feel as though he’s just tripped an invisible wire – but instead of a bucket of cold water over his head a hot flush rages through him as, with a sweep of his arm, BJ whisks his blanket off of himself to reveal—
“You – you—!” Hawkeye can’t even find the breath to bombast, so BJ helps him out: “Creep? Cretin? Scammer? Rogue?”
“Those are – those are my shorts!” And to pile on to the indignity of BJ lying there in a pool of golden lamplight in a t-shirt and Hawkeye’s special surgery shorts, he tips his head back on his pillow and lets loose a laugh so loud and so enchanting that Hawkeye feels it bouncing around the canvas walls and lodging somewhere in his own chest, confusion and delight and outrage all jostling each other for control over his limbs and before he can take the reins again he finds himself on top of BJ, shaking him by the shoulders and glaring into his face, chanting like a little kid, “Mine, mine, mine!”
BJ’s chest is heaving as he fully submits to the laughing jag, clinging back to Hawkeye as tears roll down his cheeks, all thirty-two-hundred of his teeth gleaming right in Hawkeye’s face.
“I’ll show you, I’ll show you what you get for violating the uniform code of military justice!” And wrenching his way out of BJ’s grasp he gets his hands under the waistband of his very important shorts and starts tugging them off.
“Hawk,” BJ gasps, whole body convulsing under Hawkeye’s, his gleaming eyes suddenly blown wide open, staring up at him.
“Oh no,” Hawkeye fires back, his knuckles grazing tender skin as he gives another tug. “No no no, you don’t get to ‘Hawk’ me, fella, I’ll show you what we do around here to guys with big feet who don’t know how to keep their hands out of other peoples’—”
BJ’s hands, those thieving rotten no-good fascinating hands, have curled themselves in the front of Hawkeye’s shirt and then – and that’s the funny thing about situational gravity – Hawkeye himself is falling forward, catching himself on BJ’s mouth.
“Beej,” Hawkeye gets out at last, after whatever-this-is has gone on long enough that the war’s gotta be over by now. “What – what…?”
“Uh,” says the eloquent Doctor Hunnicutt, lifting a hand to his mouth like he’s checking that it’s still attached to his face before he looks up at Hawkeye again. “I think, I could be wrong, you’d know better than me, but I think that’s what they call a kiss.”
“You think—” Hawkeye gapes down at him, watches BJ’s eyes as they drop to his lips, getting stuck there, dilated like crazy and gleaming in the dark. “Oh,” he murmurs, “I’ll show you a kiss.”
“Wait, wait,” BJ mumbles against his mouth after Hawk’s barely had a second to get into it, getting his hand on his chest and holding him away which has Hawkeye lining up the dominos all set to topple into a really good panic when the tent is plunged into darkness around them and BJ’s push turns into a pull, bringing him right back down where all this started only now with 100% less chance of throwing incriminating shadows on the wall and Hawkeye just about has time to think, Wow, for a guy who never does this, he’s really good at doing this, before BJ and his wicked, wicked mouth get back to work ensuring Hawkeye is left without a lucid thought in his head.
X*X*X*X
The next morning, BJ catches Hawkeye around the waist just as he’s about to leave the tent.
“You weren’t kidding about those shorts,” he says, when he finally lets Hawkeye up for air. “I’ve never been so inspired.”