janecarnall (![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} janecarnall) wrote,@ 2005-01-01 11:55:00 |
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Mirror M*A*S*H, part 14
Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7, part 8, part 9, part 10, part 11, part 12, and part 13.
When he woke, he was lying in a hospital bed. The feel of it, and the smell, was unmistakable. The whole front of his torso felt numb.
Hawkeye lay still, looking up at the ceiling. There was an IV in his right arm. His fingers and toes all seemed to be attached and mobile.
He glanced sideways at the IV. Looked like plasma, and it was almost empty. The room wasn’t big, but there were two beds in it: the other one was empty, but the chair between them was occupied: Francis was sitting in it, fast asleep. Beyond the second bed the door stood open, and beyond it was what looked like a hospital ward’s corridor.
A nurse came in. She caught his open eyes, and smiled, taking the chart from the end of the bed and looking at it briefly. “Good morning, Doctor. How are you feeling?”
“With my hands, usually. Where am I?”
“Tokyo General Hospital. You were flown in from Seoul yesterday.”
“I don’t remember the trip.”
“Well, you were unconscious for most of it, so Father Mulcahy said.”
Hawkeye raised his eyebrows.
“You don’t even remember me, do you?”
“No,” Hawkeye said. He couldn’t imagine why he should. Father Mulcahy?
“I was at the 4077th last year for six months,” the nurse said, her voice gone crisp and sharp.
“Sorry,” Hawkeye said. She must be one of Houlihan’s lieutenants. “How long am I going to be here?”
“Well, that depends on what the doctor says,” the nurse said. “And that’s not you.” She was taking his temperature and his pulse, businesslike and rapid, and made a note of them on the chart.
“When can I get the IV out?”
“When the doctor says.”
“When can I see the doctor?”
“He’ll be making rounds in an hour or so.” The nurse stepped round the bed and put her hand on Francis’s shoulder: he woke with a start.
“Father, Doctor Pierce is awake.”
“Oh,” Francis said. “Thank you.”
“Doctor Pierce can’t have anything by mouth until the doctor okays it, but we have coffee down at the nurses station if you’d like some, Father.”
“Thank you,” Francis said. He smiled. “Perhaps Doctor Pierce and I could be alone?”
“Of course, Father. Call if you need anything.”
Francis moved the chair around, and sat down on it again, facing Hawkeye. “Well,” he said, with an odd smile, “here we are.”
“Where are we?”
“Tokyo General Hospital.” Francis swallowed. “My world, not yours.”
“You’re telling me you’re not crazy.” Hawkeye thought about it. “The lieutenant knew me.”
“She knows Hawkeye Pierce. Not you.”
“Excuse me? I’m Hawkeye Pierce.”
“In this world, another man has priority,” Francis said. “That’s what I need to talk to you about.”
So he’s crazy. Hawkeye smiled and nodded.
“I brought you through to this side, because if I’d left you there you would have died.”
“Oh.” Hawkeye thought about it. “We went through a kind of vertical puddle…”
“Yes.”
“I don’t remember anything after that.”
“You were unconscious. Colonel Hunnicutt really hurt you, and the passage… is difficult at the best of times.”
“Okay,” Hawkeye said. “What happened to me here?”
“I called for help,” Francis said, sounding surprised. “I had a wounded, unconscious man in need of immediate treatment – I didn’t think the corpsmen would ask too many questions, and they didn’t, though they seemed worried enough about me as well – ”
“The Colonel really hurt you, too,” Hawkeye interrupted. “What did they say about you?”
“Oh – bruises, surface abrasions.” Francis put his hands together. “Nothing much, though as it worked out they took me to Tokyo General along with you, which was just as well, because I have to ask you – Captain Pierce, do you want to stay here?”
“Here?” Hawkeye jabbed a finger down at the floor, and raised his eyebrows. “It’s a nice hospital, from what I’ve seen of it, but I wouldn’t want to move in permanently.”
“Here, in this world,” Francis said seriously.
Hawkeye laughed.
“Captain Pierce, I really have to ask – ”
Hawkeye went on laughing. The door opened and the nurse came in. She looked as grim as Houlihan ever did. “Doctor, you mustn’t get overexcited.”
“Overexcited – ” Hawkeye was laughing so hard his jaw hurt.
“Father, can’t you stop him from laughing? I’ll have to ask a doctor to give him a sedative otherwise. He’ll break his stitches open.”
Francis stood up and was leaning over him. He rested his weight solidly on Hawkeye’s shoulders, and his fingers jabbed sharply into the nerve clusters, without a surgeon’s accuracy but with considerable strength. It sobered Hawkeye completely.
After a couple of minutes conversation, which Hawkeye listened to without taking it in, Francis got the nurse to leave the room again. Francis sat down in his chair and looked at Hawkeye. “Doctor Pierce – we don’t have very long. You are in another world – if I can’t convince you of that, you’re in worse trouble than you know.”
Hawkeye grinned. His shoulders still hurt. “Yeah – I think you just did. One where I’m the slave and you’re the owner, right?”
Francis leaned forward. “One where I’m a priest, and you’re a patient,” he said. “But do you want to stay here or to go back to your own world?”
“This is your world,” Hawkeye said.
“Yes.”
Hawkeye stared at him. There was an odd feeling stirring in his gut, past the numbness. “You didn’t even know what a MATH unit was,” he said. “Was the Colonel right? Didn’t you have February third here?”
Francis shrugged. “I don’t know – I heard you and Colonel Hunnicutt talking about it, but you never said what happened.”
“Nuclear bomb,” Hawkeye said. “Downtown LA. February third, 1950. Ended world war two.”
Francis swallowed. “Oh…” He looked rocked by the news. “No – in this world, two nuclear weapons have been used, by the United States, in Japan, August 1945.” He swallowed again. “So the US lost world war two?”
“Stopped fighting it, anyway. Fighting started again in Korea.” Hawkeye was frowning. “What – why Japan? They’re our allies.”
Francis started to ask a question, then shook his head. “Doctor Pierce, we don’t have time for this right now. Or ever, if you want to go back. I think I can arrrange to get us back to Seoul, and I can find the temple – and I hope, get you through. If you want to go. You are in a very different world from the one you knew, and I – don’t know if you can ever belong here. But I don’t know what you’d be going back to.”
“Oh, the usual. Torture, mayhem, mutilation, rape, and then there’s the war.” Hawkeye shrugged. “How long have we been here?”
“Two days.”
“Oh.” Hawkeye thought about it. “I’m AWOL, I suppose. How did the Colonel get us all out of the base?”
“He dragged you out and put you in the back of a jeep, and then hit me over the head… and I suppose, did the same thing to me.”
“Oh. Where is he now? Do you know?”
“No,” Francis said.
“I don’t suppose he’ll want to go back. He doesn’t have any family here. There. As far as I know. But after thirty days it’s desertion…” Hawkeye swallowed. And they’ll kill my dad. “I have to go back.”
“Who is senior, in your world – who’s second-in-command? Major Burns or Major Winchester?”
“Major Houlihan,” Hawkeye said, surprised. “She’s career army.”
“Would she lie to get you into trouble?”
“No.”
“It was obvious to all witnesses – and there were a few – that you were not leaving camp willingly.” Francis looked down at his hands. “Radar told me what the penalty was for desertion. But you didn’t desert – and I think,” he swallowed, “if you don’t go back, they will believe that Colonel Hunnicutt killed you. There will be enough of your blood found in that temple to make this seem… plausible.”
Hawkeye stared. “Do you want me to stay?”
“I don’t want to force you back into the life you lived there.” Francis looked up again. “But if you did stay here – I would need your word, Hawkeye, your solemn promise, that you would do no harm to anyone in this world.” His light voice had gone deeper: he spoke with unconscious but deeply-felt authority.
Hawkeye laughed, brief and quick. “That’s all?” he said jeeringly.
Francis said nothing. He folded his hands and rested his chin on them, looking at Hawkeye in silence.
“You hate me,” Hawkeye said, gropingly, feeling lost. “You have to. You have no reason not to hate me. I was going to kill you.”
“To save me from being tortured to death,” Francis said. “I was very grateful to you at the time. That’s not why… I don’t know if I hate you or not, Hawkeye. I don’t know what I feel about you. You – ” He swallowed, but when he went on, his voice was stronger and more certain. “You raped me. You held me so that Captain McIntyre could rape me. I was terrified and I loathed you. And myself.” He stopped again. “If I thought that in letting you stay here, I was permitting something like that to happen to someone else – that you would continue to do harm to others – I could never forgive myself. But I have to believe in the promise of redemption. And I know – I know that you have as great a capacity for compassion and gentleness as you have in you now for cruelty. If you had not been made a torturer, you could have been a surgeon. Do you want to stay?”
“And be a surgeon?”
“Perhaps,” Francis said. “You won’t have a medical degree, if you stay. There is already a Doctor Pierce in this world; you can’t take his place. You’d have to make a place for yourself. I’m willing to help. But first of all, I need your word. Your promise.”
“Not to harm anyone in this world.” Hawkeye restated it without promising it. “What happened to the Colonel?”
“He – ” Francis made a quick gesture, as if he was touching his nose, his chest, and his shoulders. “I killed him.”
Hawkeye lifted his head: his jaw fell open. “You what?”
“It isn’t safe opening the passage through to the other world,” Francis said quietly. “If you stand in the wrong place at the wrong time, it can kill you. I knew where the safe place was to stand, and where it wasn’t safe… and I told Colonel Hunnicutt to stand where I knew it would kill him.” He stopped. “God forgive me,” he said, and made the same quick gesture with his right hand. “He died with his sins on him.”
“You killed him,” Hawkeye said, with a mixture of disbelief, relief, and pure admiration. This was the man who’d laughed at him.
The door shoved open. A man came in – short, white-haired, and balding. He was in army uniform, and when Francis stood up and turned round, he grinned – wide and white. “Padre, you’re a sight for sore eyes.”
“Colonel,” Francis said.
The man came across the room – Francis took two stumbling steps towards him – and they were hugging each other. This Colonel was even shorter than Francis. He stepped back from Francis, and grinned even wider. There was nothing terrifying about him at all. “How are you? You look terrible. I have so many messages from everyone back at the 4077th that I couldn’t carry them all, but here’s something you may want – ” He fished something out of his pocket.
“My spectacles,” Francis said. He sounded happier than Hawkeye had ever heard him. He took the case out of the Colonel’s hands and slid on a pair of metal-framed glasses.
“Your spare pair. I know the hospital here has a sound ophthalmologist, but I thought you’d want to be able to see the world as soon as possible – ”
“Thank you, Colonel,” Francis said. He turned towards the bed. Wearing glasses, his face looked different – more focussed –
Trapper would never have looked at this man and said Sweet God, he’s gorgeous.
But then, I’ll never see Trapper again.
“Francis,” Hawkeye said. “You know what? Yes. I promise. My word on it.”
“Whoa,” this Colonel said. He came over to the bed and peered down at Hawkeye. “Son, I know I left you back at the 4077th, because I practically had to kick you off the chopper to convince you that we couldn’t all go to Tokyo to see Father Mulcahy. How did you get here ahead of me?” He peered closer. “And what the devil – sorry, Padre – have you been doing to yourself to look this way?”
The End
to the chapter listing
Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6, part 7, part 8, part 9, part 10, part 11, part 12, and part 13.
When he woke, he was lying in a hospital bed. The feel of it, and the smell, was unmistakable. The whole front of his torso felt numb.
Hawkeye lay still, looking up at the ceiling. There was an IV in his right arm. His fingers and toes all seemed to be attached and mobile.
He glanced sideways at the IV. Looked like plasma, and it was almost empty. The room wasn’t big, but there were two beds in it: the other one was empty, but the chair between them was occupied: Francis was sitting in it, fast asleep. Beyond the second bed the door stood open, and beyond it was what looked like a hospital ward’s corridor.
A nurse came in. She caught his open eyes, and smiled, taking the chart from the end of the bed and looking at it briefly. “Good morning, Doctor. How are you feeling?”
“With my hands, usually. Where am I?”
“Tokyo General Hospital. You were flown in from Seoul yesterday.”
“I don’t remember the trip.”
“Well, you were unconscious for most of it, so Father Mulcahy said.”
Hawkeye raised his eyebrows.
“You don’t even remember me, do you?”
“No,” Hawkeye said. He couldn’t imagine why he should. Father Mulcahy?
“I was at the 4077th last year for six months,” the nurse said, her voice gone crisp and sharp.
“Sorry,” Hawkeye said. She must be one of Houlihan’s lieutenants. “How long am I going to be here?”
“Well, that depends on what the doctor says,” the nurse said. “And that’s not you.” She was taking his temperature and his pulse, businesslike and rapid, and made a note of them on the chart.
“When can I get the IV out?”
“When the doctor says.”
“When can I see the doctor?”
“He’ll be making rounds in an hour or so.” The nurse stepped round the bed and put her hand on Francis’s shoulder: he woke with a start.
“Father, Doctor Pierce is awake.”
“Oh,” Francis said. “Thank you.”
“Doctor Pierce can’t have anything by mouth until the doctor okays it, but we have coffee down at the nurses station if you’d like some, Father.”
“Thank you,” Francis said. He smiled. “Perhaps Doctor Pierce and I could be alone?”
“Of course, Father. Call if you need anything.”
Francis moved the chair around, and sat down on it again, facing Hawkeye. “Well,” he said, with an odd smile, “here we are.”
“Where are we?”
“Tokyo General Hospital.” Francis swallowed. “My world, not yours.”
“You’re telling me you’re not crazy.” Hawkeye thought about it. “The lieutenant knew me.”
“She knows Hawkeye Pierce. Not you.”
“Excuse me? I’m Hawkeye Pierce.”
“In this world, another man has priority,” Francis said. “That’s what I need to talk to you about.”
So he’s crazy. Hawkeye smiled and nodded.
“I brought you through to this side, because if I’d left you there you would have died.”
“Oh.” Hawkeye thought about it. “We went through a kind of vertical puddle…”
“Yes.”
“I don’t remember anything after that.”
“You were unconscious. Colonel Hunnicutt really hurt you, and the passage… is difficult at the best of times.”
“Okay,” Hawkeye said. “What happened to me here?”
“I called for help,” Francis said, sounding surprised. “I had a wounded, unconscious man in need of immediate treatment – I didn’t think the corpsmen would ask too many questions, and they didn’t, though they seemed worried enough about me as well – ”
“The Colonel really hurt you, too,” Hawkeye interrupted. “What did they say about you?”
“Oh – bruises, surface abrasions.” Francis put his hands together. “Nothing much, though as it worked out they took me to Tokyo General along with you, which was just as well, because I have to ask you – Captain Pierce, do you want to stay here?”
“Here?” Hawkeye jabbed a finger down at the floor, and raised his eyebrows. “It’s a nice hospital, from what I’ve seen of it, but I wouldn’t want to move in permanently.”
“Here, in this world,” Francis said seriously.
Hawkeye laughed.
“Captain Pierce, I really have to ask – ”
Hawkeye went on laughing. The door opened and the nurse came in. She looked as grim as Houlihan ever did. “Doctor, you mustn’t get overexcited.”
“Overexcited – ” Hawkeye was laughing so hard his jaw hurt.
“Father, can’t you stop him from laughing? I’ll have to ask a doctor to give him a sedative otherwise. He’ll break his stitches open.”
Francis stood up and was leaning over him. He rested his weight solidly on Hawkeye’s shoulders, and his fingers jabbed sharply into the nerve clusters, without a surgeon’s accuracy but with considerable strength. It sobered Hawkeye completely.
After a couple of minutes conversation, which Hawkeye listened to without taking it in, Francis got the nurse to leave the room again. Francis sat down in his chair and looked at Hawkeye. “Doctor Pierce – we don’t have very long. You are in another world – if I can’t convince you of that, you’re in worse trouble than you know.”
Hawkeye grinned. His shoulders still hurt. “Yeah – I think you just did. One where I’m the slave and you’re the owner, right?”
Francis leaned forward. “One where I’m a priest, and you’re a patient,” he said. “But do you want to stay here or to go back to your own world?”
“This is your world,” Hawkeye said.
“Yes.”
Hawkeye stared at him. There was an odd feeling stirring in his gut, past the numbness. “You didn’t even know what a MATH unit was,” he said. “Was the Colonel right? Didn’t you have February third here?”
Francis shrugged. “I don’t know – I heard you and Colonel Hunnicutt talking about it, but you never said what happened.”
“Nuclear bomb,” Hawkeye said. “Downtown LA. February third, 1950. Ended world war two.”
Francis swallowed. “Oh…” He looked rocked by the news. “No – in this world, two nuclear weapons have been used, by the United States, in Japan, August 1945.” He swallowed again. “So the US lost world war two?”
“Stopped fighting it, anyway. Fighting started again in Korea.” Hawkeye was frowning. “What – why Japan? They’re our allies.”
Francis started to ask a question, then shook his head. “Doctor Pierce, we don’t have time for this right now. Or ever, if you want to go back. I think I can arrrange to get us back to Seoul, and I can find the temple – and I hope, get you through. If you want to go. You are in a very different world from the one you knew, and I – don’t know if you can ever belong here. But I don’t know what you’d be going back to.”
“Oh, the usual. Torture, mayhem, mutilation, rape, and then there’s the war.” Hawkeye shrugged. “How long have we been here?”
“Two days.”
“Oh.” Hawkeye thought about it. “I’m AWOL, I suppose. How did the Colonel get us all out of the base?”
“He dragged you out and put you in the back of a jeep, and then hit me over the head… and I suppose, did the same thing to me.”
“Oh. Where is he now? Do you know?”
“No,” Francis said.
“I don’t suppose he’ll want to go back. He doesn’t have any family here. There. As far as I know. But after thirty days it’s desertion…” Hawkeye swallowed. And they’ll kill my dad. “I have to go back.”
“Who is senior, in your world – who’s second-in-command? Major Burns or Major Winchester?”
“Major Houlihan,” Hawkeye said, surprised. “She’s career army.”
“Would she lie to get you into trouble?”
“No.”
“It was obvious to all witnesses – and there were a few – that you were not leaving camp willingly.” Francis looked down at his hands. “Radar told me what the penalty was for desertion. But you didn’t desert – and I think,” he swallowed, “if you don’t go back, they will believe that Colonel Hunnicutt killed you. There will be enough of your blood found in that temple to make this seem… plausible.”
Hawkeye stared. “Do you want me to stay?”
“I don’t want to force you back into the life you lived there.” Francis looked up again. “But if you did stay here – I would need your word, Hawkeye, your solemn promise, that you would do no harm to anyone in this world.” His light voice had gone deeper: he spoke with unconscious but deeply-felt authority.
Hawkeye laughed, brief and quick. “That’s all?” he said jeeringly.
Francis said nothing. He folded his hands and rested his chin on them, looking at Hawkeye in silence.
“You hate me,” Hawkeye said, gropingly, feeling lost. “You have to. You have no reason not to hate me. I was going to kill you.”
“To save me from being tortured to death,” Francis said. “I was very grateful to you at the time. That’s not why… I don’t know if I hate you or not, Hawkeye. I don’t know what I feel about you. You – ” He swallowed, but when he went on, his voice was stronger and more certain. “You raped me. You held me so that Captain McIntyre could rape me. I was terrified and I loathed you. And myself.” He stopped again. “If I thought that in letting you stay here, I was permitting something like that to happen to someone else – that you would continue to do harm to others – I could never forgive myself. But I have to believe in the promise of redemption. And I know – I know that you have as great a capacity for compassion and gentleness as you have in you now for cruelty. If you had not been made a torturer, you could have been a surgeon. Do you want to stay?”
“And be a surgeon?”
“Perhaps,” Francis said. “You won’t have a medical degree, if you stay. There is already a Doctor Pierce in this world; you can’t take his place. You’d have to make a place for yourself. I’m willing to help. But first of all, I need your word. Your promise.”
“Not to harm anyone in this world.” Hawkeye restated it without promising it. “What happened to the Colonel?”
“He – ” Francis made a quick gesture, as if he was touching his nose, his chest, and his shoulders. “I killed him.”
Hawkeye lifted his head: his jaw fell open. “You what?”
“It isn’t safe opening the passage through to the other world,” Francis said quietly. “If you stand in the wrong place at the wrong time, it can kill you. I knew where the safe place was to stand, and where it wasn’t safe… and I told Colonel Hunnicutt to stand where I knew it would kill him.” He stopped. “God forgive me,” he said, and made the same quick gesture with his right hand. “He died with his sins on him.”
“You killed him,” Hawkeye said, with a mixture of disbelief, relief, and pure admiration. This was the man who’d laughed at him.
The door shoved open. A man came in – short, white-haired, and balding. He was in army uniform, and when Francis stood up and turned round, he grinned – wide and white. “Padre, you’re a sight for sore eyes.”
“Colonel,” Francis said.
The man came across the room – Francis took two stumbling steps towards him – and they were hugging each other. This Colonel was even shorter than Francis. He stepped back from Francis, and grinned even wider. There was nothing terrifying about him at all. “How are you? You look terrible. I have so many messages from everyone back at the 4077th that I couldn’t carry them all, but here’s something you may want – ” He fished something out of his pocket.
“My spectacles,” Francis said. He sounded happier than Hawkeye had ever heard him. He took the case out of the Colonel’s hands and slid on a pair of metal-framed glasses.
“Your spare pair. I know the hospital here has a sound ophthalmologist, but I thought you’d want to be able to see the world as soon as possible – ”
“Thank you, Colonel,” Francis said. He turned towards the bed. Wearing glasses, his face looked different – more focussed –
Trapper would never have looked at this man and said Sweet God, he’s gorgeous.
But then, I’ll never see Trapper again.
“Francis,” Hawkeye said. “You know what? Yes. I promise. My word on it.”
“Whoa,” this Colonel said. He came over to the bed and peered down at Hawkeye. “Son, I know I left you back at the 4077th, because I practically had to kick you off the chopper to convince you that we couldn’t all go to Tokyo to see Father Mulcahy. How did you get here ahead of me?” He peered closer. “And what the devil – sorry, Padre – have you been doing to yourself to look this way?”
The End
to the chapter listing