9 June 2006
M*A*S*H

henry/radar
not mine.

Someone has to document this carnage.




He's just a kid.  It's what Henry tells himself, a couple of times a day, or however often he thinks about it.  Almost young enough to be his son.  He's enlisted, and small and strange.

But the thing is, Henry's never been happy.  He's lived most of his life in the kind of accidental marriage that young men never think they'll wind up suffering.  Nothing wrong so much as nothing right.  They haven't had a real conversation in fifteen years.  He wakes up some mornings and he can't remember her name.

Faceless New Look silhouette of a woman.  When he tries to imagine her features, all he can call up are her perfectly manicured, very red nails.

He can't imagine doing this back in the States, but he can't imagine his wife here, either.

The army's full of married men.  Never stopped any of them.

So it happens occasionally.  Like when he's coming out of twenty-five hours of piecing teenage boys back together, because someone thought it'd be fun or funny to throw them in front of a fragmenting shell.  Everyone else gets to shower and go to bed, but Henry has to document this carnage.  List the casualties and sign off on them.

It's not like he actually does the counting, or the writing, but he has to sign.

It means he winds up in his office still smelling like latex and blood.  Looking at his bare arms and seeing places that the blood soaked through his gown and marked his skin.  The latex is a better seal; there's no blood under his nails, even if he can still smell it.

And Radar brings him the papers.  Pages and pages of dead kids, and he doesn't have to read any of it, but he knows what's listed.  He's had his hands in their guts.

Soft presence at his elbow, "Are you okay, sir?"

And.  He isn't, really, but that's not new.  He's cracked up in here enough times that when he slumps, Radar just steps in a little closer and lets Henry's head hit him in the chest.  Stands quietly, just barely brushing Henry's arm with his hand.

Soft little mouth when Henry tilts Radar's mouth down to him.  This very careful kiss that goes on for a while.  Long moment after it while their foreheads touch and Henry keeps his hands wrapped around Radar's neck and skull.

It's not how either of them kisses women, but. 

He hurts all over.  Radar's the only person he knows who doesn't smell like blood.  The only one of them who doesn't bathe in it.  He just smells like boy and dust and paper.

This moment when he wants to ask for more.  Radar's the sweetest boy in the U.S. army.  Maybe the sweetest boy in the world.  And he'd probably do anything that Henry asked.

It'd make him a terrible person.

So he lets go, and goes to bed.  No shower first.  Blood faint on his skin and that faint taste in his mouth all night.



jane
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