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amrv-5 · 1 year

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for @partlyironic : nooooo idea when the stupid Enormous Fic i’m writing is going to be done (105K baybee woooo), but please enjoy another excerpt in which BJ tricks himself into going to therapy.

After he’d mailed off two or three letters, and heard nothing in response, BJ had started and never sent another thousand messages to the man, feeling confused and more than a little abandoned. He’d promised Hawkeye they’d stay friends, sworn to see him again in the States, and now radio silence? From Hawkeye, who a guy couldn’t hardly pay to shut up?

Well, most times. The few times Hawkeye had gone quiet—

BJ frowned, leaning back. He was technically off work, but he didn’t want to go home. He was taking a few minutes to himself in the staff room.

—The few times Hawkeye had gone quiet, it was because he’d been dragged under some invisible tide. He struggled with melancholy, BJ thought, but not always—and sometimes, even in the midst of his lows, he could be provoked into an upswing. It was all a matter of finding the right topic, the right prank, the right balance of letting him be to sulk, and bothering the pants off him, to commit what BJ viewed as a sort of alchemy of mood.

But what could he do for Hawkeye, a continent away, if he was sinking into a long dark spell? He couldn’t offer him a drink, or nail his shoe to the floor, or reach across the gap between their cots and put a hand on his shoulder. Hawkeye didn’t even seem to want to hear from him. If he did, he would have written BJ back.

So he was stuck. Stuck and helpless and he didn’t even know if he was needed. If he was, he was on the wrong side of the country. And if he wasn’t, then, well, hell—he wasn’t needed. And that was its own special kind of hurt.

BJ stood up, and decided to pace around. He was frustrated. It was like being in Korea all over again, in a way.

He wandered the halls of San Francisco General, the winter light coming in through the windows dilute and watery grey. The whole city looked grey. Why the hell did he live in California, if the weather wasn’t going to live up to its reputation?

He turned off the windowed hallway, finding himself quickly getting unsustainably angry at the overcast sky.

This was stupid. He should just go home. What was he doing, skulking around the halls after hours? Sure, plenty of people were on shift, but he wasn’t. He wasn’t even being paid for being there anymore. Christ, hadn’t he spent enough of his life in hospitals?

He slowed a little, thinking—hey—most people are born in a hospital, and die in a hospital. He was part of a select few who were born, lived, and died in one. The twenty-odd years he’d spent outside a medical environment were going to end up an anomaly compared to all the time he’d be here over the length of his career.

He jogged up a staircase, and thought about trying to do a pull-up from a hanging rail. He gave in, did a chin-up, and then dropped back to the concrete landing.

There was a funny thought—living and dying. He might spend the rest of his life working at SFG. He might have a coronary on the job one day.

And—a more uneasy thought—it was highly possible he was living in the house he was going to die in. Or driving the car that would send him off the edge of a bay cliff.

He opened the door to the fourth floor where the psychologists had their offices, feeling abruptly cagey. Life seemed big and dangerous and highly unfair. He didn’t like that so many roads felt closed to him, and so many decisions he’d made non-negotiably final. Was this life really his? Would he be content to die with his career, in his house or car, next to his wife?

Without ever speaking to Hawkeye again?

He slowed, and caught sight of a familiar nameplate.

The light in the office was still on.

BJ knocked lightly on the doorframe.

Dr. Steinhart—Terry—looked up, and smiled. “BJ. It’s good to see you. Come on in.”

“This is a social visit,” BJ said, lingering in the door. He just wanted somebody to keep him company for a minute, before he started the drive home, through the miserable dim weather.

“Of course. Come on in.”

BJ stepped in, and then stepped back and closed the door. He approached the chair. It was a pleasantly pink-orange color. Salmonish. The office was full of color, and nothing matched. It was comfortingly eclectic.

He sank into the chair. “How are you?” he asked.

“Oh, you know,” Terry said. “Having a bit of a slow week. Though you never know, with this weather.”

“That has something to do with it?” BJ asked.

“Oh, yes,” Terry said. “Quite a lot to do with it, actually. Rainy days, cold days, overcast conditions and daylight savings: guaranteed rush on business.”

“Huh,” BJ said.

“And holidays,” Terry added.

BJ frowned. “Oh.”

“Anyway, how are you doing? What brings you by?” Terry asked, clapping his hands together.

“Purely social,” BJ said, smiling.

Terry nodded, and then came around the desk and sat in a chair across from him. He leaned back, getting comfortable.

“No need to sit behind the desk when you’re not psychoanalyzing, then?” BJ asked, trying to inflect the question with a joke-tone.

Terry laughed. “Oh, it’s different every time. Some people really respond to that—they like the professional feeling of a person behind a desk, or need to feel that I’m trustworthy. Other people really don’t respond well to authoritative or paternalistic figures, so I’ll come out here to make them feel more at ease. It’s all about perception.”

“Right,” BJ said. It made sense. He wouldn’t have liked trying to tell somebody about his troubles across a desk, that was for sure. It would remind him too much of being called into his father’s study.

#my fic #bj is a consummate liar (affectionate)#n e way hoping to have this finished. in a somewhat timely manner #but honestly it's probably going to go for another 50K minimum so?????#i'm not in control here i'm just along for the ride #mash #mashposting #the litfic cometh

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amrv-5 · 1 year

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@marley-manson thanks for the WIP sharing tag.....!! yet another chunk from The Long Fic below the cut.

i’ll tag @pomegranate @theblob1958 @mashbrainrot and @kaviiinsky (if you want and also if you. don’t write fic .... SOWWY ignore this)

Enjoy BJ having a pleasant morning by sneaking out of church:

They spent the rest of the service outside, with Erin jumping around in BJ’s jacket like one of the superheroes in Radar’s comic books. BJ tried and failed to recite a poem he’d often traded with Hawkeye to her—he kept getting lost halfway through the second stanza, and Erin had taken to gleefully repeating the last word of every line, which was as cute as it was thought-derailing.

“Here come I to my own again,” BJ started again. “Fed, forgiven and known again. Claimed by bone of my bone again, and cheered by flesh of my flesh.”

Erin took a few toddler-wobbly steps down the stairs, and started dragging BJ’s jacket through parking-lot gravel.

“The fatted calf is dressed for me, but the husks have greater zest for me…” he said, trailing off. He tried to imagine Hawkeye, sleep-deprived and bitter over a tray of poisonous-looking C-rations.

He recalled Hawkeye’s voice as vividly as he was able, the timbre, the inflection, the way he elided consonants when he was tired, and the vexing half-stanza came to him almost immediately.

“So I’m off with wallet and staff to eat the bread that is three parts chaff to wheat, but glory be!—there’s a laugh to it, which isn’t the case when we dine.”

Hawkeye’s voice was sonorous and soft, even coming to him from months in the past.

Erin dropped his suit in favor of picking up a piece of gravel that was partially quartz.

“Glory be, there’s a laugh to it,” BJ repeated to himself as Erin held the quartz out for his inspection.

He held it to the light, admiring the way the light refracted through the crystal. “Beautiful,” he said, and handed the rock back to Erin. “Good find.”

“Diamond,” Erin said.

“Quartz,” BJ said.

Erin tilted her head.

“Quartz,” BJ said, “is a type of mineral. It’s what we call igneous—” he paused, and let her sound the new word out— “which just means that it was made when magma inside of the Earth cooled.” He tapped his cheek.

“Do you know what magma is?” he asked.

Erin shook her head.

“What about lava?” he asked.

Erin’s face lit up. “Volcano,” she said. “Like hot laba.”

“Lava,” BJ said, enunciating carefully. “Well, it’s called lava when it’s outside. When it’s still inside the ground, it’s called magma. Anyway, the point is, when that melted rock—”

“You can melt a rock?” Erin asked, eyes ablaze with interest.

“Yes,” BJ said. “That’s what metal is, and lava.”

Erin appraised the cars around them with renewed interest.

“Anyway,” BJ said, smiling. “When that melted rock cools off, sometimes we get minerals like quartz. Actually, usually we get minerals like quartz. That rock you found is one of the most common minerals on Earth.”

“Common,” Erin repeated.

“It’s everywhere,” BJ elaborated. “You can find it all over the place. It isn’t particularly valuable, or special.”

Erin looked at the stone in her palm. “But it’s pretty.”

BJ cleared his throat, and then scooted down a few steps. He laid a hand on her shoulder, and then planted a kiss on her forehead. “I love you. Did you know that?”

“Love you,” Erin said offhandedly, looking for more quartz in the parking lot grit.

BJ leaned back on his elbows and took in the sun and the peace and the vivid blue of the sky while Erin occasionally exclaimed over finding new and interesting rocks.

#my fic #the litfic cometh #mashposting #thank you for the tag!!! hope u all enjoy this #im getting antsy to post but I really want to fully finish it first and I'm......... 125k in and still going so

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amrv-5 · 1 year

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sorry this is out of curiousity and you totally can not answer it but what is the long fic you’re writing about

ahh hello!! no problem I’m happy to answer (i love.... talking about writing....i will ALWAYS love talking about writing. it fills me with absolute joy to talk at length about themes ideas motifs etc in my writing. even if they’re just ‘what in god’s name were you thinking’ i will ALWAYS love questions!!)!

in general terms, the as-yet untitled Long Fic is just another post-war fic about Hawk and Beej trying to adjust back to life in the States on their own, and eventually finding their way back to each other again. extremely down-the-line, absolutely no supernatural twists, high realism. It’s only stupid long because I’m trying to give that the space it needs to feel real to me, and that amount of space is turning out to be: A Lot.

a broader series of themes & questions (so far lol) are below the cut for mild thematic spoilers, length, and (sorry) minimizing exposure to pretentiousness purposes:

So You Want to Know What the Long Fic is About: A Condensed Thematic Overview of 158K (For Now) of Straight-Up Realist Historical Fiction Where, No Joke, a Significant Portion of That Length is Dedicated Solely to Guys Thinkin’ Real Hard About Stuff, Guaranteed to Make You Say ‘Holy Fuck, I’m Sorry I Asked, Please Just Shut Up’ With Parker, Your Resident Guy Who is Normal About TV

1. Mis- and non-communication.

What happens when you go from sleeping three feet away from your best friend in the world to living so far away a letter takes two weeks on a round trip? How do your methods of understanding each other (and misunderstanding each other…) change? How does or can one maintain closeness when literal proximity is denied? How does somebody handle abandonment when the abandonment in question was unavoidable (i.e. nobody to blame--the death of a mother, maybe, or the end of a shared living situation)?

2. Justice, suffering, and recompense.

This is where the pretentiousness comes in, I know this makes me sound like an asshole I just care about American case law a lot and it infects all of my writing, etc. etc. Anyway. How do we approach ideas of suffering and justice when they fall outside the jurisdiction of an American view of legal culpability? How does one go about trying to seek justice when they are provably, demonstrably hurt, but there is nowhere to direct the blame? These questions are kind of slippery and weird, so I’ll try to frame it more directly: somebody in this story is going to struggle (as they always do in my work) with despair. It is a serious and life-long struggle. How does a person in that situation move beyond ideas like fairness, justice, and being owed relief, to accepting that ‘fairness’ doesn’t really exist in terms of things like personal neurochemistry? And how, then, does that acceptance hold itself in relation to larger forms of human injustice--how does somebody accept their own ‘unfair’ situation as a reality they must bear while continuing to maintain ideological opposition to injustices that can be changed?

3. Empathy and invisible strife.

A little bit of an overlap with the previous set of ideas, but this one flows out of one of my favorite poems in the world, “Musee des Beaux Arts” by Auden (check it out, if you haven’t read it!). The narrator states:

About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters: how well they understood Its human position: how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

And then, later:

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

I am compelled by how frequently awareness of strife is set aside in day to day life, especially in American life, and that comes through big time in the Long Fic.

At a psychological level, there’s a certain idea, I think, that it is very evident when people are doing badly; that you will always be able to tell; that the solution is as simple as reaching out, or asking for help. Unfortunately, that is often not the case. Somebody can be having the worst day of their life, be absolutely at the end of their rope, be seconds away from losing it completely, and five feet to the left there could be somebody else making a ham sandwich. So that comes through a lot in the work--this borderline absurdist, tragicomic idea that nobody’s ever really going to know exactly how you feel, and even if they did, they might be too busy doing the crossword to notice.

And at a less granular level, you can apply this (and will see it applied) to the American cultural response to the Korean War, which was incredibly muted. Even though millions of people died, even though the daily suffering of people, especially local civilians, involved was immense, because it was so (to an American domestic point of view) far-off, most people just went on with their lives. People celebrated birthdays, TV shows were produced, city council meetings dragged gaily on.

These things seem inevitable, and the ideas behind them kind of obvious: of course the world keeps turning when bad things happen. People just aren’t built to maintain ceaseless fear, anger, outrage, etc. at tragedy that is not directly affecting them, because they are concerned with the business of being alive. The people that do manage to maintain constant attention to large-scale but abstract or not immediately visible tragedies tend to go crazy, self-immolate, and/or quit their fancy math professorships at Berkeley in order to start direct mail marketing campaigns. Everybody else tends to feel bad about an issue, maybe they’ll see if they can do something small to help, and then they forget about it and keep managing the minutiae of their own lives. Yes, of course this or that issue is tragic--but I’ve got to do my taxes, or I’ve got to hit a deadline, or I’ve got to go to the store. The ploughman keeps working, too busy to investigate the splash. The ship sails on with somewhere to get to.

But then again, even if the logic is sound, from Icarus’s point of view the world has got to seem awfully cold and mean.

#fuck this got long #sorry! hope that explains vaguely what to expect!#and again to clarify: I LOVE QUASTION #never apologize for talking to me about writing i am a little literature freak and i WILL write you an essay about literally anything #in conclusion: it's going to be a weird one but I hope it connects to people #but if you don't have time to read like probably 200K #(and who could blame you)#just read that auden poem and it'll say everything i'm trying to say 10000x faster and better and more beautifully #meta #the long fic #The LitFic Cometh

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amrv-5 · 1 year

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It's a 💌 from me! And then a wildcard pick of your choice from the list <3

hello helen!!!! & thank you!! answers (and excerpt!) below the cut....

wildcard: 💫what is your favorite kind of comment/feedback?

Best feedback is either someone else's analysis OR somebody asking for my own analysis of a scene/moment/chapter whatever. If it would not be insane and annoying I'd release meta-essays with every chapter of everything I wrote lmao i LOVE talking craft and interpretations.

💌share something with us about an up-and-coming work (WIP) that has you excited!

I'm particularly excited for the way that I think my Hawk Goes Home (working title for the longfic) piece has been able to sit with the experience of unfixable loneliness (no spoilers but I swear to fuck it will have a good ending I realize that this does not sound positive as it stands). It was cathartic to write, and I sure hope it's cathartic to read. Relevant excerpt:

///

BJ had a few drinks downstairs, reluctant to go upstairs to the bedroom. He was hoping Peg would be asleep by the time he decided to turn in.

In the meantime, he listened to the radio, feeling odd and hollow and off balance. The old songs from the 30s and 40s made him melancholy, rife with longing for the nostalgic warmth of a life he’d never had. He frowned through a run of three songs he remembered Hawkeye singing in surgery.

He poured himself a few fingers of scotch, and leaned back in an armchair, his eyes closed.

The rain was bucketing, the air damp and cold. BJ couldn’t feel his toes. The body under his hands steamed, the red-purple shine of an exposed intestinal tract hot in his grip as he checked for perforations. It was his fifteenth or fiftieth hour. His third-ever marathon surgery in Korea. He was new, and green, and green. He was starved, but couldn’t bring himself to eat; watching Hawkeye passively chew a bite of a baloney sandwich by leaning back from an open abdomen, where a soldier’s punctured stomach leaked half-digested C-rations into the surrounding cavity, horrified him. He felt like he might cry, but knew he couldn’t. It might blur his vision at a critical moment in the surgery.

All at once he felt himself start to collapse. Not physically, but psychically, spiritually. Something internal and critical started to crumble, and his hands no longer felt like his own. His breath came in staggered, uneven gasps, his vision tunnelling. He couldn’t go on like this. It simply wasn’t possible. He wasn’t strong enough. This was the end of his road. He was going to snap, and his brain would gently, paternalistically separate him from reality for his own good, and he’d never get back. End of.

Hawkeye cleared his throat, and said something BJ didn’t hear.

Somebody touched his elbow, maybe. He didn’t notice. He was doing an incredible job with the surgery, he noted from a thousand miles away. His hands were amazing. They didn’t even need him.

“Someday I’ll meet you again,” somebody was saying.

No. Singing.

BJ glanced up, struggling to control the vector of his gaze.

“Tell me where, tell me when,” Hawkeye sang. He was no Frank Sinatra, but his voice was strong, and clear, and warm. It was the sort of voice you liked better than a radio voice, because you knew it really meant what it was singing. A voice with feeling, that was it.

“Each night I’ll wish on a star,” Hawkeye sang, catching his eye. He might’ve been smiling under his mask. It was impossible to tell. “That you stay as you are!”

“You have my heart, but my heart wonders when,” BJ joined in, trying to reach the high note that Hawkeye seemed to manage so effortlessly as the feeling returned to his hands, “we’ll meet again.”

Dear one, this is our fate! Partings and sad goodbyes, sang the Hawkeye in his head. BJ was beginning to suspect that he’d always live there, that there would always be one Hawkeye Pierce, frozen at age thirty, looking out from behind his eyes. Never changing, always charming and a little sad, until BJ was old and bent and eighty-nine. And the Hawkeye in his head would stay young forever. It seemed, somehow, exactly what he deserved.

Dear one, I’ll always wait—wait for that blue horizon! Hawkeye sang, two years distant.

Turner Layton played the piano beautifully, BJ thought. His chest was starting to hurt, so he socked the rest of his drink and turned the radio off. He stumbled getting up the stairs, his limbs loose and his head full of the past.

#ask game #thank you!!!!!#the litfic cometh

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amrv-5 · 1 year

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I was going to ask about bdyswp but I see Marley already asked about it so “Hawk goes home”?????

AHHHHH hello. yes. thank you so much for asking about this one LOL!! hawk goes home is my special project at the moment. i'm no good at balancing multiple WIPs so I just pick a thing and hack at it for a billion years. HGH is my longform litfic that I've been wanting to write forever. it is going to be stupidly long I assume, and is going to take forever to write. but the most important thing is that I Am Having Fun.

it's alternating hawk and beej POV (which i. never fucking do.) so bits of both below the cut, with classic beejdenial included:

Hawkeye trailed his fingers over the dashboard. The air was hot and thick with humidity. Outside the pavement shimmered with heat. The car shook briefly as Daniel slammed the trunk, and then again when he opened the front door.

“You got a radio put in,” Hawkeye noted, rolling his thumb over a round, ridged dial. It clicked satisfyingly, and stopped at the extreme ends of its range on either side.

Daniel paused, and then shut his door softly. “Yes. About a year ago. I guess I must not have written about that.”

“Maybe I forgot,” Hawkeye said, fiddling with the dial.

“Maybe,” Daniel conceded. He started the car, and the radio crackled to life. Hawkeye spun the volume up slightly.

The car pulled out of the airport’s parking lot. Hawkeye didn’t notice.

“God damn,” Hawkeye said, hand still hovering over the radio’s face. “What the hell is that?”

Daniel smiled slightly. “You like it?”

“What is it?” Hawkeye asked again, foot tapping. He couldn’t seem to make it stop.

“What do you think?” Daniel asked, merging them onto the highway.

“It’s jazz,” Hawkeye said, after a long pause. His whole leg was bouncing, now, and his head was starting to get in on the action. “No. Blues. Jazz? Ragtime? Jesus, I don’t know. What the hell is it?”

“You like it?” Daniel asked again.

“I love it,” Hawkeye said, knocking his knuckles against the window in time.

“Oh, Hawk,” Daniel said, grinning insufferably, reaching over to hold his arm, “Things are changing. It’s a whole new world out there.”

“What is it?” Hawkeye asked, laughing a little in disbelief at how terribly infectious the rhythm of the music was, the way it reached down deep inside him and made him want to move.

Daniel laughed at him laughing, and took them smoothly around a curve in the highway as the piano on the radio rolled and jumped. “They’re calling it rock and roll.”

///

If Hawkeye were a woman, BJ figured, he would have married the man himself.

The woman, he meant. And only if BJ hadn’t already been married. After all, Hawkeye was smart, and saw people. Not how they wanted people to see them, but how they actually were. And he was funny. Quick. He knew how to talk about important things, and beautiful things. He could stand on a table and sing every Broadway hit ever penned and then sing the praises of every painter he’d ever loved and tell a fellow just where their best works hung in the Met, and then start all over railing against the war and War, capital-W, and still have enough energy afterwards to spin BJ a story involving the entire female cast of Bringing Up Baby that always ended up somewhere between frustrating and funny, no matter how heavy it started off. He would have made somebody a great wife, if he hadn’t been a man.

Hawkeye was a slob, admittedly, though surely there were a few women who weren’t natural homemakers. Hawkeye would’ve been one such girl, BJ figured. Too busy following her husband around, cracking jokes at him over the kitchen table while bread turned to charcoal in the toaster to think about things like laundry. She’d be tomboyish. Sort of odd and inappropriately rakish. A little too gawky to be classically pretty, too flat to be a bombshell, her laugh too goose-like to be truly elegant, with her dresses permanently rumpled. But she’d be almost unbearably endearing. Always endearing, that was his Hawkeye.

BJ smiled, chuffed at the clarity of the image. Hawkeye was already sort of pretty, if one thought about it. And kind of girlishly shaped, with a feminine set to his hips and a touch of pectoral softness, before he’d become so frighteningly thin at the end. It didn’t take much imagination to think of him as a her. How he would look with his hair grown out, height-wise a little shorter—or, no, the same height, but in heels—smiling across a room at BJ. Asking him to do up the back of his dress. Sprawled on the edge of a bed, smug, wearing something sheer and delicate and the farthest shade from olive possible. Funny to imagine, a thing like that.

#mashposting #my fic #The LitFic Cometh

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