Warnings: This isn't too happy. It's also got a few semi-graphic descriptions of wounds, so if you don't like that sort of thing… There is no slash, unless you consider a deep bond of friendship to be slash.

I own nothing—not the lyrics you see below, and not the characters. Which is probably good, because if I do this sort of thing to people I don't own, just imagine what I'd do if I did own them.

Reviews would be much appreciated. I could probably continue this, if it's liked enough.

Hello, darkness, my old friend
I've come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision
That was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence
-"The Sound of Silence," Simon and Garfunkel

- The Sound of Silence -

The screaming was the worst; BJ could hear it as he scrubbed in, and it made him want to scream in return, because he couldn't think of anything else to do and his mind was already screaming. He was still in shock, his mind numb, as his hands performed the habitual task of scrubbing in. "Can't they make him stop?" BJ asked softly of Margaret as she worked the gloves over his hands. She looked up into his face, saw the pain in his eyes, and quickly looked away.

"They're waiting for you, doctor," she said softly, tying the mask around the top of his head.

BJ closed his eyes for a moment, trying to get himself calm, to get his head to cooperate. He couldn't operate in this sort of condition, no one could, but no one else could do this either. It had to be him, and wasn't that just fitting? He pulled in a deep breath, and hurried into the O.R.

It was louder here, the screaming, punctuated by wails of pain and the ever-present clatter of surgical tools, nurses rushing around and ultimately just getting in the way—why were there so many of them? One patient didn't require a dozen nurses…

He could see Potter sitting at the head of the table, talking softly, trying to still the screaming; Kellye was laying out the surgical instruments, and BJ could see the tears on her dark cheeks as she turned towards him for a moment. He stepped up to the side of the table, Margaret standing across from him, and BJ allowed himself to look down at Potter and the face he held between his gloved hands.

A few superficial cuts on the face, far from urgent—but they gushed blood, looking horrific, staining the whole side of his face red. Black hair slicked back with blood, familiar features transformed into those of some horror-movie monster. But the eyes—wide with terror, pupils tiny pricks of black against the blue—the eyes were the same, he'd recognize those eyes anywhere, even with the pain-crazed cast to them. Hawkeye, it was the eyes, always the eyes. Pained, terrified blue met grieved, uncertain blue, and between the screams, the wrenching pain, a whisper slipped out through the bloody lips, a question, a plea for help, a sign of relief, a show of trust: "Beej."

"I'm here, Hawk," BJ said softly, surprised at how steady his own voice was—so different from how he felt. "Put him under," he said to Potter. Please, just make the screaming stop…I can't think with him screaming… Potter slid the mask over the sobbing, screaming, bloody mouth, and a deadly silence descended over the O.R. Silent as the grave, they say… Don't think like that, he's just asleep, he needs to be quiet or you can't work. But the silence was almost worse than the screaming, because at least when he was screaming BJ knew he was still alive; but the silence could be sleep or death, and no telling at any moment which it was.

BJ turned his attention to the mangled body, the body that couldn't possibly be Hawkeye's body, Hawkeye didn't look like that. The right side of his body had taken the brunt of the explosion—the arm, from the elbow down, was just gone, vanished—now you see it, now you don't, like magic. A gaping belly wound, some shell fragments lodged in his chest, knee cap looked shattered.

"Just get him fit enough for transfer," Potter said softly. "Nothing fancy."

BJ still felt numb, frozen; he couldn't move, couldn't stop staring at the ruin of his friend's body. This can't be Hawkeye…he doesn't look like this…

"BJ?" Margaret said softly, looking at him over the body that wasn't Hawkeye's.

"You all right, son?" Potter asked a beat later.

BJ almost laughed. He was so not all right, he'd nearly come full circle back to all right. He had to be all right…he was the only one who could do this, and if he couldn't… "Clamp," he said abruptly, springing into action as quickly as if someone had just stuck a key in his back and wound him up. "Let's get this bleeder closed off…"

Time became meaningless, irrelevant. The only thing that mattered was Potter's voice, calling out with impossible calm whenever Hawkeye's blood pressure dropped too low. If BJ could just stop thinking of the body as his friend's…if he could convince himself this was just another faceless soldier, wounded at the front lines…it would be easier, easier to stay calm, to think, to save his friend's life…

He saw Father Mulcahy hovering near the end of the table, his face pale, Bible in one hand and rosary in the other. BJ wanted to yell at him to get out, Hawk wasn't dying, not if BJ had anything to say about it, but he couldn't take his eyes away from the mess the shell had made of his friend, and when he looked up again, Mulcahy was gone. "Move, Margaret, I can't see anything. How's he doing?" he demanded of Potter.

"Fine, he's just fine. You're doing fine, too, son."

Hours, days, years, later, BJ stepped back from the table, finished; and he turned and sprinted from the O.R., into the scrub room, tearing off his mask and gloves, leaning over the sink, breathing heavily and trying to keep from heaving up his breakfast. He could hear the flurry of activity as Klinger and one of the other corpsmen lifted Hawkeye and carried him out of the O.R., to the chopper that would take him to Tokyo, where better doctors would do what BJ hadn't been able to.

The door opened behind him, and a hand rested on his shoulder—Potter, good old Dad. "You saved his life, BJ," the colonel said softly. "He wouldn't've made it if you hadn't been here."

"It wouldn't have happened to him if I hadn't been here," BJ said bitterly. He rubbed furiously at his eyes—Don't cry, damnit, don'tcry—and tried to straighten up; but his stomach cramped, twisted, and a sob escaped from his mouth as he collapsed against the sink.

"Take it easy," Potter said—calm, always calm, how could he be so calm? "You did a fine job, son, damn fine job—no one could ask any more of you, given the situation."

"If I hadn't let him go—"

"Damnit, Hunnicutt, none of us could've guessed something like this would happen, least of all you! And don't you dare say it should've been you in that jeep, because we both know that if it had been, you'd be dead now! You got the chance to save the life of a damn good man, and you did more than anyone else could've done. You saved his life!"

The tears began to fall then, splashing softly into the sink. Potter sighed, and put an arm around the surgeon's hunched shoulders, offering what little comfort he could and knowing it wasn't nearly enough. "Come on, BJ," he finally said. "I think we could both use a drink."

&.o.&.o.&

It'd been over a year since BJ had set foot in a real hospital, and he found himself disoriented for a moment—white-washed walls, tile floors, neat rows of clean beds with peaceful patients, nurses in white moving about with confidence and smiles. An orderly came to his aid, and pointed him towards a bed halfway down the left row. BJ forced himself to lift one foot, move it forward, there we go, now the other one, until he found himself standing by the side of the bed, looking down at the battered and bandaged face. The right eye was covered up by a crisp white bandage, but the left one blinked slowly open, the bright blue dulled, dimmed—that's wrong, that's wrong, his eyes aren't supposed to look like that. "BJ?" he whispered.

BJ swallowed hard, tried to smile confidently, and sat down on the stool at the side of the bed and carefully put his arm on Hawkeye's shoulder. "Yeah, it's me. The nurses wouldn't rest until someone came to see that you were doing all right." He had to swallow again, Adam's apple bobbing jerkily. "Are you?"

"Doing all right?" Hawkeye tipped his head, looking down at himself—leg in traction, stomach bandaged up tightly (to keep his guts from spilling out, he worried, even though the nurses had assured him that wasn't true), the arm—he couldn't think about the arm, the arm he could still feel. "I don't know," he said honestly, his voice cracked and broken, hardly recognizable.

BJ rubbed a hand over his face, his eyes worried, uncertain. "Hawk…I'm—"

"Don't say it," Hawkeye snarled fiercely, his face twisting, so open and vulnerable and hurt, a baby bird fallen from its nest, wings broken, lost, confused, terrified. Tears leaked from the exposed eye, making rivers into the gray-tinged forest of black hair at his temples, and Hawkeye turned his face away, ashamed and angry and confused. And because he didn't know what else to do, BJ dropped to his knees next to the bed and reached out to put one of his hands on Hawkeye's face; and when the wounded man turned to look at him, blue meeting blue, BJ leaned forward and rested his forehead against Hawkeye's, both silent, both grieving, their tears mingling on the older man's patched-up face.

The nurses and orderlies who saw weren't shocked by the display—they'd seen too much of pain, and knew well the many ways in which humans reacted to pain; this was nothing new to them. And the patients who saw, stared—not out of shock or suspicion, as BJ would later worry, but because they all longed for a similar bond, an unlikely friendship formed in an unlikely place, a friendship whose sole purpose was to maintain sanity, despite any frills and ribbons that might be tied around it. They kept each other sane in the place they called Hell, supported, carried when necessary; and Hawkeye needed to be carried now, needed the impossible bond to buoy him through the present pain and the pain to come, because he teetered dangerously close to the edge, and one wrong move, one wrong breath, could send him pitching into the darkness, the madness, that unbearable, screaming silence whose face he'd stared into and been able to turn away from because of the line of light that kept him from sliding over the edge, the anchor that kept him grounded on this side of sanity. He fed on that light, drew it desperately into himself from the warmth against his face, the pools of blue that wouldn't look away, that never looked away. And as he cried, sobbed his pain into his friend's shoulder, he could hear the darkness, the silence, retreating, moving away, fought off by the glow of the reaffirmed bond, and for the first time in a very long time, Hawkeye felt at peace.