Title: Emotional Blockage of the Oesophagus
Author: Am-Chau Yarkona
Rating: G
Pairing: Hawkeye/Radar
Disclaimer: Not my characters.
Feedback: amchau@popullus.net

“You don’t want to *eat* that, surely, Radar,” Hawkeye said, looking at the mountains of pale brown mush and grey tinged slop on their metal trays. “You’d do better to throw it straight into the latrine.”

“It’s not that bad, Hawkeye sir,” Radar smiled and started to tuck in. Looking round for BJ before remembering that his tent-mate was still in the OR, Hawkeye poked at the—well, it wasn’t food as such—the supposedly edible mess.

Radar. Poor kid—much too young to be out here really, mentally if not in years. But then, who wasn’t? Hawkeye was still wishing he could be at home, longing for his father, so was it any surprise that Radar missed his mother and his Uncle Ed?

Watching Radar eat, shovelling down the muck so fast that Hawkeye wondered if at home people had threatened to take it away, or if that was a product of the war, something to do with spending your time being fired at and trying to save lives: lives that too often slipped away into—wherever people went. Hawkeye tried not to think about that. He didn’t know where you went after death, and he wasn’t in a hurry to find out for himself.

Unlike Radar, who was apparently going to eat army pulp until he exploded or buried himself so deep in food that he didn’t have to be part of the war any longer. Hawkeye wanted to do that, hide from everything around him; but he knew that only alcohol or home could remove him.

Poor kid—and Hawkeye watched, detached from the scene however much he longed to reach in, touch Radar, pull him into a hug and tell him that he’d see his mother again soon. However much he longed to eat, the slop simply refused to go down.

A classic symptom of the unrequited lover, he thought: emotional blockage of the oesophagus.

 

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